Distraction and Waste: The Great Electioneering Spending Stimulus

Democracy, The Left, The Right, Vulgar Politics
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I’m hearing reports that nearly $1 billion has already been spent on US House elections alone. Sheila Krumholz of the Center for Responsive Politics predicts “$3.7 billion will be spent on this midterm election.” That’s 30% more than last time. It’s no surprise that the more legal plunder government is able to redistribute, the more people are willing to spend to gain control of the state. Obama is making Bush the Younger look thrifty and the next president will likely do the same for him. The increase in electoral spending will continue apace.

Such a distraction and waste of money political elections, especially national elections, are. As I explained in Voting, Moral Hazard, and Like Buttons: “The very existence of [a] centralized voting system for deciding public matters of moral importance encourages citizens to focus their energies on this formal democratic process, which is to say that it encourages the wasting of time and money on vote getting (or buying), at the expense of getting anything actually productive done in a timely fashion.”

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Thrifty, Principled Republican Plans to Defund NPR

Taxation, The Right, Vulgar Politics
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In a bold move that promises to prove the Republicans’ dedication to preserving the First Amendment and fixing up the federal budget, Senator Jim DeMint has introduced a bill to eliminate federal funding for NPR. This is following the great controversy over NPR’s decision to fire Juan Williams, who made some commentary on Muslims and air travel that his bosses at NPR didn’t quite like.

DeMint, I’m sure, of course has a heroic record of free speech advocacy. I assume, though I have not found evidence at the time of writing this, that he introduced bills and fought vigorously for an end to this ridiculous idea of “free speech zones” which were used during the Bush Administration to stifle free speech. Because, surely, Jim DeMint is all about free speech, and this latest move was not simply motivated by his approval of Williams’ commentary, but rather from a deep philosophical opposition to government restriction of speech.

Some might also think that the $420 million that defunding NPR (and PBS) would save is a bit on the paltry side as far as budget cuts go, given that federal spending for FY2010 was officially about $3.5 trillion, or, to use like-terms, $3,500,000 million. But hey, that’s something, right? And, after all, if you exclude Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, interest on the debt, all the other “mandatory” spending, and everything to do with the military, is there really that much else to cut?

So good on you, Jim DeMint. Keep up the good work.

Not labeled: The 0.00012% of the budget that NPR represents

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Tea partiers will fall for anything

The Right
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Tom Tancredo today boasted a variety of endorsements he has received from local tea party organizers in his bid for the governorship in Colorado. I won’t bore you with the details, but Tancredo, a Republican member of Congress until 2009, launched a campaign as an independent demagogue after he decided the GOP nominee was not to his liking.

Now, I have no idea how representative these tea party organizers are of the rank-and-file tea partier, but I do know that Tancredo has spoken at local tea party events and has been cheered.

What’s interesting is that Tancredo was the only GOP member of the Colorado Congressional delegation that voted for the TARP Bailout. So, Tancredo, who voted for the greatest taxpayer ripoff in American history, goes to tea party events where he recites something about the virtues of small governments, and then receives thunderous applause.

Tancredo, who supported the legislation that stole almost a trillion dollars from the taxpayers and handed it over to Goldman Sachs and friends, now lectures the American people on the need for smaller government.Probably no other piece of legislation in recent memory galvanized and defined the party of liberty in America more than the TARP bailout and the opposition to it. It was the legislation that revved up the non-stop fleecing of the American public to about triple its normal speed. And with the support of Tom Tancredo.

The tea party types here are making excuses for him because Tancredo now says that voting for TARP was a mistake. How courageous. He voted for TARP because that required no courage, and now he’s disavowing his vote because that requires no courage. What a magnificent display of principle!

But, hey, tea partiers, I’m sure that, even though he voted for the biggest big government piece of legislation in decades, because Goldman Sachs told him to, that doesn’t mean he won’t be a staunch opponent of big government on everything else. Right? Keep dreaming, tea partiers.

Hey, remember when all those Republicans slashed the size of government after they got control of Congress back in 1994? Remember when George W. Bush didn’t double the size of amount of federal spending in 8 years? Wasn’t that great?

Oh wait, none of those things happened? Well, I’m sure your voting into office all the exact same people, like Tancredo, who gave us the bloated government and bailouts of the last decade will suddenly act in the exact opposite way now. It’s sure to happen.

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Road Socialism Leads to Broadband Socialism

Nanny Statism, Technology, The Basics, The Left, The Right
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In a previous post I pointed out the slippery slope in accepting government-backed licensing of “crucial” professions. The problem with slippery slope arguments is that they tend not to be rhetorically-compelling to those without a sufficiently cynical, I should say realistic, conception of the state. They are simply not convinced that allowing certain “reasonable” policies now will set a precedent that will lead to unreasonable policies down the road. Our worries are discounted as merely hypothetical possibilities. They are quite content to put off discussion of crossing that bridge when we come to it…if we come to it, as they see things. And, in any case, something needs to be done about the current problem now, dammit! The trouble is, by the time we reach that bridge of unreasonableness (wherever it happens to be for our interlocutor), we have already gathered so much momentum from sliding down the slope that it is difficult, if not impossible, to halt, much less reverse, the slide. Along the way, with each new government intervention, people grow increasingly used to turning to government solutions for every little problem — they lose the ability to even imagine the possibility of private, market solutions — and what was once thought unreasonable no longer seems so.

We libertarians have more than merely consequentialist, slippery slope arguments against government policies, of course, but I still think it is useful to point out dangerous precedents, particularly when our worries are not just theoretical as we are already well on our way down the slide. The acceptance of professional licensing of “crucial” professions has over time been expanded into ever more areas, even to the licensing of florists in my home state of Louisiana and now to calls for the licensing of parents.

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Grading the Pledge to America

Corporatism, Democracy, Health Care, Imperialism, The Right, Vulgar Politics, War
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So….the Republicans have put out their Pledge to America. Is it any good?

Jeffrey Tucker sums it up pithily by juxtaposing short quotes from it and the Declaration of Independence:

Declaration of Independence (1776): “That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it…”

A Pledge to America (GOP, 2010): “Whenever the agenda of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to institute a new governing agenda and set a different course.”

If this goes on, related fellow TLS blogger Daniel Coleman to me, in another 100 years it will be “Whenever a subpoint of policy within a government agenda becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to organize a committee to change those subpoints of policy and replace them with better subpoints.”

Liberty Central, the Establishment’s attempt to co-opt the Tea Party, has a poll asking us to grade the Pledge. Head on over there and tell them what you think of it. Fellow TLS blogger Jacob Huebert has a couple of good posts on LewRockwell.com about Liberty Central, the Tea Party, the Pledge, and Glenn Beck.

The Liberty Central poll only lets you grade the Pledge as a whole. Here is a quick graded breakdown of important aspects of the Pledge, with short reactions by me in parentheses:

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