Do you remember that time that a classified document was released that caused the United States to lose a battle? Or that time Americans died because of a leak? Or when a hangnail got infected and a government official had to go on antibiotics? The reason you don’t remember any of these things is because they never happened. The government doesn’t get angry about leaks because it harms the country or even the government itself. It gets angry because those leaks usually embarrass government officials. You ought to have wondered about that after the Clinton administration declassified a bunch of documents that the Cheney administration later reclassified.

But more than this, the most important documents are classified not because government officials are afraid that foreign entities will find out about them but rather because they are afraid that Americans will find out about them. It took forty years for information about the Gulf of Tonkin incident to be released. It certainly wasn’t because the Vietnamese couldn’t learn the truth about our error. It was that the American people would not be pleased to know that our big push into the Vietnam War was based upon nonsense — that the justification for the Spanish-American War was better.

As a result, one of the absolute worst legacies of Obama will be his use of the Espionage Act of 1917 and his war on whistleblowers. That really will create a great narrative for the history book. The young and idealistic constitutional law professor comes into office and abandons everything he once claimed to be in favor of. This is why we shouldn’t elect Boy Scouts as presidents. Once the spooks get at them, the naive fall apart. Can’t risk anything going wrong by being liberal about freedom of the press![1] This is why the US press freedom ranking has been dropping.

If you are like me, you got a good laugh out of David Petraeus getting probation for his unconscionable leak of top secret information. We never thought he would get anything more. After all, he is the right kind of leaker: a very powerful older man who used the information to impress and bed an attractive younger writer. Boys will be boy, right?! We can’t hold that against the man!

But it is different when you are someone who is really concerned about wrongdoing by the government. If you leak information about that, then you need to be punished — and severally. That’s why John Kiriakou was given two and a half years when Petraeus was given nothing. One of the big claims for not punishing Petraeus is that none of the names he leaked ever made it out. Well, that was true of Kiriakou too. But again, it doesn’t matter. Kiriakou was the wrong kind of leaker. He wasn’t a high ranking member of the government who was doing it for personal reasons. He was doing it out of a sense of right and wrong. You can’t respect that!

Now Jeffrey Sterling is looking at 19 to 24 years for the information he provided to James Risen for his book, State of War. He didn’t leak any names at all. The government, of course, claims that Sterling caused all kinds of harm to the United States. When does the government claim anything else (except in the case of highly placed leakers just trying to bed a younger woman)? I don’t think Sterling’s leaks hurt the United States at all. Regardless, it will be a major miscarriage of justice if he gets two decades in prison while Petraeus gets none. And Sterling’s lawyers are arguing just that.

Sterling is scheduled for sentencing on 11 May. Expect to see him sentenced to something between 19 and 24 years. The courts can’t make a special exception just for him. After all, he’s the wrong kind of leaker.

[1] I know Obama hasn’t gone after the press directly. The systemic attacks on leakers is a constitutional loophole. Without leakers, the press will be allowed to write anything it wants based upon government press conferences. And at that point, you might as well have a government controlled press.

Nancy LeTourneau does every other weekend at Political Animal. I think she does the best job of replicating what Ed Kilgore does during the week. And if we can’t have Sam Knight on the weekends, I’d rather have LeTourneau than the other options (good as they are). But this weekend, she decided to tweak some progressive noses. First, she published, Fast Track Isn’t So Fast. That was basically just a press release from Obama claiming that we shouldn’t fear fast track authority because “they can shut off ‘fast track’ with 60 votes and amend the deal.” That’s a good one! The Republicans control the Senate, and contrary to progressives’ hopes, they don’t seem at all concerned about this “threat to sovereignty.” I guess Ted Cruz heard from the billionaire donors that he wasn’t going to get any money if he got in the way of this. So we do need to fear fast track authority.

Next up, LeTourneau wrote, Who Threatens Our Privacy? This one also comes off like a White House press release. We are supposed to be as outraged that Wikileaks released the Sony hacks as we are that Snowden revealed the kind of things that our government is up to. It seems to be apples and oranges. And more to the point, it doesn’t seem to be about making people more concerned about the Sony release but rather making people less concerned about the Snowden relations. And that’s just nonsense.

But by far, the most annoying thing she published was, A Study in Contrasts. It is a comparison of Elizabeth Warren and Cory Booker. And it is even intended as trolling, as she started the article, “I’m about to write something that will likely get me in hot water with a lot of my progressive friends.” That’s kind of standard New Democratic — or “centrist” — nonsense where the writer admits to knowing they are going to upset those rigid leftists by speaking The Truth™. But what follows is anything but.

She noted that on Warren’s economic legislation, there are no Republican co-sponsors. But on Booker’s criminal justice sentencing legislation, there are Republican co-sponsors. And… Nothing! That’s the extent of her contrast. So allow me to respond: she has got to be out of her mind! Does she really think that Booker has Republican co-sponsors because he is working in the shadows to form relationships with Republicans? Because that isn’t what’s going on. Booker is simply working in an area where Republicans are already working. So of course he has Republican co-sponsors.

Booker has always been a New Democrat. He’s a Wall Street guy. And LeTourneau was correct when she wrote, “Senator Booker became persona non grata when he criticized Democrats and the Obama campaign for going after Romney over his connections to Bain Capital just prior to the 2012 election.” But that isn’t because he could have hurt the Obama campaign. It was because he said something that went totally counter to what Democrats believe.

So Booker has his nice, safe Senate seat. And what he has chosen to work on is something that many Republicans are working on. So why didn’t the good people of New Jersey just elect one of those Republicans? Because they care about other issues. I have no doubt whatsoever about Warren backing Booker’s criminal justice reform legislation. It isn’t at all clear that he would vote for the kinds of economic policy that Warren is pushing — the kind of policy that Democratic voters are for.

The truth is that we need Democrats who push the existing Overton Window. And we need Democrats who can get things done. But there is nothing in what LeTourneau wrote to indicate that Booker can actually get things done. We will see. Getting Republicans to support ideas they’ve long supported means nothing. Meanwhile, Warren actually is changing the conversation. Check back with me after Booker gets one of those laws passed.

Paul Rosenberg wrote a great article over at Salon last week, Scott Walker, Forever Tarnished: Republican Governors Have Tanked the GOP Brand. It is about how the 2010 election allowed a bunch of true-believer conservatives to get hold of a number of states, causing them to put into practice the kind of economic policy that they are always claiming will create jobs and grow the economy. And the result has been just what readers of this site would expect: disaster. Instead of improving their economies, they’ve harmed them. And in exchange, they have slashed government services and still managed to destroy their budgets.

What Rosenberg focuses on is the fact that all these decades right wing think tanks have developed policy ideas. But these ideas have not been based on good economics, but rather ideology. So rather than the states being those fabled “laboratories of democracy,” they have been the opposite: they’ve all done the same things. And they’ve all managed to get the same bad results. Of course, I wouldn’t get too excited about that. The worst case is Kansas, were Sam Brownback was just re-elected. Rather than admitting that his policies have failed, he just keeps claiming that his policies will take time to work. There is no teaching an ideologue. The question is where it is possible to teach the American media.

One of the things that has traditionally been nice about state level politics is that it was relatively pragmatic because it had to be. Unlike the federal government, state governments actually do have to balance their budgets. So normally, we wouldn’t expect to see states pass up free money like they get with the Medicaid expansion. But refuse many of them did. But it is hard to evaluate that behavior. Sure: it is needlessly cruel and fiscally stupid. But these Republicans never said they were doing it because it made humanitarian and economic sense. When it comes to the tax cuts, the services cuts, the infrastructure cuts — these were all done because it was going to make their economies boom. And just the opposite has happened.

The main idea that is behind all of this slash and burn economics is that tax cuts will stimulate the economy so much that the government will actually bring in more revenue. This is supply side economics. And since it was first tried in the early 1980s, it has literally never worked. Not once! Yet this is still the guiding light of Republican economic policy. When the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business polled prominent (mostly conservative) economists, it “couldn’t find a single economist who believed that cutting taxes today will lead to higher government revenue — even if we lower only the top tax rate.” But that’s why we have Arthur Laffer around: an official “economist” that Republicans can hire to tell them that they can cut taxes and everything will be great.

Rosenberg put it well:

Rosenberg went on to discuss two different studies that showed that Republican economic policy in the states actually harm their economies. But the truth is, even if they worked, it would only be by helping a given state at the expense of other states. When Art Laffer was pushing his plan to the Kansas legislature, he said there was a war among states over tax policy. The idea was to lower taxes so that companies would move to the low tax state. This is, obviously, a race to the bottom — which states stupidly participate in all the time. But even on this level, the Republicans can’t seem to make their economic policy work.

The question remains whether the mainstream media will wake up and start covering this. Rosenberg seems at least a bit optimistic. I’m not. We didn’t need this new crop of Republicans loons to prove that conservative economic policy doesn’t work as advertised. The truth is that the media really do see the Republicans as the “daddy party.” And it is just easier to continue to push the same old narrative. (Look at the issue of fighting wars: can any reasonable person really think Republicans are good at that anymore?) But if there is a chance to get the truth out, it will be through the people. That’s pretty sad: we need the people to educate the journalists. But luckily, with the internet, we are in a much better position to do that now than we were before.

James Gibney wrote a very interesting article following of a recent Gallup poll, Everyone Likes Obama’s Foreign Policy Except Americans. It seems that the world is actually quite keen on American leadership. And contrary to what pretty much every Republican will tell you, our allies are the most positive of all. The one exception to this is Israel, which thought that the US foreign policy was great under George W Bush. I think we can disregard any group of people who think that the high point of American foreign policy was the Iraq War. In addition to our friends being very happy with us, our enemies (at least as most would define them) are very unhappy with us. In Russia, the United States gets an amazingly low 4% approval rating. (I assume this is a reflection of the fact that Russian media is as biased and jingoistic as the American media is.)

But it is wrong to say that Americans don’t like Obama’s foreign policy. Right now, Americans aren’t that keen on foreign policy as a thing. But their opinion has improved steadily since Obama took over the presidency. So clearly, the Republicans who are shouting about America’s standing in the world are just preaching to the choir. (Gibney seemed strangely a bit confused on this point.) American approval of our own foreign policy reached a nadir at the end of Bush’s presidency with less than 30% and now it is almost 40%. And this is for a poll taken “even as Russia was annexing Crimea, Islamic State was beheading its way across the Middle East, Ebola was taking its toll in West Africa, and Europe was dealing with an unprecedented crisis in Greece.” If the poll were done today, I’m sure the numbers would be better.

But should we pay much attention to what Americans think in a general way about foreign policy? After all, we are the people who gave Bush a 51% approval rating the week before 9/11 and an 86% approval rating the week after. Even more stark, his disapproval rating went from 39% down to 10%. This is after he oversaw the worst attack on American soil ever — where his initial reaction was to sit there reading, The Pet Goat. (Although I will admit: goats really are charming animals!) Similarly, approval of our foreign policy went up after the Iraq invasion — the very thing that now makes Americans sad about foreign policy in general.

The main thing to consider here is that Americans are unhappy with the idea of intervention altogether. Since 1964, the Pew Research Center has been asking Americans if the United States should “mind its own business, internationally.” In 1964, only 20% said we should. The number went up quite a bit in the decades after that. But in the lead-up to the Iraq invasion, it dipped back down to 30%. And as of 2013, it is at an all time high: 52%.

So I don’t think it means much when Ted Cruz rants, “Today, the consequence of the Obama-Clinton foreign policy is that our friends no longer trust us, and our enemies no longer fear us.” The truth is that he is completely wrong on the facts. Our friends do trust us. Our enemies fear us even more. But most of all, the American people just don’t care.

A week and a half ago, David Auerbach wrote a very good and detailed article, Buyer Still Beware. It is in response to an article by libertarian economists Alex Tabarrok and Tyler Cowen, The End of Asymmetric Information. In that, they argue that the internet and other information delivery systems have greatly reduced the asymmetry of information, which has long been known to distort markets. So basically, we don’t need regulation, because people can just check Angie’s List. Auerbach makes a compelling case that having more information doesn’t help much given that it increases both good and bad information. The question is still how to find good information.

I would take it a step further — although Auerbach does imply this. All increased information does is create a kind of information arms race. People want more and better information about the products they buy. Sellers do not want this. It is much better for businesses to be able to control what people think and feel about products. And here is the main thing. Control of information is a major part of what businesses do. Consumers do not have the time or inclination to become fully informed about every product they buy. And I think this the critical issue.

On a practical level, libertarian ideas always lead to neoliberal policy. And this results in our getting worse systems. I understand that Obamacare might be better for a small number of healthcare consumers who have the time and inclination to really research all the insurance options. But for the vast majority of people, having a single-payer system is better. Overall, they would get a superior form of health insurance. But apart from that, their lives are easier because they don’t have to worry about something that really doesn’t improve their lives. Most people have the experience of just shifting through two or three insurance options at their employers — it’s a pain. The situation is just madness when it is 20 or 30.

What Tabarrok and Cowen are up to here is just libertarian fantasy. They want there to be no need for regulation, so they have gone out looking for something to justify it. It isn’t a coincidence that their paper just happened to find what they were looking for. If they had come to some other conclusion, I question whether they would have written the paper. And I know that if they had, the Cato Institute wouldn’t have published it, because it has been very upfront about its lack of scientific ethics. (They are not in the business of publishing information that pushes against libertarian solutions.)

Auerbach also documents how libertarian information systems become, in real life, little fiefdoms. He mentioned the whole Silk Road debacle. I wrote about it earlier this year, How the Libertarian Dream Dies. But he also goes into some depth about Reddit, and how moderators on subreddits actually ban articles. For example, Simon Owens wrote an article, Should Reddit’s Powerful Mods Be Reined In? It was banned from the technology subreddit.

This, I think, is the fundamental problem with libertarianism. It would have us get rid of government because of its fairly minor oppression of us, and replace it with totally unaccountable private parties that could and would oppress us far more. It is just a matter of incentives. There may be a great macro-level incentive for all of us to follow the law, but we don’t all follow the law. The same is true in markets. There will be some who will not do well — or at least not as well as they think they should — and they will use whatever advantage they have. And the fact that this makes everyone else worse off doesn’t matter in the least.

I know what libertarians say in response to this. But it is no less fanciful than the notion that everyone will get along just fine and no one will try to game the system. It all depends upon perfect judicial systems. Or even worse: it is dependent upon voluntary judicial systems. There could not be a more perfect political philosophy for those that already have economic power. It’s the ultimate con, “Just get rid of the one thing that is stopping you from enslaving yourself and then you will be able to do whatever it is you want, without anyone to tell you what to do!”

Does the fact that I don’t believe everyone can get along perfectly in a libertarian utopia mean that I am cynical? I don’t think so. Basically what the libertarians are saying is that we don’t need government in a world where everyone gets along. And I agree: in that kind of world, we wouldn’t need a government. But that is not the kind of world that we live it. It is because of human imperfections that we have governments. And yes, governments are a mixed blessing. But “no government” isn’t mixed at all: it is just bad.

It’s sad that two respected economists like Alex Tabarrok and Tyler Cowen write such rubbish. Or not. Maybe it is sad that people who put forth such rubbish are respected. But they both write smart things a lot of the time. It is like libertarianism is a kind of disease. More than most ideologies, it fries the brain, making proponents think they are being smart and deductive when they are just being fanciful. They so want to believe. And there are rich people around with so much money to pay them to believe…