A Libertarian-Democrat I am

Through the long and winding road of time and geography, I paused at, and passed, quite a few religious and secular isms.  Over the last few years, I have comfortably settled into a Libertarian-Democrat perspective on society.

While the respect and value for the individual and the contempt for intrusion into lives fuel the Libertarian me, I can not see myself signing up ever as a full-fledged Libertarian, primarily because of the concern for the disadvantaged, and the worries over the power that the military-corporate alliance has--the triggers for the Democrat in me.

As is probably the case for many of us in this corner of the political spectrum, two intellectuals helped me a lot in arriving here (even if it was only my half-baked understanding): George Orwell and Robert Nozick.

It was, thus, a pleasure to read this lengthy critique of Nozick's philosophy, and of full-throated libertarianism. The final paragraphs are way too good to summarize:

Calling yourself a libertarian is another way of saying you believe power should be held continuously answerable to the individual's capacity for creativity and free choice. By that standard, Thomas Jefferson, John Ruskin, George Orwell, Isaiah Berlin, Noam Chomsky, Michel Foucault, and even John Maynard Keynes are libertarians. (Orwell: "The real division is not between conservatives and revolutionaries but between authoritarians and libertarians." Keynes: "But above all, individualism … is the best safeguard of personal liberty in the sense that, compared with any other system, it greatly widens the field for the exercise of personal choice.") Every thinking person is to some degree a libertarian, and it is this part of all of us that is bullied or manipulated when liberty is invoked to silence our doubts about the free market. The ploy is to take libertarianism as Orwell meant it and confuse it with libertarianism as Hayek meant it; to take a faith in the individual as an irreducible unit of moral worth, and turn it into a weapon in favor of predation.

Another way to put it—and here lies the legacy of Keynes—is that a free society is an interplay between a more-or-less permanent framework of social commitments, and the oasis of economic liberty that lies within it. The nontrivial question is: What risks (to health, loss of employment, etc.) must be removed from the oasis and placed in the framework (in the form of universal health care, employment insurance, etc.) in order to keep liberty a substantive reality, and not a vacuous formality? When Hayek insists welfare is the road is to serfdom, when Nozick insists that progressive taxation is coercion, they take liberty hostage in order to prevent a reasoned discussion about public goods from ever taking place. "According to them, any intervention of the state in economic life," a prominent conservative economist once observed of the early neoliberals, "would be likely to lead, and even lead inevitably to a completely collectivist Society, Gestapo and gas chamber included." Thus we are hectored into silence, and by the very people who purport to leave us most alone.

Thanks in no small part to that silence, we have passed through the looking glass. Large-scale, speculative risk, undertaken by already grossly overcompensated bankers, is now officially part of the framework, in the form of too-big-to-fail guarantees made, implicitly and explicitly, by the Federal Reserve. Meanwhile, the "libertarian" right moves to take the risks of unemployment, disease, and, yes, accidents of birth, and devolve them entirely onto the responsibility of the individual. It is not just sad; it is repugnant.

Thank heavens it is not seven billion Kim Kardashians!

BTW, all the other cartoons I came across--on this topic of the world population at seven billion--were  Maulthusian.  Pretty much variations of the theme of imbalance between the demand (from the seven billion) and food, or resource, availability.  Like the one below:

Is it because a Malthusian framework appeals to us a lot more than otherwise?  Are humans somehow wired to be pessimistic that way?  Is it because since the proto-human times we have been worried about our individual and collective abilities to survive?

It is an unfortunate irony that not a single cartoon pointed out that if we should be worried about the resource issue, it is not the actual number of people that drives consumption.  Consumption--and overconsumption--comes from affluence.  If only a cartoonist had transformed into an image the following words:

the populations that are rising fastest contribute very little to climate change. The poorest half of the world produces 7% of carbon emissions. The richest 7% produces half the carbon.

Higher education is leading us astray

Taking off on Voltaire's comment on the Holy Roman Empire, I wrote in an opinion piece, which was published a while ago, that there was no"higher" nor "education" in contemporary higher education.

Especially, once we muddied the waters by misrepresenting education as the ticket to jobs, instead of education simply as a pursuit of knowledge with jobs as a wonderful byproduct, well, we have quickly slid down to an incorrect belief that everybody needs to go to college and, worse, that those who choose the trades over college are somehow inferior humans.

With the net result that we are wasting precious time and money, and the ones who will be really screwed by this are the students themselves, who have to pay for the mistakes--individually and as a society.

College is not necessary for most people. It never was. In fact, the preoccupation with college has left America bereft of its former ability to create wealth.
An unhealthy cultural myth has flourished that says everyone must go to college and get an advanced degree, even if it’s something for which there is virtually zero market demand. Meanwhile, below-market interest rates and government-backed loans have lured a couple generations of Americans down the road to higher education.
Further, the kind of education colleges provide — indeed, all of American schooling from kindergarten onward — doesn’t produce innovators, entrepreneurs and job creators.

Oh well ...

If you worried that the excerpt was from a Wall-Street-type guy, how about the following from an academic:

I believe one now has to wonder if going to college is a sensible decision. Such a suggestion would have been unthinkable as recently as five years ago, perhaps, but the combination of two factors—soaring tuition costs and what seems to be a permanently stagnant economy (or at the very least, yet another jobless recovery from a recession), have made me seriously consider whether going to college is now a good choice.
...
So here’s my somewhat obvious question: Is it worthwhile for high-school graduates to go to college right now? My provisional answer, and I’d really like to be persuaded otherwise is “no.” The Republican Party and President Obama are clearly, as we’ve learned in the last weeks, at loggerheads over student-loan reform, so it’s unlikely to happen. Obama argues that students are being crushed by education-related debt; Republicans argue that tightening student-loan regulations and making it easier (and ultimately less punitive) for students to borrow will only serve as an incentive for colleges to increase tuition even more. Both positions are supportable, but as for high-school graduates right now, I think college is a bad bet. The exceptions:  highly practical occupation-related fields and quick and cheap two-year credentials, or, of course, independently wealthy parents or some other guaranteed lifetime-income stream. Otherwise, to start your life with a massive amount of debt (on which one cannot default) and a good chance that you won’t find a full-time job, let alone a secure one with career potential, just doesn’t make sense.

At the end of the day, higher education merely comes across as a giant money-sucking industry--never satisfied with any amount of money spent on it.  After all, the Taj Mahal costs money, right? :(