Rossputin.com Rational Thinking About Our World

In yesterday's note, Chris Jenkins began to tackle individual political issues. Here's my response so far...

Chris,

First, let's be very clear on the difference between capital-L "Libertarian" and small-l "libertarian", the former meaning a member of the Libertarian Party and the latter meaning an adherent to a libertarian political philosophy. I am the latter, and a registered Republican. As I said in a prior note, I really wanted to vote for a Republican for President this year, but couldn't vote for McCain, so I voted Libertarian for President for the 4th time in a row.

So, it's no surprise, given that I'm libertarian and not Libertarian, that I also have a "few things that cause me concern" with the Party's positions.

Iraq: While there's plenty of time for debate about what we should or shouldn't have done, the Libertarian view of getting out immediately without regard to the consequences is something I can't support. This is a part of a wider war that we simply can't afford to lose. That said, I do agree with the idea of getting away from being the world's policeman, and to stop spending so much money having troops all around the world. For example, we should make Europe spend more of their own money and allocate more of their own citizens to their own defense.

Education: I don't understand how anyone who's actually paying attention could be ambivalent about school choice and vouchers? The teachers' unions are strangling education. I saw a show on PBS the other day on which the principal of what was one of the worst primary schools in Denver say that after she was able to get her school free from control by the local district and the union, her school's performance massively improved. Yes, it's still behind the average school, but far far less than it was. What did she do? She took some of the money that the district and unions force to be wasted and allocated it to merit pay for teachers (as I understand it.)

Competition works. One can't argue, as I heard from the president of the CEA stunningly say, that competition is great, even for higher education, but just not for K-12 education.

There are good public schools, but you and I agree they tend to be in areas of rich white people. Theoretically, those people could just not pay the portion of their property tax that goes to public education and just send their kids to private schools instead and they'd be fine. The public schools are most failing the people who need good public schools, i.e. lower-income people. And look what they cost. Some of the worst schools in the country, like D.C. and Chicago, are some of the most expensive, spending over $10K per student per year, when a far better private education could probably be had for less than half that price.

One of the few things John McCain has right is that education is "the civil rights issue" of our day. It's so frustrating to hear white people in ivory towers or rich white suburbs say that public education is basically fine. Federal control of education, i.e. No Child Left Behind, is a huge step in the wrong direction. We need more local control and less government and union control. And we need to sever the incestuous connection between teachers' unions and the Democratic Party who strengthen each other with money and votes at the expense of our children. The Heartland Institute noted the length to which the teachers' unions will go to prevent competition:
"The National Education Association (NEA) spent at least one dollar from every teacher nationwide to defeat the Utah voucher effort. NEA used a coordinated misinformation campaign and every weapon in its arsenal to ensure its monopoly on public education is protected."

Ending foreign aid: There's a difference between being isolationist and just burning our money. A huge percentage of foreign aid is wasted or stolen, especially in Africa. We need to stop sending our money overseas, at least the vast majority of what we're sending now. I don't see where the US should be "doing something about" Zimbabwe directly. If there were ever a use for the UN, that is it. We should simply stop funding the UN until they start doing what they should be doing and stop spending all their time bashing Israel and the US.

You ask "Do we not have a duty to help other people on this earth who face oppression?" If by "we" you mean the government, the short answer is "no". The long answer is "Absolutely not at the level of our federal government, but I fully support individuals and private organizations doing whatever they can to help attack these problems." There is NO authority in the Constitution for doing what you suggest, and it's critically important that the federal government in particular do only what it's constitutionally authorized to do. If you want to help Zimbabwe, help fund a media campaign within the country, lobby the US or the UN or the African Union, or hire someone to put a bullet in Mugabe's head (or do it yourself.) But leave the US federal government out of it.

And as for the welfare system, I can give a short answer to that, too: I'm against it. The welfare system squeezes out charities which could and would do a better job than the government, and not give so many incentives to people to rely on government rather than on themselves and their families.

Before the welfare state, people took care of people quite well, even when the donors were not in a strong financial situation. Also, you'll note that "blue states" are far less charitable than "red states" on a percentage basis, even though blue states have richer people. It shows that conservatives are more generous, even if some of that giving is to churches, and that where people might have a problem receiving charity is ironically in the caring, liberal jurisdictions.

I do agree with you that government has a higher responsibility to take care of children than adults, but that doesn't mean it takes a village to raise a child.

The idea that it's "not worth the risk" to try to step back from our welfare system is a cop-out. Look at the predictions of catastrophe going into the welfare reform that Clinton reluctantly signed. None of the bad predictions came true and now Clinton claims it as his great achievement.

President Grover Cleveland led the way on this issue when there was a bad harvest due to drought in Texas. According to the WhiteHouse.gov biography of Cleveland, "Vetoing a bill to appropriate $10,000 to distribute seed grain among drought-stricken farmers in Texas, he wrote: "Federal aid in such cases encourages the expectation of paternal care on the part of the Government and weakens the sturdiness of our national character..."

And what happened to the farmers in Texas? According to a paper by Burton Folsom, Jr., ". The Louisville Courier-Journal and other newspapers urged Americans to help the farmers of east Texas, and in response over $100,000 was raised and sent to the destitute farmers who experienced the drought—a much greater sum than Congress had allocated—and the farmers had the satisfaction of knowing that their relief came from Americans who cared about their health, not politicians who cared about their votes."

In other words, people who weren't even from the same state came to the rescue of Texas farmers. That is the nature of Americans when left to their own devices, and when a decent percentage of their disposable income is left in their own control.

There some more excellent language from Cleveland in this article about the Texas Seed Bill.

And a really excellent collection of Cleveland wisdom, things which all our federal politicians should be forced to read:
http://mises.org/story/1129

Finally, here's a short must-read article about the government and charity by the always-excellent Walter Williams:
see "Charity Is No Function of the Federal Government"

Ending the welfare system is a key part of a libertarian philosophy. I don't need to get there all at once, as the Libertarian Party platform suggests, but we need to start moving in that direction and to start reminding Americans of the successes of those reforms.