Last week I discussed, Deficit’s Down and So Are Debt Scolds. It was about how the CBO looked at the 2014 budget deficit and found that it will be $200 billion less than predicted. And this is after the predicted value was down from previous years. So all those groups who exist to foment hysteria about the budget deficit are happy. Just kidding! In as much as it gets their attention at all, it has been only to claim that they were only concerned about long-term budgets and of course they were for short-term stimulus.

Friday, the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB) put out an apologia, The Concern Has Always Been Long-Term Deficits. The nicest thing you can say about it is that it is disingenuous. It contains six quotes from previous CRFB documents. The first, from January of 2008, reads:

That’s a highly selective quote. It is from a document, CBO Baseline: the Deficit Is Growing Again. The quotation above is not in the main document, it is in what is effectively a footnote. It is also a misquote. It is not a full sentence. The full sentence is this:

So really what they are saying is, “Okay, maybe stimulus is okay. But generally it is not. If you don’t do it our way, you shouldn’t do anything.” And the bottom line is that what is most important is, “Budget deficit!” The comment does link to a document (doc) that is pretty clear headed — at least it admits that you can’t have stimulus if the government pays for it. But this is a pretty low bar.

The next quotation comes from, CBO’s Analysis of the President’s FY2010 Budget Blueprint (pdf):

As Jonathan Chait has pointed out, whether short-term stimulus is necessary is open to debate (“may”), but there is absolutely no doubt (“cannot”) that there must be something done about the long-term deficit. This is the case with all the quotes. They provide lip service to the need for short-term stimulus, but they are metaphorically shouting about the deficit.

For example, the last quote is from a five page document and it shows up in the second to last paragraph. And even in that paragraph, it is sandwiched between “budget paints a dismal fiscal picture” and “threaten long-term economic growth and impair the normal functions and flexibility of government.” Even more important, they don’t believe that short-term stimulus is okay to get the economy moving again, it is all about stabilizing the economy. The last paragraph starts, “The latest projections underline the need for the Administration to put forward a plan for reducing the deficit as soon as the economy has stabilized.” So as soon as the economy is not in free-fall, there should be austerity. By this logic, we should have cut back in June of 2009. As it was, we waited a bit past that time.

All the rest of the quotes are of the same kind. And they are all small caveats at the end of longer documents. Even in January of 2012, after the federal government approved the sequester and increased taxes on the wealthy, they were ranting about the budget deficit. The caveats were put into the documents for exactly the reason they are being used now: to allow them to claim that they were never against short-term stimulus even though they were.

Notice also that the sequence of quotes itself is telling. It starts in January of 2008 and goes through February of 2014. That’s seven years of projections. Are we still in the “short-term” and “stabilization” phases of this recession? Each one of these CBO analyses say the same thing, “Be afraid; be very afraid! Oh, and short-term stimulus might be okay.” But as Chait pointed out:

Another thing to note is that their focus was not on long-term deficits. It was on deficits generally. In their 2009 document, they mention the word “deficit” 26 times but only modify it three times. The best word to describe this is disingenuous. It’s true that the CRFB has always said that their concern was the long-term deficit, but their overall message was just that deficits were bad — now and always. I remember seeing representatives of the group interviewed in which they admitted that short-term deficits might be necessary to stabilize the economy and that their real concern was the long-term deficit. But these were the quiet moments. These were 30 seconds at the end of a half-hour during which they ranted about the coming catastrophe of budget deficits. What I never heard and is not contained in any of the documents they quote is the idea that the best way to deal with our long-term deficit is to have a strong economy. And their attitude about short-term stimulus was always as a frustrated mother teller her young son that he can play video games for five more minutes but then he must clean his room because that is very important. Their support for short-term economic measures was a concession — an unfortunate one that got in the way of their real agenda, which is entitlement cuts and fiscally neutral (Ha!) income tax rate cuts.

Over at Political Animal, Ed Kilgore wrote a very interesting article, Presuming Extremism Right Out of Existence. It’s about how the media ignores right-wing extremist beliefs of politicians like Joni Ernst and Cory Gardner. He quoted a couple of people about why the media does this, but his own theory sounds the closest to the truth. The vast majority of the journalists who cover politics simply don’t believe that people like Ernst and Gardner hold the kind of extreme positions they claim to. They think that support for “personhood” amendments are just pandering to the base.

This dismissal of extremism always reminds me of the journalistic reaction to the Nazis in Germany. Many journalists (including Jewish ones) dismissed Hitler’s rhetoric — claiming that it was just used for the purpose of firing up the base. Since many of the things that Hitler said were so beyond the pale, many respectable establishment types just couldn’t see that Hitler really meant it. I’m not suggesting that people pushing “personhood” amendments are the same as Nazis. I’m just noting that there is a history of dismissing truly radical policy ideas as “just politics.”

This is a very bad idea for a couple of reasons. Just on its face, politicians are not in complete control of their environments. A politician may not actually believe his own rhetoric. But once he whips up people’s emotions about the issue, he may have no power to stop it or even tone it down. So it is still extremely dangerous even if the reporters are right that Ernst was just, as Kilgore put it, “cynically shoveling out to the yahoos.” And this is the best case scenario.

In general, I think politicians believe what they claim. There is no doubt Hitler was actually antisemitic. And there is no doubt in my mind Joni Ernst is very much in favor of “personhood.” Republicans get into trouble because what they actually believe is incredibly unpopular. Consider one of the slimiest politicians ever: Mitt Romney. Like me, all he really cares about are economic issues. That’s why he was pro-choice when he needed to be and anti-choice when he needed to be. What he believed in was that people like him deserved a five trillion dollar tax cut. And even at that time, a lot of journalists apologized for this, claiming that the fiscal situation would have made him change that policy if he became president. Not true. The one thing you could absolutely depend upon in a Mitt Romney presidency was that he was going to get his tax cut.

More than just this, however, there is the incredibly lazy journalistic practice of simply taking the parties as the poles of the debate. I noted this during the Todd Akin dust-up. What he was arguing was a hair’s breadth away from Republican orthodoxy. The official (and uncontroversial) position is that there should be no abortion right except in the case of rape, incest, or the life of the mother. The truth is that Akin’s “no exception” position is far more defensible. Either the fetus has rights or it doesn’t. The establishment position is basically, “Women who enjoyed the sex should have to pay for it.” From a policy standpoint, there really is no difference. But to mainstream journalists, there is every difference in the world.

What this means is that Republicans could come up with literally any policy position, and as long as they got to it gradually, the media would never counter them. This doesn’t work, by the way, with the left. Apparently because most reporters think of themselves as being on the left, they tend to treat any idea more liberal than their own as far outside the Overton Window.

All of this makes the media incredibly dangerous. It normalizes what is not normal and makes even more extreme policy acceptable. It also, of course, allows wackjobs like Joni Ernst and Cory Gardner to get elected.

Matt Bruenig wrote a very interesting article a few years ago, Two Different Kinds of Libertarians. The two kinds of libertarians are “procedural justice” and “consequentialist.” It is easier to just call them “theoretical” and “practical,” and so I will. Supposedly, the practical libertarians are just looking to maximize utility and they just look out at the big bad world of ideas and find that libertarian ideas are the ones that make everyone best off. The theoretical ones start from the theory that no one has the right to take another’s property, and work out from there.

I think this is a false dichotomy. No one reading this blog can question but that I think that people decide and then rationalize. It doesn’t work the other way around in most cases. There is lots of science to back me up on this. In fact, this is why I believe it. I didn’t want to believe it. I greatly value my reasoning ability. I hate the idea that my beliefs just bubble up from deep in my brain and then my higher brain functions set about justifying why they are right.

As a result of this, I know that libertarians are generally libertarians because it feels right. So I think the libertarians who justify their beliefs on theoretical arguments are no different than libertarians who justify them on practical arguments. And it just so happens that I have experience with this. If you can talk seriously with a practical libertarian and convince him that, for example, the minimum wage does not cost jobs and will actually stimulate economic growth, he will not stop being a libertarian. He will just change his arguments from practical to theoretical.

Bruenig says that he has seen a shift from practical to theoretical libertarianism. But this is just because he hangs out with far smarter people than most of us do. I mean — Good God! — he mentioned Murray Rothbard and Hans-Hermann Hoppe. I assure you that people are not standing around at Libertarian Party conventions discussing Democracy: The God That Failed. All you really have to do is listen to Majority Report, where libertarians call in all the time. And they always make practical arguments, although when losing, they will sometimes back up into theoretical arguments.

So really, all that has happened is that the high end thinkers of libertarianism have had to retreat into theory. That alone speaks incredibly poorly of libertarianism. The truth is that most people are not theory-based when it comes to governance. They aren’t going to pick a political ideology on the basis that it has a good theoretical foundation. They what practical results. So the fact that the best thinkers in the movement have abandoned it as a means of enriching everyone means it will never be adopted in a free country. This may be why Hoppe has argued so strongly against democracy.

But as Bruenig has pointed out in a different article, even the theory of libertarianism is filled with holes, Non-Aggression Never Does Any Argumentative Work at Any Time. This is a response to what is by far the most common theoretical libertarian argument. The non-aggression principle (NAP) holds that it is always wrong to commit aggression against another. Libertarians use this as an excuse for saying no one should have the right to their person or property. There are very many problems with this, but here is Bruenig’s take:

In other words: the argument is about our approach to property rights. It has nothing to do with “aggression.” The truth is that the government uses aggression to enforce property rights. Of course, it is also true that all land currently owned was, at some point, stolen either from the commons or from other individuals. So it is hard to make the argument from non-aggression when the current state of property rights depends upon aggression. Libertarians, therefore, must argue in favor of property rights. I think most don’t do this because it doesn’t even occur to them that property rights are anything but God given. And those who get beyond that find that the issue gets incredibly murky.

Take, for example, Ayn Rand and her ignorant and racist claim that the founders of the United States were justified in stealing land from the native peoples. As I discussed in Ayn Rand and Indians, this is simply the claim that “might makes right.” She decided that what the native peoples were doing with their land was not valid and so that justified the European settlers taking it. This is very much like my arguing that I ought to be able to use a gun to steal cars from old people, because I drive better and can make better use of their cars.

The bottom line of all of this is that libertarians are hung up on an infantile notion that no one has a right to take their stuff. And then they justify it based upon whatever kind of arguments make sense to them. For most people, those would be the practical arguments. Very few people find the theoretical arguments very compelling. But libertarians will use whatever arguments are needed. And if even the theoretical arguments fail them, they can fall back on the real argument that animates all the higher level nonsense, “Mine!”

As a micro-businessman, I can tell you: I hate a lot of government regulation and taxes. In particular, I hate certain zoning requirements and I hate inventory taxes. Maybe it is just that I am selfish, but I think the society has a vested interest in not making the bureaucracy too much of a burden on very small businesses. On the other hand, it isn’t people like me who are out there complaining. It is always quite large and wealthy companies who can not only afford to pay their taxes, but who can hire accountants and lawyers to deal with regulatory requirements.

What really burns me is how the “largest bookstore in the world” has managed for years not to pay taxes that I have always had to pay. Why them? Well, there are some historical reasons for this, but mostly it is because Amazon is so large. (Please buy your Amazon Stuff from the links of my pages; it goes a very small way to pay for the hosting of his site.) But big companies getting sweetheart deals from the government isn’t anything new. We need to do something about it, but I don’t think I need to tell you about it.

But the issue of Uber and Lyft are rather different. In case you don’t know, these are basically freelance taxicab companies. There is much nice to say about them. In most cities, the taxicab system is terribly corrupt and unjust. But are these companies really the answer? A couple of weeks ago, Dean Baker brought up a few questions, Economists and Uber. He wondered if these firms were really competing on an equal footing with the traditional cab services. Do they really have the same safety and insurance requirements? Do they provide handicapped service the way that traditional series do according to federal law?

More important to me is what this does to workers. In the old days, “freelance” was just another word for, “Pay me three times what you pay your salaried workers.” But that isn’t true anymore. Our economy has become so messed up the last three decades that “freelance” is now another word for, “A better way for companies to screw the worker.” Baker noted:

There is another aspect of this. It is the old “creative destruction” aspect of it all. The “pure” economic take on the situation is that the extra taxis on the road will drive down prices, that extra money saved by consumers will go into other areas of the economy, and everyone will end up richer. But if the last thirty years have taught us anything it is that this “free market” narrative is nonsense. Most of the savings will go to the richest people and they will just sit on it.

I’m not against Uber and Lyft. But I think any enthusiasm for these companies should be moderated with our understanding of how these things go. I’m sure a lot of what is making these companies successful is that they have managed to push off a lot of the costs of the business onto their freelancers. And what we will see in the long run is that customers get a slightly better system with slightly lower prices, the drivers see their already poor paying jobs pay even less, and the owners make more money than ever. I’ll be happy to be proved wrong.

But my biggest concern is the way that Uber and Lyft create yet more micro-businessmen. They must have their own late model car of a specific level of attractiveness, “Car needs to be free of body damage and dents… Air conditioning and heat need to be fully functional.” They must have their own insurance. (Lyft, at least, adds extra liability to this, although that doesn’t cost much to add to the mandated base.) So the major start-up costs of these companies are all placed on the freelancers. And there is basically no way Uber or Lyft can lose money, unlike their drivers.

Again, and for the last time, these companies may work out great. But I’m not expecting great things from them. They are just another step in our journey to turn all workers into freelancers who have no stability, no benefits, and ultimately, no rights. This has been and continues to be the wrong direction for our society to go. But there can be marginal improvements in our current bad status quo. Maybe Uber and Lyft will provide that. But they aren’t some great new approach to capitalism; they are just another step in the path we’ve taken for the last four decades.