Two New Books on Pop Culture by Libertarians

History, Pop Culture
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In the past two weeks, both Paul Cantor and I have released new books on television, literature and film.

My new book, Commie Cowboys: The Bourgeoisie and the Nation-State in the Western Genre is now available on Amazon. The book examines the relationship between the Western genre and the bourgeois liberalism of nineteenth-century America, and looks how at how post-war Westerns, which appealed to a generation of New Deal-loving, Cold War-enamored nationalists, teach us that capitalism is bad and the nation-state is good. It includes a forward by Paul Cantor.

Also newly available is Paul Cantor’s extensive study of television and film, The Invisible Hand in Popular Culture: Liberty vs. Authority in American Film and TV. If you read Gilligan Unbound: Pop Culture in the Age of Globalization (which I reviewed here.) you’ll remember that Cantor can take pretty much any television show, such as Gilligan’s Island, and dissect it using everything from Homer to Shakespeare to Marshall McLuhan, and entertain you while doing it.

In The Invisible Hand, Cantor provides a section on Westerns, and from there goes on to examine South Park, Mars Attacks! and more.

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Federal Net Outlays

“We Now Have Our Smallest Government in 45 Years”

Corporatism, The Left, Vulgar Politics
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That’s the absurd title to a blog post over at The Atlantic today. The writer claims that the U.S. government is now the smallest it’s been since LBJ was president. The article is making the rounds among leftists, who, against all reason and common sense, have managed to convince themselves that the US government is getting smaller.

The claim is based on a calculation of total government employment as a ratio of the total US population. Right off the bat we know that comparing these ratios from 1968 and today will be off. This is largely because in 1968, most people whose salaries were funded by taxpayer sweat actually worked for the government. There weren’t mercenaries shooting up foreigners back then, or an enormous government-funded non-profit sector or legions of “consultants” who are really just government employees making extra-large salaries.

On top of this is the fact that government size is not only measured in the number of government employees. Better measures would include the US prison population, or taxes paid, or pages of government regulations or the number of federal laws, or the number of people groped by TSA pedophiles. Needless to say, all of these things have exploded in recent decades. On top of that, you have the war on drugs, the war on terror, the war on salt, fat, guns, raw milk, and a number of other things.

Yep, government sure is a shadow of its former self!

But, to make it simple, let’s just look at government spending. In 1968, the US government spent $883 dollars for every one of the 201 million Americans, or annual outlays totaling 178.1 billion. In 2011, the US government spent a whopping $11,493 for every one of the 313 million Americans for total outlays of 3.6 trillion. That’s an increase of 1,923 percent since 1968. The CPI over this period increased 545 percent, so we’re talking an enormous increase, even when adjusted for the official inflation rate.

We can also look at this another way. The amount of money taken from each American has increased almost 2,000 percent since 1968, which is more than triple the inflation rate.

Federal Net Outlays

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Wildfires: Government praised for ‘solving’ problem it started

Uncategorized
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As the wildfires raged, apologists for government thought they had a trump card against libertarians and triumphantly concluded this was the latest proof that the government and its firefighters remain that thin line between order and chaos. Unfortunately for them, however, history has now made it abundantly clear that the true driving force behind the increasingly large mega-fires that plague public lands are the product of decades of mismanagement by the forest service. That is, we can thank the government for putting out the fires it is responsible for.

This has been well documented in some research published by the Property and Environment Research Center here and here.

Briefly put, decades of fire suppression and bans on logging by the feds to protect obscure rodent species has doomed the forests to massive wildfires which thrive on forests where underbrush piles up and creates a “fuel ladder” which in turn ignites the trees.

More logging, more small, natural fires, and more decentralized management (including privatization) is the answer, but don’t expect the politics to line up behind any of these sensible solutions any time soon. Most Americans now have utterly unrealistic expectations for forests. Forest fires are going to happen, and short of an army of robots to clean out and manage forests constantly, lighting will ignite forest fires in even the most well managed environments. The idea is to let these fires happen. The politics is against this however since wealthy vacationers with second homes in forested lots think that they should be able to build mansions in the wilderness and not be subject to the basic laws of nature.

Thus, the forest service gets huge funding increases every year to badly manage forests, and when that fails, spend tens of millions on fire suppression.

But don’t worry, it turns out that forest service has spent the last eleven years developing a plan for the forests. They’ll be finished sometime before the end of the next decade.

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Government stats now eyed with suspicion

Business, Business Cycles
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Another one of the positive side effects of the current economic crisis is that even the government’s statistics, once accepted uncritically by the media, are now faced with some skepticism. As someone who examines government statistics often, I can say that government stats definitely have their uses, assuming you consider the methods used, and take it all with a grain of salt. But for years, the stats had been accepted as gospel and as a reliable foundation for the practice of macro economics.

To be sure, this article at Fortune today doesn’t actually impugn the unemployment rate itself, but it does question its relevance. Titled “The increasingly irrelevant unemployment rate,” the article notes that the unemployment rate, touted for years by the government and the media as a reliable index of economic strength, doesn’t really give us a good picture of reality anymore – assuming it ever did.

With labor force participation at the lowest point in a generation, the addition of the few new jobs added in May hardly convinces us that the economy is improving, and indeed, as new jobs were added – some of those people who gave up on finding work rejoined the workforce and drove the unemployment rate up, not down.

So, the unemployment rate tells us nothing without an understanding of labor force participation, and that is a pretty iffy number. It’s now becoming well-known that the method used to generate the unemployment rate is fatally flawed. The survey method used in the Household Survey ignores all the underemployed and chronically unemployed people who would love to have a full-time job. The labor force then only really consists of recently unemployed and people who absolutely must have jobs now. This excludes recent college grads living in their basements and stay at home moms who would otherwise be wage earners, and earl-y retirees who can’t find another job.

This is a huge shadow inventory of unemployed people not picked up in the official unemployment rate. Who can take a politician seriously who quotes these stats as proof of anything?

And for that matter, who can take a macro economist seriously who attempts to manage the economy this way? The decline in the reputation of government stats also nicely follows the decline of faith in macro economists to manage the economy to perfection. Does anyone think that a macro economist feeding the unemployment rate into a computer model somewhere will know just what to do? That dream died in 2008.

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‘Hispanic’ vs. ‘White’

Political Correctness, Racism, Uncategorized, Vulgar Politics
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As a Hispanic, watching the media’s use of terms like “white” and “Hispanic” and “Latino” in the Zimmerman-Martin case has been an occasion for much eye-rolling. The way the press uses these terms betrays just how completely ignorant most reporters and talking heads are about even the basics of ethnicity and race in this country. Also, it’s a fair bet that the “journalists” at CNN and NBC have never actually seen a Hispanic who wasn’t scrubbing toilets or peeling potatoes back at the reporters’ Chevy Chase estates, so they can be forgiven for being so clueless on this matter. Our media elite might have to leave Martha’s Vineyard to actually meet a Hispanic who didn’t fit their preconceived notions of race and ethnicity.

With the Zimmerman-Martin case, Zimmerman is labeled as simply white, in spite of his claims of Hispanic heritage, because that’s what the media has determined will produce the most fertile ground for “racial” conflict. Had Zimmerman been the victim of a shooting, and the shooter were also white, then Zimmerman would of course then be labeled Latino, and the case would then be a national story on the oppression of Latino persons of color by whites in this country. In fact, Zimmerman is pretty obviously white or perhaps mestizo. What is not deniable however that he is also Hispanic. I don’t know why this is so hard for the media to grasp, but let’s just make this clear: According to anthropologists, ethnologists, historians, and census takers, “Hispanic” or “Latino” is not a racial designation. It is a term that denotes ethnicity.

Hispanics can be of any race. There are white Hispanics, black Hispanics, and even Asian Hispanics. Examples would be former Mexican president Vicente Fox, Cuban musician Ibrahim Ferrer, and former Peruvian president Alberto Fujimori, respectively. There are also, of course, mestizo Hispanics, such as Benito Juarez. …

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