Paul M. Jones

A letter from a libertarian to his conservative friends.

My friends on the right, I find that you have failed in two ways.

The first is that you have mistaken mere wealth for market process. You praise the industrialist and the banker. Very well. Often they deserve it. But have you looked closely at the industrialists and the bankers just lately?

Among Ayn Rand’s villains, I don’t believe that a single one was poor. Every one of them was a member of the elite, and almost all of them were rich. They were people much like we know today, who maybe once upon a time set themselves apart through their own efforts. But at some point they committed a cardinal sin -- they reached for the state to keep themselves on top. They made bad bets, then pleaded that they were too big to fail.

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Often the biggest enemies of the market properly understood are precisely those who have made large fortunes--and who now want the government to shield them from all further risk. They are also trying their best this election cycle to portray themselves as your friends, and as friends of the market. You’ve spent way too much time listening to them and doing their bidding.

A politician who loves the market as a moral institution would be the very last one to do any favors for individual market actors. And I do mean any favors. I mean subsidies, tax breaks, eminent domain, no-bid contracts, and all forms of regulation that keep honest competition out. I mean our intellectual property system, which if conservatives had any tactical sense they’d already be attacking--cheap entertainment for the consumer, less cash for liberal Hollywood elites. What’s not to like?

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And now for your second failing: The market has moral value because it is an arena of self-fashioning. But there are other arenas. They have value too, and they should be free for exactly the same reasons.

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Consider immigrants. In particular, if our free market is so great, why do you work so hard to exclude immigrants from it? Is the immigrant laborer less a moral self-fashioner than the Wall Street banker? I wouldn’t say so. He’s clearly at least as motivated. If the immigrant wants to make a life in America -- why not let him?

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Consider our surveillance state. Mass secret data collection has grown almost unchecked over the course of the last two administrations. What chance is there for dignity, for autonomy, for self-fashioning when the government may well be spying on almost everything we do?

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Consider the Drug War. In the final analysis, it’s a war on the market process, at least for some goods. But it also appears purposefully designed to wreck individual lives and to make a mockery of the kind of self-fashioning that we so value in our defense of the market. Nothing kills self-authorship like being thrown into prison. Not business regulations, not high taxes, not even the demon weed itself.

All emphasis is mine. Via An Open Letter to My Friends on the Right | The Agitator.

Several other experiments showed that Americans link even moderate drinking with stupidity, which the professors call the “imbibing idiot bias”.

This may be short-sighted. Another recent paper from the journal Consciousness and Cognition by psychologists at the University of Illinois confirms what many have long suspected: a couple of drinks makes workers more creative. Tipsy employees, they say, find it hard to focus on a task, but this makes them more likely to come up with innovative ideas. This may help to explain the success of Silicon Valley, one of the last workplaces in America where hard and soft drinks still jostle for space in the company fridge.

via Drinking at work: The boredom of boozeless business | The Economist.

We tend to think of the conservative influence in purely political terms: electing Ronald Reagan in 1980, picking away at Social Security, reducing taxes for the wealthy. But one of the movement’s most lasting successes has been in developing a common intellectual heritage. Any self-respecting young conservative knows the names you’re supposed to spout: Hayek, Rand, Ludwig von Mises, Albert Jay Nock. There are some older thinkers too--Edmund Burke, for instance--but for the most part the favored thinkers come out of the movement’s mid-20th century origins in opposition to Soviet communism and the New Deal.

Liberals, by contrast, have been moving in the other direction over the last half-century, abandoning the idea that ideas can be powerful political tools.  This may seem like a strange statement at a moment when American universities are widely understood to be bastions of liberalism, and when liberals themselves are often derided as eggheaded elites. But there is a difference between policy smarts honed in college classrooms and the kind of intellectual conversation that keeps a movement together. What conservatives have developed is what the left used to describe as a “movement culture”: a shared set of ideas and texts that bind activists together in common cause. Liberals, take note.

via Paul Ryan and Ayn Rand: Why don’t America liberals have their own canon of writers and thinkers? - Slate Magazine.

I think you're using the wrong verb tense.

In a Christian Science Monitor/Investor's Business Daily/TIPP poll completed last week, 40 percent of respondents generally agreed with the statement: "The US is evolving into a socialist state." That outnumbered the 36 percent who disagreed. About one-quarter of respondents expressed a neutral view or said they were unsure.

The same poll asked other questions that took America's temperature on the size of government. A majority said it should not be the government's role to redistribute wealth, and a majority said they prefer "a smaller government providing less services."

via Is America becoming a 'socialist state'? 40 percent say yes. - CSMonitor.com.

During the first half of the 20th century, Pit Bulls were the closest thing the United States had to a national dog.  They were featured on U.S. recruiting posters in World Wars I and II, prominently featured as corporate mascots and cast as the ideal family dog in television and movies.

Now the breed is demonized and battles everything from a media-driven reputation for being predators, to abuse from their owners, to legislation that seeks to outlaw their existence. How did this happen to a dog that was once America’s sweetheart?

via What Happened to America's Dog? - Fairfax City, VA Patch.

If you consider yourself a writer of any kind in the English language, you need to read "Politics and the English Language" by George Orwell. It is a short essay that I return to time after time to correct my own poor habits. The briefest of excerpts:

I am going to translate a passage of good English into modern English of the worst sort. Here is a well-known verse from Ecclesiastes:

I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.

Here it is in modern English:

Objective considerations of contemporary phenomena compel the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.

This is a parody, but not a very gross one.

via George Orwell: Politics and the English Language.

I believe in America and in Americans. I take second place to no one in love for my country. The Sikh speakers, especially the President of the temple, exceeded me in patriotism by a long shot. America is not blood, and it’s not soil. America is ideas, and the people who believe them. These were Americans. They might have been born here or far away. But once they started talking about America, the “best” and “safest country in the world”, you could tell that they were Americans. These are not scare quotes, these are direct quotes from the speakers. Thomas Jefferson might have had a problem understanding the accents, but not the sentiments.

And now for the funny part. There must be some sort of gun enthusiast radar. I don’t know if they found me or I found them, but we found each other. The guys I was sitting next to were both Sikh and gun owners. We talked about guns, and we’ll be getting together sometime soon to go shooting. One of my new friends said that he was surprised that no one in the Temple shot at the intruder. He was mystified as to why there was no one with a gun available to shoot back. He assured me that it was almost certain that there were concealed carriers in the congregation. I did not go to the temple to advocate for concealed carry. I was, however, treated to a discussion of how banning guns would not change anything. I was told that criminals would get guns no matter what the laws, and that taking guns from the honest people would only make things worse. In short, it was a discussion pretty much like any that you would read on any pro-gun blog.

via I had lunch with my fellow Americans today | An NC Gun BlogAn NC Gun Blog.

The TSA has no business looking for drugs, outstanding arrest warrants, or immigration problems unless it has serious reason to believe that the person involved poses a serious threat to air safety. If it is going to serve as an extension of every other sort of law enforcement, then its searches should be subject to the same requirements for probable cause, which would allow almost everyone to travel without submitting to TSA examination.

This mission creep recalls InstaPundit's prescient post at 1:49 p.m. on September 11, 2001:

It's Not Just Terrorists Who Take Advantage: Someone will propose new "Antiterrorism" legislation. It will be full of things off of bureaucrats' wish lists. They will be things that wouldn't have prevented these attacks even if they had been in place yesterday. Many of them will be civil-liberties disasters. Some of them will actually promote the kind of ill-feeling that breeds terrorism. That's what happened in 1996. Let's not let it happen again.

And that's exactly what happened.

via Mission Creep Leads TSA to Racially Profile in Pursuit of Non-Terrorists to Arrest :: Dynamist.

A stranded jet-skier seeking help effortlessly overcame the Port Authority’s $100 million, supposedly state-of-the-art security system at JFK Airport -- walking undetected across two runways and into a terminal, The Post has learned.Motion sensors and closed-circuit cameras of the Perimeter Intrusion Detection System, or PIDS, were no match for Daniel Casillo, 31, of Howard Beach, who easily breached the system meant to safeguard against terrorists.

Major fail by the TSA and related "security" apparatus. Via EXCLUSIVE: Stranded jet-skier effortlessly overcame $100M security system at JFK, walking across two runways and into a terminal undetected - NYPOST.com.

After breaking down doors and shooting the family dog, a drug task force forced handcuffed children "to sit next to the carcass of their dead and bloody pet for more than an hour," and kept searching even after they knew they were raiding the wrong house, the family claims in Federal Court.

via Courthouse News Service.