I’m a free-trader. . . . I’m very libertarian. I’m working on a book called The Libertarian Democrat. . . . I like to make a lot of money.
Like many bad ideas, libertarianism is based on a simple and attractive idea:
People should have a right to do what they wanna do as long as they don’t bother the rest of us.
So, everyone’s a libertarian, right? And, maybe that simplistic slogan is what Markos means when he says he’s “very libertarian.” But I don’t think so. Because for libertarians with money the above quote is almost always greedily transformed into the following:
It’s moral and right for rich and poor to pay the same income tax percentage.
The above is, of course, why libertarianism (and its associated ‘freedom’ doctrines, laissez-faireism and ‘free trade’) is a lavishly funded and therefore major political force in the U.S. Nope my weed smoking fiends/friends, it ain’t its stance on dope.
Libertarianism is, after all, the root of the disastrous Milton Friedmanesque American (and WorldBank/IMF-sponsored global) libertarian and ‘free trade’ economic policies of the last 30 years or so, which have both stagnated the U.S. economy and massively redistributed wealth up to the top 20, 10 and especially 1%.
Heck, we should’ve known, because libertarianism (when it was called ‘liberalism’) was also the root of the laissez-faire economic policies that led both to the Great Depression and to Hoover’s do-nothing response to it. But no problem, that didn’t stop Milton from giving the ‘free the rich’ philosophy a rebirth indecently soon thereafter. And it doesn’t stop the ahistorical Kos either.
So laissez-faireism/libertarianism refuses to die because it’s where rich people and their wannabes are at. And for those like Markos who feel it is their upper middle class birthright (see pic above of the Markos family hotel/resort in El Salvador) to be in the top 10 or 1%, redistribution up is not a problem but a bigger pot of gold at the end of their self-righteous rainbow.
Note especially the reasoning here, where Markos’s immediate rationale for switching away from the Republican party was a feeling that the party rabble (I mean the Christian fundamentalists) were taking it away from the traditional “I got mine” business (I mean ‘libertarian’) Republicans:
When you were younger you were a Republican. Why the flip-flop?
The rise of the Christian Coalition in the late ’80s and early ’90s. The increasing authoritarian streak versus the libertarian side. . . .
Kos: ‘Ah the golden Reagan years, before the trailer-park Christians got uppity & demanded something for their Republican votes.’
Further insight into Markos Moulitsas’s Reagan love is here (emphasis added):
Moulitsas’ family was upper-middle-class in a country with virtually no middle class, and so had little sympathy for attempts to overthrow the corrupt ruling party. “I’m still the family communist,” he says. At the time, though, Moulitsas was politically in line with his folks. The family fled back to Chicago when Moulitsas was nine, and he became a fanatical supporter of Ronald Reagan (who backed El Salvador’s government as part of his anti-Communist strategy), even working as a Republican party precinct captain in high school.
Or look here, where you need to infer the (19th century ‘survival of the fittest’) meaning of ‘liberal’ that Markos wants to revive:
You’re perceived by the mainstream press as very liberal. Do you consider yourself a leftie?
People are hung up on this left/right thing, which is completely ridiculous and stupid. I’m not a traditional liberal in any sense. I’m very libertarian. I’m working on a book called The Libertarian Democrat. . . . I speak of myself as a liberal — but as a way to try to bring the word back and reclaim it. . . .
And so, inevitably, Markos allies with the libertarian and lavishly funded by the rich Cato Institute (He is a well-paid contributor to Cato Unbound).
The Cato Institute effort most important to its wealthy backers is its facts-be-damned promotion of unregulated trade. Its latest counterfactual abomination is reported by Paul Craig Roberts in Cato, Trade and Outsourcing, Blinded by Ideology. A new Cato report – “Thriving in a Global Economy: The Truth about US Manufacturing and Trade” – writes Roberts, “confuses a company’s offshored products with its import competition and wrongly concludes that US companies with the most import competition are the companies that are thriving.”
So Roberts rewrites what the Cato-developed facts actually should conclude:
“Revenues, profits, output, and value added rose the most for industries that offshored manufacturing, and they rose the least for those industries that produced their output domestically.”
And adds:
Obviously, corporations that arbitrage labor and replace their US employees with less expensive foreign labor are going to enjoy greater growth in profits and value added.
Roberts notes, by the way, that offshoring jobs is not just a problem for displaced US manufacturing employees: “Princeton economist and former Federal Reserve vice chairman” Alan Blinder states that offshoring will also eventually axe “30 to 40 million high-end US service sector jobs.”
In fact, says Roberts, here’s the ‘free trade’ problem in all its gory:
Every job that does not require a “hands-on” presence can be offshored. Charles McMillion and I have pointed out for years that the nonfarm payroll jobs data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show that the US economy can only create net new jobs in domestic non-tradable services. . . .
The Cato report does not acknowledge that the financial prosperity of US capital is at the expense of US labor. The report does not explain how an $800 billion trade deficit can be closed when domestic corporations face powerful incentives to offshore . . .
The financial prosperity that US corporations are enjoying from offshoring increases the US trade deficit and makes American consumers increasingly dependent on imports. In 2006 (the most recent annual data) the US trade deficit in manufactured consumer durable and nondurable goods was 3.4 times greater than the US trade deficit with OPEC. The US “superpower” has a massive trade deficit in consumer manufactured goods and even has a deficit in capital goods, including machinery, electric generating machinery, machine tools, computers, and telecommunications equipment.
The well-funded Cato Institute pundit, or a DNC Democrat like Markos Moulitsas, must not see when “the profit motive becomes disconnected from the general welfare.” Even when the basic economic problem stares us straight in the face:
Today the profit motive causes capitalists to create job opportunities and GDP in low-wage foreign countries instead of their own.
What do we do about this? We re-regulate trade, like our government did during America’s golden age of economic growth, 1947 to 1973. But the solution will have to be over “I’m a free trader” Markos Moulitsas’s dead body, apparently.
Also at http://politicalfleshfeast.com/showDiary.do;jsessionid=33300D6440AB400A579AB1CF6A632D27?diaryId=789