Almost Classical

Donald Trump in February 2009 (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) You vowed to leave if Donald Trump won the White House. Leave. Please. Go. Be gone with you and all of your snobbery, your condescension, your identity politics. The rest of us have work to do! People from marginalized communities cannot pick up and leave the United States. And where would they go? Where would you go? France, where head coverings are banned? Germany, where anti-Semites are out in public again? Where is this mythical better place? A progressive friend posted that people struggling should move from places like Youngstown, Ohio, or rural West Virginia. Let me understand how that works. You have no money. You lost your job, might be on public assistance, have minimal technical skills.... Surely you can move to an expensive city with no problem. No. Most of us have to stick around. We have to gather up our resistance to a Pres. Trump and develop a more coherent strategy to salvange what moderates exist...

One good sign from this election year: none of my close friends has made a stink and defriended me for not agreeing with X, Y, or Z and not being a vocal supporter of Candidate A, B, or C. I never felt embarrassed to have this president and his family represent the United States, despite not agreeing with him on several core issues. For eight years we've had a president with whom I disagree but consider a decent father, good role model, and generally well-intentioned human. (Foreign affairs, generally disappointed by both parties since 2001.) For eight years, the big change was health care. Did anything else change? I'm not sure. I wish we had seen some Big Bank CEOs in prison (capitalism without the rule of law doesn't work), a reworking of corporate and personal tax systems (simplify, close loopholes, end "targetted" breaks), and a willingness to confront long-term infrastructure issues while interest rates are low. We need an educated, moral, persuasiv...

For many of us who have studied, deeply, the works of Adam Smith, J.S. Mill, Hayek, von Mises, Sowell, Mankiw, Garrison, McCloskey, and others with Austrian and Classical Liberal theoretical underpinnings, the death of the intellectual movement began when intellectually skilled yet stupid people like Charles Murray (The Bell Curve) were given credence by the Republican and Libertarian Parties. The Religious Right wasn't seeking religious liberty. It was, often, seeking a cover for hateful biases and a desire to legislate morality. Religious men and women led the Abolitionist movement and the Civil Rights movement, but those aren't the people of the modern religious GOP subset. We let racists, nationalists, sexists, and worse claim the banner of "personal liberty" and "states rights" when we should have been and must today reject these people. Horrible people have used libertarian and classically liberal ideals to defend their twisted opinions and hatre...

Our "choices" for the 2016 presidential election are very bad and extremely bad. What, you say? There are more than two choices? Right. And I'll soon be running a Hollywood Studio. The two-party system of the United States is not going to change this election cycle, though the cracks are showing. More likely, if the Republican Party does implode, a new party will rise. It has happened before and will happen again. But, overall, we remain a two-party nation. The parties flip ideologies, the parties change names, individual parties split. And we always end up with a duopoly. Not that other nations really have multiple parties in the way romantically imagine. There are, generally, two central parties with minor parties trying to pull the major parties to the left or right. Because the parliamentary systems rely on coalitions, those minor parties have more influence than smaller parties can have in the United States. The upside of the European model is that small ...

Because I've been cautioning that libertarians need to be pragmatic and we should avoid the caricatures of others that we are subjected to online and in the press, a few readers have asked why I consider myself an almost classical liberal and a libertarian. My core values and my ideal economic and political models remain firmly grounded in the works of Austrian economic theorists and John Stuart Mill's theories on freedom. I value Adam Smith, Ludwig von Mises, Henry Hazlitt, F. A. Hayek (a lot), early Murray Rothbard, Roger Garrison, Eugene Fama, Deidre McCloskey, and Milton Friedman. I enjoy the views and historical grounding of Meagan McArdle, Robert J. Samuelson, and Amity Shlaes. I argue with other "libertarians" over Ayn Rand, while still respecting The Fountainhead  for its emphasis on personal expression over greed. The federal government of the United States is a tangled mess of departments, agencies, bureaus, and offices. In order of Constitutiona...

The Libertarian Party in the United States is no more (and maybe no less) realistic than the Democratic or Republican parties. The platforms of parties are not based on realistic legislative goals; they are the work of party ideologues with little to no hope of becoming legal realities. There are exceptions, but overall the party platforms are hopes and dreams, meant to reaffirm core values for base voters. In the world of an Almost Classical Liberal, ideologues from across the political landscape represent the failure of pragmatism in our political discourse. Let us admit to some basic realities, how things really are, and that might reduce the name calling and outlandish fallacies that dominate our political climate. 1) Every major nation in the world has a hybrid economic system. There are welfare state programs in most industrialized nations and those aren't going to be ending anytime soon. Also, there are markets in those nations, and the markets aren't going away,...

A supposed "tolerant progressive" wrote online that Libertarians are "invariably men with immature, selfish attitudes." When asked why she also invoked Ayn Rand on a regular basis when criticizing the "greedy libertarians" she posted that Rand "looked and acted like a man." At least the irony wasn't missed by those posting comments on Facebook. Reading this thread, which started on the site of a major online magazine, the generalities from all sides were disturbing. Can we be any more insulting to people with different views than the approved urban-elitist progressivism? (See, I can generalize, too!) Seriously, my wife is more "Libertarian" than I am, but I consider myself more "libertarian." The range from left-to-right within libertarianism is probably broader than the ranges within either major political party in the United States. What unifies libertarians is a distrust of the majority to protect the rights of the ...

Tonight, someone generalized so broadly about libertarianism that I was shaking in anger. The notion that libertarians do not care about other people is beyond insulting. It is precisely because we do care about human rights that we want government powers and government intrusions limited. People trusting the government any more than they trust corporations will either be disappointed or choose to willfully ignore the failures of government. And government fails spectacularly on a constant basis. It scares me that an increasing number of people are okay with "socialism" or "communism" and have nothing but contempt for classical liberalism. They blindly associate libertarian ideals with crony capitalism and a lack of compassion. Most of us in the "classical liberal" school of thought are not Libertarians with a capital-L as in the Libertarian Party. The party, for one thing, does not reflect the Austrian economists much less Adam Smith. The Libertar...

The simplistic, and intentionally misleading, discussions of "libertarians" and classical liberalism tend to paint all libertarians as "anti-government." These popular caricatures of libertarians appear in various "progressive" publications and on many websites. The common theme is if libertarianism worked, Somalia or {insert lawless nation here} would be libertarian paradise. Yet, libertarianism requires functioning courts, enforceable laws, and the planning of some shared commons. If contracts don't matter, if you can take my life without consequence, if we can't travel across territories, then we don't have individual freedom or commercial markets. You can find these high-school level analyses equating Somalia with libertarianism easily online without my help; these are works I'd never accept from my college students. It's no better when classical liberals caricature progressives as uncritical supporters of all big government. Mos...

Watching Senator Bernie Sanders on CNBC last week, I was reminded of why I like him as a person and worry that such an earnest, nice politician (a true rarity) could have such misguided ideas about economics. If only I felt the same about the men and women who tend support more classically liberal policies. I do not trust the politicians with whom I agree on economics, and I adamantly oppose the policies of the few politicians I might trust. Yes, another lousy election season begins, not that they ever end. Here is what Sen. Sanders said that troubles me. It proves he doesn't get market economics or how the areas in which government is most involved are least responsive to customers. 10 questions with Bernie Sanders John Harwood Tuesday, 26 May 2015 | 6:10 AM ET The whole size of the economy and the GDP doesn't matter if people continue to work longer hours for low wages and you have 45 million people living in poverty. You can't just continue growth for the sake ...

The Fountainhead (film) (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) When a critique of libertarianism consists primarily of figuratively shouting "Ayn Rand!" and tossing in the Koch brothers, Nietzsche, and Gordon Gecko (a fictional character, nonetheless), you can be assured the author isn't going to address the Nobel economists or noted philosophers associated with libertarianism on the left, right, and center. Instead of discussing the major thinkers of classical liberalism, the author will attack the caricature of "Libertarians" that has little to do with scholarly reflection. Another Would-Be Critic of Libertarianism Takes on a Straw Man - Reason.com How refreshing it would be for someone to set forth the strongest case for libertarianism before attempting to eviscerate it. Sheldon Richman | March 15, 2015  We must face the fact that criticism of the libertarian philosophy in the mass media will most likely misrepresent its target, making the commentary essent...

We will always have articles accusing "libertarianism" of being everything from "fascist" (huh?) to "right-wring" to "juvenile." Those advocating for classical liberalism will be linked to racists, plutocrats, crony capitalists, and other perversions of limited government and negative rights. (I still hate the "negative" rights label, inherently a rhetorical device that insults various philosophical and political schools of thought.) When I read "Somalia is a libertarian paradise," I know the comment poster is either ignorant or intentionally lying. The basics of classical liberalism include: Rule of law, with an egalitarian legal system; Enforced contracts, protecting parties in transactions; Property rights beginning with the individual's ownership of self; Limited, effective, and reliable government. Now, for the sad reality that libertarians in the United States need to address: there are horrible people who...