Originally posted at Liberal Street Fighter
That conman owner of the DailyKog has vomited up some crap on Cato Unbound:
The Case for the Libertarian Democrat
by Markos Moulitsas
It was my fealty to the notion of personal liberty that made me a Republican when I came of age in the 1980s. It is my continued fealty to personal liberty that makes me a Democrat today.
The case against the libertarian Republican is so easy to make that I almost feel compelled to stipulate it and move on. It is the case for the libertarian Democrat that has created much discussion and not a small amount of controversy when I first introduced the notion in what was, in reality, a throwaway blog post on Daily Kos on a slow news day in early June 2006.
Well, weren’t many of us TRUE lefties banned from his little party-owned site for POINTING OUT that they were pushing for Republican values, that indeed Markog, the writers he supports and many of the candidates he flogs for ARE REPUBLICANS?
Wait, it gets better:
But that post—as coarse, raw, and incomplete as it was—touched a surprising nerve. It generated the predictable criticism from libertarian circles (Reason and several Cato scholars piled on) as well as from conservatives who perhaps recognized their own slipping grasp of libertarian principles but were unwilling to cede any ground to a liberal. But more surprising (and unexpected) to me was the positive reaction: there’s a whole swath of Americans who are uncomfortable with Republican/conservative efforts to erode our civil liberties while intruding into our bedrooms and churches; they don’t like unaccountable corporations invading their privacy, holding undue control over their economic fortunes, and despoiling our natural surroundings; yet they also don’t appreciate the nanny state, the over-regulation of small businesses, the knee-jerk distrust of the free market, or the meddlesome intrusions into mundane personal matters.
Like me, these were people who didn’t instinctively reject the ability of government to protect our personal liberties, who saw government as a good, not an evil, but didn’t necessarily see the government as the source of first resort when seeking solutions to problems facing our country. They also saw the markets as a good, not an evil, but didn’t necessarily see an unregulated market run amok as a positive thing. Some of these were reluctant Republicans, seeking an excuse to abandon a party that has failed them. Others were reluctant Democrats, looking for a reason to fully embrace their party. And still others were stuck in the middle, despairing at their options—despondent at a two-party system in which both parties were committed to Big Government principles.
If you really want or need that view of the world, go read something John Danforth says pretty much the same thing, only he’s a better writer and a hell of a lot smarter. What Markos represents is the ineffective and whipped-like-dogs Rockefeller Republicans trying to take over the Democratic Party because they were unable to hold onto their own. Sadly, the Democratic Party is run by DLC corporatist lapdogs, Blue Dogs and ineffective used-to-be liberals like Kerry and Kennedy who have internalized the idea that it’s better to go along than to actually FIGHT for something. Having lost their party, they are eagerly pursuing ownership over the other party. Yes, both parties are owned and run by rightwingers. There is no real institutional left anymore.
In essence, what we’re watching now is a proxy fight for control of the company board of this one party “state” we used to call a free nation. It is a fight between stockholders who support the current rape-and-pillage style of management represented by the Republicans, and a smaller group who think that their chance of improved “returns” on their “investments” would be better served by less extreme management. We no longer have a representative government, we have a giant corporation, and for most of us being born here only counts as a fractional share. We have no influence on management decisions. They will withdraw our proxies if it serves “management’s” interests.
The little gate-crasher says in his coming-out-as-a-Rethug piece:
Embracing the market
My libertarian tendencies have always found a welcome home in the Silicon Valley culture (and in all of the nation’s great technology centers). It is a place where hard work and good ideas trump pedigree, money, the color of one’s skin, nationality, sex, or any of the artificial barriers to entry in most of the rest of the world. It is a techno-utopia that, while oft-criticized for a streak of self-important narcissism, still today produces the greatest innovations in technology in the world. Where else could such a motley collection of school dropouts, nerds, brown people (mostly Indian), and non-Native English speakers (mostly Chinese), not just rise to the top of their game, but dominate it? This is free market activity seemingly at its best, and it works precisely because these individuals are able to take risks and be judged by the results of their work, rather than be judged by who they are, where they’ve been, or who they know.
But there are other reasons why this outpost of libertarianism works. The government has put in an infrastructure to support the region including, among many other things, roads, the Internet, government research grants, and the most important ingredient of all: education, from the lowliest kindergarten to the highest post-doc program. Such spending, while requiring a government bureaucracy that makes a traditional libertarian shudder, actually provides the tools that individuals need to succeed in today’s world. If our goal is to promote and champion individual liberty and the free market, we need government to help provide those tools to all Americans, not just a privileged few. This isn’t a question of equality, it’s one of opportunity. Some people will take advantage of those opportunities, and others will not. That will be up to each individual. But without opportunity, there is no freedom.
There is also no individual freedom if corporations aren’t forced to provide the kind of accountability necessary to ensure we make proper purchasing or investment decisions. For example, public corporations are regulated to ensure that investors have accurate data upon which to base their trading decisions. If investors can’t trust the information given by corporations, the stock markets couldn’t function. If the stock markets couldn’t function, our current market system would collapse. Matters such as deceptive advertising, labeling, and some safety regulations are also important. Does anyone doubt that requiring food companies to label ingredients and nutritional data doesn’t enhance our liberties by giving us the information we need to make informed decisions?
On the flip side, much of what’s known as “corporate welfare” is not designed to protect personal liberties. Rather it rewards inefficiencies in the market and the politically connected. Intellectual property law protections, constantly extended at the behest of Walt Disney in service to its perpetual Mickey copyright, have created a corporate stranglehold over information in an era where information is currency. Patent law allows companies like Amazon to patent simple and obvious “business processes” like “one-click shopping,” which they protect with armies of lawyers and deep pockets. In the non-virtual sphere, cities use eminent domain to strip property owners of their rights on behalf of private developers.
So a “free” market needs rules (“regulation”) in order to function. And such rules should be welcome so long as they are designed to enhance and protect our personal liberties.
Got that everybody? This isn’t a free nation with a representative government that exists to provide for individuals to live their lives in freedom while pursuing their own particular brand of happiness, it’s a big company that needs an authoritarian structure to order our lives so that we can make and buy stuff. There’s no public square, only a big corporate campus. His twisted celebration of Silicon Valley “culture” is laughable, as it glosses over all of the class, racial and educational inequities that built that very sheltered and often hostile world.
This is what we’ve come to … BOTH of our parties owned by militaristic greedheads seeking to preserve the inequitable status quo. True lefties in office should declare themselves Independents and form a third caucus, starting the hard work of building a real party that will fight for the people. Perhaps Dr. Dean can join them after they drum him out of the party leadership, blaming him for the upcoming disappointing returns in the mid-term election next month. It is plain that any real work is going to have to start locally and build from there, because the national parties are wholly owned subsidiaries of international corporation, and hack consultants like Markos will do everything they can to prevent a genuine debate to happen within the parties.
As Bill Moyers wrote recently:
When it comes to selling influence, both parties have defined deviancy up, and Tony Soprano himself couldn’t get away with some of the things that pass for business as usual in Washington. We have now learned that Jack Abramoff had almost 500 contacts with the Bush White House over the three years before his fall, and that Karl Rove and other presidential staff were treated to his favors and often intervened on his behalf. So brazen a pirate would have been forced to walk the plank long ago if Washington had not thrown its moral compass overboard.
Alas, despite all these disclosures, nothing is happening to clean up the place. Just as the Republicans in charge of the House kept secret those dirty emails sent to young pages by Rep. Mark Foley—a cover-up aimed at getting them past the election and holding his seat for the party—they are now trying to sweep the DeLay-Abramoff-Reed-and-Norquist scandals under the rug until after Nov. 7, hoping the public at large doesn’t notice that the House is being run by Tom DeLay’s team, minus DeLay. All the talk about reform is placebo.
The only way to counter the power of organized money is with organized and outraged people. Believe me, what members of Congress fear most is a grassroots movement that demands clean elections and an end to the buying and selling of influence—or else! If we leave it to the powers that be to clean up the mess that greed and chicanery have given us, we will wake up one day with a real Frankenstein of a system—a monster worse than the one created by Abramoff, DeLay and their cronies. By then it will be too late to save Lincoln’s hope for “government of, by, and for the people.”
It’s going to be a long, hard fight, one which may very well take as long as the suffrage, civil rights and labor movements took. Remember, though, that if you really want a humanitarian, peaceful and just society, fake “progressives” like Markos are part of the problem. At least he finally admitted it.
