Burning Man Politics

What are the politics of Burning Man? This article claims the event is perniciously libertarian, despite a veneer of communal rhetoric and practices. As you can imagine, that caught my attention, since it arose conflicting passions. I՚m as persistently anti-libertarian as anybody, yet I kind of dug Burning Man, and didn՚t detect any of the things I hate about libertarianism there. There was a capitalist camp, but despite its name it didn՚t seem very paradigmatic of Burning Man as a whole, and in fact they spend a lot of energy apologizing about how they conflict with BM principles. The Black Rock Census says there are about 3 times as many Democrats as Republicans and Libertarians combined, as one might expect.

Burning Man՚s rhetoric of sharing, inclusion, and decommodification makes it sound like a socialist utopia, a radical critique of capitalism, an effort to establish a set of values that are wholly at odds with the accumulationist materialism of the mainstream. They are pretty serious about obliterating the market economy: no monetary transactions are allowed (with two exceptions: ice and coffee are for sale) and you are even expected to tape over corporate logos on clothing or equipment. Gifting is the norm, and participation rather than passive consumption is expected. It might sound like bullshit, but I was pleasantly surprised by how thoroughly and successfully these values are realized in practice.

This attitude coexists uneasily with the huge influx of Silicon Valley money and other rich individuals. Not only hip young tech leaders like Larry Page and Mark Zuckerberg, but the VCs and even Republican moneymen like Grover Norquist have thrown in. The participatory nature of the event appears threatened by so-called “turnkey camps” where rich people pay for fancy RVs and “sherpas” to do the hard work of providing life support and comfort in the harsh desert environment. All of a sudden the elitism of the default world threatens to reproduce itself into this alternative universe that was supposed to be an escape from things like that.

Burning Man has always ben elitist, in a sort of self-selecting way – not an elite of the moneyed, although going isn՚t cheap. While you have to have a certain level of well-offness to participate, it really requires more in the way of freedom than money. Doing it right requires months of preparation, so the real filter is whether you are enough of an independent artist/hipster/whatever to devote your life to something crazy. This very high level of required commitment (of time, money, risk, and discomfort) is a big reason it works at all. Sharing is a lot easier when you know that everyone else is committed to the same craziness you are. Subcultures in general have a problem of getting diluted by hangers-on who aren՚t fully committed as they should be; making you camp out in a remote alkalai desert serves a similar function to a fraternity initiation or gang tattoo – it creates a barrier to entry and forces people to pay for the privilege of belonging. Being there is itself a costly signal of shared values which enable the participants to trust each other more than they would some random on the street.

That՚s the real reason people are upset at turnkey camps, not because rich people are douchebags but because the commitment barrier is threatened. If you can buy your way in, the cultural value of being there is diminished. I don՚t mean to imply that this is mere snobbery: boundaries are important if you are trying to establish a space that is explicitly different from the everyday world. Money eats away at social boundaries, both traditional ones and subcultural ones.

If the issue was just that a great annual desert party and subculture was getting its soul diluted, then nobody but the participants should really care. The article advances the much stronger and more interesting thesis that Burning Man՚s politics mirrors and feeds larger trends in the Silicon Valley culture – libertarian ones basically, the idea that government and democracy is fundamentally broken, that we should rely on the largess of the enlightened rich to provide public goods.

So rather than an egalitarian community of roughly equal sharers, the author sees an aristocracy of the rich providing bread and circuses (literally at Burning Man, figuratively elsewhere) for the masses, mirroring the weakening of democratic institutions and their replacement by the whims of corporate largesse. Mark Zuckerberg՚s intervention in the Newark public schools being an exemplar of this in the default world. Charity is lovely but not a replacement for robust governance, and Burning Man՚s promotion of a gift economy, rather than a harmless image of a better world, actually becomes propaganda for rule by aristocracy and against democracy.

While there may be some truth to this, I don՚t really buy it as a critique of Burning Man, which is simply too huge and overwhelming a phenomenon to be reduced to ideology. The event doesn՚t pretend to be a democracy, it՚s a community with alternative rules and alternative status hierarchies – and being a rich turnkey camper is pretty low status. As far as I can tell, the event still is about insane levels of commitment to art, individualism, and other weirdness, and none of that essential nature is threatened by the presence of some rich people. If they are spectators rather than participants, it՚s their loss, nobody else՚s. That՚s the thing about radical participation, those who participate get to say what something means, those who stand outside watching or critiquing have missed the point.

The attempt to graft a political agenda onto an ecstatic festival reminds me of the rupture in the sixties between the hippie/psychedelic/dropout wing of the counterculture vs. the more politically-minded parts like the anti-Vietnam war movement (I am not quite old enough to have personal experience of this). These two factions never quite got each other, despite their shared opposition to the mainstream. They expressed different values in different ways, although of course many individuals had connections to both camps. The politicos were impassioned humanistc idealists who wanted to change the world by seizing power, the hippies were more like romantic artists, whose strategy for change was self-transformation and personal empowerment. My own favorite sixties heroes were the Yippies like Abbie Hoffman and Paul Krassner, who were explicitly trying to bridge this gap.

Burning Man is way above and beyond politics. It՚s some combination of wild party, transcendent art experience, and temporary autonomous zone, and as such should be taken as an effort to break out of the tedious parameters of default world politics. Not left or right, but orthogonal to that axis, pointing in a direction beyond. Nobody should confuse it with a political movement for social change, despite the idealistic communal values. Like the drugs that are a key component of the experience, it should be considered a temporary alternative state of being, that at best has some tantalizing suggestions for how the regular world could be different.

[ I am missing out on Burning Man this year, instead wistfully and lamely listening to the online radio station and watching the video feed to recapture a bit of the mood. Some part of me is there; some part of it is here with me, trying to express itself. ]

[ Fred Turner՚s excellent paper on the relationship Burning Man and the tech community explores these issues in more depth. Basically he agrees with Jacobin that Burning Man culture and Silicon Valley culture mirror reinforce each other, although he is less focused on the pernicious aspects. ]

Three forms of antipolitics

There՚s a certain quality that unites libertarianism, rationalism, and neoreaction, and helps to explain my somewhat conflicted attitude towards all of them. They are all in their own way antipolitical, and for roughly the same underlying reason. To put it crudely, nerds don՚t like politics, perhaps because they are generally no good at it. These ideologies are all, in different ways, trying to replace politics with something more tractable to the nerdish brain – something with neat well-defined rules. These formal systems are obviously better than the messy and violent reality of actual politics in every respect but the most important one – they don՚t engage with the actuality of power

I՚m going to just assume that nerdism is something like lightweight Asperger՚s, which means that some of the normal mental circuitry that deals with modelling and interacting with other people just doesn՚t work as well as it should. As a consequence, aspie-nerds tend to be awkward socializers but often with compensating skills at formal reasoning. They can grasp formally complicated structures so they often excel at computer engineering and similar pursuits. They tend to like board games.

The similarity I see in the three ideologies is that they are all efforts of the nerdish to try to apply their board-game thinking to the real world. In some sense these are laudable efforts – what could be more important than trying to come up with better models for understanding and influencing the real world? The three ideologies all have powerful models they are organized around, and that model is a powerful enough tool that it suggests to some people that it is foundational, that the model is somehow sufficient for everything. There՚s a point where a system of useful ideas becomes an ideology, a fetish, and a cult.

To be a bit more concrete: libertarians fetishize individual property rights and the marketplace, rationalists fetishize objectivity, and neoreactionaries fetishize centralized power. Note that these things are not really very compatible with each other, yet these groupings are quite socially close and people drift from one camp to the other rather easily. Which is evidence for my thesis that it is a certain kind of intellectual fetishization of simple rule systems that unites them, even if the rule systems themselves vary widely.

But the messy world of actual politics is another matter. The effective leader of rationalism, Eliezer Yudkowsky has a widely read post called “Politics is the Mind-Killer”, which puts the thesis pretty starkly: politics interferes with the rationalist goal of pure objective cognition. Rationalism defines itself around figuring out what is true. Having interests, especially political interests, interferes with this. And indeed, politics is not about what is true so much is it is about what people want, and how they collectively go about getting it.

Rationalists tend to be repelled by social phenomenon like that. A comment on Scott Alexanders blog, expressed the great unease he feels in a political crowd:

“I’ve never been to such an event, but I also don’t get them. In fact, I find myself actively creeped out by many forms of collective displays of emotion/enthusiasm.”

Libertarianism is a sort of antipolitical political belief system. It is an ideology for those who don՚t believe in politics, don՚t trust politics, and think that the messy business of human collective goal-seeking can be replaced by the purely individualistic and quantitative mechanisms of the market. Libertarianism holds great attraction for nerds in part because of its (ostensible) elegant distribution of control. The realities of winner-take-all monopoly capitalism don՚t enter into their thinking, as far as I can tell. Libertarianism has been critiqued to death, by me and others (over and over) and I don՚t want to do that here, just to acknowledge that I believe what attracts at least the nerdy to libertarianism is not greed (the usual critique from the left) but the desire to replace the political reality of society with something simpler.

Neoreaction spun out of libertarianism, and while it seems to have attracted a whole bunch of unsavory racists, I believe the true motivation of its founder Mencius Moldbug was basically the same as the libertarian one, namely, to eliminate the inter-group conflict of politics and replace it with something better, that is, something simpler and more formalizable – he even calls his imaginary system “formalism”. I can՚t tell whether he is more horrified by the violence of inter-group conflict (which is something that can be truly horrifying) or its messiness, its failure to be captured by simple rules.

Moldbug basically was a libertarian who was too smart to accept the fantasies of the market worshipers, so rather than giving up he doubled down and advocated rule by an absolute monarch. This stroke of genius eliminates politics altogether, in his fantasy. (Note: any readers not in Silicon Valley may have problems believing that people are seriously putting forward this idea, but trust me, it՚s a big deal among the advanced thinkers of nerdistan).

Much to my surprise neoreaction grew from a single blog run by a single genius to a major movement, which now has an incalculable number of websites and buy-in from some fairly serious people. It՚s now in the fissile stage where groups are firing off manifestos to each other as the break up into separate groups – it seems that trying to run a movement on radically authoritarian principles may be as difficult as trying to run one on radical anarchist principles. This warms my heart.

So, rationalism, libertarianism, and neoreaction all stem from and share a revulsion to normal politics. Yet are all political movements in themselves: the last two obviously so, but rationalism, given that it is in part a movement, an ideology, even a bit of a cult, can՚t help taking on political characteristics of its own. Rationalism has an agenda, just like any other human group, and is thus political (just like any other well-meaning non-profit group, like say Amnesty International, it acts as though its values are or should be universal).

I believe these people are all deeply wrong, although I am torn because I empathize with some of the motivations that lead them to these antipolitical forms of politics. Yes indeed, politics sucks, but no, it cannot be avoided, to try to do so is to simply give yourself over to the manipulations of others. And, while revolutions do happen and replace one political order with another, I am skeptical that you can replace politics with a well-engineered formal system.

I could be wrong, and it could also be that the effort to do so results in valuable insights and ideas. So I don't consider these movements to be valueless by any means. Spinning fanciful political utopias and working to realize them is obviously a broader phenomenon, so why shouldn't nerds do it? Political fantasy can be dangerous but it is also the source of change, and god knows we need some changes.

I myself am a bigtime nerd, and am pretty bad at and kind of hate politics, and wish it would leave me alone. So antipolitical ideologies present themselves as temptations that I need to fight against. That՚s why I spend so much energy fighting them, it is a battle with a part of myself.

Endarkenment

Neoreaction was the fringiest of fringe idea up until a few months ago, confined to the darkest and dankest corners of the internet. But lately it has burst out of obscurity, gaining new followers in the Singularity/Less Wrong crowd, prompting detailed critiques, coverage from mainstream news sources, and now well-known writers are joining the fray.

What is neoreaction? Roughly, it equates to being explicitly anti-democratic. Neoreactionaries believe that democracy has failed and in fact must fail, and that the only viable form of government is autocracy. Why this idea should appeal to anyone in this day and age is a bit of a mystery. Some of the believers are simply extreme rightwingers searching for a coherent philosophy, but oddly (or not) it also draws from the libertarian and rationalist communities. Here’s a map, prepared by believers, which shows how thoroughly this idea is linked to both high-tech libertarians and to the absolute dregs of the internet – men’s rights activists, christian extremists, and some truly vile racists – basically, people anyone with any taste whatsoever would cross the street to avoid. I would have some hesitancy about making a diagram like this myself – it implies that rationalists in Less Wrong, who are for the most part both smart and well-intentioned, are tightly linked to scum. But I didn’t draw this, they did. The chief of Less Wrong, Eliezer Yudkowsky, has distanced himself, but the meme pools are clearly leaking into each other in an alarming way.

All recent neoreactionary activity can be traced back to Mencius Moldbug, someone I have had some interaction with online and off (I am somewhat inexplicably on his blogroll). Like many of these people, Moldbug is obviously extremely bright but it is also obvious that has something has gone horribly wrong in his thinking. He struck me as someone who was, like many nerds, attracted towards libertarianism; but was also too smart to not see its internal contradictions. However, rather than backing off and being a normal progressive (which would be boring), he doubled down on the inherent authoritarianism that lurks under the surface of libertarianism.

Like libertarians, his attitude towards actual politics is a mixture of disdain and terror. He can’t tolerate the sloppy and unprincipled clashes of the various interests of society that make up civic life, so he’s constructed an imaginary version of absolute monarchy that makes all that disappear. It’s total nonsense of course, but I can detect and even have a smidgen of sympathy for the reasoning behind it. An example of moldbuggery (there are megabytes of this sort of stuff):

"…a reactionary is a believer in order, stability, and security. All of which he treats as synonyms….Thus, the order that the rational reactionary seeks to preserve and/or restore is arbitrary. Perhaps it can be justified on some moral basis. But probably not. It is good simply because it is order, and the alternative to order is violence at worst and politics at best. If the Bourbons do not rule France, someone will – Robespierre, or Napoleon, or Corner Man."

This is a remarkably clear statement, and also remarkably false in all of its presuppositions – that you can have human society without politics, for instance, or that the only two alternatives are autocratic rule or gang violence. Moldbug’s entire output is like this: crisply built on axioms that collapse like tissue if looked at with even a minimum of critical thought. And for all the macho posturing that goes on in this corner of the internet, it strikes me as a fearful, shameful, wussified stance. Order and security may be fine things, but if you are willing to sacrifice everything else for them, you have no pride, and you will only produce stultification.

I’m writing this from Chicago, a down-to-earth city far from the various sillinesses of the coasts. From here, disputes between various fringe belief systems seem about as significant as an argument between geeks about whether they prefer Star Trek or Star Wars. There’s nobody here I could even begin to explain this movement to without feeling foolish. However, the fact that these ideas are taken even a little bit seriously by well-connected technical people means they do have significance. Software is really eating the world and what goes on in obscure corners of Silicon Valley nerd culture really does end up having a disproportionate impact on how the world works.

So, I don’t think neoreaction is really going to get much political traction, because it is just too extreme, silly, nerdy, and ultimately self-contradictory. But it does seem to have become a powerful attractor in idea-space, and more people are being pulled into the orbit of this extremely dark belief system. There are short paths between this nonsense and real powers in technology, and that is something that at least needs to be watched.

"Don't Obligate Yourself"

I try to avoid commenting on day-to-day political stuff, because there's so many other places to go for that, but this segment of Supreme Court deliberations on the ACA grabbed my attention:

“[The uninsured are] going into the [health care] market without the ability to pay for what [they] get, getting the health care service anyway as a result of the social norms…to which we’ve obligated ourselves so that people get health care,” explained Solicitor General Donald Verrilli. 

“Well, don’t obligate yourself to that,” Scalia countered. “Why — you know?” 

“Well, I can’t imagine…that the Commerce Clause would forbid Congress from taking into account this deeply embedded social norm,” Verrilli responded. 

“You could do it,” Scalia retorted.

So Scalia, the most prominent intellectual force on the right side of the court, believes not only that the ACA is unconstitutional, but apparently would like to get rid of the law that obligates hospitals to provide emergency care to the uninsured (the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act, passed in 1986 and signed by Reagan). It is, I suppose, consistent in a glibertarian sort of way. The government is powerless to provide or enforce almost any positive good whatsoever, even to keep people from dying in the streets, although it's perfectly free to strip-search you for no reason whatsoever.

More from Dalia Lithwick:

This morning in America’s highest court, freedom seems to be less about the absence of constraint than about the absence of shared responsibility, community, or real concern for those who don’t want anything so much as healthy children, or to be cared for when they are old. Until today, I couldn’t really understand why this case was framed as a discussion of “liberty.” This case isn’t so much about freedom from government-mandated broccoli or gyms. It’s about freedom from our obligations to one another, freedom from the modern world in which we live. It’s about the freedom to ignore the injured, walk away from those in peril...And now we know the court is worried about freedom: the freedom to live like it’s 1804.

Half a cheer for libertarianism

Ron Paul is having his moment and as a result everyone is examining his particular brand of libertarianism, in general finding it pretty odious what with its fairly strong connections to neocofederate racists and whatnot. All these libertarian-haters-come-lately annoy me, since I've been doing this for decades! So in order to go against the current, I thought I'd say a few words about what I like about libertarianism.

If there wasn't anything there that I found attractive, I would not bother with attacking it so much. Or in other words, my attacks on libertarianism are a reflection of an internal argument between different aspects of myself.

Up until a few years ago, I thought libertarians were basically just misguided nerds, who had fallen in love with the formal elegance of free-market theories and mistaken this abstraction for a viable system of government. This elegance may be hard to understand by those who are neither geeks nor libertarians, but for those who are one or the other, it exerts an almost metaphysical appeal. Markets are wonderful because nobody is in charge. Prices represent condensed chunks of information about supply and demand, and adjust themselves automatically, with no Central Bureau of Price Control. Money does in fact encode human needs and abilities into a readily exchangeable form, and that's a good thing.

That's the positive vision of libertarianism, and it's something that I can appreciate a bit, despite being aware of its limitations. The negative aspect of libertarianism, something I can also get behind, is their healthy distrust of government, authority, and centralization. Such tendencies are found on the moderate left too, but generally run into the problem that the moderate left wants to do things for society, and you can't do things without an institutional structure, and that generally means a government.

So the libertarian starts out with a couple of appealing ideas. The problem (or so I thought until recently) is that they just don't think them through enough, they don't understand that corporate power can be as damaging to freedom as government power, they don't understand that some centralization can be a good and necessary thing, they don't understand that society will be ordered one way or the other and refusing to acknowledge the machinery of society just lets others run away with it. But despite the manifest flaws, at least there is some underlying idealism.

But my picture of the libertarian movement turned out to be incomplete. Present-day libertarianism seems to involve at least four major threads:

1. idealists motivated by the above vision, generally infused with some fictional support from Robert Heinlein or Ayn Rand;
2. big-money corporate interests fighting regulation (see Kochtopus); 
3. neoconfederates, racists, and the usual extreme-right whackjobs;
4. leftover anti-communists from the cold war era.

The relative role of each of these is an interesting question that I don't know enough of the history to answer. My personal encounter with libertarianism happened through MIT and the early Internet, which has heavily biased towards (1). Recently I've become more aware of the other two motivating forces, which are probably more important politically since the appeal of (1) is limited mostly to nerds.

Ron Paul, on the other hand, is fatally compromised by his roots in (3). This manifests very noticably in his policy proposals. For instance, rather than opposing all drug laws as s strict libertarian would, he wants to devolve the issue back to the states, as if only the Federal government is capable of infringing on liberty. That particular view are easy to trace back to the so-called "state's rights" movement and general racial backlash.

It's a pity that the only candidate who opposes the American imperium is fatally contaminated by this kind of stench.

Libertardian

Libertarianism has a slick new website, funded by Cato, ie the Kochtopus. I couldn't find anything obviously mock-worthy on a quick overview, and I have to applaud their including a whole list of pointers to anti-libertarian writings. OK, so the fact that it is titled "Critics of Liberty" rather than "Critics of Libertarianism" is pretty laughable. As is the listing of Ayn Rand, Thomas Sowell, and Murray Rothbard in a list of "major libertarian thinkers"...oh well, I don't want to get started here, because I have a new place to do it.

I will take this opportunity officially launch a side-microblog I've had for a little while now, Libertardian. I started this because my obsession with libertarianism is boring but I seem to be unable to give it up, and because so many of these freedom-lovers censor comments on their blogs (anyone else who has been banned from EconLog or elsewhere is welcome to be come a contributor). I have no real excuse for this, and people are giving me a hard time about the name, but what the hell.

I also wanted to investigate what micro-blogging was all about, and I admit to being baffled, because the features of Posterous seem only slightly different from a full-blown blogging platform like Blogger. Maybe inability to percieve these niches is why I'm not a successful web entrepeneur.

Libertarian Bizarroworld

Bryan Caplan gives the game away:

Since you're nerdy enough to read EconLog, I assume you're familiar with Bizarro World, Bizarro Superman, and Bizarro Jerry.  Now imagine adding a new figure to this mythology: Bizarrro Wolf Blitzer.  In Bizarro World, the masses and the mainstream media (Blitzer included) are thoroughly libertarian.  Statists are just a handful of hard-blogging oddballs.  To signal his open-mindedness, Bizarro Blitzer invites a leading statist on his show....

My claim: The people of Bizarro World have a far better understanding of right and wrong than the people of the real world.  In Bizarro World, people know that it's morally permissible to refuse to help a total stranger who failed to purchase health insurance, and morally impermissible to treat a peaceful immigrant like a criminal.

My response on EconLog was censored, because apparently "WTF" is such strong language that it makes Galtian supermen clutch their pearls and head for the fainting couch. So reproduced (reconstructed) below:

WTF does "morally permissible" mean? It can't mean "moral under the generally accepted moral code of western civilization", since that makes charity a moral requirement (as stated explicitly in the Torah, in the New Testament, and in fact by most moral codes elsewhere).

If there be among you a poor man of one of thy brethren within any of thy gates in thy land which the LORD thy God giveth thee, thou shalt not harden thine heart, nor shut thine hand from thy poor brother: But thou shalt open thine hand wide unto him, and shalt surely lend him sufficient for his need, in that which he wanteth. "  -- Deuteronomy 15:7-8

So it must mean "moral according to the rules of libertarian bizarroworld", which inverts the usual moral codes. In libertarian bizarroworld, selfishness is a virtue and charity is a sin.  The sociopath-admiring Ayn Rand I guess is the prophet of this inverted religion.

So Caplan's "claim" is basically a tautology; that in bizarroworld, inverted morality is "better" and more generally accepted than normal morality.  That's fine for bizarros, and you know who they are. But it has nothing to do with the real world except to serve as a horrible counterexample of how to think and behave.

[[update: this is too good (emphasis added):

Suppose a guy with no health insurance and no assets shows up at a hospital emergency room with an urgent life-threatening condition. Should you let him die? Ordinary compassion says no. The heightened compassion of the economist says, at the very least, maybe.

Has there ever been a field so self-regarding as libertarian economics? Any field that is so in love with its own abstractions, so convinced that they confer moral virtue?

I will give the author of that quote, Steve Landsberg, credit for making it a "maybe" (sure, anything might be true), and focusing on an important issue (the scope of compassion). But still.]]

Libertarians for slavery

At this point I should be jaded, but I still get a little chuckle when I find the gods of libertarianism devoting their efforts to defending some of the most brutal enemies of human freedom. Here we see Murray Rothbard musing over Just War theory and deciding that the only ones he approves of are Revolutionary War and "the War for Southern Independence". That is, he is happy to support the collective rights of slavers over the individual rights of slaves, who barely register in his consciousness.

In 1861, the Southern states, believing correctly that their cherished institutions were under grave threat and assault from the federal government, decided to exercise their natural, contractual, and constitutional right to withdraw, to "secede" from that Union. The separate Southern states then exercised their contractual right as sovereign republics to come together in another confederation, the Confederate States of America. If the American Revolutionary War was just, then it follows as the night the day that the Southern cause, the War for Southern Independence, was just, and for the same reason: casting off the "political bonds" that connected the two peoples. In neither case was this decision made for "light or transient causes." And in both cases, the courageous seceders pledged to each other "their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor."
...
we must always remember, we must never forget, we must put in the dock and hang higher than Haman, those who, in modern times, opened the Pandora’s Box of genocide and the extermination of civilians: Sherman, Grant, and Lincoln.

Perhaps, some day, their statues, like Lenin’s in Russia, will be toppled and melted down; their insignias and battle flags will be desecrated, their war songs tossed into the fire. And then Davis and Lee and Jackson and Forrest, and all the heroes of the South, "Dixie" and the Stars and Bars, will once again be truly honored and remembered.

via. He has a grain of a point -- the rise of a strong federal government made it possible for the US to spend the next 150 years building the military empire we have today, which is also anti-freedom. But the cause of southern slavery is the worst argument possible against federalism.

Seeing libertarians like these guys and Bryan Caplan write about war is kind of painful. I presume they own a little chunk of real estate like the rest of the middle class -- are they under the impression that their title doesn't squat over an ocean of blood? That because they obtained their little territory by sitting down in a realtor's office rather than swinging a sword, it doesn't represent a conquest over other people who might have thought they had a right to live there?

Gay marriage impacts everyone

Congratulations to gays and the marriage equality movement for a major victory in New York. But rather than marching along in a pride parade, I need to be contrarian and point out one small but significant area in which the opponents of gay marriage actually have a point. It's not a decisive point by any means -- I still favor allowing gays to marry and so should you -- but it nags at me.

The pro-gay-marriage position is based on the idea of individual and equal rights, and a standard argument for it is that allowing gays to marriage cannot have any conceivable impact on heterosexual marriages (eg here or here). This seems very wrong to me. Despite this argument generally coming from the left, its underpinnings are identical to the libertarian/conservative dismissal of social reality, put in its starkest form by Margaret Thatcher's line "there is no society; there are only individuals". Well, no. Society is a real thing, we are all involved in it in one way or another, and it is involved with our lives. Marriage is a social institution, not merely something two individuals decide of their own free and independent wills to do. This is true of pretty much everything, but it's glaringly obvious in the case of marriage, which comes with a huge set of legal, social, and cultural baggage.

So extending the bounds of marriage to include same-sex couples is in fact a big change that impacts everyone, whether or not they themselves are going to get hitched to someone with similar genes and plumbing. Conservatives are right to sense this. Society works by means of norms and institutions, which are very real things (and sorry if I sound like a college freshman who has been bowled over by his Soc 101 course, but my naive and amateurish interest in the sociological won't be still) and changing them changes the world for everyone.

Now, that particular bit of truth is quite separate from the idea that such a change is necessarily pernicious. And even if it was, those theoretical harms would have to be balanced with the very real harms done to individuals by denying them equal rights.

But proponents of marriage equality should be careful in their arguments. Extending individual freedom is great, but pretending that it doesn't have any impact on society is a bad tactic because it isn't true, and people (including the people who need to be convinced in order to continue the legislative victories) know that it isn't true.

The issue is complicated by the fact that marriage generally has a religious and a secular component, but they are tightly interwoven. Proposals to split it up and get government out of the marriage business entirely and just have it manage the legal relationship of civil union made a lot of sense, but that's not the way things have been playing out. Marriage has remained a unified concept and that's where the battle is taking place, and if our side wins let's not pretend that there was a ground to fight over and the other side has not lost something.

The larger issue is that the left should not be in the business of making libertarian arguments and ceding the ground of society to conservatives.

Volunteered slavery

I suppose if I didn't have a real job and a real life I might devote myself to critiquing the George Mason economics department. I already seem to spend an inordinate amount of time doing that. My defense is that when it comes to bashing libertarians, at least I'm picking on some of the most prominent, ones who are well-respected academics as well as popular in the blogosphere, public intellectuals (of a sort). And they are also one tentacle of the Kochtopus, so there's that, I feel like I'm doing my small part to battle this fearsome monster. There's also the alarming fact that this libertarian tendency has been seeping into mainstream discourse for decades and is a large part of what is making the institutions of government completely dysfunctional.

Anyway: Bryan Caplan is one of those people who even when I agree with his conclusions, I feel like he's wrong. Here's a post where he asserts that "conscription is slavery" (echoed by Robin Hanson, my other bete noire). Now, I am no fan of conscription or the military. But there's clearly something wrong here, if only because this has exactly the same form as the standard libertarian assertion that "taxation is theft", and there's clearly something wrong with that. So I wrote in a comment:

Conscription is slavery in exactly the same way that taxation is theft: that is, it isn't really, except in the most superficial form of analysis. And just as your precious bank account is not really yours in some cosmic, absolute, and unqualified way, neither is your body or self, it turns out. The government gets to take a slice of both. Why? Because it's the government.

The way people around here and Hanson's blog use the idea of status is fairly obtuse. Instead of saying "people have a very strong innate bias for government over firms", maybe you should enquire as to why that is.

If you are an anarchist, then OK, you can complain about government all you want. If not, then you really can't whine when it comes around to collect the bill.

To expand on the cryptic second paragraph, Caplan should check out his colleague Daniel Klein's paper The People's Romance. He's just down the hall (I imagine). This paper outlines a reasonably good theory of why governments exist, why people align themselves to it, and why that's important to the functioning of society.

The larger point: the only reason libertarians can maintain their stupid ideology is because they are, almost uniformly, white middle-class suburbanites who are almost completely isolated from the violence necessary to prop up the state that maintains their pampered little lives. They don't go to prison, they don't go off to fight in wars. And they don't actually fight the government, as real radicals do, and thus they never feel its wrath.

The core of libertarianism (and most other anarchist tendencies) is to take the fact that modern societies have more or less granted government a monopoly of violence and "coercion", and reason from there that if only we got rid of government, we'd get rid of the violence. The error here is completely obvious once you've thought about it for ten seconds, yet the idea won't die. Anarchists are like atheists -- they define themselves by what they claim not to believe in.

Libertarianism always involves a corruption of language. They took the perfectly good word "libertarian" and co-opted it to mean an apologist for power, and Caplan is busy trying to do exactly the same thing for "pacifist", so that it no longer means someone deeply committed to non-violence, who will risk their life for the principle, but just someone who thinks in the abstract that war is bad. Is Caplan going to lie down in front of a troop transport? I think not.

So does the fact that Bryan Caplan doesn't like conscription mean I have to be for it? Not really. But there's one somewhat good argument for it -- it democratizes the costs of war, and thus may dampen the tendency of states to go to war. That dynamic certainly was active during the Vietnam War era, and is absent now. If states are inevitable, then wars are inevitable, and the best way to keep it in check might be to make sure everyone has a risk of being killed, or forced to kill. Or else forced to become actual pacifists, conscientious objectors who will actually risk something for their principles.

[update: some unrelated George Mason shenanigans. And it appears that the next Commerce Secretary may come out of the Mercatus Center? WTF?]

Ron Paul R[love]ution

Since I spend so much time bashing libertarians I thought for balance I should link to this well-written and convincing post by Charles Davis on the reasons why progressives should prefer Ron Paul to Barack Obama. Excerpt:

[Obama has] pushed for the largest military budget in world history, given trillions of dollars to Wall Street in bailouts and near-zero interest loans from the Federal Reserve, protected oil companies like BP from legal liability for environmental damages they cause – from poisoning the Gulf to climate change – and mandated that all Americans purchase the U.S. health insurance industry's product. You might argue Paul's a corporatist, but there's no denying Obama's one.

And at least Paul would – and this is important, I think – stop killing poor foreigners with cluster bombs and Predator drones. Unlike the Nobel Peace Prize winner-in-chief, Paul would also bring the troops home from not just Afghanistan and Iraq, but Europe, Korea and Okinawa. ...

Even on on the most pressing domestic issues of the day, Paul strikes me as a hell of a lot more progressive than Obama. Look at the war on drugs: Obama has continued the same failed prohibitionist policies as his predecessors, maintaining a status quo that has placed 2.3 million – or one in 100 – Americans behind bars, the vast majority African-American and Hispanic. Paul, on the other hand, has called for ending the drug war and said he would pardon non-violent offenders, which would be the single greatest reform a president could make in the domestic sphere, equivalent in magnitude to ending Jim Crow.

To put it my own way: I'd say I agree with maybe 30-40% of Ron Paul's principles, and strongly disagree with the rest. But the point is, unlike every other current Presidential condidate, he actually has some. That in itself is enormously appealing. It also pretty much guarantees he won't be elected, unless something awfully drastic happens to change the way electoral politics works.

[This previous post is pretty anti-Paul, but also expressed a similar fondness.]

Why do engineers become terrorists?

This article (via Crooked Timber) claims that engineers are quite a bit overrepresented in the ranks of terrorists -- including Mohammed Atta, the leader of the 9/11 attacks.

Well, I've spent some time tracking political extremism in engineering culture, although not of the violent type, so here's some random attempts at a theory:

- engineering historically has been a profession caught between the upper and working classes. The lowest-status of the professions, it has been a way for children of laborers to move up to professional status. I don't know how much this is still the case, but it wouldn't surprise me if it is still so in the developing world.

- this sociological fact causes a good bit of status-anxiety and role confusion, among a class of people whose social skills aren't usually that great to begin with.

- engineers are also often mathematically inclined and hence drawn to abstractions.

- so, one cure for being lost in society is finding a cult to belong to, preferably one with a simple, powerful, self-reinforcing belief system, that is, a form of fundamentalism.

- but, engineers also having a practical, real-world orientation, they will also be drawn to taking action, and may be more skilled than average in doing so.

This is drawn from my experience with libertarians and Randroids, who whatever else you can say about them are not particularly violent (Ayn Rand depicted blowing stuff up in her novels and was drawn to serial killers, but her followers don't seem to follow her that far). But I'm guessing some of the psychological forces that pull engineers into those ideologies may also draw others into violent religious and right-wing fundamentalism. Libertarianism is a form of enlightenment fundamentalism, it fetishizes and oversimplifies enlightenment virtues like rationality, self-interest, and individuality, and turns them into an ideology and a cult.

Now of course the vast majority of engineers aren't terrorists or libertarians or extremists of any kind. And almost no libertarians are terrorists as far as I know -- but they do tend towards unhealthy obsessions with weaponry and in that respect the culture tends to merge into other more violent tendencies of the extreme right.

I hope nobody interprets this as an attack on engineers or engineering culture. Engineering's successes represent some of the highest forms of human creativity and progress. But we are talking here about failures, people on the margins who, due to either their own limitations or the limitations of their education, failed to direct their energies in a creative direction and instead chose destruction.

Purity of Essence

In between dropping off one child at the SF Ballet School (which to me represents the purest form, in the contemporary world, of the old aristocratic mode of society and artistic production) and taking the other one to the SF Public Library (which, in a nice contrast, is the best working institutional expression we have of the spirit of democratic communalism), I chanced upon...a libertarian rally! Ron Paul was the star speaker! It's odd how the collection of randoms there manage to situate themselves as far as possible from both sets of virtues -- they have neither class, nor any principled opposition to class.

OK, some good stuff -- The antiwar.com people had perhaps the biggest table there, and they are not completely insane. I learned that they are an offshoot of something called the Randolph Bourne Institute, which I approved of -- in fact I could have sworn I'd discussed Bourne here but Google says not, anyway, he is best known for the phrase "War is the health of the state". Well. I'm antiwar, so I could get behind them and the fraction of speeches that related to that. OTOH, their honcho Justin Raimondo is co-publishing with Hitler apologist Patrick Buchanan -- that kind of puts a damper on their appeal for me.

There were plenty of teatards, drug legalizers, 9/11 truthers, old weathered beatnik types, along with some minor local politicians in suits. The major theme, other than opposition to war, seemed to be financial crankery, "sound money", paranoia at the Fed, proposals to go back on the gold standard, etc. Someone running for the State Assembly handed me a leaflet proudly announcing her opposition to such vital issues as water flouridation and the "Codex Alimentarius". It was a pretty small-scale event, considering the nominal leader of the entire Libertarian movement was speaking.

I didn't feel much like engaging with this crowd, but my son hasn't been burned out with decades of the same old arguments like I am, so I encouraged him to get verbally combative...he needs the practice. He got into it with some woman at a table promoting the Bay Area Voluntaryists for around 20 minutes, and held his own pretty well -- I'm encouraging to get on the debate team. He took a version of the Nolan test and it indicated that he the most statist person there. A sensible boy, and he generates his own opinions.

I guess my take on this is not that different from this one on a left-wing anarchist gathering -- I can't help feeling some genuine fondness for individuals trying to make sense of the world, and willing to go out on ideological limbs to do so, but damn, can't they manage to do so while retaining a minimum of critical reasoning facilities? Don't people who want to devote their lives to this sort of thing have an obligation to think at least one step beyond their visceral dislike of authority and try to understand what government is, why it is, and how maybe its structure reflects some human realities and getting rid of it does not get rid of the problems that it arose to solve? Argh. OK, it took me awhile to think through these issues myself, and I consider myself pretty bright, so I guess it's no surprise that so many others haven't gotten past the first step.

Reasons to be Local

[Or "I hate economists", parts MMCCCXLI and MMCCCXLII.]

So here is Arnold Kling piling onto a discussion (he's 3rd in a chain that started in the NYT) of economists mocking locavores, people who believe it's gennerally better to eat food produced locally. The crux of the libertardian argument is that the price of a vegetable accurately reflects all the costs that went into making it, particularly energy, so that buying local (if it is more expensive) is not really any better for the environment and may well be worse.

There are at least three responses to this that I can think of (aside from "fuck off"):

- Economics takes as axiomatic that people's preferences are unassailable. So if some hippies want to pay more for locally produced produce, who are you to tell them otherwise? Obviously they get more utility out of it. It's not like it's hard to discern the sometimes vast differences in quality between locally-grown produce and stuff that's been industrially produced and shipped across the country.

- Underlying the locavore ideology is a set of beliefs that may or may not be accurate but must be addressed in any sensible discussion. Among these: the idea that prices do not accurately reflect energy usage because of the massive subsidies given to petroleum-based economy (including highway construction and fighting trillion dollar wars in the Middle East). Some locavores believe that it's a moral duty to compensate for these distortions even at the cost of paying more at retail.

- Another value underlying locavorism is that local is better because it's more reliable and there are fewer intermediaries between producer and consumer. There is actual value in being able to look the grower of your beets in the eye and converse with him. There is value in having a short supply chain because it reduce the potential for adulteration.

And there's the feeling of unease at the astounding reach and complexity of global economic webs. This may be easier to see in the context of manufacturing. Sure, it's nice to be able to afford cheap stuff from China, but (a) sometimes it has poison in it, and (b) it makes us dependent on a bunch of heathens who don't necessarily have our best interests at heart. Validly or not, it is easier to imagine a farmer two counties over as being a good guy than one two countries over.

I myself don't entirely buy into this sort of view, which might as well be called localism, which underlies a lot of the ecological, foodie, and other movements, especailly here at the southern end of ecotopia. It has elements of fear and reaction to it; in its extreme forms you end up as a survivalist hoarding guns and trying to grow all his food in the backyard because when the apocalypse comes, you can't rely on anybody. And it seems to be somewhat of a conservative, romantic reaction to the triumph of globalized capitalism -- which needs a response, but somehow farmer's markets don't seem quite adequate.

The flippant, arguments presented by economists illustrate very clearly the extraordinary poverty of thought produced by the crappy economic ideology exemplified by libertards. They are just so enraptured by their abstract models of how markets work that they don't bother to see if they actually apply to the actual world.



On a slightly more elevated plane, here's a couple of comments I made on Robin Hanson's blog. Hanson seems a lot smarter than Kling, but in these posts and elsewhere you can see a deformation professionelle not very far below the surface, a determination to reduce the complexity of social dynamics to some kind of univariate maximization of "status" or "utility". Blah. Not that that is not a useful stance sometimes, but really, what a boring way to view the world.

[[update: I forgot to mention that Kling is a corporate shill who used to write for the propaganda mill Tech Central Station. This piece that trashes Open Source as communism and praises Microsoft is a good example -- that its predictions were entirely wrong is somewhat forgiveable given that it was written in 2003, but check out the ad banner at the bottom.]]

Sucked into the Singularity

Due to circumstances somewhat beyond my control it looks like I'll be going to the Singularity Summit this weekend (long story short, my son is in a program that was handing out free registrations for young up and coming nerds, and so I get to go as his chaperon). I have decidedly mixed feelings about it. The technological religion of transhumanism gives me hives, but OTOH there are many smart people doing interesting things drawn into its orbit, so maybe I'll learn something.

Anyway, it's a chance to dig a little deeper into what bugs me about this movement:

First: it's a scene. I'm just not a scenester, something I've grudgingly come to acknowledge at my late stage of life. I don't want to belong to any club that would have me as a member, etc. And it's a particularly cultish sort of scene, a pseudo-religion that elevates science and technology into god-like forces. If I want religion I prefer a real one; I've been working with technology too long to believe that it can produce transcendence.

Second: Here's a post from leading singulitarian Eleazar Yudkowsky entitled "Politics is the Mind-killer". Like many of Yudkowsky's posts, its insightful and well-written, but it gets things exactly wrong. Or slightly more charitably, it goes in the exact opposite direction that I want to go in. Latour is all about the underlying politics of science and everything else. Ainslie is all about the internal politics of what happens within a singe individual. Politics, war, and conflict are central to existence, central to any comprehensive model of the universe. Denying the political is a trick used to disempower people; to make them accept existing power relations as somehow laws of the universe.

What happens when you have a movement that despises politics? Why, libertarianism of course, the default politics of geekdom and something I've talked about too many times to do it again here. One pithy description of libertarianism is the (absurd) belief that you can replace politics with economics. This conference is going to be crawling with libertarians of the most irritating sort. Such as seasteaders, a movement that just so perfectly captures something -- this ludicrous idea that utopia is to be found on a sterile metal platform sitting in the ocean, that by removing themselves from land and life they will leave their (admittedly shriveled) humanity behind. That it's run by the grandson of Milton Friedman is just nanoparticle icing on the synthetic cake.

What I'd like to see is a bunch of technofuturists who aren't playing at a kindergarten level when it comes to politics. Hm, maybe these so-called "technoprogressives"? Or the more extreme endpoints of the Government 2.0 movement, building the operating system for the society of the future?

OK, now that I've got the negativity out of the way, what do I like about these guys? Well, there are a lot of young, smart, idealistic, activist types circling around this movement. They even occasionally do things other than flame about the singularity. And, shit, they may be right -- it may in fact be the case that technical progress is accelerating to some sort of climactic, nonlinear, unimaginable state-change. Maybe science fiction novels are a good guide to the future. The Gulf of Mexico looks like a setting for a Bruce Sterling story, but that's not the kind of SF these guys have in mind. No, they think the future is gonna be bright, they are going to freeze their heads and download themselves to super-powerful computronium substrates that can be launched like seeds into vast depths of space to colonize the universe -- and that this is somehow going to be an answer to the problems of existence. Such naivete can be annoying, alarming, or occasionally charming.

Libertarians for Stalin

A few years back, my model for libertarians was that they were my brethren (that is, basically nerds) who had just happened, through some hitch in their intellectual or emotional development, to latch onto an oversimplified ideology, an ideology that channeled a perfectly normal and even admirable adolescent ant-iauthoritarianism into political stupidity. That this geeky ideology was twisted and used by truly appalling real-world politician to gain power and strip society of its ability to function was not the nerds' fault, exactly.

But I keep learning more creepy things about this movement. Patron saint Ayn Rand was a fan of mudering sociopaths. More recent patron saint Ron Paul is in bed with racists and antisemites. Etc. It's no longer possible to think of them as just people who appreciate the elegance of distributed systems.

Now, here's something new: the Koch family, who bankrolls an amazingly wide swath of libertarian institutions (ie, the Cato Institute, Reason, the George Mason economics department...pretty much the entire brain trust of the movement) as well as the tea party and many other questionable things, turns out to have made their money by contracting for Stalin's USSR. (and later, skimming off government contracts while ripping off Indian tribes, but that seems pretty vanilla under the circumstances).

In 1929, after hosting a delegation of Soviet planners in Wichita, Kansas, Winkler and Koch signed a $5 million contract to build 15 refineries in the Soviet Union. According to Oil of Russia, a Russian oil industry trade magazine, the deal made Winkler-Koch into Comrade Stalin’s number-one refinery builder. It provided equipment and oversaw construction...At the time, the Soviet Union’s oil industry was a total mess. Equipment built by Western engineering firms was always breaking down or didn’t work at all. Western engineers were constantly being accused of espionage or sabotage, real or imagined, and booted out of the country. Soviet workers suspected of colluding with the foreigners were simply taken out back and shot. Winkler-Koch made sure it was running a tight, efficient operation. Unlike his Western competitors, Koch pleased his Soviet clients by ensuring top quality and helping the cause of socialism.

I am truly in awe. As I mentioned in the last post, no matter how cynical I get, the weird corruption of the real world manages to trump my imagination.


It's now safe to fuck with Stalin!

Is all this just a trivial sideshow? Not hardly. If the belief system of these nerds had not been so successfully employed to weaken the regulatory functions of government, we wouldn't have had an entirely preventable oil spill in the Gulf. This bullshit just killed an ocean. Doesn't get more real than that.

The Kochs also fund a good chunk of the climate-change denial machine. Of course.

Libertardianism

People are beating up on Bryan Caplan for some extra-stupid remarks he made lately that I guess are part of a major discussion about libtertarianism and if we are more or less free now than in the late 19th century. Apparently Caplan thinks women in the 1880s were freer than they are now because they didn't have to pay income tax, or something like that.

It's an excuse for me to link to some of my earlier jibes at Caplan, at this blog and his own, where he was seriously entertaining the idea that the Earth could support a population in the trillions.

I know, twitting libertarians is a waste of time, but this guy is an actual tenured professor of economics at an actual university. Damn. His home page has got to be seen to be believed. [[update: oh darn, it's been updated to not look like it was done by a 14-year-old on ecstasy -- here's the archive.org version of the good one]]

In fairness, there are some non-crazy libertarian types writing on this as well, and there's even some interesting talk about liberal/libertarian fusion. But I'm not in a fair mood.

[[Update: Caplan, not satisfied with being the blogosphere's whipping boy for a week, outdoes himself in creepy blockheadedness. This guy really puts the Ass in Asperger's.]]

Ayn Rand (and the) Sociopath

This article on Ayn Rand and her cult has gotten a lot of attention recently, but it didn't tell me much that I didn't already know -- both her and her followers were immature, emotionally stunted and dysfunctional. The sexual and power escapades of the cultists are somewhere between amusing and pathetic.

This, however was new to me and genuinely horrifying. Good Lord.

The wall between political ideology and psychopathology just keeps getting weaker. Or, put it another way: politics inherently involves deep-seated psychological processes: emotion, attachment, self-image, object-relations, purity, boundaries, etc. Like religion, it's one way people deal with their inner turmoils and conflicts, by projecting them outside themselves. Extremism in politics goes together with extreme psychological states. The madness outside is a reflection of the madness inside.

One of the reasons Marxism seems so hokey to me is that it presumes that people's politics should be based on a rational material interests. Not on this planet. I suppose standard capitalist economics makes the same assumptions but is more robust to their falsity.

I always thought that autism was the right model for Randroids but perhaps the sociopath is closer. In both diseases, the person has something fundamentally wrong with their theory-of-mind module. Rand elevated this lack of ability to have compassion into the cardinal virtue of her ethical system. Most Randroids of course do not have anything organically wrong with their brains, they are merely would-be sociopaths.

The Gatesgate test

The Gatesgate affair may be mercifully behind us once the principals have enjoyed a beer together at the whitehouse, but it's been an instructive little summer newstorm. Your reaction to it may be taken as a pretty definitive test of your politcal leanings. Try to think back to when you first heard the story. If your reaction was sympathy for the policeman, you are an authoritarian, with a reflexive tendency to submit to authority and a desire for others to do the same. If your sympathy was with Gates, then you are a (small-l) libertarian, inclined to distrust authority and favor the individual in contests with state power. Note that this has little to do with the facts of the case. The ambiguity of the event makes it a nice litmus test.

Obama is neither of these, and I believe his unfortunate remark that the "police acted stupidly" may be explained as an interaction of these competing frames. His sympathy for the underdog (Gates) in this particular case competes with his effective role as Chief of Police (or, executive officer of the most powerful government in the world). He has no desire to delegitimize state power, but in this case the results were undesireable so it was applied "stupidly".

Of course simple racism also affects what side one falls in, but racists tend to be authoritarians, who would like nothing better for the inferior races to adopt their former subservient stance. To such people the very existence of someone like Dr. Gates is an affront.

Libertarianism is toast

[Image courtesy of Toothpaste for Dinner via tbogg.]

I used to spend a lot of time arguing with libertarians, back in the prehistory of the Internet, when that was the primary form of mental infestation found there. It helped me refine my own views a bit, but was mostly a waste of time, and aside from occasional sniping I don't do it any more.

On reading that Alan Greenspan has started muttering favorably about bank nationalization, which is akin to Genghis Khan becoming a pacifist or the Pope opening an abortion clinic, I realize that I have won. Libertarianism is dead, over, finished, kaput. Although if experience is any judge, its devotees won't realize it and will keep on churning out the same brain-dead arguments over and over, which will be even more disconnected from reality than before. In fact, the stronger the role of the state in the economy, the more they will have to complain about, and the more they can pile the blame for every evil in existence on its ample back. So maybe it's good times for them.

However, their role in the last couple of decades of being the useful idiots of the Republican Party will be over (as will, one hopes, the Republican Party). The governing style of Republicans from Reagan through Bush II was to spout small-government rhetoric while massively building up the state apparatus, and to preach fiscal responsibility while racking up massive deficits. Republicans who campaign on a small-government platform deserve to be laughed off the stage, and for at least the next couple of election cycles, might actually get what they deserve for a change.