Skip This Post If You Don't Like Football

After the embarrassing defeat on Monday night football, I told a friend of mine that if the Packers don't bench Carroll for good then they don't deserve to win another game.

The guy can't cover. He can't tackle. He can't follow the damn rules. Putting anyone at corner would be better than Carroll.

Turns out they did one better and released his sorry ass.

I don't have many good things to say about the Packers coaching staff. And it may not have been a good business decision, but I am oh so happy I will never have to curse the name of Ahmad Carroll anymore.

Can Reed Persuade Me To Jump Left

Bruce Reed, president of the Democratic Leadership Council, responds to Kos's Libertarian Democrat screed over at Cato Unbound.

First, personal liberty and personal responsibility go hand in hand. We won’t have more of one unless we insist on more of the other. Government is not the first nor the most important agent of responsibility, but its example matters. An irresponsible, unaccountable government of any size poses a far graver threat to individual freedom than a responsible, activist one.

I can agree with that.

Second, markets can be the most effective engine of individual opportunity, but only if they are honest ones, tempered in the public interest. Third, government must be an engine of individual opportunity as well, or else it will end up imposing a crushing burden of privilege and bureaucracy.

So far so good.

In a country like ours, the more likely threat to freedom is not government conspiracy, but government ineptitude and bureaucracy.

Wow! This guy really knows libertarians.

Unlike George Bush and the Republican Congress, we’ll give you accountable government that lives within its means. But we want government to do something useful, not just sit there.

Wha- huh? Never mind, he is just as clueless as Kos. The problem with government isn't the people running it, its the incentives that they have to do it right.

Incentives are the one thing that liberals simply do not understand - they think that everyone would just do the right thing if you just explained to them what the right thing is. The real world just doesn't work that way; I really hate to say it, but it's true.

If the best that he can come up with is "Bush was a liar, but we really mean it" then their hopes to enlist libertarians to the Democratic party is a wasted effort.

Dildos Make Headlines

I was suprised to see that the Supreme Court's decision to not grant cert to Ignacio Sergio Acosta v. the State of Texas was frontpage news on nearly every news source.

Sure, sex sells, but why is a ban on selling dildos a major news development? What I was not suprised to find was not a single news story explained that SCOTUS denying cert is not an implicit affirmation of the case.

The Supreme Court decides not to hear thousands of cases each session and when they do reject hearing a case it isn't because the case was correctly decided - its because they felt there were more important cases that needed to be dealt with in a limited amount of time.

Why anyone would be suprised that dildos are less important than abortion, the environment and affirmative action I have no idea. I guess nothing is more important than painting the Supreme Court as an ultra-conservative monstrosity that is going to seek to control every aspect of our lives.

News Flash! Congress already does that - we don't need a court.

Maybe This Wall Is a Good Thing

Arnold Kling points to some early signs of negative consequences of cracking down on illegal immigration.

Carnes ended up with less than 100 workers and fell two weeks behind, with bits and pieces of the fields unpicked. His income fell about $150,000, a significant loss.
...
Illegal immigrant workers who used to travel the country picking different crops as the seasons changed are hesitant to migrate for fear of being caught.
...
The problem is now reaching crisis proportions, food growers say. As much as 30 percent of the year's pear crop was lost in Northern California, growers estimate. More than one-third of Florida's Valencia orange crop went unharvested, Regelbrugge said.

This actually may be a good thing. People do not understand what they cannot see. Many (if not most) of the people that oppose immigration do so on the mistaken notion that immigrants take jobs away from native workers. Actually imposing the real costs of strict immigration could have two positive impacts.

First, it will (hopefully) illustrate the positive impacts of immigration. Importing low-skill labor means keeping costs low for the rest of us while the importer workers get a higher standard of living. A win-win if there ever was one.

Second, as rising prices or shortages start to cause real pain for consumers and growers alike there will be a push to liberalize immigration rules. Something that all supports of immigration would like to see anyway. Interestingly, we will see, in no uncertain terms, whether many on the right are really only concerned about the "illegal" part of illegal immigration.

A third, and I think highly unlikely, option is that low skill workers already in the US will flock to rural America to pick fruit when the wages start to rise. I'm not holding my breath.

Update: I missed another option, which is probably the most likely of all - the farmers will simply automate picking, replacing labor with capital. This mitigates my enthusiasm for a lesson to be learned by quite a bit.

Corporate Power

I've never really understood the leftist meme that claims corporations have too much power over individuals. Except in cases where there is a government enforced monopoly, you don't ever have to do business with a corporation. And in the cases where you have a legitimate gripe with a corporation there are plenty of avenues of recourse.

The statists always come back to the "people power" that citizens have over government as their trump card as why government is the better option. Well I have a little experiment that I would like you to try next time government seems like an appealing option.

Run to your local Wal-Mart or whatever evil capitalistic representative you would like to prove my point and buy something. Anything. Bring it home and set it on the counter and go about your day. The next day pick up that thing and bring it back to that evil corporation and tell them that you aren't happy with the item.

What do you think happens? The person asks for a receipt and gives you your money back with rarely a question asked.

Now run to your local school district, road commissioner, utility board or what have you. Try to tell someone that you are not happy with the product. What happens? Well, assuming that you actually can find any of these places and assuming that you find someone that will talk to you. Nothing. They don't care.

If you can go through this exercise and honestly tell me that government is more responsive to customer needs than corporations then I have found myself the worlds largest pathological liar.

Thanks Kip

Welcome visitors from A Stitch in Haste. Kip is one of my favorite bloggers and I consider it a great accomplishment to be included in his Elite Eleven blogroll.

I lean libertarian Chicagoan (though, thankfully, I don't actually live in the People's Republic of) and much of my blogging tackles national and local politics colored with a libertarian lens.

Feel free to take a look around and I hope you come back soon.

A Reply To a Commenter

A thoughtful commenter has stopped by trying to pursuade me that Kos is right. You can read his whole comment here, but I quote, in part:

There is a hierachy of liberty interests. Arguably, political rights against state intrusions are superior to mere economic liberties, such as the right to pollute the commons, or defraud customers, or even to use one’s property in an unrestricted manner. You may feel differently, but history has demonstrated over and over that political rights, once lost, are much harder to restore than economic rights,

To which I reply:

a) insulting libertarian ideals by insinuating that we favor polluting the commons and defrauding customers is probably not a winning strategy.

b) Your assertion that political rights are harder to restore than economic rights is simply wrong. There are not political rights and economic rights - there are just rights.
Second, American history is full of liberties that have been taken away and restored:
Alien and Sedition Acts
Japanese Internment
Full Scale spying on American Citizens (Hoover and McCarthy)
and the list goes on.

You may (or may not) be right about American politics being stuck in a two party system but I do not have to accept that the Republican party and Democratic party are the only options, therefor I will sit this one out.

More On Kos

Whatever you think about Kos, his essay on Cato Unbound is at least thoughtful. Not particularly well thought out, but thoughtful. He doesn't call names and he doesn't insult anyone. For now.

One of the reasons that I took Cato Unbound off my blogroll is that it has typically deteriorated into a shouting fest of name calling shenanigans. I thought their first topic went very well, but the ones that followed have been less than scholarly debates.

After the rebutal essays are published I'm putting even odds on Markos becoming completely unhinged which should, all things being equal, put an end to this Democratic Libertarian BS once and for all.

Should Libertarians Look Left

Markos "Kos" Moulitsas is once again pitching the theory that libertarian minded voters should support Democrats over Republicans. Once again, he offers nothing compelling to show that Democrats are the better option. Republicans have certainly not been friends to the libertarian ideal, but how is the anti-Walmart, pro-single payer healthcare, anti-gun rights, pro-smoking/transfat banning Democrats an improvement?

While some of what Markos says, on the surface, seems to hit the right chords a close examination reveals a disconnect between what libertarians want and what Markos is promising Democrats will deliver.

They also saw the markets as a good, not an evil, but didn’t necessarily see an unregulated market run amok as a positive thing.

What, exactly, is a "market run amok"? Who gets to decide when it has gone too far? As Kip loves to say - Every advocate of central planning always — always — envisions himself as the central planner. What a Democrat sees as a market run amok it means things like Wal-Mart selling cheap drugs and restaurants selling froie gras. Then Democrats are falling over themselves trying to fix these "market failures."

Markos correctly identifies the libertarian mistrust of government.

The larger government grows, the more it infringes on our personal space, inevitably placing limits on our freedoms.

But he follows it up (via a repost by another Kos diarist) by trying to pursued us that government is bad, but corporations are worse.

The fundamental reason that "libertarian" has become "libertarian democrat" is that corporations are becoming more powerful than governments. This fundamental fact has created a union between those with libertarian tendencies and those with those who believed all along that government can be a force for good.

This misses the fundamental foundation of libertarianism - the corporations only have power over government because government has power. If the government could not make rules defining how the marketplace works, then there would be no power to buy and influence.

The essay goes on attacking Republican infringments on personal liberty while ignoring the Democratic attack on the same. Which is the fatal flaw in his attempt to pursuade us that Democrats are a valid alternative to Republicans - they are, essentially, no different. while Republicans may be in the pocket of Big Business, at least that means they, typically, just stay out of the way. The harm that they do on the economic front is much smaller than the harm that Democrats are trying to do.

Until Democrats are willing to demonstrate that they can keep their pudgy little fingers out of the free-market and let people decide for themselves what is a fair wage and what products they wish to buy, Democrats will never receive my vote.

More thoughts at Inactivist and A Stich In Haste

Tags: democrats, politics, libertarian, Kos, smilerz

Something Is Wrong

When Congressmen openly admit that a bill is unconstitutional and vote for it anway.

Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) voted for the bill after telling reporters earlier that he would oppose it because it is “patently unconstitutional on its face.” He cited its denial of the habeas corpus right to military detainees. In an interview last night, Specter said he decided to back the bill because it has several good items, “and the court will clean it up” by striking the habeas corpus provisions.

Does the oath that they take to uphold the Constitution mean nothing? There must be a way to force Congress to start unbundling these bills that contain hundreds of regulations. I'm convinced that this step alone, would decrease the amount of regulation 10 fold.

HatTip: Cato@Liberty
More thoughts at A Stitch in Haste.