elfs: (Default)
This morning, I had a conversation with a Londoner who commented on a news article about a toddler finding a gun in her mother car and shooting her mother in the back. The gun, it turned out belonged to the mother's boyfriend. "Hell of a thing, a gun permit," he said. I pointed out that in the US, one doesn't need a gun permit to buy a gun, only carry it on your person in public, and in some states it's perfectly legal to carry one in your car without any regulation at all.

"That's nuts!" he said.

"That's the United States," I said with a shrug. "We're not a psychologically healthy country. The boyfriend will now be prosecuted, but as the Onion says, there was no way to prevent this, in the only country where this happens routinely."

It occurred to me even as I said it that the NRA is the distilled essence of libertarian morals. Libertarians will tell you that absent regulation, syndicates and "private rights-enforcement organizations" will emerge that will pressure corporations to treat their customers well.

We all realize this is bullshit. Corporations, by their very nature, will have more money than the syndicates and investigators; they'll be able to hire their own "private security-enforcement organizations" (and they already do), they'll be able to corrupt the internal workings of their competition and stay within the letter of the "night watchman's" idea of the law.

But the NRA's behavior is completely consistent with libertarian ideals. In our world, food companies will cut corners, and people will die. The company might get sued out of existence, or it might have the resources to maintain itself in the face of lawsuits. For example, the infamous case Grimshaw v Ford revealed that Ford Motors had run the numbers and figured it was making so much money that buying off the families of those killed by its poorly-made cars was cheaper than retooling the factory line. The NRA would like a world where misuse of a gun is never regulated before the fact; the libertarians would like a world where misuse of the market is never regulated before the fact.

If people die, well, eh: caveat emptor, motherfucker, even if you personally have no economically viable way checking the quality and suitability of a car, a processed food product, or a medical procedure.

There are two kinds of governments— one is an military force which worries about the education and well-being of its citizens only insofar as it can feed its military powerhouse, the other is an insurance company that ensures the education and well-being of its citizens so that they can be its economic powerhouse. The United States has always wanted to be both. The impulse to be both has kept it vacillating between these two extremes, and every time it does the powerful find a way to wedge themselves further into control.
elfs: (Default)
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.
elfs: (Default)
The freedom of the individual can be curtailed not only by the government, but by a large variety of intermediate powers like work bosses, neighborhood associations, self-organized ethnic movements, organized religions, tough violent men, or social conventions. In a society such as ours, where the government maintains a nominal monopoly on the use of physical violence, there is plenty of room for people to be oppressed by such intermediate powers .. The founders of libertarianism ... failed to extend the principle [of liberty] to covertly violent, semi-violent, or nonviolent forms of coercion.
Noah, The liberty of local bullies

Profile

elfs: (Default)
Elf Sternberg

May 2025

S M T W T F S
    123
45678910
111213141516 17
18192021222324
25262728293031

Syndicate

RSS Atom

Most Popular Tags

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags
Page generated Jun. 5th, 2025 01:55 am
Powered by Dreamwidth Studios