About a week ago, Matt Bruenig wrote, A Note on Libertarian Anti-Paternalism. It was about this curious fact that the philosophical basis for libertarianism is paternalistic. He went back to Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia, and looked at the argument for private property. And Nozick’s argument is utilitarian: yes, private property reduces freedom, but that’s okay because it leads to a society in which everyone is better off. So there’s the libertarian answer to the question, “Why can’t I have the liberty to go wherever I want?” And the answer is, “Because depriving you of that liberty is the best thing for you.” In other words: paternalism.

This is a good example of why Nozick is one of the very few libertarians worth reading. At least he understands that private property is something that has to be argued. Whenever I talk to libertarians, they take private property as a given — a matter of faith. This is why arguing with them is usually so frustrating. Given their unstated assumptions, their arguments are relatively straightforward — still full of problems, but at least they can be argued against directly. It is apparently beyond most libertarians’ comprehension that private property mightn’t be a given. It’s especially ironic considering that libertarians are fond of talking about how “rights imply responsibilities,” but according to them, property rights don’t imply any responsibilities at all.

Bruenig noted another irony. Libertarians commonly complain about state paternalism, but the paternalism of private property is far more powerful:

Of course, when I was a libertarian, I didn’t go around complaining that buying cigarettes wasn’t convenient enough. I complained that the government put me in jail if they caught me anywhere around those particular drugs that it had decided were so bad. (Note: this is not an argument for libertarianism!) But a libertarian commenter, Dr J, responded with this astoundingly fatuous remark, “The ‘nudging paternalism’ of New York’s cigarette taxes ended up choking Eric Garner. It’s difficult to see what libertarians are advocating that’s harder or more problematic than that.” Check out the comments on Bruenig’s article for a full refutation of that. (But is it really necessary? The problem is obvious.)

One of the threads in the comments is worth highlighting, however. It was between the very same Dr J and Matt (not Bruenig). It had to do with something that Bruenig has written about a lot: the non-aggression principle. Following on his ridiculous argument, Dr J said that he didn’t think that police should attack peaceful people. I think we can all agree on that, which pretty much makes it a comment not worth making. But Matt decided to press on just what he meant by the this whole “peaceful” business.

Dr J was constantly about two questions behind in the dialog. Matt asked what about people who peacefully walk into a building and take things. Dr J said they should be charged for the item. Matt then asked what if the people wouldn’t pay for the item. And so on. I’m sure you can see where he’s going, even if Dr J couldn’t. This led to this clear knockdown:

And it all begins again with Dr J claiming that the problem is that there are too many laws. But of course most of those laws are related to property rights. And on and on. Eventually, Matt gets Dr J to sort of understand the question, at least. But Dr J is still deeply confused, “So you’d be okay with me exercising my freedom to peacefully break your window, walk through your home, and take your computer?” And that, my friends, begs the question in the mostly clueless way imaginable. All Dr J has managed is to argue himself in a circle: property rights are not paternalistic because property rights are not paternalistic. Or something.

The thing is that Dr J is clearly smart. In general, I find that libertarians are smart — subgeniuses. As I’ve explained before, this term refers to smart people, but not really smart people — ones who don’t understand what they don’t understand. Dr J must have commented at least 30 times on that article, with responses to them all. Yet I doubt he went away any the wiser. There’s a reason why I say that libertarianism is a theology. Libertarians just have faith — it all makes sense to them. And that’s fine. But it is no different than the thinking that comes from a born against Christian.

Everyone — and by everyone, I mean Dean Baker and Paul Krugman — is going after William Daley’s silly OpEd in The New York Times, Free Trade Is Not the Enemy. It’s about the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), so you know that it’s nonsense. The TPP is not a “free trade” agreement. Baker is starting to turn blue talking about this. Some ideas just won’t die. This deal will do primarily two things: give businesses more power to sue governments and restrict free trade by strengthening intellectual property rights. You have the right to feel as you want about these things, but given that they aren’t popular ideas, they are being shielded. Krugman, who’s been agnostic about the deal is now turning against it. He quoted Daniel Davies in the context of the Iraq War, “Good ideas do not need lots of lies told about them in order to gain public acceptance.”

The biggest howler in Daley’s article is his claim that out of the 40 largest economies in the world, the United States ranks 39th in the “share of our gross domestic product [GDP] that comes from exports.” Oh! My! God! Baker and Krugman both offer economist rebuttals to this claim. But I think I’ve come up with a better way to think of it. Imagine that the world had only two countries: Big and Little. Big makes 99% of the world’s stuff and Little makes 1% of the world’s stuff. Let’s also assume that there is no trade deficit — a reasonable assumption, at least in the long term. So imagine that Little exports everything it makes in exchange for an equal value of stuff that Big makes. That would mean that Little is exporting 100% of its GDP, while Big is only exporting a paltry 1%!

It’s quite simple, really. That’s probably why Daley doesn’t understand it: he’s a rich and famous lawyer and banker and political mover and shaker. He can’t be expected to understand, you know, facts and concepts. What my example shows is that big economies effectively do a lot of exporting to themselves. Imagine if we took Big and divided it up into 99 little countries. Each of them would then be exporting quite a lot — almost all of it to the other 98 countries and almost none of it to Little. Or if you want to take it to the limit: imagine that Little and Big merged into one country and became Huge. Then there would be no exports at all. Yet there would be just as much trade!

This is such nonsense. And what it reminds me of is the lead-up to the Iraq War. The proponents of TPP have decided that this is something they just want to do. They may be like Thomas Friedman, who has a Pavlovian response to the issue, “I just knew two words: free trade.” Or they may just be corporate hacks, like I expect that William Daley is. Regardless: the decision comes first and then the justification is developed. And in the case of the TPP — just like in the case of the Iraq War — the arguments in favor of it are bad. That’s even true of the ones that aren’t clearly disingenuous.

What’s more, if TPP goes through (and I figure it is more likely than not), we will look back on it in two decades and see that actually, it did cost the United States jobs. And just like with the Iraq War, people will say, “But how could we have known?” The answer will be the same: by not being determined to ram the TPP through and by actually listening to opponents and not coming up with clearly specious arguments to support it. But it won’t matter. The same kind of people will be in power and they will not have learned anything from the past.

See Also

Check out my article, No Trade Deals Until Our Economy Is Fixed. My point in that article is related to this one. Basically, I argue that it doesn’t even matter if the TPP worked as its proponents claimed. If it did cause GDP to increase faster than it normally would, all the extra revenue would go to the rich. So why should the rest of us support it?

On Sunday, I was with my father over at Sturgeon’s Mill — a steam powered sawmill that dates back to the 19th century. Once a year, they fire it up. It is loud, with steam everywhere. And it filled me with a sense of dread. Everywhere on the property are reminders that life for people a hundred and fifty years ago was extremely hard and dangerous. I’ve provided a photo of one of the many bits of rubbish on the site. This is the 19th century equivalent of a power saw. The user connected a belt between it and a motor and then used it to cut logs. There is basically no guard and I have no doubt that people often lost lives and (literally) limbs.

Sturgeon’s Mill was part of the logging industry. Logging is still the most dangerous job in American. And it is far more safe now than it was then. The mill is now very much like a museum and there are many pictures of the people who worked at and around the mill. These were hard men. They couldn’t just assume that they would live into old age. There were many ways to die, and they saw that on the job every day. Many people in other countries face the same thing. But things have gotten infinitely better since that time.

As a result of this, it is deeply offensive when politicians stoke fear in people and talk about how we aren’t safe. And this is just what Marco Rubio is pushing as his new foreign policy, “The fundamental problem we have in America is that nothing matters if we aren’t safe.” Just on the merits, it isn’t true. Squirrels aren’t safe, yet they still have to go out and gather nuts. The idea that we must be “safe” before we can’t deal with anything else is the thinking of a coward. And let’s face it: for a long time, the rhetoric of the Republicans has been the rhetoric of cowards. Brave people don’t beat their chests.

This, of course, is all about terrorism, which understandably freaks people out. It’s similar to people’s fear of sharks. Most people would choose to be killed by a bear rather than a shark. But the truth is that sharks kill quickly. Everything I know indicates that being killed by a bear is a slow agonizing process. Terrorism is almost no threat — even for people outside the country. Last year, the CDC reported, “Motor vehicle crashes — not crime or terrorism — are the number one killer of healthy US citizens living, working, or traveling in foreign countries.” And just like with logging, cars are far safer than they used to be.

Jonathan Chait referenced the Nazi dentist torturer Christian Szell in Marathon Man, Morbid Marco Rubio Asks America, “Is It Safe?” He doesn’t put it this way, but Rubio’s kind of demagoguery is a form of torture. Even if one is safe, it is traumatic to be afraid — to be constantly told that you are not safe.

But Americans are safe. We are vastly more safe than we used to be. And the things we should worry about are simple things: workplace safety, careful driving, washing your hands before you eat. But look at Rubio’s plan: he wants to get rid of Obamacare, which would make the millions of people getting insurance through the plan far less safe. At the same, his Taken foreign policy ideas will also make us less safe when it comes to terrorism. They remind me of Tom Clancy Combat Concepts.

We are safe. But we will be less so if we allow Marco Rubio to become president.

For years, I’ve been hearing that Texas is going to turn into a “purple” swing state in the next decades. And my response has always been the same: that’s nonsense. I’m not saying that it is untrue. I’m just saying that there is no way to know. The brilliance of the Republican Party is how it is able to sculpt a world of the deserving and the undeserving. The fact that African Americans are not part of the Republican coalition is not directly because of their skin color. If the Republicans could win by glorifying African Americans and dumping on the white middle class, they would — just as long as they were still able to do their real business of taking from the poor and giving to the rich.

But last week, I saw this paper, Projecting Partisan Change Deep in the Heart of Texas, by Tiffany Cartwright and Tyler Young, two political scientists at Collin College. They looked at the changes of demographics over the next 35 years. Not surprisingly, they find that if voting patterns stay the same, by 2050, Texas will be a solidly blue state. Of course, voting patterns do not stay the same. But what shocked me was not how things would look in 2050, when we really can’t say what will be going on. The shocking finding is that by 2020 — just five years from now — Democrats will have a solid (six percentage point) advantage in Texas.

Note how stark this is. The last time Texas voted for a Democratic presidential candidate was 1976. Also, “Texas Democrats have not won a statewide election in over twenty years.” There is a reason that the people supporting Texas politicians running for president are so certain that Obama is in the process of “taking over” Texas with this Jade Helm nonsense: Texas isn’t just red — it is crazy red. So if Texas became at all competitive in the next few years, it would be amazing. It would also make things really hard for the Republican Party.

Of course, Texas is not going to vote Democratic in the 2020 presidential election. It almost certainly would if everyone eligible to vote actually voted. But we know that is not going to happen. And in the case of Texas, the problem is extreme. The demographic shift in Texas is largely due to increasing Latino population. And they are terrible voters! “In the last few decades, reported turnout among Hispanic voters is about half that of white or black voters in Texas.” Of course, that might change as Latinos respond to their greater political power. Sad to say, people are more likely to vote if they think they will win. The problem is that it will take time to get Latinos to take voting more seriously. And during that time, the Republicans will be working to re-brand the “right” kind of people and the “wrong” kind of people.

Nevertheless, I find this all interesting. Even as early as 2020, the Republicans are going to at least have to start protecting Texas as their territory. And that’s a good start. There doesn’t seem to be any move at all among Republicans to reach out to Latino voters. As Republican voters get whiter, they seem to demand ever more extreme demonstrations of anger at immigrants. Eventually, the Republicans will get over that. But in the next five years? I don’t think so.

Amy Fried wrote a very good article on something that I’ve been thinking about a lot, Three Stark, Politically Critical Dynastic Differences Between Jeb and Hillary. Let me give you an overview of it, and then I’ll add my own take, because I think there is a much more profound difference than she talks about.

In a sense, all three of Fried’s differences could be summed up thusly, “Hillary is a far better politician than Jeb” — because Americans are particularly reticent to blame a person for the sins of a loved one. But she was right to break this all out. She started with something pretty obvious, “Bill Clinton is seen favorably. George W Bush is seen unfavorably.” It’s true: Americans don’t mind power families if, you know, they like the power family. Bush Sr isn’t terribly revered and Bush Jr is hated. So Jeb Bush gets nothing positive from his association and Hillary Clinton does.

The second difference is really just the first difference, “The Clinton economic record is far better than the Bush economic record.” That’s why people like Clinton. If the economy had boomed under Bush, they would all forgive his many other problems. But it didn’t. As Fried noted, even if you forget the bursting of the housing bubble, the unemployment rate under Bush started at 4.2% and went up to 6.3%. For Clinton, it was the opposite: from 7.3% down to 4.2%. Are these fair ways of judging a president? No! But they are how people do judge presidents. And Bush’s economic policies were bad regardless.

The third difference is the heart of the matter:

Even with George W Bush’s policies being unpopular in pretty much every area, Jeb Bush doesn’t see the need push against them. Hillary Clinton is showing no hesitation is pushing back against Bill Clinton’s unpopular policies. I just wish she would push back against his bad policies that aren’t particularly unpopular, but that is certainly asking too much. My hope is just that if she becomes president, she will try to do some minor fixes to the way that her husband screwed up things like the welfare system.

But I think there is a much more fundamental difference between the Clintons and the Bushes. I don’t even see the Clintons as a dynasty. They are a power couple. They were both involved in politics before they met. So their existence as a couple is largely due to their involvement in politics. It is the other way around for the Bushes. I don’t think that George W Bush would have gone into politics if it hadn’t been the family business. What’s more, I don’t see anyone taking him seriously if he had. He has always been a silly guy. People took him seriously because his father had been president. People take Hillary Clinton very seriously on her own terms.

So there is a Bush dynasty, but it is a Clinton partnership. Does that mean that there are no problems with the partnership? Not at all. And it is getting a lot of scrutiny — and it will get a whole lot more. But the Bush dynasty is a greater concern — especially in a country that so fetishizes meritocracy (even though it doesn’t practical it). But it seems oddly “off limits” in mainstream political discussions. Sure, people talk about it on the margins. But just imagine in Jeb Bush were elected president. That would mean that the last three Republican presidents were all from the same family: a father and his two sons. That’s a dynasty — and more proof than is required to call the lie of American “equality of opportunity.” A husband and a wife being president, separated by almost two decades, it is not a dynasty — although I still don’t especially like it.