From here and from there - 3

Collected Links, Libertarianism

Bloomberg, be careful the Russian are right behind you purring new meaning into the the term Nanny State. But the Russian have to consider this benefits program, after all having children are, together with Israel, the cause for the global warming…:)

Instead of burning down our numbers with oil and gas, we might follow the advice of the founder of the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, who tells Weisman that everyone in the world should stop having kids all at once. Weisman isn’t up for quite so drastic a measure, but he makes his own pitch, moderate in comparison: Let’s cut the birth rate to one child per couple, for a few generations at least. The population would dwindle by about 5 billion people over the next century, he says, ensuring the habitability of the Earth for the 1.6 billion who remained. At that point, they could all reap the rewards of a more spacious planet, sharing in "the growing joy of watching the world daily become more wonderful." It seems like a notion from the fringe, but Weisman’s book has become a mainstream best seller. Could population control be the next big thing in green culture?

And if we are on the subject of global warming, and before we adopt the chines methods of population control, we might take a sceptic look at the global warming science data we are reading. We can start with the anecdotal story about the arctic sea :

It is almost impossible to avoid stories about Arctic sea at the lowest recorded level.  The National Geographic, who should know better, had the temerity to headline "Arctic Ice at All-Time Low".  All-time?  Really?  In the 6 billion year history of the earth, this is the least ice ever in the Arctic?  Well, no, it’s the least since we have started measuring it.  So when was that?  Only since about 1979 when we had sattelites that could make this measurement.  OK, so its the least ice in about 25-30 years.

[...]

There is little doubt the Arctic has been warming the last 30 years or so, but some doubt whether it is warmer even than the 1940’s.  Be that as it may, last I checked there were two poles with sea ice.  It’s funny no one ever mentions the South Pole.  Do you think that they just forgot?  Or could it be that the facts don’t conviniently fit the storyline?  Luboš Motl picks up the story:

    Some analysts have speculated that the new record could be evidence of global warming. But is it? Even though it may sound very complicated, it turns out that the Earth is round. At the global scale, there is not one polar region but, in fact, two. There is also sea ice on the Southern Hemisphere. It turns out that the Antarctic sea ice area reached 16.2 million squared kilometers in 2007 - a new absolute record high since the measurements started in 1979

I think it will be appropriate to stop using the term American Capitalism when referring to the current USA, the proper term should be The American style Social-Democracy. At some point, however, someone will have to pay for this.

 

But forget about my pessimistic point of view and go read this excellent review:

And yet, judging by their output in recent years, libertarians are in a fine mood–and not because they are in denial. However distant the country may be from their laissez-faire ideal, free-market principles now drive the American economy to a degree unimaginable a generation ago. Former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan, who as a young economist sat at the knee of the libertarian guru Ayn Rand, presided in the 1990s over one of the most prosperous stretches in American history, with the support, no less, of a Democratic president. When the avowedly libertarian economist Milton Friedman died last November, he was lauded just about everywhere, and even given respectful treatment in places like the New York Review of Books.

Nor have libertarian victories been limited to the economic arena. Americans are increasingly laissez-faire in their attitudes toward sex, divorce, drugs and gay marriage. In the personal sphere as in the world of business and finance, freedom has become the guiding principle, especially for the young. As the motto of Reason magazine, the movement’s flagship publication, trumpets: "Free minds and free markets."

I recommend reading the entire article, mostly for its criticism on the Libertarian thought. It is sharp, very well argued and wrong. It is wrong because one cannot axiomatically assume that only the coercive power of central government. One can argue that the incentives for moral behavior, good work ethic etc. are better served without government involvement, as the graph above may suggest. The writer is also wrong when making a leap from the point that racism is bad to the conclusion that the government should force social association in clubs:

The civil-rights movement is an instructive case. Mr. Lindsey includes it in his list of libertarian victories, but it is a perfect example of the inability of libertarians to find a political and moral framework suitable to the big questions of American public life. If people ought to be able to do what they want, then certainly hating blacks–either by oneself or in the company of like-minded souls–is nobody else’s business, including the federal government’s. To the extent that libertarians are remembered at all for their role in the civil-rights era, it is not for marching on Selma but rather for their enthusiastic support of states’ rights and the freedom of white racists to associate with one another.

Libertarianism was complicit, too, in the vociferous attack during the 1960s on the bourgeois family. After all, blood relationships are involuntary, and parents with any interest in rearing and educating their children are unlikely to look for guidance in "Atlas Shrugged." Ayn Rand was predictably wary of kinship ties and, like radical feminists, saw the family as a soul-killing prison. Rothbard struggled with the vexing question of how to square the biological fact of the dependency of the young with the libertarian devotion to freedom. His conclusion was that parents should not be legally bound to feed or educate their children, and children should have an absolute right to leave home at any time. Today, libertarians support the loosest of divorce laws, and many wonder why the state should be involved in the marriage business at all, a question that has come to the fore in the debate over gay marriage.

And if we are already discussing conservatives point of view one can hardly avoid the new research about the different brain structure of Conservatives and Liberals. What was important, and was missing, to add to the hyped discussion was a little bit common sense:

We live in a strange time in human history. Every time a scientist discovers that child molesters or geniuses or musicians have different brain structures, the public gasps at the suggestion that the brain is involved in thinking. What were the other hypotheses? Souls? Elbows?

Thanks to the persistent superstition of free will, it still qualifies as big news that the brain is a moist machine. And by that I mean it is big news to conservatives. Liberals saw it coming.

 

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Rogel @ September 14, 2007