Moving to Russia

By Dan Summer

I would also like to thank Ken for having me as a guest publisher.

As a creative arts therapist and artist, I have become growingly disappointed with the arts being cut in the school as well as publicly. Several of my friends have encouraged me to debate how art can heal the world. Though I am not sure it fully can, it does have its benefits. Unfortunately with right people and left people complaining, censoring, or disallowing art, the power of creativity has become more diminished, and now one has to be a private collector to view even erotic art! So I decided the best thing for artists to do, who care about artistic freedom, and lack of censorship should move to Russia, and try to get the Kandinsky award.http://www.reuters.com/article/entertainmentnews/idUSTRE4A654P20081107 (not sure how to do the link thing!) and you can see Putin naked on a couch with Hilary, but also express yourself any which way you want.

Libertarians getting their wish?

By Mitch Johnson

Thanks to Ken for letting me chime in.

I read Dan McCleary's entry, and he might be happy to know that at least one fancy opera house that he eschews in favor of his favorite rock venues could be in trouble for lack of government funding.

This past week, the foo-foo frenchy music director, Gerard Mortier, dumped his impending directorship of the New York City Opera because he didn't have enough government money to play with. At his current gig, the state-sponsored Paris National Opera, the operating budget is $160 million. The City Opera, facing a $15 million deficit, is struggling to come up with a promised $36 million operating budget for next year and meanwhile has cancelled most of it's current season. The entire 2008 budget for the National Endowment for the Arts was $145 million.

While some readers might think any federal funding of the fine arts is outrageous, it should be noted that the US is nowhere as extreme as Europe. As an opera lover myself, I hate to see this "people's opera" facing such hard times but acknowledge that cutting arts funding from the federal budget may be warranted, especially with government spending reaching sickening levels. Love opera, love Paris, hate European entitlements and the entitled. It's a hard time to be an opera fan and a libertarian.

Bin Laden hunt

I've criticized, and expect to continue to criticize, Barack Obama on various grounds. Therefore, it's only fair that I should point out some of the positions and policies of his with which I agree, and a major example is his statement that "We will kill bin Laden. We will crush al Qaeda. That has to be our biggest national security priority." It may be that Obama underestimates the relevance of destroying Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia as part of that objective, but annihilating the overall organization that attacked us on September 11 is as crucial a priority as there is.

Of Palin and Libertarianism

By Gil Weinreich
With gratitude to Ken for opening up his blog, I will add my thoughts on the current discussion of Palin and libertarianism. As much as a lightening rod as she has been, it bears noting that she is not the leader of the GOP or primary opposition to the Democrats for the foreseeable future. The only force that stands between responsible government and "creeping socialism" right now is Mitch McConnell, a shrewd legislative strategist and the Senate Minority Leader. Well, perhaps I should add Rahm Emanuel, whose duty as Obama's chief of staff will be to keep the Democratic extremists from derailing the Obama Administration's more "moderate" legislative agenda.

As for the future of the GOP, count me as a strong supporter of Palin. Libertarians like to attack social conservatives as threats to their liberty, but the cultural and political barriers to change are so enormous that even Ronald Reagan accomplished very little on the social/cultural front.

The true threat to liberty is not social conservatism, but rather the continuing erosion of societal values. To take one recent example, look at the civil rights ballot measures champtioned by Ward Connerly in Colorado and Nebraska. In formerly solid-red-state Colorado, the initiative narrowly lost. In Nebraska it passsed with 58% of the vote, meaning that in the one of the most conservative, wholesome corners of the Midwest and America, as many as 42% of the people supported politically correct but discrimatory affirmative action.

Not every issue goes as close to the heart of equality under the law as this one, but on a range of issues -- whether it be the freedom to own guns or affirmations of the religious values (all those "bitter" people out there) on which this country was founded -- social conservatives are the last ones holding the fort. My perception is that few do so with determination because they know how our culture of political correctness filters their beliefs as divisive, bitter, intolerant, etc.

Maybe it will take a plain-talking Alaskan with innate political talent and an appealing persona, who has not spent time in elite educational insitutions, to make American bedrock values "cool" again. To paraphrase the late William F. Buckley, I'd rather be governed by Sarah Palin than all the folks on the Harvard Law faculty, or even at Reason magazine.

Palin, counter-Palin

CNN's Jack Cafferty, whose questions to his viewers seem to emanate from a bottomless chasm of cluelessness, asks "Why is there still so much interest in Gov. Palin?" I'll give him the answer: it's because the attacks on her have continued even after the election, and have maintained the same viciousness that's characterized so much of the criticism of her since she was nominated.

Sarah Palin's greatest asset is her enemies. The smug, false and idiotic attacks on her have overwhelmed the reasonable concerns about her becoming vice president. I am not a wholehearted fan of Sarah Palin; she underperformed at crucial moments, overstated some of her rhetoric, and is more socially conservative than I'd prefer. But hearing her noxious critics -- not just on the left but also anonymous has-beens in the McCain camp -- makes me hope she will stick around on the national stage as a counterpoint to such knee-jerk cultural snobbery.

Robert A. George, never a Palin fan, has an insightful post about the latest attacks.

Libertarian leanings

By McCleary

Thanks to Ken for the invitation to post.

Intro: I was a teenage punk rocker in DC in the early eighties. One night after a Minor Threat show in Arlington, Va., I was driving home along Rock Creek Parkway, under the cantilevered balcony of the Kennedy Center. I had worked a summer job in DC, and I thought to myself, "why do my tax dollars support an arts center for rich people, while DC punks are watching Minor Threat at Woodlawn High School?"

Though certainly liberal with regard to social issues, I developed an overly simplistic economic philosophy that boiled down to "the government shouldn't spend my money on anything." It took me at least fifteen years to realize that I was probably a libertarian.

Dan

Guest bloggers

I've asked several individuals, of diverse viewpoints and areas of expertise, to consider doing some guest blogging for this site. Guest blogging could commence at any time. Moreover, this blog is now immunized against any possible federal action under a revival of the Fairness Doctrine.

Compulsory service watch

Advocacy of compulsory national service for students appeared and then disappeared on the president-elect's website. I'm losing my skepticism about the merits of libertarian civil disobedience.

Leftist alienation

Noah Pollak: "Leftist alienation with Obama is already setting in, and it is hilarious."

Or maybe it's a brilliant ploy to give Obama some centrist credibility....

Libertarians vs classical liberals

One more note about ideological labels and then I may give that subject a rest for a while. Here's Todd Seavey:

[Will] Wilkinson also sounded a sympathetic note about the idea of a social safety net, saying he sometimes feels ideologically "lonely" when he tells friends that he likes the positions of Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman—including their sympathy for policies such as a guaranteed minimum income. Wilkinson's friends on the left denounce him as "a market fundamentalist," but the libertarians can be almost as negative: "They tell me I'm not a libertarian at all."

Brown University political science professor John Tomasi offered a plan for bringing together such feuding factions. Theatrically arranging three cups in front of himself on the podium, Tomasi encouraged libertarians (and liberals) to drink three metaphorical cups of potentially strange-tasting philosophical ideas: (1) Accept that there is a real distinction between classical liberals (who share a somewhat flexible bundle of ideas such as democracy, constitutionalism, and individual rights) and libertarians, adherents of a strict version of property rights that "not many people believe;" (2) accept that some version of "social justice" will seem intuitively appealing to most political thinkers and must be part of our agenda; and (3) recognize that once 1 and 2 are accepted, a friendly empirical conversation about economic policies can proceed.

It seems to me that "libertarian" as defined above ought to be called something like "absolutist propertarian" and ought to exclude not just Hayek and Friedman but anyone who's inadvertently breathed on someone else without a signed contract. But be that as it may, if any such "strict version" becomes the broadly accepted meaning, count me out. And while I've never much liked the term "classical liberal" (it seems a little nostalgic and musty), the "somewhat flexible bundle of ideas" described above is something I would sign onto rather readily.

Conservatarian thoughts

"Can libertarians and conservatives still be friends?" The trouble with the question is it assumes a purely binary relationship between libertarianism and conservatism. But in reality there is a great deal of overlap between the two, and there are many variants of each, and the relationship is more like a Möbius strip. (Well, maybe.) I'd choose "libertarian" over "conservative" as a label, if I had to choose (though arguably libertarianism is best understood as a form of conservatism anyway). Both self-identified groups, unfortunately, can be quick to write people out of the ranks if they don't meet some rather narrow ideological purity standards. And I agree with Ilya Somin that finding some common ground is a very good idea right about now.

Barr closing

With 98 percent of precincts reporting, Bob Barr has 490,644 votes, which CNN helpfully rounds down to a big fat zero percent. So maybe he won't get a talk-radio gig after all. But he's welcome to stop by at Lolita Bar anytime.

UPDATE: This would be a good time to point out that the electorate has been growing, and therefore comparing absolute numbers of Libertarian votes now versus previous years is misleading. Over 110 million votes were cast in the 2008 presidential election, compared to 86 million in 1980. Thus, Barr having "the second-best Libertarian presidential performance of all time," albeit "well behind Ed Clark's 921,128 votes in 1980," is actually a bit pathetic.

Where things stand

A few items worth contemplating:

-- Jeff Flake charts a limited-government "way out of the wilderness." (Link thanks to Mike B.)

-- Jim Lindgren notes that the prospective chief of staff favors "universal citizen service."

-- Jason Zengerle points out that Robert F. Kennedy Jr., now being touted for EPA or Interior, is an exponent of anti-vaccine pseudoscience.

The latter two items should raise a few concerns among freedom- and science-loving liberals who voted for Obama. Right?

Conservative reinvention TK

A big political story of the next couple of years will be how conservatism reinvents itself in response to the new Democratic era. I, for one, hope conservatism moves in a decidedly more libertarian direction, without embracing the extremes of conspiracism and anarchism that have characterized (too) much libertarianism in recent years. It's a subject I plan to follow and, in some small way contribute to, on this blog. And it's the sort of thing that I expect will be under discussion at tonight's Lolita Bar event: "Yesterday Was the Election: What's Next?"

Note on headline: TK is an editor's term for "to come."

Congrats

Congratulations to Barack Obama, who by all indications is about to become president-elect.

And also to Bob Barr, who's probably getting just enough votes for a talk-radio gig somewhere.

Election night

Breaking out the Lagavulin. In keeping with the earlier theme of unpredictability, I haven't decided if I'll weigh in on election returns tonight, or even if I'll be sober.

Nature of things

Happy Election Day. And in case there are any surprises tonight, here is Lucretius making an early attempt to understand the nature of human unpredictability:

Thou must admit, besides all blows and weight,
Some other cause of motion, whence derives
This power in us inborn, of some free act.-
Since naught from nothing can become, we see.
For weight prevents all things should come to pass
Through blows, as 'twere, by some external force;
But that man's mind itself in all it does
Hath not a fixed necessity within,
Nor is not, like a conquered thing, compelled
To bear and suffer,- this state comes to man
From that slight swervement of the elements
In no fixed line of space, in no fixed time.

Business International radical?

I worked at Business International starting in the late 1980s, a few years after Barack Obama worked there. As I've written, I think Obama glamorized things considerably in his description of the organization, making it sound like some lucrative fast track he turned his back on to be a community organizer, when in reality it was a rundown operation rife with ill-paying, dead-end jobs. However, I'm rather puzzled -- and unimpressed -- to see assertions now that Business International had a connection to the leftist Students for a Democratic Society in the 1960s. Whatever their contacts may have been, the idea that BI was some kind of hotbed of radicalism is even more preposterous than the idea it was some high-powered corporate gravy train.

Who has the better argument?

David Frum makes a 10-point case for McCain.

Peruvian shamans express their preference for Obama.

Post-Halloween

Widespread rumors of gang initiation activities occurring on Halloween were, fortunately, false.