Christopher Beam is wrong to say libertarians own the heritage of the Founders

In his much-discussed and mostly pretty-good overview of libertarianism for New York Magazine, Christopher Beam makes a statement I think is just flat-out wrong:

Every political group claims the Founders as its own, but libertarians have more purchase than most. The American Revolution was a libertarian movement, rejecting overweening government power. The Constitution was a libertarian document that limited the role of the state to society’s most basic needs, like a legislature to pass laws, a court system to interpret them, and a military to protect them. 

Beam might be right, as far as the Revolution goes. But the people who created and advocated for the adoption of the Constitution weren't really the libertarians of their day. They were trying to consolidate power for a national government, and even gave it unlimited power of taxation! The libertarians of the day were the Antifederalists, who thought that the power of taxation and the ability to create a standing army -- powers granted the government by the new Constitution -- were a dangerous threat to their hard-won liberty. Heck, the reason I even know of the Antifederalists is due to the proddings of a libertarian friend of mine. The Constitution might've restrained the powers of government compared to, say, the British monarchy -- but it was a lot more than limited-government types of the era felt entirely comfortable with. Granting libertarians a stronger purchase on the history of the Founders is simply incorrect.

Even Stanley Kurtz doesn't buy Jonah Goldberg's defense of red-baiting Stanley Kurtz

Remember last week, when Jonah Goldberg said that Stanley Kurtz's new book calling Obama a socialist isn't the same thing as calling him a communist -- and it's those oversensitive liberals who are conflating communism and socialism? Remember that?

For example, I’ve just been dipping in and out of Stan’s book, but nowhere I’ve seen does he call Obama a Communist. I’m sure Dave understands the distinction and he might have simply found the word-play irresistible, but it’s worth noting that the Hammer and Sickle are not symbols of socialism but of Communism.

Who is seeing Hammer and Sickles everywhere now?

I responded by noting that the cover of Kurtz's book actually features Obama's face superimposed on a red star. But it turns out you don't need to read into the cover symbolism to believe that Kurtz is doing a bit of red-baiting here. Here's Kurtz himself, today: 

There’s no doubt that Radical-in-Chief’s cover art draws the reader’s eye with a spectacular symbol of classic Marxist socialism. It would have been tough to put a picture of the Midwest Academy on the book, since no-one’s ever heard of it, and since the Midwest Academy keeps its socialism secret in any case. I get at the stealthy, pragmatic, and incremental Midwest Academy-style socialism the reader will learn about inside through the book’s subtitle.

But the fact is that a lot of Radical-in-Chief is about good old fashioned Marxism. There’s the story of Reverend Wright’s adventures in Cuba, for example, which drew Obama to Wright’s church, I claim. And Obama himself was a revolutionary Marxist at Occidental College. Also, many of the Swedish-style socialist organizers who trained and sponsored Obama supported Marxist regimes like Cuba and Nicaragua. Alice Palmer, who chose Obama to be her successor in the Illinois State Senate, was a fan of the Soviet Union. Bill Ayers often wears the red star. Despite their democratic professions, many of Obama’s stealth-socialist community organizer colleagues believed that a violent socialist revolution would be necessary in the future. And some of Obama’s mentors favored Swedish social experiments that skirted the boundary between democratic socialism and outright authoritarianism. Even Obama’s most gradualist mentors saw their ideological stealth as a modern version of Communist Party strategy during the Popular Front period.

So while American socialism definitely changed during its turn to community organizing in the eighties and nineties, the hard-core Marxist past was never entirely shed. The book grapples with that complexity. The Swedish alternative is real, but the links to the bad old Marxist days remain. That’s part of what makes even reformed socialism a matter of legitimate concern to those who love liberty.

Now, maybe this isn't directly calling Obama a communist. But he's certainly making a direct case that at one point, at least, Obama was a Marxist. (Can we agree that word is a synonym for Communist, or is more parsing called for?) And he's certainly making the case that Obama is so tied to and enmeshed with Marxists that his presidency endangers our country. I'm not sure that Goldberg's effort at pedantry -- communism is different from socialism, and Democrats are getting their feelings hurt because of their own inability to make distinctions -- really stands up at all in light of Kurtz's own words.

In any case, if Obama's a socialist, he's a damned lousy one. Tax cuts for the rich? Putting GM back on the market after saving it? Passing health reform by keeping insurance entirely in the hands of private companies? No doubt Kurtz and others will view this as Alinskyite go-slow subversion of free markets, but most of the rest of us don't see a president who looks all that radical. 

I buy a lottery ticket twice a year. This week is one of those times.

The Mega Millions lottery annuity jackpot jumped to $237 million ($150.8 million cash) today after Tuesday night's drawing produced no top prize winner.

The jackpot is the biggest on offer since June in either the Mega Millions of Powerball games when one ticket had all the numbers in $261.6 million Powerball drawing.

via philly.com

I know and fully agree with all the arguments against the existence of a lottery -- it amounts to a tax on the poor, one that encourages them to spend money on hopeless dreams instead of productive purposes here and now. And I know the odds against winning the lottery: I'm almost certainly not the person who will win it if I play.

On the other hand: *Somebody's* going to win this money. $1 won't make my son go without a meal. So -- completely irrationally -- I will buy a single Mega Millions ticket this week.

About those Predator drone attacks in Afghanistan and Pakistan

These attacks by unmanned aircraft may have succeeded in eliminating hundreds of dangerous militants, but the truth is that they also kill innocent civilians indiscriminately and in large numbers. According to the New America Foundation, one in four of those killed by drones since 2004 has been an innocent. The Brookings Institute, however, has calculated a much higher civilian-to-militant ratio of 10:1. Meanwhile, figures compiled by the Pakistani authorities suggest US strikes killed 701 people between January 2006 and April 2009, of which 14 were al-Qaida militants and 687 were civilians. That produces a hit rate of just 2% – or 50 civilians dead for every militant killed.

via guardian.co.uk

Obviously, the numbers are all over the place. But if the United States really is killing civilians in significant numbers in Afghanistan and Iraq, it could hardly do more to spread the ideologies of terrorism.

The Wall Street Journal has its death panel cake, eats it too

Here's the WSJ headline on its editorial about the revival of government-sponsored, voluntary end-of-life counseling sessions for seniors:

headline.png.png on Aviary.

Remember Sarah Palin's point? It was that the government was going to set up a bureaucracy that forced seniors to commit suicide so they wouldn't spend our precious health care resources. That was never, ever, ever true. It was either a lie or a gross misunderstanding on Palin's part, but it was never, ever true.

And the Wall Street Journal, once you get past the inflammatory headline, admits this!

Certain quarters on the political right are following the media's imagination and blasting Dr. Berwick's decision as the tangible institution of death panels. But the rule-making is not coercive and gives seniors more autonomy, not less.

In this case, fully a fifth of the U.S. population will be over age 65 inside of two decades, and whatever the other marvels of modern medicine, the mortality rate remains 100%. Advance care planning lays out the options and allows patients, in consultation with their providers and family members, to ensure that their future treatment is consistent with their wishes and moral values should they become too sick to decide for themselves.

So, wait: If end-of-life counseling sessions aren't anything like death panels, then how does can the WSJ headline say Palin "had a point"?

We wrote at the time that Sarah Palin's coinage was sensationalistic, but it was meant to illustrate a larger truth about a world of finite resources and infinite entitlement wants.

Hmm. I'm not sure that "larger truths" can be well-illustrated by fat, whopping mistruths compounded by sensationalistic headlines contradicted by the articles they lead. But maybe that's how the WSJ editorial board does business. 

Income inequality: Rein in the rich or lift up the poor?

In his post on income inequality, Mickey Kaus gets at another question that I want to get answered during my year of immersion reading: Is it better to restrain the income of the rich or to lift the incomes of the poor:

The question is then what makes Brazil Brazil. Is it wild riches at the top, or extreme poverty at the bottom? It seems pretty obvious, from what little I know of Brazil, that the problem is the bottom, not the top. We worry about Brazil because of the favelas, the huge impoverished shantytowns, and the crime coming out of them. 

I think Kaus is mostly right about this: I don't feel class-envy need to keep Bill Gates from earning another billion dollars or so. 

But...

The evidence suggests that -- recent circumstances notwithstanding -- the amount of actual wealth in America grew during the last 30 years. And that the people who were already rich did pretty much all of the accumulating of that wealth, while incomes for the rest of us stagnated during that time. But I have a hard time believing that the people in the Top 1 Percent who accumulated all that additional wealth did all the creating of all that additional wealth. I suspect that additional wealth was created, in part, on the labor and ideas and sweat of people further down the food chain who might not've shared proportionately in the rewards. (Although perhaps I'll be disabused of that notion as I keep up my reading.)

Assuming they're not simply shills for rich business interests, that should concern lovers of the free market: If hard work and productivity don't actually bring you additional income -- and that seems to be the case under the prevailing ideologies of the last 30 years -- then where's the incentive to hard work and increase productivity? 

Preserving the free market aside, though, I think this is one of my concerns about growing income inequality: It suggests that most of us aren't being rewarded for our part in creating wealth for others. So I'm concerned about the runaway wealth accumulation of the Top 1 Percent because it suggests that the system is badly broken in its distribution of the wealth it creates, not because I don't want people to make more money.

Denis Dutton, Arts & Letters Daily founder, RIP

Denis Dutton in 1998 created the well-read Arts & Letters Daily, which the New Yorker's Blake Eskin today calls "the first and foremost aggregator of well-written and well-argued book reviews, essays, and other articles in the realm of ideas. Denis was the intellectual’s Matt Drudge." Dutton, a philosophy professor at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand, has died after having cancer. He was the brother of the former Los Angeles booksellers Doug and Davis Dutton. The Chronicle of Higher Education, which bought Arts & Letters Daily in 2002, announced that the site will attempt to continue.

via laobserved.com

I've not much to add, except that Dutton's website was one of those places that made a guy from Kansas feel liberated by the Internet -- regular exposure to the world of ideas made my world bigger. I'm grateful to Dutton for his work. Rest in peace.