I understand why libertarians get upset when people attack them. When I was one, I was something of a singularity. For example, although I know of libertarians who support labor unions, in all my time as an active libertarian, I never met a fellow traveler who agreed with my position. So usually, when I argued with people about libertarianism, I would agree with their criticisms — but it didn’t reflect on the libertarianism that I practiced. Of course, I was being silly. I didn’t define libertarianism. I called myself a libertarian, but really I was just a political eccentric with libertarian tendencies.

Matt Bruenig wrote about this recently, #NotAllLibertarians: an Illustration. It’s about how it is pretty much impossible to argue with libertarians because they always comes back with, “But that’s not what libertarianism is.” It is in reference to an article by Elizabeth Stoker Bruenig, Porn Star Belle Knox Doesn’t Know What Libertarianism Is. Neither Do Libertarians. It is based on a Pew poll that I had wanted to write about, In Search of Libertarians. Because what it shows is that people who call themselves libertarians are not what I would ever have called libertarian.

Let’s just start with the fact that twice as many Republicans call themselves libertarians as Democrats. The first thing that I noticed when I started going to libertarian meetings was that almost everyone was a disaffected Republican. One of the big topics of conversation was what Rush Limbaugh had been talking about on the radio that week. At best, these were people who fully embraced economic conservatism and held their nose about social liberalism — the two pillars of what libertarianism is supposed to be. And indeed, the Pew poll bears this out. On most social issues, libertarians are distinctly more conservative than liberals.

Let’s take another issue that isn’t discussed in the poll. Libertarians, almost to a person, believe that local control is better than federal control. Yet it is almost always state and local governments who infringe on the rights of individuals. This is why libertarianism is so associated with racism and the neo-confederacy. A sizable portion of libertarians just want to be “free” to discriminate. Rand Paul might say that he would never discriminate against African Americans, but the fact that he thinks people ought to be able to do it is a big part of his appeal.

On foreign affairs, libertarians are more bellicose than the country as a whole. About the only place where libertarians deviate from the Republican script is that they are slightly more in favor of legalizing cannabis. But I don’t think that means anything. A lot of young people consider themselves “libertarian” for the single reason that candidates like Rand Paul are for legalization. And again, that isn’t even a libertarian position. Saying that people ought to be able to do drugs that the government thinks aren’t harmful is what we have now. The argument is simply about which drugs should fall in that category.

I understand why more serious libertarians would bristle when we point out that most libertarians are nothing more than Republicans who are slightly less hostile to the LGBT community and slightly more in favor of cannabis legalization. The problem comes in with a general belief among serious libertarians that if only people knew what libertarianism was, they would sign up. And certainly, the Libertarian Party was attending Tea Party meetings and talking up the rise in “libertarianism” in the country. Well, they can’t have it both ways. Either roughly 10% of the country is libertarian, and by that definition, libertarianism is just a minor variation on the Republican Party; or almost no one in the country is libertarian, and it actually means what these defenders of libertarianism claim it means.

Of course, even among the more serious libertarians, there is fierce disagreement about what a libertarian is. Anti-Libertarian Criticism provides a Critical Map of the American Libertarian Movement, in which they list eight different kinds of libertarianism. But ultimately, libertarianism is a utopian philosophy. And it ought to be dealt with on that level. The question is simply if the world would be a better place if we moved in that direction. And we’ve seen over the last forty years that the answer to that is a resounding no.

But this is all part of the same thing. The truth is that libertarianism is not a serious philosophy. Although proponents claim that they come to it from first principles, they actually come to it because it gives them something: tax cuts, legal drugs, “states’ rights,” whatever. And as I’ve noted, proponents always start by arguing from a practical standpoint. When they find those arguments untenable, they change to theoretical arguments. But ultimately, there is really nothing supporting libertarianism. So it isn’t at all surprising that libertarians constantly change their arguments. Because the real arguments are much like the essays in The Early Ayn Rand.

Dean Baker has been having an ongoing argument with libertarian columnist Megan McArdle for the last week. It’s always interesting to listen to libertarians make their arguments, because they are so certain that they are all evidence based. But in fact, libertarians are the most ideologically constrained thinkers around. I’ve written a lot around here about how libertarians start with practical arguments like, “The minimum wage kills jobs.” But when those arguments fall apart, the libertarians retreat to theoretical arguments, “People should be able to enter into any contracts they want.” That’s because all they had to start with was their ideology. And as Baker has noted again and again, McArdle makes a lot of different arguments against Social Security, but all she really means is that that she hates the program.

Baker caught her most recently using one of the classic disingenuous arguments against Social Security. You see, people arguing against the program want to have it both ways. On the one hand, they argue that the there is no way to separate taxes for Social Security and the general fund. Thus, the idea that Social Security has a huge trust fund is meaningless. Then, on the other hand, they argue that if Social Security spends more than is brought in with payroll taxes, it is bankrupt because it can’t take money from the general fund.

So Social Security is damned either way. When it is bad for the program to be just another part of the general fund, it is just part of the general fund. When it is bad for it to be a separate program, it is not part of the general fund. And these claims are not always made at different times. They are made inside the very same arguments. In McArdle’s article on Friday, she uses this trick. Basically, she argues that we can’t increase Social Security payments because we don’t have the money — as though we don’t have the trust fund. But at the same time, the money can’t be taken from the general fund.

I discussed the basic issue before, Reagan’s Legacy: Tax Cuts for Rich, Tax Hikes for the Rest. Those big tax hikes on the non-rich were intended to create a huge trust fund — to tax more for Social Security than was being spent at that time. But people like McArdle want to brush that all aside and claim that the government just spent that extra money and it is gone. This was part of Baker’s longer argument with her.

It is true that the federal government has borrowed from the Social Security trust fund. But it is never clear why people like McArdle think this is different from the federal government borrowing from bond holders. In her most recent article, she argues that this is because the bond holders exist outside the government, but the government could just end the Social Security program and pocket the cash. That strikes me as disingenuous because the government could also decide to default on its debts. Governments have done that before. Of course, the government is not going to eliminate the Social Security program, although people like McArdle want to do just that.

It would be a whole lot better Megan McArdle would just admit that she doesn’t like Social Security. It goes against her ideology. It just wastes everyone’s time to write endless articles about accounting and how it all proves that retired Americans are just living too high.

See Also

Megan McArdle Ridiculous Anti-Filibuster-Reform Argument
Megan McArdle Humiliates Eric Alterman
Mitch McConnell’s Cunning Plan

As I write this, Fox News has reported, White House Swipes at Netanyahu With Tweet of Iran Bomb Diagram. I’m sure that Friday afternoon’s panel discussion on the Republican propaganda network will be filled with outrage. After all: how dare the President of the United States make fun of the King of the Republican Party, Benjamin Netanyahu (who recently unseated Vladimir Putin, who is now just the authoritarian man-crush of the party)?

The story starts back in 2012, when Netanyahu came to the United Nations to talk about the threat of Iran getting a nuclear bomb. And as proof, he apparently got his four year old grandson to make a drawing of a bomb that looks like something out of a Looney Tunes cartoon. And there he is in the picture drawing a red line on it as if to say, “Danger, Will Robinson!” It was when he claimed that the summer of 2013 was absolutely, positively the last chance the world had to stop Iran from getting a nuclear bomb. Of course, I recently discussed just how seriously we should take his pronouncements, Netanyahu’s Long History of Being Wrong. But hey, a cartoon bomb. A red line. These things must be taken seriously! Of course, the Obama administration wasn’t too happy at the time.

So it isn’t surprising that now that the Iran nuclear framework is in place and a deal looks like it is going to come to pass (as long as the Democrats don’t destroy it), the Obama administration would take to a little payback. And what payback it is! They tweeted out the following image that is quite brilliant:

Zack Beauchamp at Vox has noted that, The White House’s Netanyahu-Trolling Cartoon Is Pretty Misleading. But that headline itself is misleading. It just refers to the fact that this simple cartoon doesn’t correctly summarize the agreement. But he admits:

And let’s not forget: the point of the cartoon is to be simplistic. It is a parody of Netanyahu’s ridiculous “argument” that his cartoon bomb picture somehow proved that Iran was on the verge of having a nuclear weapon. What the administration has produced is far more nuanced and accurate than that.

To me, the most important part of the image is the pair of scissors. If we take Netanyahu’s image as reality (and we shouldn’t), then this deal snips off that lit fuse. No one is claiming that this deal will stop Iran from ever getting a nuclear weapon. But it will slow any such efforts. So that’s a good thing, right? Well, apparently not — at least for Netanyahu. And that’s interesting coming from the leader of the only country in the Middle East that has nuclear weapons — and lots of them.

Troll on, White House! Troll on!

Ed Kilgore wrote kind of a boring post about why it is that the Washington press made a bigger deal of Rand Paul’s predictable announcement that he was running for president than they did about Ted Cruz’s equally predictable announcement that he was running. Not mentioned is just the feeling that Cruz is such a loon that he can’t win. I always think that argument is terrifying, because people said much the same thing about Ronald Reagan. I would never count Cruz out. But the media thinks he’s a nonstarter (they are probably right), and so they don’t much care that he’s running for president. But Kilgore focuses on what is probably the bigger issue.

Kilgore wrote, Libertarianism With a Human Face. He quotes David Frum correctly noting that libertarianism appeals to mainstream media because it is “socially permissive, fiscally cautious.” This is the core of my indictment of the supposedly liberal media. Even in Eric Alterman’s classic What Liberal Media? he notes that the claim that the media are liberally biased on social issues is largely true. It isn’t that they go out of their way to be biased, it is just that everyone they know — including conservatives — are socially liberal. The Koch Brothers don’t actually care about same sex marriage and reproductive rights.

This is why I devalue social issues. The policies that the vast majority of people care about are bread-and-butter issue. Abortion and marriage are things that happen rarely in people’s lives. But they have to eat each day; they have to pay the rent each month. So the fact that the rich have managed, over the last last 70 years to make the whole political debate in this country to be about non-bread-and-butter issue is really an amazing defeat for democracy. Regardless of whether the Democrats or the Republicans are in power, the rich still win.

And it is doubtless the case that the greatest weapon that the rich have in their fight against democracy is the media who often discount the thoughts of the social conservatives, even while they serve up a constant diet of neoliberal policies designed to vilify the government and argue in favor of privatizing all services. If there is one thing in American media coverage that isn’t even questioned, it is that charter schools are a great thing and “school choice” is just common sense. And as all of this is taken for granted, never do we discuss the egregiously unequal way that we fund education.

And why is that? It is because the major media players who bring us their “objective news” are upper middle and upper class reporters and editors. They may not think of themselves as elites, but they are precisely the kind of people who Anand Giridharadas had in mind when he said:

But of course these media figures think they totally know what’s going on. And that’s a big part of the problem. The way that American politics is now divided, they can look at their socially liberal and economically conservative viewpoints and think that they are just telling it like it is. But what they are really doing is what the privileged have been doing for thousands of years: they are seeing what is good for them as being what is generally good. So of course they think that Rand Paul has a real chance to become president. They are his constituency.

See Also

Serious Centrist Saletan’s Selfishness
The People Don’t Care About Gridlock
Professional vs Regular Moderates
The “Moderate” Voter and the Selfish Pundit