In Defense of Rand

Recently Rand has said that he’s not going to end the war on drugs. This has caused a barrage of Paul bashing by libertarians. I want to try and sway libertarians back into Paul’s camp.

Before libertarians unfollow me or bash me, let me explain what I am NOT saying: I am not saying that Rand Paul is a libertarian. I am not saying that I don’t disagree with him on ending the war on drugs. Hell, I am not even saying that I like him. When he first came onto the scene of politics, I didn’t like him. I still don’t particularly like him. However, Rand Paul doesn’t need to be a libertarian to have some decent beliefs. Nor should your entire focus be on him ending the war on drugs. Nor do you even need to LIKE him.

I want whomever is reading this to do a little thought experiment.. I want you to imagine if India had acted like many libertarians have before 1991 when economic liberalization occurred. What if Indians refused to vote for Narasimha Rao because he didn’t fully support capitalism. After all, India is still far from a capitalistic country. Rather, they are a mixed economy. They still have many regulations in place. Now make that comparison with how libertarians are acting today. Rand Paul doesn’t want to end the war on drugs, and libertarians don’t like that. That’s fine because I agree with libertarians on that. The war on drugs SHOULD be ended, but libertarians are not interested in making small steps forward. This is the mistake that libertarians make. Rather than take the incremental steps like India took for making a more liberal economy, libertarians want all or nothing. They refuse a MORE libertarian society because they want a PURE libertarian society. This is a mistake because it’s not going to happen immediately. It is a mistake because incremental steps must be taken in order to get a libertarian society. Evolution happens slowly. Ideas change slowly.

Now the libertarian might say, “well, how is Rand Paul any different from any other Republican?” That’s a good question, and is something that libertarians should ask about any Republican. Luckily, in the same piece that Reason put out to cause all of this unnecessary controversy, Reason writes that Paul wants to reduce sentences for people caught with drugs, especially the mandatory minimums which expands the criminal code to include more crimes and does away with federal parole (funny enough it’s the same author that wrote Paul wants to reform mandatory minimums that wrote the article that got everyone upset about Paul). Paul teamed up with Pat Leahy, a well known Democrat, to try and pass this bill. This wasn’t 2 or 3 years before he’s making his presidential bid. This was in March of 2013. I don’t know of many, if any, other Republican Senators are doing this.

Another thing to remember, though, is that, according to the same author that caused all of this controversy, only 214k, out of the 6.98 million people locked up overall, are in a federal prison. Out of the 214k people, roughly 100k of them are drug offenders (not necessarily nonviolent drug offenders, simply just drug offenders). If he is correct about this, that leaves more than 6.5 million people are in state jails. According to the ACLU, half of the people in state jails are nonviolent drug offenders. This is important because we see that drug reform needs to happen at a state level rather than federal level.

There is some good news. For the first time in a long time, marijuana is legal in a few states. What if libertarians had used the same kind of reasoning as they are with Paul against Massachusetts whom only legalized medicinal marijuana? Hardly any libertarian would say that it was not a step in the right direction or that it should never have even happened. The point is public opinion on many of these social issues are becoming more libertarian. Social issues and freedom are just as important as economic freedom. There is absolutely no doubt about that, but because social issues are becoming more liberalized, it may be time to pay more attention to economic issues. Paul is still fine on economic freedom. So what is the last remaining argument against Paul?

“Paul is not a libertarian!” Well, that’s a terrible argument. In that same manner, neither is Ron Paul or Gary Johnson. Libertarianism does not coincide well with politics because it is the anti-politic.

The war on drugs needs to be ended. There is no doubt about that. It wastes too much money, it causes cartels which in turn causes violence in other countries, and the mindset it creates for people who depend on government to tell them what is good and what is evil in turn creates laws that hurt innocent people. The war on drugs is a terrible, evil thing. However, if we cannot end it, we should at least take a step in the right direction. Much like India did with their liberalization policy in 1991. I don’t think any libertarian would argue that India should never have become a mixed economy simply because it wasn’t purely capitalistic. Furthermore, the drug reform on a state level is certainly just as, if not more, important than the federal level.

Paul is not perfect. However, there is no perfect libertarian. There is also no perfect politician. Libertarianism will only take hold if we make incremental steps. As catchy as a phrase might be like, “we run before we walk,” there is an even truer catch phrase that libertarians might think about adopting, “lead by example.” Libertarians like theory. This is good because so do I. However, instead of trying to hypothesize of what a libertarian society coud look like, perhaps it would be more effective in winning the hearts over of other people if we actually began to implement incremental steps to a MORE libertarian society. That way we can point to the successes of freedom and win the hearts over of all the naysayers.

Michael Huemer, the professor of philosophy at the University of Colorado, Boulder, argues that people have a prima facie (at first value) right to immigrate where ever people please (including the United States).

There are a few audio problems occasionally so please don’t blare this while listening on your headphones. I don’t recommend blaring it at all.

From your experience, what is the most important argument for government?

I’d like to write about it! Let me know.

First World governments’ immigration policies effectively forbid international trade in labor.[3] The world’s poor cannot legally work in a First World country without that government’s permission. For most current residents of the Third World, this permission is almost impossible to obtain. If you’re an unskilled worker with no relatives in the First World, you have to endure Third World poverty, win the immigration lottery, or break the law. Contrary to popular opinion, moreover, illegal immigration is far from easy. The U.S.–Mexico border is almost two thousand miles long, but Mexicans still pay years of salary to coyotes to get across. Smugglers’ fees for more remote nations are higher still.

If First World governments simply respected everyone’s right to accept job offers from willing employers, most of the world’s poor wouldn’t need charity. They could take care of themselves. Any able-bodied person living in poverty would be free to sell his labor to the highest bidder in the world. Instead of paying years of income to coyotes, the global poor could migrate for the cost of a bus or boat ticket. Instead of crossing the border in fear to compete for illegal jobs, the global poor could cross the border openly to compete for any job they’re qualified to do.

Wouldn’t this simply drive First World wages down to Third World levels? No. Basic economics tells us that trade barriers don’t just redistribute wealth; they destroy wealth. Confining able-bodied workers to the Third World is like confining agriculture to Antarctica. Standard economic estimates say that open borders would roughly double world output.[4] While trade liberalization never benefits absolutely everyone, free migration would be great for the world and great for the world’s poor.

— Bryan Caplan in his reply to Nicole Hassoun.

Many find the anarcho-capitalist vision a troubling one, chiefly due to a distrust of corporations. I will just make one suggestion for reflection. Imagine that someone proposed that the key to establishing social justice and restraining corporate greed was to establish a very large corporation, much larger than any corporation hitherto known—one with revenues in the trillions of dollars. A corporation that held a monopoly on some extremely important market within our society. And used its monopoly in that market to extend its control into other markets. And hired men with guns to force customers to buy its product at whatever price it chose. And periodically bombed the employees and customers of corporations in other countries. By what theory would we predict that this corporation, above all others, could be trusted to serve our interests and to protect us both from criminals and from all the other corporations? If someone proposed to establish a corporation like this, would your trepidation be assuaged the moment you learned that every adult would be issued one share of stock in this corporation, entitling them to vote for members of the board of directors? If it would not, is the governmental system really so different from that scenario as to explain why we may trust a national government to selflessly serve and protect the rest of society?

— Michael Heumer in his essay, “The Problem of Authority” in which he defends libertarian anarchism by appealing to common sense morality. As mentioned before, he is second to none when it comes to libertarian philosophy. His book is available, although the price is steep. It’s well worth the read, though.

Terrible, just terrible.

Anyone else get a little queasy browsing through political affiliation tabs like democrat, republican, and even libertarian?

I highly recommend this to EVERY ONE. You don’t need deontology or utilitarianism to argue for libertarian anarchism. Michael Huemer is by far the most enlightening libertarian philosopher that has ever existed (in my opinion). If you cannot buy his book, at least watch this video. So happy that this exists. Again, better than Rothbard, better than Friedman.

In short, what the living wage is really about is not living standards, or even economics, but morality. Its advocates are basically opposed to the idea that wages are a market price—determined by supply and demand, the same as the price of apples or coal. And it is for that reason, rather than the practical details, that the broader political movement of which the demand for a living wage is the leading edge is ultimately doomed to failure: For the amorality of the market economy is part of its essence, and cannot be legislated away.

— Paul Krugman

What is remarkable, however, is how this rather iffy result has been seized upon by some liberals as a rationale for making large minimum wage increases a core component of the liberal agenda—for arguing that living wages “can play an important role in reversing the 25-year decline in wages experienced by most working people in America” (as this book’s back cover has it). Clearly these advocates very much want to believe that the price of labor—unlike that of gasoline, or Manhattan apartments—can be set based on considerations of justice, not supply and demand, without unpleasant side effects. This will to believe is obvious in this book: The authors not only take the Card-Krueger results as gospel, but advance a number of other arguments that just do not hold up under examination.

— Paul Krugman in 1998

…you might argue that even if the current minimum wage seems low, raising it would cost jobs. But there’s evidence on that question — lots and lots of evidence, because the minimum wage is one of the most studied issues in all of economics. U.S. experience, it turns out, offers many “natural experiments” here, in which one state raises its minimum wage while others do not. And while there are dissenters, as there always are, the great preponderance of the evidence from these natural experiments points to little if any negative effect of minimum wage increases on employment.

Why is this true? That’s a subject of continuing research, but one theme in all the explanations is that workers aren’t bushels of wheat or even Manhattan apartments; they’re human beings, and the human relationships involved in hiring and firing are inevitably more complex than markets for mere commodities. And one byproduct of this human complexity seems to be that modest increases in wages for the least-paid don’t necessarily reduce the number of jobs.

What this means, in turn, is that the main effect of a rise in minimum wages is a rise in the incomes of hard-working but low-paid Americans — which is, of course, what we’re trying to accomplish.

Finally, it’s important to understand how the minimum wage interacts with other policies aimed at helping lower-paid workers, in particular the earned-income tax credit, which helps low-income families who help themselves. The tax credit — which has traditionally had bipartisan support, although that may be ending — is also good policy. But it has a well-known defect: Some of its benefits end up flowing not to workers but to employers, in the form of lower wages. And guess what? An increase in the minimum wage helps correct this defect. It turns out that the tax credit and the minimum wage aren’t competing policies, they’re complementary policies that work best in tandem.

So Mr. Obama’s wage proposal is good economics. It’s also good politics: a wage increase is supported by an overwhelming majority of voters, including a strong majority of self-identified Republican women (but not men). Yet G.O.P. leaders in Congress are opposed to any rise. Why? They say that they’re concerned about the people who might lose their jobs, never mind the evidence that this won’t actually happen. But this isn’t credible.

For today’s Republican leaders clearly feel disdain for low-wage workers. Bear in mind that such workers, even if they work full time, by and large don’t pay income taxes (although they pay plenty in payroll and sales taxes), while they may receive benefits like Medicaid and food stamps. And you know what this makes them, in the eyes of the G.O.P.: “takers,” members of the contemptible 47 percent who, as Mitt Romney said to nods of approval, won’t take responsibility for their own lives.

Eric Cantor, the House majority leader, offered a perfect illustration of this disdain last Labor Day: He chose to commemorate a holiday dedicated to workers by sending out a message that said nothing at all about workers, but praised the efforts of business owners instead.

The good news is that not many Americans share that disdain; just about everyone except Republican men believes that the lowest-paid workers deserve a raise. And they’re right. We should raise the minimum wage, now.

— 

PAUL KRUGMAN, writing in the New York Times, “Raise That Wage” (via inothernews)

Data trumps theories and deduction every time. It’s fine to argue that “the effect of A is B” … unless there is data showing that your argument is not correct. At that point, you need to change your argument or lose the respect of anyone who cares about facts.

(via wateringgoodseeds)

For every person who has said I’m a dumb lefty who doesn’t get how money works: I’m backed up by a guy with a Nobel prize in economics. Oh, and all of those real-world studies he mentioned. No biggie.

(via stfuconservatives)

Besides the actual content that is very, very wrong (I’ll explain why in a second), the very fact that you had made your decision before looking at the facts gives you no credibility whatsoever. The best you could have made was a ethical, value judgment. You pretend that you made an economic judgment.

As for the nobel prize in economics comment, James Buchanan, a Nobel Prize winner whom is much more notorious wrote:

no self-respecting economist would claim that increases in the minimum wage increase employment. Such a claim, if seriously advanced, becomes equivalent to a denial that there is even minimum scientific content in economics, and that, in consequence, economists can do nothing but write as advocates for ideological interests. Fortunately, only a handful of economists are willing to throw over the teaching of two centuries; we have not yet become a bevy of camp-following whores

As well as other much more respected nobel prize winners such as Milton Friedman, and Friedrich Hayek.