“No advocate of reason can claim the right to establish HIS version of a good society, if such society includes the initiation of force against dissenters in ANY issue. No advocate of the free mind can claim the right to force the minds of others.”
-Ayn Rand, Letters of Ayn Rand
One will note that I called my last post “The Once And Future Libertarian” without doing much to advocate for libertarianism or the Libertarian Party. That’s because, having gone over what’s still wrong with the duopoly, and why simply assimilating into the Democrat Collective is not sufficient to solve this country’s problems, it requires a bit more analysis as to why going libertarian is a good idea. Especially these days.
Since one of the major issues in the news the last few weeks is Texas. What specifically about Texas? The whole thing. First, while the winter storms of February were intense for most of the country, it was only in Texas that the weather caused both power and water to go out across the state, since lack of power also caused the systems heating (and cleaning) the water lines to freeze. And that, it turned out, was because a, the Texas power grid is separate from the rest of the area around it, and b, the state didn’t protect that power grid by winterizing the equipment. And of course, now people are getting charged four-digit power bills for that period, because Texas utilities were allowed to charge customers “what the market will bear.” One company, Griddy, had actually warned customers to leave. The first time I’d heard about that story, I thought they were telling people to leave Texas, which is good advice regardless of the weather.
And then on March 2 Texas Governor Greg Abbott (three guesses as to what party he is, and the first three don’t count) publicly announced, as though it were something to be proud of, that he was lifting all COVID-19 restrictions in the state “100 percent.” This was exactly at the point that vaccines were about to roll out, but before the sectors of labor most likely to require contact with the public, such as medical and service workers, were vaccinated. Which sort of defeats the purpose of acting like the pandemic is over.
How is a right-winger, especially a libertarian, going to say that lack of restrictions is necessarily going to lead to good results? You can’t. Which leads to the second lesson I want to impart to the Right. To recall, “The first thing that right-wingers (Republican or Libertarian) have to learn is that the Left is going to call them a bunch of heartless ogres and witches whether they earn the reputation or not. Which is what makes it imperative NOT to earn it.” The second lesson is that the reason we have as much government as we do is that someone saw a need for it, as I’ve also said before. Since the kind of disaster that we’ve seen in Texas can happen if you just let the private sector do as it will, this makes it possible to enact heavy regulations under the impression they’re actually going to help people. I say, “under the impression” because that’s not usually how it works, and that’s really not the reason we have the bureaucracy that we do. In fact, much of the regulation we have is specifically intended to protect the businesses ostensibly being regulated, and is written on their behalf, sometimes actually BY them.
Believe it or not, the best explanation of this point I’ve seen is from leftists on social media.
Here is an example of what would happen if we treated the local pizzeria like we treated health care: https://www.facebook.com/james.gillen.969/posts/3737875906261472?notif_id=1614799095747641¬if_t=feedback_reaction_generic&ref=notif
And then there’s this: (https://www.facebook.com/kirstin.hamaker/posts/3784372801624524)
I wasn’t able to see anything else referring to this tweetstorm on my Internet searches, so I just posted the link.
Even if you see the need for regulations of the dairy industry (in this case) or the corn syrup industry, or whatever, the regulations we have are designed not only to benefit giant industries but to corner out smaller farmers and producers that not only would do things in a more capitalist, competitive way, but would also behave more ethically and follow the regulations and practices that the liberals and socialists actually want.
And in regard to the particular crisis, before Greg Abbott was Texas Governor, he was the state Attorney General, and had taken the (Republican) state government’s position against the Obama Administration that it should be able to operate its power grid independently and not have to enact the winterization procedures that everybody else did. Now he’s calling on the utilities to do so, even as politicians are telling us we need to rescue the people stuck with bills from unregulated companies. The Texas Tribune article: “Lawmakers have demanded that the utility commission roll back its decision to allow the huge rate increases, or suggested cobbling together some package of emergency waivers or relief money to buffer Texans’ from the high bills.
“We cannot allow someone to exploit a market when they were the ones responsible for the dire consequences in the first place,” said state Rep. Brooks Landgraf, R-Odessa.”
If only they could have guessed that such consequences were possible.
I opened with that particular Ayn Rand quote because it could be interpreted for more than one purpose. With COVID, for instance, is it “initiation of force against dissenters” if the state government imposes laws restricting people’s freedom of action, for example, mandating masks, to stop the spread of the pandemic?
Well, let’s look at it another way. If a storm takes out an old bridge and the state has to put up barriers until a crew can be sent and they have to put up a sign saying “BRIDGE OUT”, is that a restriction of your right to use the roadway? You could interpret it that way. You could just blow past the barrier, go “FUCK you I won’t do what ya tell me” and cross the bridge, at which point, it won’t be the government that’s restricting your freedom. It’ll be gravity.
Pretty much the same point can be made with regard to coronavirus restrictions. We didn’t have to have them, and not every state does. Deciding that your state is “free” of coronavirus restrictions doesn’t make the state free of coronavirus. Plus which, in a lot of cases during the early reaction to COVID-19, private businesses were quicker to create social distancing rules than government, and in the current situation, a lot of places in Texas have announced in the wake of the governor’s decision that they will still mandate pandemic rules, at least for their own employees. (In the case of airlines, they are operating under federal restrictions.) Now surely right-wing followers of Ayn Rand will respect a business owner’s right to dictate the use of their space? Well, we know the answer to that question.
In the Dallas Morning News article, the CEO for the Texas Association of Business said in response to Abbott’s announcement that “The association believes businesses understand the protocols needed to ‘function safely’ and that ‘Texas companies will operate responsibly’.” But if we could trust businesses to operate responsibly, you wouldn’t have the situation you do in Texas with the power grid and the other utilities. At the same time, like I said, businesses on the whole have been more responsible about pandemic restrictions than certain state governments or American Presidents. As I say, it is possible for two different things to be true at the same time. On a case by case level, I can trust people to do the right thing, but not as a rule. There has to be a default standard. THAT’s why you have a government.
But what if the local government is less responsible than the public at large? Ay, there’s the rub.
Part of the problem is that invocations of “freedom” versus “socialism” are not only dodging common sense, they’re using deceptive political labels. The most officially socialist country in the world is the “People’s” Republic of China, which is no less socialist in its desire to have one party control all aspects of the country, they just figured after a few decades of Leninist/Maoist ideology that they wouldn’t get to run it for much longer if the masses were starving and near revolt. So they incorporated just enough capitalism, under strict controls, to keep the structure going. So you have one country that apes a leftist ideology but really has a bunch of guys in business suits in control.
Meanwhile here you have a bunch of professional Christians and ostensible conservatives who want to preserve a nationalist and capitalist system but are finding themselves increasingly unpopular – since after a few decades of ideology the masses are starting to starve – so in order for the guys in business suits to stay in control, they increasingly ape the posture of a one-party socialist regime that among other things says that only people the ruling party deems “patriots” can get to run for a local government. Where have I heard that one before?
That would be the danger to the American experiment even if the Republican faction of the duopoly were competent. As it is, the real danger from a right-wing (or non-socialist) standpoint is that the only alternative presented against the Democrats is a bunch of bad-faith culture war initiatives that are not taken seriously and really are not intended to be taken seriously. Now, if you’re to believe the polls, three out of four Americans approve the $1.9 trillion “Rescue Plan” passed by Congress and signed by President Biden March 11, including at least half of Republicans. The actual Republican Party isn’t even trying to compete with that, even though they still have the numbers to do so. Instead they’re using their media to read Green Eggs and Ham.
So from a right-wing standpoint, the longer these guys are the official NotDemocrat Party, the less likely it is there will be any serious resistance to genuinely bad left-wing ideas, especially when the Party of Trump took the real bipartisan concerns about “the swamp” and used them to promote incompetence, corruption and spite. The only opposition to an open borders policy is internment camps and separating families. The only plan for balancing our trade deficit was a tariff war with China that simply let them expand their trade with everyone else without benefiting us, and shutting down some of our retailers in the process.
And from a left-wing standpoint, a “conservative” party that doesn’t even try to represent its voters is just there. Like a lump. Or an obstacle. They are serving literally no purpose in the government other than to make the Democrats negotiate everything amongst their “progressive” and centrist wings. That does serve the moderating function that a multi-party system would otherwise create, but again that merely emphasizes the twin points that the more the Democrats are expected to absorb every voter and faction that is NotRepublican, the more they have to do everything themselves, for people who are not their natural constituency (if they even have one), because the Republican Party is worse than useless.
If you expect politics to get anywhere and you expect elections to be taken seriously, the Democrats are going to need competition. Do you seriously want that competition to be the Republican Party?
So that’s why I’m going back to the Libertarian Party. There needs to be something else. And please don’t tell me their ideas are horrible and they can’t be taken seriously. You HAVE one faction of the duopoly that has truly horrible ideas that shouldn’t be taken seriously, and yet are. The matter, bluntly, is whether the ideas have any support, and it looks like Republicans are starting to lose that support. Which leads to my third lesson for Libertarians in particular. We’re already against government. But assuming we DO want to get elected, we have to take government seriously. You’ve already got the people who are against government IN government and making a mess of it. You’ve already got the Merry Pranksters. As long as they’re there, they’re going to be making the Right worse and the country as a whole worse. It can’t be that hard to present a constructive alternative to them. You just have to be the grownups in the room, and the fact that Libertarians can be the grownups compared to Republicans shows where we are now. This is a real opportunity that I think must be taken.
Mind you, I will probably be voting Democrat in several elections simply because the Libertarian Party doesn’t post candidates for those races. But you have to start somewhere. I already know there’s no point in trying to change anyone’s mind in the Republican Party, and there’s really no point in trying to sway Democrats either.