The politics of the libertarian mob

Democrats were day-trading, Republicans were divorcing. We were all individualists now.

A wonderful line from Mark Lilla's essay in the NYRB, which has a neat title: "The Tea Party Jacobins."  Lilla is a professor at Columbia, after quite some time at Chicago.  More than anything else, Lilla is a faculty who is comfortable in both academic and journalistic domains--a trait I admire and look up to.
What is Lilla writing about there?

A new strain of populism is metastasizing before our eyes, nourished by the same libertarian impulses that have unsettled American society for half a century now. Anarchistic like the Sixties, selfish like the Eighties, contradicting neither, it is estranged, aimless, and as juvenile as our new century. It appeals to petulant individuals convinced that they can do everything themselves if they are only left alone, and that others are conspiring to keep them from doing just that. This is the one threat that will bring Americans into the streets.
Welcome to the politics of the libertarian mob.

Instead of the old Jacobins, who were leftist radicals, Lilla says we have the new Jacobins.  How different are these from the old?

When the new Jacobins turn on their televisions they do not tune in to the PBS News Hour or C-Span to hear economists and congressmen debate the effectiveness of financial regulations or health care reform. They look for shows that laud their common sense, then recite to them the libertarian credo that Fox emblazons on its home page nearly every day: YOU DECIDE.

Lilla has a point when he notes that the new Jacobins prefer:

the company of anti-intellectuals who know how to exploit nonintellectuals, as Sarah Palin does so masterfully.¹⁶ The dumbing-down they have long lamented in our schools they are now bringing to our politics, and they will drag everyone and everything along with them. As David Frum, one of the remaining lucid conservatives, has written to his wayward comrades, “When you argue stupid, you campaign stupid. When you campaign stupid, you win stupid. And when you win stupid, you govern stupid.”

So, where is this heading towards?  Lilla thinks that the Tea Party itself might dissolve soon, as much as a float is taken down after the Homecoming party!  But:

Now an angry group of Americans wants to be freer still—free from government agencies that protect their health, wealth, and well-being; free from problems and policies too difficult to understand; free from parties and coalitions; free from experts who think they know better than they do; free from politicians who don’t talk or look like they do (and Barack Obama certainly doesn’t). They want to say what they have to say without fear of contradiction, and then hear someone on television tell them they’re right. They don’t want the rule of the people, though that’s what they say. They want to be people without rules—and, who knows, they may succeed. This is America, where wishes come true. And where no one remembers the adage “Beware what you wish for.”

I wish Lilla had phrased something else in place of "libertarian mob" because true libertarians like the intelligent folks at Cato or Reason are not quite thrilled with the Tea Party folks' anti-intellectual ranting.  And, to a Libertarian Democrat like me, well, this nutcase mob is not anything like our idea of why we like the libertarian streak in our politics .... But, that is my only quibble :)

Larry Summers unites the left and the right :)

In graduate school, a professor once remarked that on some issues, if you go far enough, the left and the right will agree.  Yet again, he was proven right--in this case with Larry Summers.  Both the leftist Nation and the libertarian Reason have labeled Summers a liar, and for the same stuff he said.
The context is this PBS interview with Summers

According to the Nation: " Larry Summers is a clumsy public liar."  There, as simple as that!  Well, there is more than that:

Summers's claims about what caused the banking crisis were, likewise, aggressively misleading to plain deceitful. "Regulators didn't have the specific mandate for the consumer." Wrong. The Federal Reserve and other agencies had plenty of legal authority to protect consumers. They chose not to use it. Their dereliction actually occurred on Summers's watch, when he himself was Treasury secretary under Bill Clinton.
"Regulators didn't have authority in a comprehensive way to monitor the derivatives market." This is a flaming lie. The principal regulatory agency--the Commodity Futures Regulatory Commission--was actually preparing to impose stricter oversight on derivatives in the late 1990s when Larry Summers stopped it. Summers and Republican allies intervened in 2000 with legislation that castrated that agency and prohibited it from acting further. Derivatives exploded thereafter.
When Summers was finally asked about his own responsibility for encouraging the dangerous financial instruments, he responded with a mouthful of double talk. "You know, the situation's changed hugely.... So people were actually focused on a very different set of issues." Summers even tried to make it sound like he personally had wanted to tighten the oversight, but was blocked by "Congressional opposition."
Liar, liar, pants on fire.

Ok, that is from the left.  Next up, from the libertarian perspective, here is Reason:

More serious than Summers' well established habit of citing a fake consensus of experts to support his claims is that these comments embarrass an administration that is trying to promote the fiction that it is seriously interested in ending bailouts for gigantic banks. It might make intuitive sense that regulators would rather deal with a few big, identical institutions than with many diverse ones, but that's not the story the Democrats are using to sell their financial reform plan. So between Thursday and yesterday, somebody must have found a woodshed big enough to take Summers out to. Here's what he had to say on one of the Sunday talk shows:

"We must end too big to fail," he said on Face the Nation. "There is no one associated with the White House who believes "too big to fail" is acceptable, or that it's acceptable for financial institutions to rely on a bailout."

Glad that's squared away.

You can understand why I like these: After all, I identify myself as a libertarian Democrat :)

The carbon economies

I rarely walk around with ideological lenses. One result is, I suppose, most faculty colleagues who are way more ideological than me prefer not to interact with me. I am the "infidel" to them. To quite an extent that at least one faculty colleague openly asked me what I think most others think within: whether I am a Republican.

I thank Camille Paglia for helping me out; well, not personally, but through one of her essays. I liked the phrase "libertarian Democrat" that she uses to describe her political leanings. Which is what I am. Paglia, of course, ticks off people, even within the same Democratic fold, when she does not adopt an ideological framework and instead talks as an honest intellectual, and an honest individual.

Life can get difficult for a "libertarian Democrat" in a world of ultra-left Democrats. And more so when every once in a while I include ideas from Cato, or the Manhattan Institute. But, of course, "they" conveniently forget that I gather ideas from The Nation, too. And for the most part, I am straddling somewhere in the middle--the Brookings Institution, for instance, is one of my favorite policy research source.

A specific example to illustrate these dynamics? Take the case of the global use of carbon. The rare occasions I am asked for my opinion, I think I might tick some off with my concerns that the billions in India and China do not have inexpensive options that can replace the use of coal. And that we can, therefore, expect them to increase coal consumption even as we change light bulbs here in the US. And, given the sheer number of poor people there, merely forcing a carbon limit on those countries might be equivalent to trying to keep them poor. A new form of imperialism cloaked by a honorable idea of environmental concerns. Yes, it does not win me friends!

So, imagine if I were to distribute the following excerpt from an essay in the City Journal:

The oil-coal economics come down to this. Per unit of energy delivered, coal costs about one-fifth as much as oil—but contains one-third more carbon. High carbon taxes (or tradable permits, or any other economic equivalent) sharply narrow the price gap between oil and the one fuel that can displace it worldwide, here and now. The oil nasties will celebrate the green war on carbon as enthusiastically as the coal industry celebrated the green war on uranium 30 years ago.

The other 5 billion are too poor to deny these economic realities. For them, the price to beat is 3-cent coal-fired electricity. China and India won’t trade 3-cent coal for 15-cent wind or 30-cent solar. As for us, if we embrace those economically frivolous alternatives on our own, we will certainly end up doing more harm than good.

By pouring money into anything-but-carbon fuels, we will lower demand for carbon, making it even cheaper for the rest of the world to buy and burn. The rest will use cheaper energy to accelerate their own economic growth. Jobs will go where energy is cheap, just as they go where labor is cheap. Manufacturing and heavy industry require a great deal of energy, and in a global economy, no competitor can survive while paying substantially more for an essential input.

In the first place, I will be asking for excommunication given the (ill)reputation that the Manhattan Institute and the City Journal have among most academic social scientists who are generally way left of the Manhattan Institute. And then the content itself--about coal and carbon.

Sometimes I wonder whether many of the hard-core academics who are committed to a rapid elimination of carbon from our energy lives have ever been to India. Or China. It is one thing to talk about these things from the comforts of our own living rooms in the US, and is another to see and experience the remarkably poor lives that hundreds of millions lead all over the planet. Those hundreds of millions would love to get out of poverty, and telling them that they cannot burn coal simply won't work.