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“Libertarianism’s Achilles’ Heel”: Circular Hypocritical Logic That Avoids The Messy Choices

In politics, we often skip past the simple questions. This is why inquiries about the fundamentals can sometimes catch everyone short.

Michael Lind, the independent-minded scholar, posed one such question last week about libertarianism that I hope will shake up the political world. It’s important because many in the new generation of conservative politicians declare libertarianism as their core political philosophy.

It’s true that since nearly all Americans favor limits on government, most of us have found libertarians to be helpful allies at one point or another. Libertarians have the virtue, in principle at least, of a very clear creed: They believe in the smallest government possible, longing for what the late philosopher Robert Nozick, in his classic book “Anarchy, State, and Utopia,” called “the night-watchman state.” Anything government does beyond protecting people from violence or theft and enforcing contracts is seen as illegitimate.

If you start there, taking a stand on the issues of the day is easy. All efforts to cut back on government functions — public schools, Medicare, environmental regulation, food stamps — should be supported. Anything that increases government activity (Obamacare, for example) should be opposed.

In his bracing 1970s libertarian manifesto “For a New Liberty,” the economist Murray Rothbard promised a nation that would be characterized by “individual liberty, a peaceful foreign policy, minimal government and a free-market economy.”

Rothbard’s book concludes with boldness: “Liberty has never been fully tried in the modern world; libertarians now propose to fulfill the American dream and the world dream of liberty and prosperity for all mankind.”

This is where Lind’s question comes in. Note that Rothbard freely acknowledges that “liberty has never been fully tried,” at least by the libertarians’ exacting definition. In an essay in Salon, Lind asks:

“If libertarians are correct in claiming that they understand how best to organize a modern society, how is it that not a single country in the world in the early 21st century is organized along libertarian lines?”

In other words, “Why are there no libertarian countries?”

The ideas of the center-left — based on welfare states conjoined with market economies — have been deployed all over the democratic world, most extensively in the social democratic Scandinavian countries. We also have had deadly experiments with communism, a.k.a Marxism-Leninism.

From this, Lind asks another question: “If socialism is discredited by the failure of communist regimes in the real world, why isn’t libertarianism discredited by the absence of any libertarian regimes in the real world?”

The answer lies in a kind of circular logic: Libertarians can keep holding up their dream of perfection because, as a practical matter, it will never be tried in full. Even many who say they are libertarians reject the idea when it gets too close to home.

The strongest political support for a broad anti-statist libertarianism now comes from the tea party. Yet tea party members, as the polls show, are older than the country as a whole. They say they want to shrink government in a big way but are uneasy about embracing this concept when reducing Social Security and Medicare comes up. Thus do the proposals to cut these programs being pushed by Republicans in Congress exempt the current generation of recipients. There’s no way Republicans are going to attack their own base.

But this inconsistency (or hypocrisy) contains a truth: We had something close to a small-government libertarian utopia in the late 19th century and we decided it didn’t work. We realized that many Americans would never be able to save enough for retirement and, later, that most of them would be unable to afford health insurance when they were old. Smaller government meant that too many people were poor and that monopolies were formed too easily.

And when the Great Depression engulfed us, government was helpless, largely handcuffed by this anti-government ideology until Franklin D. Roosevelt came along.

In fact, as Lind points out, most countries that we typically see as “free” and prosperous have governments that consume around 40 percent of their gross domestic product. They are better off for it. “Libertarians,” he writes, “seem to have persuaded themselves that there is no significant trade-off between less government and more national insecurity, more crime, more illiteracy and more infant and maternal mortality . . . .”

This matters to our current politics because too many politicians are making decisions on the basis of a grand, utopian theory that they never can — or will — put into practice. They then use this theory to avoid a candid conversation about the messy choices governance requires. And this is why we have gridlock.

 

By: E. J. Dionne, Jr., Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, June 9, 2013

June 10, 2013 Posted by | Libertarians | , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

“Time For Issa To Put Up Or Shut Up”: Proof That White House Was Not Involved In IRS Tea Party Targeting Finally Exposed

Appearing this morning on CNN’s “State of the Union” and “CBS Sunday Morning”, Rep. Elijah Cummings, the ranking Democrat on the House Oversight Committee chaired by Rep. Darrell Issa, revealed that the manager responsible for the Cincinnati screening team involved in the 501(c)(4) investigations of conservative tea party groups—and the man that apparently first referred the issue to IRS technical office in Washington—has now weighed in on the controversy.

The Cincinnati based manager—a long-time employee of the IRS who self-identifies as a “conservative Republican”—was interviewed on Thursday by the staff of the Oversight Committee. What he had to say might well be the beginning of the end of Darrell Issa’s campaign to lay the blame for the IRS fiasco at the White House doorstep.

According to the transcript of the interview, the still unnamed supervisor was asked, “Do you have any reason to believe that anyone in the White House was involved in the decision to screen tea party cases?”

The manager’s response? “I have no reason to believe that.”

The gentleman is in a unique position to know what actually happened as he was the supervisor who, in 2010, sent the matter to the IRS technical office in Washington for further guidance after an IRS screener under his supervision identified an applicant for 501 (c)(4) status as a “high profile’” conservative organization. According to the manager, he forwarded the case to the Washington based technical folks for their guidance so that the matter could be treated “with consistency”.

What this tells us is that this was not a case of Washington instructing the Cincinnati office to target Tea Party applicants but rather it was the Cincinnati office that first sought guidance from the IRS in Washington as to how to handle the matter. This is a far cry, indeed, from what Chairman Issa has been trying to sell to the American public through his constant—yet fully unsubstantiated—claims that the targeting originated in White House.

According to the transcripts, the manager is now on record saying that there was no political motivation or instruction originating in the White House or anywhere else in the nation’s capital, noting “I do not believe that the screening of these cases had anything to do other than consistency and identifying issues that needed to have further development.”

In response to the interview with the Cincinnati supervisor, Representative Cummings suggested this morning that “Based upon everything I’ve seen the case is solved, and if it were me, I would wrap this case up and move on to be frank with you.”

Of course, Cummings desire to put the matter to bed is unlikely to happen. Certainly, any hope that the tide can be turned on the full-scale GOP attack on the President will require that the public gets a look at the actual transcripts to see the full interview—a matter that has, in and of itself, been chock full of controversy.

While Chairman Issa made news last week by promising to release full transcripts in support of his still unsupported claims in this matter, he has failed to release a word of testimony despite numerous requests from various reporters and columnists, including myself.

It was during Issa’s  own “State of the Union” appearance last Sunday when he stated that interviews with workers in the Cincinnati IRS office indicated that targeting Tea Party applicants was “a problem that was coordinated in all likelihood right out of Washington headquarters – and we’re getting to proving it. My gut tells me that too many people knew this wrongdoing was going on before the election, and at least by some sort of convenient, benign neglect, allowed it to go on through the election. I’m not making any allegations as to motive, that they set out to do it, but certainly people knew it was happening.”

Despite Issa’s indication that the transcripts of interviews with the Cincinnati employees would be forthcoming, the transcripts have not been released including the transcript with the manager providing the testimony that would appear to clear the White House.

Representative Cummings is now demanding that all of the transcripts be released for review.

Speaking to Candy Crowley on this morning’s edition of “State of The Union”, Cummings said:

“I wrote Chairman Issa on Thursday and I wrote to him this morning. I want those transcripts to be released,” Cummings said. “I’m willing to come on your show next week with the chairman with the transcripts if he agrees to do that. If he doesn’t, I’ll release them by the end of the week.”

Good.

It’s far past time for Issa to back up his over-the-top allegations with some evidence–evidence that even conservative Republican Senator Lindsey Graham acknowledges has not been forthcoming.

While there is no reason to imagine that the anti-Obama forces will actually allow the truth to get in the way of their political narrative—nor will there be any shortage of Americans who will be more than willing to ignore the testimony of the one man in the Cincinnati who actually knows what happened—the truth may serve to accomplish one real benefit for which we can all be grateful—

Just maybe, Darrell Issa’s fifteen minutes of truly illegitimate and undeserved fame may finally be over.

Hallelujah.

 

By: Rick Ungar, Op-Ed Contributor, Forbes, June 9, 2013

June 10, 2013 Posted by | Internal Revenue Service, Tea Party | , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

“Worried About The Right Wing”: Marco Rubio Threatens To Betray His Allies On Immigration Reform

As we discussed in April, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) spent a few months playing an awkward game on comprehensive immigration reform. On the one hand, Rubio has been a high-profile member of the “Gang of Eight,” helping negotiate the details of the legislation. On the other hand, the Florida Republican signaled his willingness to oppose the legislation he’s ostensibly helping write. Rubio would say he likes his own bill, but wouldn’t commit to it.

Many of those involved in the process grew weary of Rubio straddling the fence. It was common to hear Capitol Hill insiders joke that the senator thought he could be “a little bit pregnant” on the policy.

But all that changed in mid-April, when Rubio got off the fence and began championing the legislation he helped craft. And all of that changed again late yesterday when Rubio said he’s prepared to reject his own legislation.

Speaking with radio host Hugh Hewitt Tuesday, Rubio said the Senate should “strengthen the border security parts of this bill so that they’re stronger, so that they don’t give overwhelming discretion to the Department of Homeland Security.” He said he was working with other senators on amendments to do just that.

Then Hewitt asked: “If those amendments don’t pass, will you yourself support the bill that emerged from Judiciary, Senator Rubio?”

Rubio answered, “Well, I think if those amendments don’t pass, then I think we’ve got a bill that isn’t going to become law, and I think we’re wasting our time. So the answer is no.”

Even for Rubio, this is bizarre. The Florida Republican had concerns about provisions related to border security, which he worked out through the “Gang of Eight” negotiations — his colleagues made the changes he wanted to see, which in turn led Rubio to endorse the bipartisan legislation.

But now the senator is moving the goalposts, saying the changes that have already been made aren’t good enough, and unless he’s able to move his bill even further to the right, Rubio is prepared to reject his own legislation.

Well, maybe Democrats can once again give Rubio what he wants, keeping the larger effort intact?

I’m afraid not — Rubio is asking far too much.

Senate Minority Whip John Cornyn intends to introduce a sweeping amendment to the immigration bill when it goes on the floor next week, seeking to replace an entire section devoted to border security and tweak the national security and criminal justice titles.

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), one of the members of the Senate’s bipartisan Gang of Eight, has been working with Cornyn on the amendment “for weeks,” a Rubio aide said.

The Texas Republican wants stricter border patrol provisional “triggers” before registered immigrants are allowed to apply for green card status. His amendment would require 100 percent operational control of the Southern borders and that 90 percent of illegal border crossers be apprehended. It would also require 100 percent border surveillance, or situational awareness, of each one-mile segment of the Southern border and installment of a national E-Verify system before registered immigrants can pursue green cards.

No serious person involved in the negotiations believes this is a responsible approach. Indeed, no one even thinks these standards are realistic — it’s exactly why the Gang of Eight considered and rejected these measures during their negotiations. Rubio said they weren’t necessary to earn his support for the legislation, and now he’s saying they are.

He is, in other words, apparently prepared to betray his allies.

And why would Rubio do this? Because the Republican Party’s radicalized base opposes comprehensive reform, and Rubio’s support for the bill will undermine his future career ambitions, including a likely run for national office in 2016. [Update: Adam Serwer notes this is ultimately pointless, since the right will still resent the fact that he helped write a bill they hate, and the left will resent the fact that he walked away from a deal reached in good faith.]

There is an important caveat to all of this: Rubio has waffled before. I don’t recall him going as far as he did with Hugh Hewitt, but the Florida Republican occasionally waffles, only to be brought back into the fold. Reform proponents can hope that McCain and Graham will give him a call this morning, Rubio will walk back his comments from yesterday, and the process will move forward. Rubio isn’t a policy guy, so it’s possible he got rattled yesterday and said what he didn’t entirely mean.

But if we take his words at face value, Rubio has put the future of immigration reform at great risk, basically because he’s worried right-wing activists won’t like him anymore.

 

By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, June 5, 2013

June 8, 2013 Posted by | Immigration Reform | , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

“Obama Hatred And The IRS”: Republicans Rage At The Continued Existence Of Barack Obama

So now we know a little more officially than we did before that the Republican Party higher-ups know or at least suspect that there’s likely no actual political scandal in the IRS matter, and that they’re letting Darrell Issa have his fun and make a fool of himself just for the sake of doing whatever random damage to Barack Obama they can in his remaining time in office. An article by Shane Goldmacher in National Journal yesterday, when read properly between the lines, says as much. And if they can’t get him while he’s in office, by ginning up some flimsy reason to open impeachment hearings, they’ll hound him on his way out the door and afterward, trying to add words like “corrupt” and “tarnished” to the first paragraphs of historical summations of his tenure. That’s all this is really about—their base’s rage at the continued existence of Barack Obama, and their own twisted craving to acknowledge and stoke it.

The Goldmacher piece makes the commonsensical and nonideological observation that you might think that Issa, who has been out there throwing unproven allegations against the wall like Oscar Madison did Felix Unger’s linguine, would be reined in a bit by his party. This is especially so after calling Jay Carney a “paid liar” and backing it up with nothing specific. In fairness, a couple of Republicans—interestingly, Lindsey Graham and John McCain chief among them—did urge a holding of the horses after that one.

But by and large, Republicans are perfectly happy for Issa to keep stirring the pot. Eric Cantor—this happened after the “paid liar” remark—singled Issa out for praise at a closed-door meeting of the House GOP on Tuesday. At a press conference the same day, Cantor twice refused to criticize Issa even mildly.

I would love to know what someone like Cantor really thinks about this IRS thing. My guess about him and most top Republicans: they’d love for some unexpected nugget of political gold to turn up, of course, but they surely know very well that this scandal is almost certainly a bureaucratic one. With luck, they might land proof that someone in the Obama reelection campaign knew about the IG probe into the matter, but then the question will be how much detail this person or persons knew. The likelihood would be simply that they knew of the existence of the probe but nothing about the details.

On the other hand, there may be even less to all this than that. Issa once promised that he would release all the transcripts of his closed-door proceedings. He has not done so, and I gather he is stonewalling reporters on the question. Could it be that there’s something in the full transcripts that would more or less end this whole thing? I’m sure we can trust him, though, because Republican staffers never doctor docum—oops, never mind.

Whatever. Nothing would stop the GOP from trying to turn this thing into another Watergate. Their base will demand it, because to them, Obama is capable of all manner of evil. Ted Cruz’s recent McCarthy-esque comparison of Obama to Nixon (because the IRS matter somehow proves that Obama has an “enemies list”) is, to the base, soft-pedaling the situation if anything, and undoubtedly insulting to Nixon to boot.

Over the years since Obama arrived on scene, right-wingers have believed and circulated and peddled the following about him (and this is just a very partial list from Snopes.com, putting aside the ones you already know about the birth certificate and his “Muslim” heritage): that he refuses to recite the Pledge of Allegiance; that his campaign was funded by Hugo Chávez; that he wanted to replace “The Star Spangled Banner” with the less martial “I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing”; that he must have used a non-U.S. passport to travel to Pakistan in 1981; that he plans to ban recreational fishing in the United States; that he had to surrender his law license; has banned the National Day of Prayer; stopped wearing his wedding ring in observance of Ramadan; and once kissed David Cameron, smack on the lips.

All that is to say nothing of the racist invective that is the constant background music of this presidency. We in the media never discuss this (go Google “chat board Obama n—-r,” except use the actual word, and just see what you get), but it is a daily diet in this country—yes, daily—and nothing said about any president in history that I can think of comes close to matching its relentless and savage sickness.

This is the rage the Republicans are feeding—and conservative intellectuals are doing their best to ignore. And no, it’s not this way when the situation is reversed. The Democrats specifically did not embark on these political fishing expeditions, and while much of the base wanted them to, a lot of liberal commentators did not. (I was against pursuing impeachment charges against Bush and Cheney, which you can read about here; I did urge Democrats to hold war-profiteering hearings, on which they vexingly ignored me.) The liberal base hated George Bush all right, but the hate wasn’t quite as existential, wasn’t quite as drenched in the same kind of suppurated derangement one finds in quarters of the right.

Besides which, Bush discredited himself through his uniform incompetence. Obama, clearly competent, has not done that and is unlikely to do it. So the Republicans have to do it to him. Tarnishing Obama is the only way they can emerge from these eight years not completely humiliated by him, so we’re just going to have to endure it.

 

By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, June 6, 2013

June 8, 2013 Posted by | Politics, Republicans | , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

“A Finger In The Eye Of Hispanic Voters”: House GOP Dream Act Deferral Vote Is Political Insanity

Honestly, when I saw that House Republicans had passed an amendment today which would defund President Obama’s limited, executive-order-driven Dream Act, my first thought was to wonder what the GOP is thinking. Does this party have a death wish?

This isn’t the political equivalent of rocket science. Hispanics voted overwhelmingly to support Obama last year. And given demographic trends regarding the share of the electorate they’re going to make up in coming years, neither party can afford to become noncompetitive with these voters. It’s a matter of political survival. And many Republicans know this – see the Republican National Committee’s 2012 post-mortem, for example, or the College Republicans’ recent version.

Immigration is not the number one issue for Hispanic voters, but it is a gateway issue and one that gets to tone and outlook. If voters think a party is hostile to and/or distrustful of them, they’re going to tune that party out. So rational Republicans (not to mention a whole lot of their corporate backers) want to get immigration reform done.

But today’s GOP – especially its House denizens – aren’t about rationality. So they cast the vote they did today. And it’s not an isolated occurrence. The Atlantic’s Garance Franke-Ruta looks at how the GOP is trying to blow its 2016 chances:

House Republicans walking away from comprehensive immigration reform. Tying a path to citizenship to continued second-class standing on access to health insurance. Voting to resume deporting undocumented immigrants brought here as children, a year after President Obama issued an executive order instructing the Department of Homeland Security to use discretion and make such deportations a low priority.

And this isn’t simply bad policy or stumbling into bad politics. This is going out of their way to charge into bad politics. It’s not like there’s any chance this amendment becomes law. So why make a point of voting for it?

I was at a press breakfast yesterday with Rep. Tom Price, the Georgia Republican who is vice chairman of the House Budget Committee, and he was asked about whether the GOP would suffer politically if it is blamed for killing immigration reform this year. Price, who favors the House GOP’s official approach of going piecemeal on immigration reform rather than trying to tackle it comprehensively, made a couple of enlightening comments.

First, he said that “I think what the American people want is to see individuals working to solve challenges.” I tend to think that what the American people actually want is to see their elected representatives actually solving challenges rather than simply trying – this isn’t kindergarten: You don’t get points for trying really hard; you get points for getting stuff done.

The second thing he said was that legislation with a path to citizenship or a path to legal status wouldn’t pass the House with a majority of Republican votes because the GOP doesn’t trust “the administration to enforce the current laws that are on the books as they relate to much of immigration.” But he then went on to conflate the views of his party and its base with the broader electorate: “The American people don’t trust Washington in this area because the promise that was made in 1986 has been broken,” he said, referring to the deal President Ronald Reagan signed which provided amnesty for illegal immigrants back then in exchange for promises of border security. “There’s no trust at all. The first step in regaining that trust is living up to the promise that was made to the nation back in 1986 and that is controlling and securing the border.”

Two points. First, the border is far more secure than it has been. Second, if mistrust of Washington was as widespread as Price seems to suppose, polls would show deep opposition to both comprehensive immigration reform and a way for currently illegal immigrants to gain citizenship, but poll after poll shows otherwise. A recent poll conducted for Bloomberg showed that 74 percent of adults favor “Allowing immigrants living in the country illegally to become citizens, provided they don’t have criminal records, they pay fines and back taxes, and they wait more than 10 years.” That’s hardly angry mistrust of Washington regarding immigration.

The problem is that House Republicans either confuse their base’s wishes or simply don’t want to cross them. Either way, they’re voting themselves a path to oblivion.

 

By: Robert Schlesinger, U. S. News and World Report, June 7, 2013

June 8, 2013 Posted by | Immigration Reform | , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

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