Meritocracy

Meritocracy, a society ruled by those possessing merit, is founded on the belief that merit is or should be the only measure of personal and social value. Meritocracy is a foundation belief of libertarians. The term first appeared in 1958, but the same notion was prevalent in the 19^th century when it was called social Darwinism. In the 21^st century it has again become a virulent doctrine heavily influencing every thing from economic policy to education.

There is much in our cultural history to suggest that merit has merit. If you look at the advances that human beings have made, especially in the last 400 years, they were discovered or initiated by a miniscule portion of the human beings that existed over that period. We, as a culture, express our belief that a person has a right to everything he or she creates or legally acquires, that is, he or she merits whatever they legally acquire. However, let us ask how merit functions as a social philosophy, which is what libertarians and their founder Ayn Rand intend.

Merit is one among a number of human virtues. One of the problems of any social philosophy founded on a human virtue is that the resulting society almost inevitably winds up as an authoritarian one, usually a dictatorship. Plato, for example, argued that knowledge was the primary human virtue. His proposed state, elucidated in his work entitled The Republic, eventuated in a monarchy ruled by a philosopher king. Merit, however, is but one among a number of human virtues such as empathy, generosity, etc. Additionally it can be found in some human beings combined with selfishness, a lust for power or incompetence in areas in which the meritorious person has no competence. In short merit, like many other human virtues, is a lousy criterion by which to allocate wealth and power. Yet merit along with a notion of unmitigated freedom is the rubric under which much of this nation's business and allocation of its resources are conducted. In these and other areas merit has replaced need and equality.

Let us now contrast what I shall call social virtues with these personal virtues. Among social virtues are equality, fairness and empathy. The libertarian and the massive political right wing condemn these virtues, often as socialism, as governing principles because, they say, they can lead to dictatorship. While this is true, it is also true of their free market capitalism, as witness Augusto Pinochet in Chile. Pinochet even had Milton Friedman, the father of free market capitalism, as an advisor. The point here is that any political economy can lead to dictatorship; hence, this criticism is irrelevant. The only way a democracy can avoid becoming a dictatorship is by constant citizen vigilance.

Among the insufficiencies of the libertarian view are the internal conflicts of an ethos predicated on notions as vague as "merit." Presumably, in the current libertarian view, the "merit" of Rupert Murdoch, the Koch brothers, Bill Gates, George Soros and take your pick of Wall Street financiers, say Timothy Geither, is that they all made a bundle of money far in excess of what they could personally need. I included George Soros , even though he supports liberal causes, because he made his millions gambling on the continuously changing values of the world's different currencies. On the basis of human need and well being this is one of the most deleterious uses of money, differing little from the Wall Street casino mentality that produced our current finance-generated recession. In 1921 Thorstein Veblen, one of the more gifted thinkers this country has produced, wrote a book titled The Engineers and the Price System. In this book Veblen explored the conflicts between what he called "business" and "industry." Business was solely interested in making money. Industry, in which he included workers, was interested in making things. Veblen pointed out that industry was often hampered in its efforts to make things, especially new things, by the profit concerns of business. A current example would be the Koch brothers fighting clean energy technology in order to protect their fossil fuel business. Libertarians have no way to choose between the merit of money making and the merit of production without going outside their sacred merit-based ethos to social values such as human welfare. Of course, what Veblen called industry in his day has been largely taken over by what he called the price system. Major industries became more interested in making money than making things. Hence through exporting our "making" capability to the cheap labor of China et. al., the major segment of our economy moved from manufacturing to finance.

Perhaps more basic to the failings of libertarianism is its destructiveness. Libertarianism, like ideologies in general, suffers from focusing on one human virtue to the exclusion of any others thereby creating the basis of an authoritarianism, which now characterizes our society, although it is generally disguised as the rule of money. When the Supreme Court deemed corporations to be persons with all the rights of a person, including supporting the political candidates of their choice, it was clear that we no longer had a democracy, we now have a plutocracy, which is the arbitrary rule of the many by the wealthy few. At a deeper level we are witnessing what happens, as it so often does, when personal virtues (the merit of making one's fortune) are made public virtues (this is the way society should be run.)

The bottom line in all this is that converting private virtues into public virtues leads almost inevitably to arbitrary government and is a dangerous and often unrecognized enemy of democracy. The individual values of freedom and merit are the two most prominent examples of what happens when individual values are made into public values. We need to understand what is happening when Murdoch and the Koch brothers and their Cato think tank push merit and freedom. In view of the propaganda we daily and voluminously face it is imperative that people understand that there is no virtue in wealth otherwise Donald Trump would be a paragon of virtue. It must be equally realized that excessive wealth is destructive of democracy and is a constant threat to the social fabric. We need to ask whose merit and whose freedom. We need, in short, to return to our social values and find expression for our private values within that social context lest our species perish from this earth.

Bob Newhard

Reflections on the Killing of Osama bin Laden

As I thought about the killing of Osama bin Laden I wondered what has happened to this society in the last 60 years. At the end of World War II we sought to reestablish the rule of law on a war-shattered planet. We brought to justice the malefactors in a war that had killed millions, wounded many more, and massively displaced populations. As heinous as the crimes were we did not summarily kill these practitioners of terror. With bin Laden we made no attempt to capture him and bring him to a trial in which the world could hear the evidence and judge the verdict. Instead we summarily killed him, even though others in the building were handcuffed. He was unarmed. We dumped his body into the ocean, an act that Muslim clerics condemn as against their religion and which, they fear, will incite further violence against the United States. In short, we had become our enemy. This was an act of barbarity that the America of 1946 did not tolerate, although we did tolerate incinerating thousands of innocents with the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

When World War II was over President Roosevelt sought to eliminate colonialism by establishing the United Nations in which all nations would have a voice. He tried to create a mechanism for peace. This time, Bush, one of the worst presidents we have ever had and his imperialist buddies sought to dominate the rest of the world. How could we be so retrograde?

One answer is that we are now dealing with terrorism, not states with defined borders and their armies. While this is true it is, in my view, insufficient as an explanation. We knew we were dealing with terrorism from the beginning, yet we said we were going to war with them. The fact that terrorism made all the difference between our behavior at the end of World War II and our behavior in killing bin Laden should have called forth a different approach. The fact that it did not betrays the worst sort of societal manipulation to lead us into the bloody morass we have created. The fact that 80 well trained men carried out the mission makes the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan starkly irrelevant in necessity and tragically calamitous in their results. Prior to the attacks on the Taliban and the uncalled for invasion of Iraq many people drew attention to the fact that the responsible reaction to the 9-11 attack was a global police action, which would have resulted in an operation much like the one that located him and could easily have captured him had not the Bush and now Obama administrations had other goals in mind. The Obama administration has said that they did not want a trial during which bin Laden could stir up additional enmity. The same could have been said of the Nazi criminals, but we deemed preserving the rule of law was more important than not stimulating continuing Nazi propaganda. Nazism did not die and still has many adherents in Germany,France and the United States. Similarly the summary killing of bin Laden will not staunch the animosity of many of those of his persuasion toward this country. Keeping Chalmers Johnson's articulation of blowback in mind, we have done nothing to reduce terrorism, much less understand it and seek a way to defuse it. For those of good will, stopping this misuse of terrorism to justify our own terrorism, e.g. drone attacks, must be an ongoing and accelerated process.

Bob Newhard

Democracy and Human Well Being

At a recent group discussion of public employee pensions I noticed that the issues revolved around who deserves what and who pays for it, not what is good for society. This, in my judgment, is another manifestation of the "me generation," still hanging on. While I understand the above concerns, they are misconstrued. Had the focus been on society rather then the differing individual claims, it could have been seen that the real problem is a gross maldistribution of wealth that is a social cancer that will kill our democracy if it is not redressed. As I have noted before, wealth is power and concentrated wealth is concentrated power. In democracy, which is based on distributed power, i.e. the citizens, such accumulations of wealth are deadly. A democracy demands a reasonably equitable distribution of wealth to insure the independence of the citizen. Jefferson understood this when he argued for a nation of small farmers whose farms would provide them with a measure of independence that the factory worker did not have in the industrial society preferred by Hamilton. As our nation became a manufacturing-dependent one, we had to find a surrogate for the family farm to control wealth concentration to a degree that it would not threaten democracy. We did this with a graduated income tax. We have, however, largely destroyed the effectiveness of the graduated income tax by capping that tax at a ridiculously low level, i.e. a million dollars in an era of multibillionaires and by granting massive tax breaks to the wealthy. We have also allowed tax havens for the wealthy in which massive amounts of profit provide no tax revenue at all.

This effort to persevere democracy by preventing excessive wealth accumulation has the added economic benefit of making the society's wealth more productive by insuring that said wealth will be spent on actual human needs and not on the disruptive, often disastrous, speculations of the very rich. Again, this becomes axiomatic without any concern for equity between individuals. The motive is the preservation of democracy.

As evidence that the pursuit of democracy, requiring an equitable distribution of wealth, leads directly to a public ethos of citizen well being we need only look at the state of our democracy and citizen well being under FDR's New Deal. Income taxes on the wealthiest among us were high, reaching slightly over 90% for a time after World War II. It was 70% as late as the 1970s. As a result we were able to afford the GI Bill allowing millions to get a college degree and subsidize loans so that returning veterans could afford their own home. This era also saw an unprecedented rate of building public schools and libraries and a high level of job security. When Ronald Reagan came to power, and since, we have seen the reverse. Money locked up in the coffers of the rich and their corporations does not go to improve the society as evidenced by a level of college tuition that ordinary people cannot afford, the closing and privatizing of public schools and homes being torn from people because of the shenanigans of an unregulated financial market, to mention just a few.

It is, to me, politically axiomatic that a democracy will far more likely target its resources on the well being of its citizens than will any other form of government. It is also axiomatic that the increasing destruction of democracy that we have seen since Ronald Reagan will move increasing amounts of wealth into the hands of ever fewer people, thereby weakening our society as a whole to the point of a dictatorship, known under George W. Bush as a unitary presidency. Having observed that wealth is power and concentrated wealth is concentrated power, I will add Lord Acton's observation that “Power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

Bob Newhard

A Bridge Over Troubled Waters?

We know that major disruptive trends are in the works. Global warming, overpopulation, food shortages, water shortages are the lot of humanity as it now exists. To these can be added the problems humanity causes itself, partly as it responds to these environmental pressures, e.g., war, racism, cultural antagonisms; and the multiple ways humans have of making these conflicts even worse. When one thinks of productively dealing with these matters, it is clear that we must start with those that humanity generates on its own. One of the greatest inhibitants to dealing effectively with our environmental problems lies in dealing with global human problems and fundamental to this is developing a global perspective, indeed a global mind set. Up to this point we have tried to deal with global environmental issue through our national and international institutions. However each of these has a primary interest in its particular national, economic, religious or cultural institutions. We keep preaching to ourselves that we must love diversity all the while rejecting it because we can find no effective functionality in it. What is needed is an overriding concern common to a large portion of humanity around which they can organize and exert their common energy.

I believe I may have seen the beginnings of such an effort in the uprisings in North Africa and the Middle East, especially in Egypt. First of all the youth of Cairo organized themselves into a major component of the protests. They are known as the April 6 movement. Second, they took full advantage of modern communication technology, especially Facebook and Twitter, as their vehicle of organizing. Third, they want a secular state. Fourth, a notable feature was that these young people were dressed in the ubiquitous blue jeans, not traditional or cultural apparel and there were far more women in their protests than those dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood. Finally, these young people reached beyond Egypt's border seeking solidarity. They e-mailed their support to the protesters in Madison Wisconsin. In short, here is a constituency capable of organizing on a global scale and with the energy to do so. All they need is a unifying global cause generated by a common fundamental issue.

A little investigation indicates that this issue may be jobs. A close examination of the cause of such vigorous youth protest in Egypt reveals that a want of jobs for youth was a fundamental driver for reform, especially among the well educated, yet unemployed. This issue also generated protest in the dockyards of Suez and in the steel and textile mills in other parts of Egypt. The issue of jobs is basic to youth throughout the world. In France Muslim youth rampaged burning cars and destroying storefronts a few years ago. In 2008 Greece experienced substantial youth riots for the same reason. In our own country rapidly increasing numbers of young people, even after they have married, are living at home because they cannot find jobs that would permit paying for their own home. In 2010 the United Nations issued a report on the global youth unemployment problem. Perhaps this quote from the report will indicate the enormity of the matter, "About 152 million young people, or a quarter of all the young workers in the world, are employed but remain in extreme poverty in households surviving on less than $1.25 a person a day in 2008, the report said" Because of automation, business consolidations and other factors, jobs can be expected to decrease on a per capita basis. This means the problem will be continuous and continuously worsening unless a solution is found, e.g. shortening the work period either in hours, days, or years, thereby consuming production efficiency in bettering human lives rather than making the rich richer.

Given the above factors and given the fact that people at this stage of life are at their most vigorous biological selves and given that they are more at home in today's electronic communications, it would not be surprising if the multitude of young people will find global common cause in their quest for jobs. If this were to eventuate there would globally be several hundred million people with a common bread and butter issue for the first time in human history. The youth of Egypt demonstrated the ability, the political perception, and the willingness to reach out to others undertaking protest despite the fact that they shared little in common culturally. Whether this eventuates or not, it demonstrates that humans comprising very diverse cultural backgrounds can reach out to others in an effort to resolve shared problems. In this the youth of this world may build the first span over the cultural, religious and national turbulence that roils and will continue to roil the earth's human population. In this the young may be demonstrating a way for humans to get past their cultural barriers to peace and on to an economically decent, personally rewarding life.

Bob Newhard

The Future as a Guide to the Present

Traditionally, we try to understand our situation by examining the past for cognates otherwise known as lessons of the past. However, as our future as a species becomes clearer, e.g. global warming, water and food shortage, etc. we may, I believe, profitably use the future that is increasingly being laid out before us, to understand the present. We can determine what our options are, what humans are likely to do if an option is exercised (history as well as our psychological and sociological knowledge can be helpful here) and therefore what we should do.

I ended my last column with the question " What next--George Orwell's 1984 followed by Aldous Huxley's Brave New World?" Both of these novels are depictions of how society may end up. 1984 describes a world in constant conflict and in particular a dictatorial society controlled by pervasive fear and lack of privacy.
Brave New World depicts a society in which citizens are biologically bred from selected embryos to optimally perform the tasks for which they are intended and therefore to be perfectly happy in carrying out their tasks. In the event they become overstressed and perhaps a source of societal discontent they may take a drug soma to induce pleasure and restore satisfaction.

In 1962 Huxley delivered an address titled The Ultimate Revolution at the University of California, Berkeley. A transcript of the talk may be found at http://www.infowars.com/articles/nwo/huxley_ultimate_revolution_032062.htmh/ In this lecture Huxley argued that the ultimate fate of human social/political organization favors the Brave New World scenario. While he greatly admired Orwell's work, he nonetheless believed that the cost of continuous control by the threat, fear and violence of 1984, when comared with that of breeding compliant humans in the first place, will eventually be too high for continued social survival. In either case, as I see it, the result would be dehumanizing as we now consider that term.

Both these scenarios of the future may appear far-fetched, although Orwell's may be much less so. However,they may be instructive as we attempt to gage our future as a species, assuming following blind emotion does not end us first. We have a plethora of precursors of Orwell's 1984. Its basic mode of operation is control through fear of violence and the intense surveillance of individual lives. The Stasi in East Germany, prior to the fall of its master the Soviet Union, was notorious for the pervasive spying on citizens by citizens, indeed parent by child. The autocratic regimes of North Africa and the Middle East practice this kind of domestic control. However, as we now see in those countries, people eventually rebel against such anti-social practices and, at the risk of death, rise in protest. The lesson here, I believe, is that humans can endure the internal stress of fear only so long before they erupt. In his lecture Huxley, citing Pavlov's experiments, notes that periodic release of this stress sinks deep into the human psyche and that doing this is why some dictatorships can be made to last longer than others.

In support of his own thesis Huxley notes the advances that had been made at the time of his lecture over 45 years ago, in both biological and psychological understanding of human beings. Today, especially with the advent of DNA understanding, people now talk of designer children, that is human beings bred to the parent's specifications by manipulating human cells at the DNA level. The lesson here is that we are at the point in which we are about to take charge of our own biological destiny. This, given what we know of the human tendency to self-aggrandizement and our socio/economic tendency to let that self-aggrandizement rise to power through our free enterprise system, is scary indeed.

While there is currently substantial resistance to modifying the human genome, as population wars continue, (for example, Catholics and Muslims trying to dominate through population majorities) some form of genetic or psychological modification may be necessary to eliminate this ancient form of rivalry and keep human population within earth's carrying capacity. In any event, if humans can do it, history demonstrates they will do it.

My last column was concerned substantially with modifying the human mind through psychology. That process will, in my judgment, favor Huxley's scenario for the same reason that his biologically managed society will prevail in the long run, namely, it is more economical to target the human brain than the human body.

With all the evidence that the world prefigured by Huxley is well underway in fact and even more so in potential and taking note of the abundant occasions for conflict latent in major global trends, it becomes relatively clear that human social organization is in its most perilous state since the last ice age.

Having seen in these last two posts how unprepared human emotions are for dealing with the huge, unprecedented, problems we face, the importance of our thinking ability becomes clear. If we are to survive the future with any semblance of what we now regard as human, we must think our way through. We have several hundred years of applied reason in science. We know the power of the reasoning brain. The current tragedy, however, is that when we most need to apply our powers of thought and investigation, we are rejecting thinking for feeling. We willingly substitute the fantasy of creationism for evolution. Our energy corporations, their political henchmen, and media servants, convince millions of our citizens that multiple and well-documented evidence of global warming due to our continuing uses of fossil fuels is a fable concocted to scare people into doing with less. This rejection of the most reliable source of information mankind has ever devised in favor of feel-good fantasy is, to my mind, the ultimate tragedy of the scientific revolution.

In this dire situation all that our species has going for it is its intellect. Those who care for the continued existence of our species have to make science and critical thinking the focus of a vigorous political effort because, unfortunately, truth itself cam no longer prevail against the massive self-deception that pervades this society and the massive amounts of wealth and power determined to keep it that way.

At a personal level we can exercise this faculty with the discipline it requires to take evidence seriously and revise our beliefs and actions as intelligence and evidence requires.

In what I have written in this and my previous column I have been hard on the emotions. The emotions obviously play a large role in what it means to be human. They provide us with some of the most fulfilling experiences of our lives. They make society possible. But we must always remember a basic prerequisite for mankind's continuing survival, namely, that thought validates emotion, not the other way around.

Bob Newhard

The Politics of the Emotions

One of the most inexplicable political events of recent history has been the ability of the Far Right to reverse its losses in two years despite the fact that their people caused the worst recession in the last 80 years and that recession was still in effect during the midterm elections which they handily won. Why did this happen and what have we to learn from it?

There are, no doubt, a number of things that played in to it, but the primary one in my judgment is the role that emotions and their manipulation now play in our elections. For example, we must have candidates with charisma, preferably celebrities. That is an emotional test for political viability. The issues chosen to create candidate electability must be "hot" issues or made to be hot. Making an issue hot is best done by those used to making any product hot, namely advertising professionals or, in short, Madison Avenue. The Republican power structure has, in itself, nothing to offer the ordinary citizen. Yet they succeeded in a context thought to assure their defeat. In this advertising saturated and driven economy the tools for emotional manipulation are well honed by Wall Street's well-paid colleagues on Madison Avenue.

Progressives, on the other hand have tried to persuade the electorate primarily with reason and evidence. For example, they cite the millions of children without health care; they cite the scientific evidence for global warming; they quantify the damage to and death of people due to pesticides, air and water pollution, etc. Progressives draw attention to the human suffering consequent on each of these issues hoping to arouse the voter's emotions enough to get the votes needed. It doesn't work.

The manipulation of the emotions on the other hand provides a rich field for fabrication, innuendo and half truths to cultivate and an abundance of votes to be harvested. A brief example of this type of politics can be seen in President Clinton's failed attempt to get a health-care bill through Congress. Even though it was heavily weighted with corporate rewards it failed to satisfy the pharmaceutical and health insurance greedheads. All they had to do to defeat the effort was place and repeat the "Harry and Louise" ad in which a husband and wife discussing the issue at home agreed that something should be done, but doubted this bill would do it. All Madison Avenue had to do was instill doubt, not disproof, to deprive the effort of the support it needed. In this case the emotion appealed to was that of domesticity and the trust that engendered. Nothing like the home fires to soften the harshness of facts.

As noted above, a more powerful demonstration of getting people to use their emotions to make societal decisions was the astonishing change in the electorate's views in the two years between the Democrat's sweeping election of 2008 and the 2010 midterm elections despite ongoing home and job loss and the glaring economic inequity made clearly evident by the disaster. Granted, it was the money of the Koch brothers, which bought the advertising skills of Dick Armey's FreedomWorks astroturf factory, that pulled it off, but why did so many change their point of view? There are certainly a number of reasons, but a very prominent one lay in the manipulations of human psychology.

Let me suggest the following scenario, which occurred to me as I pondered why was there such a pronounced effort to pin the label of "socialism", although honorable to me, on such an unlikely candidate as Barack Obama? How could it be made to stick on someone so obviously pro-business?

Given the deep hole the Far Right had dug for itself the political plotters began by assessing what they had to work with if the wealthy were not to lose their shirts. They knew the American public had been bombarded with anti-communist and anti-socialist propaganda for decades thereby creating an available mindset so pervasive and uncritical that people easily confused communism, socialism and even Nazism. The plotters also knew that the Obama administration might have to launch a massive public works program, a la FDR, to remedy the economic damage they had caused. Putting these two perceptions together would allow Democratic efforts to rebuild the economy through public works rather than private enterprise to be defeated by associating such efforts with labels Americans had been taught to hate. The tea party created for this purpose had no remedy for correcting the enormous damage done by conservatives. They did, however, bring forth an old bugaboo, that is an old cold war emotion, and they were able to elect Congresspeople and senators and return the party of disaster to a control of the lower house. Such is the power of the emotions when politically deployed.

But if that is all there is to it, this country and mankind are in the deepest of poo. The facts are out there and in the long run they will not be denied, whether it's global warming or effective health care for the increasing billions of this planet's population--each one of which can be a disease vector to cause the deaths of others. A major problem for progressives is how to make the facts more effective than the emotions in societal decision making.

To lend further dimension to the importance of this issue, I would draw your attention to the U.S. military Psychological Operations (PSYOP) command. This command was created in November, 1990. It says "The purpose of psychological operations (PSYOP) is to demoralize the enemy by causing dissension and unrest among his ranks, while at the same time convincing the local population to support American troops." Put this together with another of its objectives, to wit, "In addition to supporting commanders, psychological operations provide interagency support to other U.S. government agencies." and it becomes clear that there is nothing to prevent the use of this type of mind control on the American people. Indeed the military targeted Senators Carl Levin, Al Franken and others for this treatment in an effort to get their support for more funds and troops for the Afghan War. (Full story at http://blogs.citypages.com/blotter/2011/02/al_franken_targeted_by_us_army_psy-ops.php ) In many respects there is nothing new about the many means people have adopted to persuade others ranging from bribes to torture. Nor is there anything new about applying such measures against large numbers of people as is evidenced by the wide scale immersive application of advertising in this society. What is new is to see the military organized and funded to apply mental and emotional manipulation to those deemed to be the enemy and to understand the easy transfer of these techniques to the control of the domestic population via the Homeland Security Department. What next--George Orwell's 1984 followed by Aldous Huxley's Brave New World?

Bob Newhard

Freedom and Society, the Libertarian Example

In my last post I argued that absolute freedom was the freedom of the jungle, in which the top predators deprived the rest of the jungle's inhabitants, including humans, of their freedom through fear and death and that humans banded together to create their freedom. However, some may say that we humans are now the dominant predator and therefore we no longer need to band together. In this simple observation a good deal of our social and economic behavior is encapsulated. Our technology has increasingly allowed us to be independent of each other or seemingly so. Robert Putnam, in his book Bowling Alone, has pointed out some of the social consequences of this phenomenon.

However, we still have the dominant predator to fear, it is us or at least some of us. As an example let us consider libertarianism as a philosophy of predation.

Libertarians would have us believe that freedom is an individual right and, ironically, that society should guarantee it, which is obviously another way of saying society bestows freedom upon us. This appeals to the American mindset which tends to be simplistic and given, more than some other societies, to ideological solutions to complex problems. However, as in the jungle, the freedom of the powerful is obtained at the expense of the freedom of the less powerful. A recent and glaring example is the Supreme Court's decision that corporations are humans and can use their massive wealth to pursue their political objectives.

The Internet is replete with articles associating Supreme Court justices Scalia and Thomas as well as Alito with libertarianism. I found the following quote in an article on theses allocations titled The Libertarian Fantasy on the Supreme Court. The quote gives some historical and philosophical scope to the libertarian misrepresentation of freedom: "There are two dimensions to the gun lobby's individual right to gun ownership. One is the libertarian fantasy that we reverse the process described by John Locke in The Second Treatise of Government, declare individual sovereignty, dissolve political community, and return to the State of Nature which is the state of anarchy. The libertarian fantasy mixes with other political ideologies, across the political spectrum, and expresses a defeatist retreat from political life." The complete article can be found at http://www.potowmack.org/997cthom.html. One consequence of libertarian influence is thus the legal baptism of corporate personhood and the unleashing of corporate wealth to subvert the democratic process.

Libertarian influence on our economic policy has been profound. Milton Friedman was the father of trickledown economics in which the rich get the economic benefits first and the rest of society get whatever trickles down after their orgy of greed. Friedman, an economics professor at the University of Chicago (think Obama?), was an economic advisor to Peruvian dictator August Pinochet, and a mentor of Alan Greenspan, a fellow libertarian.

Greenspan expressed "shock" when our Great Recession occurred because he expected the market to correct itself as Friedman had taught him. This is what happens when ideologues address the real world with all its variables. The "law" of the self-correcting market is analogous to Marx's necessity of history in its blind adherence to doctrine. If there is one pronounced tendency in human affairs it is applying certainty, whether of the arbitrariness of morality (think the politics of values) or the arbitrariness of ideology to the vicissitudes of reality. It is a recipe for disaster, human suffering and death. This is the ultimate folly of libertarianism as it was for Soviet communism.

Bob Newhard