It Only Takes One. Unfortunately, They Are Many

[elfs]

Vid: "sick & tired of being told to pick up my trash when we have plenty of janitors who are paid to do it for us" Trump Adv Stephen Miller pic.twitter.com/cpoSGAdOGv

— Scott Dworkin (@funder) August 5, 2017

So there's this video going around of Trump advisor and now White House Communications Director Stephen Miller, looking much younger than he is right now (he's currently 31), shouting into a microphone, "I'm sick and tired of being told to pick up my trash when we have plenty of janitors who are paid to do it for us." The context for the clip is that it was supposedly satirical, but "it's satire" is pretty much the last refuge of a dude who knows he's gone too far. Miller is pretty much the trifecta of authoritarian, patriarchal, and ethnocentrist, and it's hard to claim that the authoritarian attitudes he showed in high school have mellowed at all.

Miller's rant, though, reminded me of the day I decided libertarianism was mostly bullshit. I'd always been leery of libertarianism; it made a strange sense to me, but it always also felt as if the Nozickian quality of making green slips of paper the measure of all worth, moral or otherwise, was definitively askew. Especially since I was in the tech industry, the very notion of "leverage" leading to one person owning everything and immiserating everyone else didn't make any sense, but that's where libertarianism, with its emphasis on maintaining the arbitrary distribution of wealth via historical contingency, ultimately ended up.

The day I finally broke completely with libertarianism was the day Seattle imposed recycling. There were the new guidelines, come the next trash-management cycle, for separating recyclables from landfill, and new rules for how recycling and trash would be picked up. The city was smart enough to make sure all pickups in a neighborhood happened on the same day, but instead of one bin to the curb, you'd have two (or even three!) to haul up and back. And last but not least, the guidelines requested that you rinse all your plastic and glass before tossing it.

It was that last one that set the Seattle Libertarian mailing list abuzz. They were upset. They were damned if they were going to do any more work than they had to, just to throw something away. They'd just tossed stuff into the trash when it was time to toss stuff. One guy wrote, "Of course the liberals don't care, but if I'm going to do all this extra labor for them, I expect to be justly compensated. I'm not doing it for free."

I unsubscribed shortly thereafter. I didn't want to be around people that flippin' petty.