The darling of the libertarians, Ron Paul, (and to be fair there were some lefties who flirted with his candidacy too) has come out of the closet post-election as a New World Order conspiracy theorist – World Government is Obama’s secret agenda!
Read all about it at Crooks & Liars.
There’s a big irony here. The right spent the campaign claiming Obama had some secret (Commie!) hidden agenda. But McCain’s Maverick persona masked Republican extremism as usual, and now we’ve got the Ron Paul factor – a bit of projection going on it seems to me.
Kim,
Ron Paul is the “darling” of the libertarians in the same way that, say, Marx is the “darling” of the socialists. McCain succeeded in masking Republican extremism in the same way that Obama masked Communist fellow travellers.
Self-described US libertarians, in the main part, voted for either McCain or Obama, not Paul. This means he is a very odd “darling”. They don’t even vote for him.
Paul fell off the libertarian support wagon once it emerged that he’d been letting various people (including, allegedly, Lew Rockwell) write piles of anti-semitic and generally racist screeds on his account. Jason wrote a bunch of threads about it at Catallaxy at the time. He then proceeded to get progressively weirder throughout the campaign, attracting large numbers of 9/11 Truthers to his cause (these were on top of the racists, gold bugs and other mixed nuts).
skepticlawer, Ron Pauls very first media appearance after announcing his candidacy was on Alex Jones radio show. However, even that piece of early, batshit insane craziness didn’t put Jason Soon off until well afterwards. The wilful ignorance of the nuttiness that pervades libertarianism is it’s defining feature.
Perhaps the better description would be “the darling of the self-described libertarians who are a mite confused about the nature of libertarianism”
The Great Bird of the Red Planet (ex Catallaxy) was a fan of Paul, wasn’t he? He struck me as the prototypical “libertarian” supporter.
I was always surprised by the amount of support Paul had amongst so many in the Tech world, a lot of mentions on blogs, Twitter etc at the time – then conversation about him appeared to drop off once it became more apparent what a wacky guy he was.
Lets ignore him now shall we.
Ron Paul looked great to begin with and then flew to pieces in a classic example of Blair’s Law.
But his hardline positions on government size, spending, deficits, monetary policy would have separated him very clearly from Obama.
Oh well. Back to waiting another few decades for a libertarian candidate with a hope in hell.
Phil;
The tech world is absolutely riddled with libertarians. It’s a cliche.
Propertarian theories of morality are attractive to technical minds: they are axiomatic and can be reasoned through in a stepwise fashion. When your mind is tuned to deterministic things, a deterministic ethics has got to make sense.
I know its not strictly consequential – but I met one of his shirt-wearing, badge -toting supporters in a bar in San Fransisco last year – and she was just plain crazy. I mean that in a clinical rather than street sense.
Jacques Chester wrote:
A nice precis on why libertarianism is basically nuts. If you can’t make the world fit your sensibilities, invent one that does.
Propertarian theories of morality are attractive to technical minds: they are axiomatic and can be reasoned through in a stepwise fashion. When your mind is tuned to deterministic things, a deterministic ethics has got to make sense.
I’m not so sure that’s universally true, Jacques. At Uni, I did the Engineering (“technical mind” speaking here), but also covered a lot of pure maths – dabblings in Zermolo-Fraenkel set theory, propositional logic – because I found them interesting. After that, any “axiomatic” philosophy like Objectivism would appear half-baked, clumsy, and lacking in rigor to me.
Anecdote is not data, of course.
Are you sure the number of libertarians in tech communities isn’t just because they are more able – through proximity – to appreciate that great human faculty for creating bugs? Especially bugs caused by humans not being able to take in and comprehend all the causes for a particular action?
Most of the tech-world’s ‘Libertarians’ would be economic conservative Republicans if the social conservatives/neocons hadn’t hijacked the party.
gilmae,
That would be closer to my impressions. The simple knowledge that a complex computer system cannot always function the way that it should do in response to determined user input points out well the absurdity of a government trying to control, or even significantly influence, an almost infinitely more complex society without there being major stuff ups on the way.
AR, I’d almost take the opposite approach – the idea of trying to run a complex economy without significant government oversight and infrastructure provision would be akin to trying to run the sorts of large complex applications users except today without an operating system.
And FWIW, while it’s inevitable that most bug-fixes spurn new bugs, that doesn’t mean you don’t make them! It may well be that every version of a product has technically more bugs than the previous, but so long as the overall reliability of the features that customers actually use improves, it doesn’t matter.
It’d be a poor techie who took a libertarian attitude to complex computer systems – just throw your hands in the air and call for less processing power for the system, more autonomy for files and let the system work its own way through overruns and crashes.
I’d have thought their experience would make them keenly aware of the need for planning, mandatory standards and cooperation between interests.
FDB wrote:
I think what Jacques is trying to get at is the eliminationist model of problem solving that most programmers use to debug their efforts (i.e. making it simpler makes it better!). Of course, this ignores the golden rule of programming, make it as simple as you possibly can, but no simpler.
I was thinking that maybe computing and OSs aren’t really a very good analogy for political philosophy; then I remembered that Andrew Tanenbaum and libertarianism occupy roughly analogous positions of relevance to reality as it is currently implemented.
I’d also see the kind of libertarianism you tend to see among, especially, the open-source community is often more strongly anti-capitalist than anti-government. The strongest anti-government sentiments tend to be in the area of copyright protection.
Skribe: so what happened to the Log Cabin (non-socially conservative) Republicans? I didn’t hear much of, or from them during the last election. Is non-socially conservative Republicanism dead? That would explain the attraction of libertarianism, to me.
Standards yes, but mandatory can be an issue as it can also slow down development – eg makes you keep too much historical baggage when its no longer necessary. And definitely not single selected implementations chosen by the wise….
Open source development can be a good example of evolving standards, smaller amounts of overhead and resistance to overplanning with very competitive cooperation. I can understand why aspects of libertarianism can be appealing though I’m not sure that the way techies run software development maps well to running the real world.
wizofaus,
I will let you believe that “…significant government oversight and infrastructure provision…” can be done without significant mistakes being a necessary consequence.
I take it you also believe in porcine aviation.
gilmae, I’d put Andy Tannenbaum in the reality-based community, at least compared to most tech-head libertarians.
Like Down and Out, I did tech stuff (computer science) at uni, but also with a fair bit of pure maths. I think we are in agreement.
AR, I have no intention of believing that. There’s no shortage of real-life examples of governments making truly awful mistakes. None of them, however, have come close to what goes on in countries with inadequate government.
Peter Bagge – the Gen X Robert Crumb – covered the Primaries for Reason magazine. His deft critique of Paul and expression of how others felt about him after the Rockwell thing is here. The previous pages take good shots at Hillary, Huckabee etc.
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Paul’s an idealist lost in a time warp and his dilemma’s that he’s stuck between the assumptions of old school US paleoconservatism which he espouses and younger takes on libertarian philosophy. He’s in love with a romantic image of frontier America that’s never coming back. His views on religion and race whatever they actually are are also in conflict with the political premise of libertarianism.
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Libertarianism is fundamentally internationalist. Libertarians may object to the UN but usually on the basis that it’s another layer of governance. Paul’s opposition to NAFTA however shows that he’s, at heart, a nationalist economically.
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He did however vote against the Iraq War and the Patriot Act and was the only to do so. Raise a glass.
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The idea that Obama wants to institute world government is hyperbolous but not so far-fetched. Simply revisit Wilsonian Doctrine. Liberalism’s long had an internationalist streak. This is true of all Enlightenment ideologies. Behind it there’s a dream of a united rational species, peacefully inhabiting the planet.
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Nice dream, shame about the species
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Of course as Wilson’s actions show, as Roosevelt I’s did before, as Roosevelt II’s did afterward. As Kennedy, as Reagan, as Bushes I and II all show, world government is not what’s happening. What’s happening is the same old Westphalian shenanigans. Not to mention a healthy serving of aut vincere aut mori to boot.
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Obama wants to get foreigners liking America again. So he’s likely to pursue multilateralism. Clinton did this but not at the expense of American hegemony. The SACEUR post remains reserved for an American, for example. It’s doubtful Obama will give away hegemony either. But he does come in at a time when there’s a widespread calling for international financial regulation and global standards. The global economy creates the need for regulation.
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This heads in the direction of world governance whether or not the President is a nationalist or otherwise. Historical forces and all that. It’s the bourgeoisie laddie, it’s eatin’ everything in sight!
wizofaus,
So – and just to use extremes – the mistakes perpetrated by Mao were worse than exactly which inadequate government?
It’s actually pretty hard to work out how much of the starvation etc. that went on in China during Mao’s reign could be put down to unintended consequences of mistaken policy. Certainly it would seem Mao was so ideologically committed that he wasn’t particularly prepared to admit the damaging effects of policies intended to do good, which is arguably just as dangerous to being ideologically committed to doing nothing just in case their might be unintended consequences.
So – fair point – but I’d still suggest that from the perspective of modern Western democracies, there doesn’t seem to me to be more to fear from governments making mistakes trying to fix things than from governments deciding not to intervene even when things are clearly broken.
@helen They were rounded up and herded into Building 7 shortly before it demolished. The bodies were then taken to Mars by aliens and used to fertilise the Soylent Red crops.
It’s not such a radical idea, world government. I have somewhere a copy of Bob Brown’s book ‘Memo for a Saner World’. He announces there that the Greens support a world government. But yeah, I’m not aware that it’s part of Obama/Democratic ideology, so much.
Thanks, Skribe, that was very helpful.
*Backing away slowly*
wizofaus,
Coming in to fix things when clearly broken is not a problem. The problem comes when the “fix” is the cause of a worse problem. I would say this happen with stunning regularity, for example when the most heavily regulated businesses on the face of the planet (i.e. banking) cause further instability. The first reaction of governments is to interfere further. My response to that is to say that there is a good chance that the regulations had a big hand in the problems, particularly as they are so heavy.
None of these, though, are anywhere near as much of a problem as the “fixes” attempted by Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Hitler, Mussolini, Franco and others, so at least we have that to be thankful for.
As there is no where in the world where one could experience libertariansism I’d say libertarians have no idea what they are talking about. Perhaps they should have a go at Somalia, it seem singularly free of governmant at the moment.
Well AR, I’m actually reasonably open to the idea that if we were to build a modern economy from scratch, relatively minimal regulation would be the way to go. But we can’t do that – we already have this big mess held together with bits of string and duct tape, the way most software is, but unlike software developers, we can’t rewrite it from scratch. So the best we can hope for is adding new bits of string and duct tape where necessary, and pulling old bits away when they don’t work properly any more. Both actions can have unintended consequences, and I don’t see much reason to suppose that on average, it’s worse to add more bits than to pull away old bits.
This has been an interesting thread. I will shamelessly take full credit.
Andrew Reynolds – Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Hitler, Mussolini, Franco and others, so at least we have that to be thankful for.
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We do.
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A hundred years from now these experiments will bear much fruit. In fact they already do. All the Rah-Rah Capitalism types have gone to town on these guys. Tend to leave Pinochet off the list for some reason. And forget what makes Hitler and Mussolini different from Mao and Lenin. (Hint: Henry Ford) But anyway.
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Give it time and you’ll see a huge treasure of valuable scholarship on the 20th century anti-Utopias. Valuable lessons learnt, at someone else’s expense.
Adrien,
Pinochet (for all his faults) was not in the same league as the rest of them – although I may be wrong on Mussolini and Franco in that. As for whether Henry Ford was involved I think it makes little difference to the millions murdered. The differences between them all lie in the semantics.
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wizofaus,
I have done a fair bit of software design fro time to time and I normally find the best way is to work out what you have, what you need and try to work a path from one to the other.
It is not normally best to work out what you have and then keep adding bits in the hope that it will get you somewhere useful eventually. I would suggest something similar is true more generally.
AR – I design software for a living, and trust me, “adding bits in the hope that it will get you somewhere” is surprisingly useful! Indeed we had a bug with a major customer recently that took about a week of adding bits and testing them until we had it licked.
For the next version I rewrote the code, which is bound to have all sorts of huge unintended consequences, but it will go through extensive QA to find them before being released. You can’t do that with entire economies, however.
So, wizof aus, are you honestly contending that, for the economy (and remember, no SIT or UAT environments here) the government should just keep putting in possible patches until they eventually get it right? On a live environment with millions of users that seems a little foolhardy.
My thinking would be to try to remove the most obvious errors in a slow and measured way until you get down to a reasonably simple lot of base code – consisting of a few subroutines (apologies for the VB speak) like “subNationDefend”, “subCriminalsProsecute” and “subChildrenEducate”.
The rest could be left to the independent, learning agents within the program to find their own optimal path. I believe it extremely unlikely that any code, no matter how complex, is likely to be able to tell me how to live my life well.
Indeed, it’s because it’s a live environment with millions of users that relatively small patches is the safest way to go.
If you want to make wholesale revisions you need a good test environment – which is plausible by, for instance, trying out policy ideas on some subset of the population (an idea that I know Andrew Leigh is keen on, and I think there is definitely room for).
And FWIW, I completely agree that the purpose of governments is not to tell people how to run their lives. Which is one reason I almost never vote for conservative politicans
The question, of course, is whether you avoid voting Conservative or conservative. I normally find the ALP politicians to be more deeply conservative than any of the so called “Conservative” parties.
“As for whether Henry Ford was involved I think it makes little difference to the millions murdered.”
Actually, the difference is even smaller than either you or Adrien thought – in addition to his dealings with the Nazis, Henry Ford also had a concession in the Soviet Union during Stalin’s tenure:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Ford
In 1929, Ford accepted Stalin’s invitation to build a model plant (NNAZ, today GAZ) at Gorky, a city later renamed Nizhny Novgorod, and he sent American engineers and technicians to help set it up, including future labor leader Walter Reuther.
The technical assistance agreement between Ford Motor Company, VSNH and the Soviet-controlled Amtorg Trading Corporation[45] (as purchasing agent) was concluded for nine years and signed on May 31, 1929, by Ford, FMC vice-president Peter E. Martin, V. I. Mezhlauk, and the president of Amtorg, Saul G. Bron.