While America’s libertarian streak is often wildly exaggerated, this much is not: most people don’t like the idea of a government that runs a zillion programs they have never heard of, to help some special interest they’ll never meet, and which have little accountability for actually generating results. This structure is a recipe for a lot of such programs.
.. the 1986 Reagan tax reform, widely viewed as a model for those who want to broaden the tax base: rather than trying to tidy up the wild proliferation of tax exemptions that had grown up since the inception of the federal income tax, they went after all of it at once. In the resulting melee, there was simply not enough bandwidth for all the lobbies to make their case; congressmen have only so many hours in the day.
.. while there is a coherent conservative argument to be made for many of these cuts, I would not go so far as to say that the budget as a whole has a coherent conservative logic.
.. While I am probably friendlier than most libertarians to high levels of military spending, I do not see a pressing need to make them higher still.
.. Some of the EPA cuts look like ideological warfare more than a carefully-thought-out program of agency reform
.. This is the sort of thing that the federal government should be doing, because there are great economic benefits in having national standards for companies that operate across state lines, and great economies of scale in developing this sort of research and expertise once, rather than trying to duplicate them fifty times. Similar arguments hold for scientific research, controlling pollution (no respecters of state lines), and space exploration. These things have a clear goal, that goal is worthwhile, and it is best achieved at the federal level. Conservatives should be no happier than liberals if they go.
.. it isn’t really a small government budget; it’s just a poke in the eye to blue states.
Between Authoritarianism and Human Capital
The biggest challenge facing free societies today is our lack of belief in them. I am seeing too many self-inflicted wounds, most of all the recent democratically derived decisions in the United Kingdom and the United States.
.. It’s interesting to see that the countries that are doing fine, such as Canada, are those which in their cultural DNA never pushed that hard on libertarian ideals in the first place (though I would argue that Canada is implicitly fairly libertarian).
.. global authoritarianism is probably poisoning our political climate more than many people realize.
.. what is the most important reason for optimism about a free society?
I think it is talent and human capital. Today there is more mobilized talent than ever before, by a wide order of magnitude. More people are protected from the ravages of malnutrition and severe childhood diseases, more people get educated, and more learn from the internet. Furthermore, there is more opportunity for that talent. Say it is 1970 and you are a potential math or science genius born in India. What is the chance you can bring your talents to fruition?
.. I fear that libertarians have their own version of the Progressive myth. Progressives often believe that ever-growing tolerance and health insurance coverage are the future, if only bad Republicans could be defeated in political battle.
.. many of the dangers come .. a kind of old-style authoritarianism, souped up by the clever use of social media.
.. That war, using that word in the broadest sense possible, will be between today’s amazing accumulated stock of human capital — and the emotional momentum behind authoritarianism, which is encouraged by the political fraying that stems from underlying fears of disruption.
Libertarians Blew their best chance in decades
This was the year that the Democrats nominated a corrupt, longtime-insider, big-government, scandal-ridden statist, and the Republicans nominated a guy who wants government to get bigger – more infrastructure spending, mandated maternity leave, opposes entitlement reform, cheers eminent domain, and a new 35 percent tax on companies that fire workers.
Trump’s focus was never freedom or liberty. It was about empowering government, run by him, to address grievances of working-class whites and return America to a golden past, un-doing decades of changes to the country and the world.
This year was the golden opportunity libertarians – capital L and little L – had dreamed of for decades… and they fumbled it away.
Why a Silicon Valley Founder Is Funding a Factory for Trump Memes
This is also why libertarianism mates well with computationalism (the idea that the world is best understood and operated through computers). Both adopt a burn-it-all-down attitude toward the institutions that have held them back. What is “disruption” but the act of stripping everything from society and reinventing it inside the computer?
.. It’s more surprising that everyone in the Valley doesn’t support Trump than that Thiel and Luckey do.
.. Successfully exerting force of any kind on the universe is the ultimate goal of nerddom. Silicon Valley just institutionalized the idea. That common mantra—“change the world”—means nothing more than “witness myself the force I can exert upon it.”
.. Those who see VR as a temporary, occasional tool for entertainment miss the obvious truth of its ambition. VR is a symbol of the misfit’s ultimate victory over a world that would hold him back from other victories. A tool with which to fashion virtuous, mediated lives outside the boundaries of cruel, brutish normalcy. The nerds never wanted to become popular. They want to end populism entirely.