ilyagerner:

“Freedom is living without government coercion. So when a politician talks about freedom for this group or that, ask yourself whether he is advocating more government action or less.” - Ron Paul, ignorant or mendacious?

Among the more cringe-worthy aspects of the contemporary American Right is its preferred ahistorical narrative of lost liberty. Once, goes such thinking, before the income tax and the IRS, before welfare, the FBI, and Social Security, before occupational licensing, and before rent control, there was freedom; noble, independent, Jeffersonian freedom. It wasn’t perfect, of course, with the whole slavery unpleasantness marring the American experiment, but at least most Americans - or rather, white, male, heterosexual, protestant Americans - weren’t on the Road to Serfdom. Liberty nostalgia is most pervasive among the libertarian set but not exclusive to it; presumably the guys who dress up to look and smell like the Founding generation aren’t doing so to make a fashion statement, but to make a point about reclaiming Revolutionary freedoms supposedly lost to the maws of growing government.

More sophisticated advocates of small-government reject the most extreme version of this narrative, recognizing that low tax rates could never make up for the existence of slavery, Jim Crow, and coverture laws. They understand the United States is more free today than it’s ever been in the past. What’s sometimes missing is the recognition that an empowered federal government is what made these advances in freedom possible.

Coercion is at the heart of all wars, and the suspension of habeas corpus, military conscription, and introduction of the first US income tax, meant the Civil War would be no different, but it’s impossible to disassociate these facts from the War’s aims and consequences: the salvation of a Union free from slavery. States’ rights and property rights were attentuated at the barrel of a gun - federal guns! federal guns purchased with tax increases and the printing of greenbacks! federal guns held by conscriped soldiers! - but to see this as anything but an expansion of liberty is to be a special kind of blind. The federal government grew more muscular and the nation became more free.

A century after Appomatox, an empowered central government again coincided with an expansion of liberty.  The Civil Rights Acts outlawed state-sanctioned and enforced racial discrimination, trampling on community control. The laws went further: they regulated private behavior, with Title II of the1964 Civil Rights Act forbidding discrimination in ”public” accomodations and Title VII banning discrimination based on race in the terms and conditions of employment. Again, “more government action” meant more freedom.

None of this is to say that every new law, regulation, and agency spending plan is a strike against tyranny. Most of what the federal government does has little to do with enforcing civil rights laws. The justification for the rest of the welfare state has to be made separately - though it’s not difficult to justify in freedom-enhancing terms, either. The important point is that we should be wary of those who make blanket statements about the coincidence of government power and personal freedom. Sometimes, Washington is the oppressor. And some times, it’s the guardian of liberty.

(Image: Coca-Cola machine labelled “whites only”)

ilyagerner:

In celebration of reaching over 1,000 tumblr followers - most of whom I’m reasonably sure are not pornbots - here is a gratuitous blogger-as-very-young-man picture of myself. Even by the late ’80s color film had yet to make it into wide consumer use in the Soviet Union. About the boy’s hosiery and frilly sweater: Moscow was a cold city, okay?

As for the blog’s readership, I’m honored that anyone would read my posts. My day job isn’t in journalism and I don’t have any aspirations for professional writing, but it’s heartening to know there’s an audience for policy wonkery on platforms like tumblr. About a year ago there was an MSNBC ad in which Chuck Todd announced, “I love politics; I wish every day were Election Day.” I share that sentiment in some ways, but thinking about  governance and ideology as opposed to the horse race of campaigns is important, and I’m glad I’m not the only one who thinks so.

Suggestions for post topics are welcome. As always, thanks for reading.

ilyagerner:

The Pew Research Center released its 2011 Political Typology Survey, an “effort to sort Americans into cohesive groups based on their values, political beliefs and party affiliation.”

You can take Pew’s Typology quiz and compare your responses with the attitudes/demographics of different Pew-defined groups.

The graphic above captures one of the dispiriting (for me) asymmetries in US politics: my fellow “solid liberals” want to compromise, staunch conservatives want their representatives to stick to their guns. To be clear, I’m with the 25% who want elected officials to “stick to their positions.”

ilyagerner:

Politicians considering a congressional campaign should not neglect purchasing .org and .net domains. The Atlantic explains.

ilyagerner:

A Heartbreaking Map, the Acquisition Problem, & Voluntary Exchange

A popular strand of libertarian - and what presently passes for conservative - thought argues that egalitarian concerns about the “end state” of wealth distribution are misplaced. What matters is not how much wealth the rich possess or how little is owned by the poor, but the manner in which this distribution was created. If the end state was produced by voluntary transactions, it is just. If it was produced through coercive force, is it not.

Formally, as per Robert Nozick: ”A person who acquires a holding in accordance with the principle of justice in transfer, from someone else entitled to the holding, is entitled to the holding.”

For example: I give the grocery store $5 in voluntary exchange for a gallon of milk. In order for this to be a permissible exchange, I must already own the $5, and the grocery store must own the milk. Also, I had to have acquired my $5 and the grocery store had to buy its milk via earlier voluntary exchanges of things we owned (in my case, I exchanged my labor for a paycheck), and so forth back through history.

But this process has to begin at some point. Someone appropriated a resource, excluded others from its use and began to extract value from the parcel by combining it with his labor. Only then could the (potentially) voluntary exchanges commence.

Of course, we know that in the Americas there was nothing voluntary about the initial acquisition of resources by European settlers. The lack of “improvements” and agricultural activity was cited as justification for white dominance over native lands, but this reasoning doesn’t stand up to contemporary sensibilities and is factually incorrect to boot: Native Americans practiced agriculture.

Setting aside the problem of initial acquisition, we know that much present inequality stems from historical transactions that were far from voluntary. There’re few better examples of coercion than the economy of the ante-bellum South.

So what is to be done? Seems to me that affirmative action as currently practiced is much too meager a policy for libertarians and conservatives who subscribe to the property doctrine described above. Should there not be some massive scheme of compensatory justice to right obvious wrongs? If not, why not? I see many practical objections, but accepting those objections seems to point to the moral impractability of an untrammeled right to property as a first principle.

As I’m a liberal, I think the admittedly imperfect solution is some combination of:

• Affirmative action programs, and
• A greater concern about equality of opportunity for all, regardless of how the initial inequalities were generated. The residents of the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation and the descendents of slaves may have a special claim on our conscience, but for me, the transactional history that produced poverty among whites in Appalachia, blacks in Detroit, Native Americans in New Mexico, or Hispanics in South Central matters less than the necessity of remedying present-day inequalities. But then again, I’m no libertarian.

Image credit (which is just incredible): sunisup:

This is a series of maps charting the shrinkage of Native American lands over time, from 1784 to the present day.  Made because I was having trouble visualizing the sheer scale of the land loss, and reading numbers like “blah blah million acres” wasn’t really doing it for me.  The gif is based on a collection of maps by Sam B. Hilliard of Louisiana State University.  You can see the original map here.

fuckyeahcoolquotes:

Only in America could there be a tee-shirt that says “He who dies with the most toys wins.” He who dies with the most toys only leaves his heirs a giant headache.  The story, of course, is whom you touched, whom you wove into your story, who, you allowed to weave you into theirs. 

 […]

 I know that I have been – and I believe we all are – always stronger and better when we let the strength of others help us.  But being helped by them is not goal: being one with them – unity – is the goal.  Making them part of your tapestry by reaching out, helping the next person, greeting the next person, sacrificing a little something for the next person.  The toys won’t do you any good when you die.  A tapestry well-woven will mean – for all of eternity – that you mattered

That is what America is all about, isn’t it?  Nobody makes it on their own.  Each of us is woven together into the fabric of our country.  And when one of our neighbors is in need, it is the duty of the rest of us to hold her up.  We all have a responsibility to each other.  And in that unity is not just our story but our strength.  When we want to accomplish something, we reach to our neighbors to help make it happen.  Margaret Mead once said, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world.  Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”

Elizabeth Edwards (July 3, 1949 - December 7, 2010) at Meredith College 2007 Commencement

(Source: ilyagerner)