WV Judge Excludes Third Party From Debates

Democrats and Republicans, when they’re the only ones in the room, can rarely agree on anything. But as soon as a third party comes sniffing around, the Big Two are suddenly the best of friends. There are plenty of examples of this outrageous behavior; Radley Balko documented the Supreme Court’s refusal to allow Libertarians on the ballot in Louisiana. Here in West Virginia, we have the home-grown Mountain Party’s Jesse Johnson, who sued to be allowed into the state’s gubernatorial debate.

The gutless judge, Jennifer Bailey Walker, refused Johnson. It is absolutely pathetic how anti-democratic the major two parties truly are. Third party candidates should always be allowed on the podium. The more views we have, the better elections we’ll have. Anybody claiming otherwise is a shameful liar.

(Incidentally, I vote for all Mountain Party candidates, whenever they’re on the ballot. I have no idea what they believe in, or what they’d do if elected, and I don’t care. Better that we get to hear these people than hear the same old nonsense.)

Libertarians and Health Care

Radley Balko goes after Barack Obama’s health-care plan this morning, writing:

Note to Obama: It’s great soundbite to say everyone has a “right” to health care.  But there is no “right” that can only be recognized by forcing someone else to give up time, labor, and resources.

A couple of quick thoughts:

1. Note to Balko: there are no such things as rights. If you’re going to claim that Obama can’t claim humanity has a right to health care, I’m going to claim the same thing about whatever rights you cherish. Rights exist only so far as governments are willing to recognize them. So nobody enjoys a “right” to free speech, because you’re not allowed to say whatever you want. At the moment that limits are placed upon the conceptual “right,” it ceases to exist.

2. The contempt that Libertarians have for people who aren’t good at acquiring resources is really something breathtaking to witness. Understand that the Libertarian society would be based entirely upon resource acquisition, and so the people who are good at getting health care are rewarded, and the ones who aren’t (old people, for example, or children, or the mentally and physically incapable) are left to go without…unless they are taken care of by charity. Libertarians use charity as their out for people who aren’t good at acquiring resources, claiming, “Well, charity will take care of those people.” But if you press the point, you’ll occasionally find somebody who acknowledges that if the charity doesn’t exist, the person goes without. You can’t come right out and say, “Fuck the people who can’t get their own health care,” but you sure can imply it.

3. Then you have the absurdity of: “But there is no “right” that can only be recognized by forcing someone else to give up time, labor, and resources.” If you genuinely believe this, then you cannot believe in any government. At all. Whatsoever. Because any government by its very nature requires its imposition onto people. So if you like national defense, for example, you’re going to have to agree to forcing somebody to give up their time, labor, and resources, because tanks and planes and guns don’t pay for themselves. Same goes for policing. And although Balko is a (heroic) critic of police departments everywhere, he doesn’t seem to disagree with their existence. But he’d have to if he believes the above. You simply cannot pay for government function without taxation, which is the “forcing someone else to give up time, labor, and resources…” stuff.

Libertarians who think less than they speak from their gut will claim that taxation amounts to slavery. This isn’t based on anything other than a desire not to pay taxes, and it is a position we all could take if we weren’t capable of understanding that there are some fundamental differences between paying taxes and being an actual slave. For instance, would the people who believe this sort of absurdity trade positions with a black man in the American South 150 years ago? Or is their taxation only slavery when it isn’t being compared to actual ownership by another human being.

Here’s another way to think about it. Let’s say you pay twenty percent in taxes, and you earn $100,000 a year. The claim from some libertarians is that you’re 20 percent a slave because a fifth of your work goes to the government for free! (Ignore any government services enjoyed by this person, like roads.) Of course, somebody else could merely say, I get paid $80,000 for my work, and the other 20 percent is going to the government to pay for services that I enjoy, like defense, policing, roads, a court system, etc. I know, I know, it’s a huge leap.

The thing I don’t understand about libertarians who love the market is why they’re so god-damned awful at marketing their own product. Nobody would buy Pepsi if it was sold like people attempt to sell libertarianism. (”What’s that? You drink Coke? You’re so fucking stupid! Now buy a fucking Pepsi!”) At this point, Balko isn’t even selling the charitable angle of a libertarian society in regard to health care - he’s just fuming at the possibility that his tax-dollars might pay for a grandmother’s cancer treatment. The horror!

Hey Denver Police Department…

…Go fuck yourselves. When people warn of a brutal police state, it is precisely this sort of thing that they’re talking about. Clearly, the directive in Denver wasn’t to allow for individuals to freely express their opinions, but rather, to violently put down the crowds. There is simply no other way to interpret the sort of nonsense communicated by that t-shirt.

(Hat tip to Radley Balko.)

Thoughts On The Economy

So I’m sitting at my desk praying that my boy doesn’t wake up - you’ve slept for 45 minutes dammit, sleep longer! - and trying to make sense of our current economic situation. Conclusion? I have no idea. I don’t really understand what has made it tank, other than some infinitely more convoluted version of banks had far more debts than liquid assets. The bailout, which was going to fix things (if you’re a believer in such things, and I’m not), instead failed and now everybody’s pointing fingers. The stock markets have ticked upwards today, although what that means is anybody’s guess. So, in summation, I have no idea where we are, where we’ve been, or where we’re going, and my guess is, I’m not going to have any better an idea tomorrow.

Republican Babies
Who knew that Republicans were capable only of voting when they were emotionally stable? Undone by the mean Mrs. Nancy Pelosi, Republicans were forced to vote against the bailout proposal. How sad for them.

Anybody who claims Republicans vote based upon what’s best for the country are lying through their teeth; the Republicans gave me the evidence for that claim. Think about that for a minute. They wanted America to know that they vote not based upon ideological beliefs about what may or may not be best for the nation, but because Pelosi might have said something that hurt their feelings. Somebody call the waaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhmbulance.

Democrats El-Foldo
Propose your own solution, pass it with your own majorities, and force President Bush to decide what he is or isn’t going to do. Don’t look at an idiotic proposal from Paulson and propose merely to improve upon it. You can put hot sauce on a rotten fish sandwich - the fish is still rotten!

Libertarian Glee
It’s one thing to feel as though you’ve been proven correct by events; it’s quite another to celebrate in the midst of a crisis that is hurting real people. You can be right without being a dick, and sitting around and gloating during a period of intense economic pain for people is precisely the sort of thing that will forever keep Libertarians on the political sidelines. For Christ’s sake, these people believe in the market and yet continue to market their own ideas as if they have no clue at all.

Would it really kill anybody involved to say, “Everybody owning their own home is a wonderful idea, one that we absolutely support. However, the government isn’t the mechanism to lead us toward this goal; rather, freeing up the marketplace is, as more people will do better financially, giving them ability to purchase their own homes.”

Standing around and saying, “How fucking dumb can people be when we’re around being so fucking smart?” doesn’t accomplish a lot of anything, other than smug self-satisfaction. It’s alright for people to believe in big ideas; it’s important for people to dream. For Libertarians to gloat when the big idea comes up short, or when the person awakens before the dream is finished, is unseemly.

More: Mitch the Killer suggests this. A good, reasonable read.

Markets Suffer From Information Overload…Wait, What?

Like an idiot, I waded waist deep into a debate at The Agitator’s website about information in the marketplace. The specifics of the debate dealt with mandatory posting of calorie counts in restaurants, so that when you go to a McDonalds, you’ll see the amount of calories in whatever you’re ordering. The free-marketeers are aghast, describing such legislation as hectoring, nagging, and generally offensive. This is backed up by arguments like, “I don’t care how many calories are in my cheeseburger! And what I believe counts for the entire marketplace!” Well, not so much that last part.

When it was observed that more available information leads to consumers making more informed choices, thus increasing the market’s efficiency, the standard objection was that the information is worthless because it is made mandatory by the government. Predictably, the free-marketeers in the comments don’t actually believe that information is valuable in a marketplace, instead presuming the oldest of free-market tropes: that over time, markets will fix themselves.

Technically, this argument is true. If a company releases a product into the marketplace that kills people, eventually enough people will die so that the product is no longer purchased, and the company realizes, through poor sales, not to produce it. Which is perfectly magical if you’re a free marketeer. The only problem is the dead consumers along the way.

The strange thing about free-marketeers is how loyal they are to the producers, and how horrified they are at the demands of consumers. It’s as if they believe that we can trust the producers to take care of the consumers, feedback be damned. For example, there are entire websites dedicated to the overwhelming suckitude of retailers and yet, retailers seem to continue sucking. (One bizarre fact from the calorie counts: 80 percent of polled consumers want posted calorie counts, which is immediately discounted by the free-marketeers who claim that this doesn’t matter. If their stated preferences don’t matter, what the hell does?)

Look, it’s one thing to believe in the marketplace, something that I do. Consumers can be trusted to make their own decisions, and should be held responsible for the outcomes of those decisions. But part of markets is information, and I believe just as deeply that information helps consumers to make those decisions. The more available, the merrier. Informed consumers make better choices helping the market to better respond to the demand that exists.

These free-marketeers tend to be so far up the asses of producers that they completely ignore the consumers, tossing them aside as if they don’t matter. And their deeply-held religious-levels of belief in the marketplace’s ability to police itself is fantastic if you don’t mind bad (horrible, terribly, mind-boggling) outcomes in the interim.

Or perhaps this best explains it: many free-marketeers get bent out of shape when discussing religion, something that they don’t believe in, because they’d much rather be discussing Adam Smith’s invisible hand which guides the marketplace. Good luck figuring out the difference.

The Wire’s Critique of Capitalism

The Wire was surely the greatest television show to ever be aired. Radley Balko, amongst others, has loved the show. But today, he delves into its alleged critique of capitalism, linking to Connor Friedersdorf’s work as well.

1. Both agree that capitalism isn’t Baltimore’s problem. Rather, the bureaucracy is. There is no doubt that, at almost every turn, the bureaucracy is shown to be an inhibitor in people’s lives, in no way benefitting everybody and seeming to undercut people.

2. That said, there are moments when in fact the bureaucracy does seem to help people - perhaps the motivations are wrong, but there are plenty of times in the show when bureaucratic actors do clean the streets, arrest the bad guys, provide for the kids, and generally exist in a manner beneficial to the citizenry.

3. To ignore the fact that Marlo, Avon, Proposition Joe Stewart and The Greek are capitalists, however, is to ignore reality. All are offering a product, wanted by thousands. All are working strictly for profit, caring little for what happens to their customers. All maintain their positions through power, violence, and the ability to create monopolies. Friedersdorf, at first, hilariously claims that this doesn’t represent true capitalism, because true capitalism is free from all of these things.

Later, he acknowledges that the idea of perfect capitalism exists only in books, and requires its participants to operate free from greed. Does anybody really believe WalMart wouldn’t completely shutter its competition if it could? Or if Microsoft could have forced itself onto everybody, it wouldn’t have? People pursuing money will often go to outrageous lengths to make it, steal it, have it, or earn it. If that means playing outside of the rules, so be it.

Turning around and claiming that what we see there isn’t real capitalism is changing the rules after the game.

4. Finally, there’s this from Balko:

And that is how two brilliant men like Ed Burns and David Simon … call themselves men of the left, which implies a kind of default support for massive government intervention to solve or alleviate suffering, poverty, crime, and other social ills.

If The Wire attempted to communicate anything, it was that our monolithic understanding of things is wrong. Criminals can be good (Cutty). Addicts can be friendly (Bubbles). Police can be assholes (Dozerman). Politicians can be awful (Clay Davis) or slightly less awful (Tommy Carcetti). Gunmen can have hearts of gold (Omar) and love their children (Chris Partlow) or just be out and out killers (Snoop).

Being a liberal doesn’t mean that you necessarily want the government involved in everything. In fact, as somebody who has flirted enough with libertarianism to know that I’d rather call myself a liberal, I can be pro-market, pro-freedom, and still believe that government agencies should be responsible for fixing the roads. I would imagine that the authors of The Wire deeply believe that the government can help to fix some of these problems, if they’d just do things differently. Take, for instance, Season 3’s “Hamsterdam.” The government backs off, its various agents step in, offering condoms, clean needles, information about treatment, and education, a situation which appears to be working. (Would it in real life? Perhaps. Libertarians against the drug war seem to believe so…but some of those people doing good work in Hamsterdam were government functionaries of various sorts.)

Meanwhile, I would also offer that The Wire’s authors might believe that some solution is necessary for suffering, poverty, crime, and other social ills, issues which libertarians rarely spend any time on, choosing to instead claim that, “the market will solve everything!”

No solution is perfect. No solution is right. The Wire was a searing indictment of everybody’s politics. To claim it as a bastion of libertarian thought is ignoring the message as much as claiming it as a bastion of anybody else’s thought.

Update: This is the sort of capitalist behavior that I’m talking about. Greedy people do awful things, as evidenced by this sort of behavior, all completely legal in Balko’s libertarian dreamscape.)

Libertarians and Health Care

One of my core objections to libertarianism, despite it’s obvious appeal on social issues, is its apparent fuck-you approach to issues of poverty. Here’s Radley Balko on heath care:

Of course the left will celebrate when they ram this though, because though we’ll all then have equally crappy health care, it’s the equal part that’s most important to them.

Yes, because the primary concern of people advocating for socialized health care is equality, and not the inability of some Americans to get health care. Balko is usually a reasonable fellow, so this conspiratorial claim that those of us in favor of some sort of national health care are concerned only with equality is a bit disconcerting. I can assure Balko, for whatever it’s worth, that the primary concern isn’t equality, and that nobody believes that the richest Americans will be standing in line with the poorest Americans waiting for medical treatment. I think that while there may be wingnuts in this debate, almost everybody involved understands that the upper classes and better off will not be using whatever nationalized health care is settled upon. The health insurance companies will not go away, and private interests will continue to maintain firm footing in the marketplace.

If libertarians are genuinely interested in liberty, one wonders why it is always, always, always only their own. I would assume that aggregate increases in liberty for citizens nationwide would be a good, if not great, thing. Being able to get treatment for health conditions is precisely the sort of thing that increases the liberty possessed by Americans. And nevermind that, think of the good that having health insurance does for the marketplace. If people aren’t going deeply into debt to pay for medical treatment, they are free to spend that money on goods and services elsewhere in the marketplace. More participation by consumers will lead to better information, which will in turn lead to a better marketplace.

Sometimes, libertarians will complain about roads. But the government’s (almost) monopoly on roads is good for the marketplace, because it allows consumers and sellers to freely move about the country with ease. That the government takes care of the roads allows consumers and sellers to focus their attentions on other, more important, goals. Thinking of health care in the same way - as opposed to believing that it is a leftist conspiracy designed to hurt the rich - takes the edge off, no?

Morgantown’s Co-Op: Closing?

I dug deep into the vault to find the photograph above. It’s of the clock above Mountain People’s Market, also known as the Co-Op. Details are shady right now, but somebody within the organization apparently made some atrocious financial decisions and now the Co-Op teeters on the verge of complete collapse. The question: is this a bad thing?

Before we actually answer that question, more about the Co-Op. The nicest possible way that I can describe the place is that if hippies need to shop somewhere, this place is for them. Organic food, fresh spices, and bizarre ingredients abound, as well as foodstuffs that don’t do much to satisfy my own palate. And I should get that out on the table: I’ve never been a huge fan of the place, most recently because its prices are absolutely outrageous, but also because the restaurant that used to be next door was staffed by at least one cook with ridiculously bad hygiene. You never want to see a cook go into a raspberry strudel with two fingers and eat what he pulls out, while it sits on the counter for sale. (This sort of thing goes on at most restaurants, but that doesn’t mean any of us want to actually see it.)

Before organic produce was widely available in Morgantown, the only place anybody could get it was at the Co-Op. So it was a store with its own niche. Unfortunately, bigger grocery stores, realizing that a market existed for organic produce, started selling it at prices that the Co-Op apparently couldn’t compete with. Once it lost its niche - and it did so bigtime - it struggled to find another product it could offer that nobody else could. Lest we see this as the evil big grocery businesses undermining a local producer, another group of organic farmers also did their fair share to the collective. By introducing a weekly farmers market, in which all kinds of “picked yesterday!” produce was available at very reasonable prices, even those who felt a particular loyalty to the Co-Op were torn away. One could spend a nice Saturday morning getting a coffee, reading a newspaper, and then picking up the week’s produce downtown.

You can see where I’m going with this: the market is working. Better options - either grocery stores or the farmers market - have emerged, and old businesses with old approaches have not generated the sort of new approaches necessary to continue forward. The onus is on the Co-Op to improve, either by offering wanted products that nobody else wants, or lowering prices to the point that they’re again competitive. As neither of these seems likely, the answer to the first question asked - is this a bad thing? - seems to be no.

I know that makes me a heartless free-market libertarian, all accusations which I despise, but in this case, the products were offered elsewhere at equal or cheaper prices by better managed organizations. Isn’t that the things ought to work? (In no way should this be read as a criticism of the good people who have, and continue, to work and volunteer there. But if the management’s so bad that it doesn’t innovate when necessary, those good people are unfortunately harmed by the process.)

Kids Don’t Make People Happy

I am not a fan of this article, both because it was written by somebody who is childless and because it was written by somebody who is libertarian and thus conflates money to happiness. Also, I am a father, and I don’t like being told that I’m less happy than the guy without children. But to my objections:

1. The author, Ron Bailey, admits at the end of the piece that he has no children. In fact, he writes:

Disclosure: My wife and I try not to flaunt our voluntarily childless lifestyle too much.

Of course you don’t Ron. That’s why you just wrote about it in the most widely distributed Libertarian magazine in the country. That’s like me writing, “I try not to flaunt my tattoos too much,” right underneath a picture of my tattoos.

2. I don’t know much about myself, but I’d like to believe that I’m smart enough to understand that my decision to do something doesn’t then make that decision right for everybody else. For instance, I don’t drink. I suppose I could “not flaunt” my drinking in such a way as to indicate to everybody who drinks that I think that they have a problem, except that I don’t believe that at all. I just can’t drink anymore. People who can drink should drink. It’s fun.

3. And then there’s this:

And they sure do have more money to squander as they try to pursue what happiness they can and strive to somehow fill up their allegedly empty lives.

Got it? Having more money to spend on yourself equals happiness. Also, he and his wife’s lives are not empty because they’re childless. And you know what? I agree. If Ronald Bailey and his wife are happy not having children, then by all means they shouldn’t have any children. But that doesn’t then mean that couples who do have children should believe themselves to be miserable.

To put that another way, my happiest moments, in my life, involve my daughter. Just the other night, her mother was talking about enjoying a warm bath in peace…and then my daughter said, “Dun dun dun dun! Until I come in and ruin it!” Another time, my daughter asked why she couldn’t have cereal in the living room, and before I could answer, she said, “I know, I know! Because life is unfair.”

I don’t expect that these stories to mean a damned thing to Ronald Bailey. I’m sure, had he witnessed either, he would have rolled his eyes and extolled the virtues of his own life over mine. Me? I’d assume he was doing what he wanted to do - and I would have expected him to do the same thing for me.

In other words, there is no right answer. And people who propose to mathematically solve “life” for right answers are foolish beyond words.

Talking With My Cousin About Depression

Full disclosure: Will Wilkinson is not my cousin. He is just blessed with a fantabulous last name. Some guys, as they say, get all the breaks.

For some reason, I have started receiving Reason magazine, a perfectly tolerable publication that supports libertarian ideas. It’s tagline - Free Minds and Free Markets - sounds pretty good to me. But as with all things libertarian, I sometimes wonder about the consistency of actors within the movement. Many have objected to this. “Why are you obsessed with Libertarians?” They’ll ask, and I have no good response except to say that I want to agree with them. But my primary objective is an uptick in aggregate liberty for peoples; (some) libertarians seem concerned primarily with economic liberty. As Arthur Okun once wrote of his fellow economists, they know the price of everything and the value of nothing. At times, this obsession of (some) libertarians with particular types of liberty blinds them.

Will Wilkinson wrote an article in this month’s issue of Reason about depression, a topic near and dear to my heart. It is an issue that I have dealt, and continue to deal, with. Wilkinson’s argument is ensconsed in a book review and is both simple and appealing - he believes that depression is overdiagnosed and overmedicated. It is not, according to Wilkinson, the public health crisis which some are making it out to be.

Fair enough. Obviously, as with most medicines that offer what some might describe as cosmetic benefits, some people who are taking them should be and some people who are taking them should not. None of that part of Wilkinson’s claims draw my ire; rather, it is his strange insistence that we have public health officials to blame for this. Forget, for a moment, that he offers us no reason to indict public health officials - how can he inexplicably not connect the dots drawn in his own piece?

“Outpatient treatment of depression in the United States increased 300 percent between 1987 and 1997, the last year for which comprehensive statistics are available.”

“What accounts for this deadly, rapidly spreading malaise? Nothing.”

“The overboard definition of major depressive disorder in the DSM, together with the 1987 appearance of Prozac, seems to have done much of that work.”

I bolded those two dates, as they seem to particularly pertinent here when asking why we’ve seen this uptick in depression diagnosis. The answer is clear: the marketplace demanded it. Pharmaceutical companies invented drugs specifically designed to make people feel better, the result of entrepreneurial innovation filling a void in the medicinal marketplace. Doctors, faced with an avalanche of patients (customers) coming to them asking for the prescriptions (and no doubt being simultaneously rewarded by pharmaceutical companies who aren’t insisting that certain drugs be prescribed, but rather, just suggesting it) capitulate to their clientele’s needs. Once the prescription is written, enough customers pressure their insurance companies to cover the drugs, which begins occurring. At the conclusion of this very free, and very open, practice, we end where we are today, with far more people taking medication than might otherwise need it.

As I look at this scenario, the one actor that doesn’t appear to be visible is the government. Maybe it meddled in what anti-depressive medications were allowed onto the marketplace? I don’t see how such behavior would have, in some way, limited the sort of overdiagnosis that is allegedly plaguing America today.

What’s strange about Wilkinson’s article is that it seems like it ought to be a celebration of all things capitalism. Customers wanted, mechanisms provided, everybody ended up better off. But Wilkinson still can’t help but throw in his last second criticism of public health officials, as if this is somehow their fault.

The mind boggles.

(It is worth noting that Wilkinson, elsewhere in the article, makes the sort of free-market observations that I’m making, but at no point does he connect the one - free-market - with the other - overdiagnosis of depression. It seems an almost impossible oversight.)