Well, liberals don’t care about George Will’s opinions.
And, apparently, Washington conservative don’t care, either; or at least nowhere near as much as they do about TV preachers’ opinions.
Face it: Intellectual Conservatives are as disconnected from the Republican leadership as liberals are.
Well, I wasn’t arguing the premise in the OP. I was specifically arguing about the interpretation of Leviathan above.
Wesley Clark: It’s funny that your argument against my points is that they are ‘conjecture’. OF COURSE they are. The entire argument is a hypothetical! When you say something like, “There’s no way libertarianism could have worked here”, then you open yourself up to examples of how a libertarian society might have dealth with this. To dismiss them as ‘conjecture’ is pointless. Rather, you need to explain, with counter-examples or logic, why my examples are flawed.
Your experience (or your interpretation of it) is incorrect.
As I’m sure you know, liberterians take the name of that philosophy from the latin word for freedom. Libertarians start with the assumptiont that freedom is an end in itself, and the sole purpose of government is to secure freedom for it’s citizens.
There certainly is an argument to be made that government agencies tend to be ineficient, but that’s not central to the libertarian idea. Nor do libertarians assume that people are always rational.
You are criticizing a strawman explanation of libertarian ideas, I’m afraid. You might want to read up on what Libertarianism is actually about if you are going to discuss it on this board.
#5- why on earth would a private company build the levees? How could they possibly make a profit? Who would they charge? Just like the classic example, who builds the lighthouses in Libertaria? Who would build Fifth Avenue in New York?
#6- pie in the sky. Sure, a private company could contract out disaster relief. But a disaster the scope of Katrina would bankrupt it in hours. Once the company is bankrupted, who steps in?
There is not now, has never been, and never will be a libertarian nation on the face of the earth. Just why do you suppose that is?
I have. Libertarianism is pro privitization, privitization favors profit, and only the wealthy can offer profit and profit does not necessarily equal good short or long term planning. My personal belief is that since many of those who got it the worst in NO were poor that things would be worse under libertarianism and privitization. Also I do not know libertarian perspectives on the environment, but global warming may have made Katrina worse. Also, the example I posted earlier about John Stossel is an example of gov. intervention. If people get cheap flood insurance they don’t need FEMA help, this saves money. If there was no FEMA help it may cost even more, so inefficiencies keep raising the costs.
The only way I think libertarian views would’ve helped is if the companies that provided flood insurance to the NO area had a voice in building levees and river walls to prevent floods as floods would’ve cost them billions. Had they had a voice they might have done more to encourage levees to be built.
Not a private company like this one, I hope.
The pharmaceutical analogy still holds as an example of assuming libertarianism and the pro-profit privitization it creates is a better way of life. Companies create unnecessary 4th and 5th treatments for baldness or switch an atom in a molecule of prozac to put it back on patent for wealthy western countries while millions of poor people are dying from preventable diseases. Since the poor were hit hardest I tend to think in libertarianism that things would be even worse. The wealthy and upper middle class areas probably would’ve been fine if flood insurance companies built the levees, but the poor can’t afford flood insurance and/or their claims would be minor so building levees to protect them would’ve been largely unimportant to a for profit company. Only those who can offer profit get help, and the poor largely can’t do that. Either they can’t afford flood insurance, or they’d buy crappy flood insurance so no effort to protect them would’ve been made.
Actually, after seeing some of the questions that are being asked in other threads around here (e.g., “Was the NO disaster caused by ‘welfare state’ attitudes?” “Do Bell Curve racial differences in intelligence exist? If so, what does that imply for the NO disaster?”), I’m starting to think that Katrina’s main effect on conservative philosophy will be to make anti-black/anti-poor rhetoric temporarily respectable again. Bleah.
I think when people reflect on who bears the blame for the shortcomings of the recovery effort, they will be thinking less like George Will, and more like Winston Churchill:
Harry Truman said it better:
Any attempt to spin responsibility away from the White House is whistling past the graveyard, and I don’t think it will fly.
Only the wealthy can offer profit? Gee, I guess that’s why Wal-Mart is such a success – their relentless drive to cater to the limousine set.
Flood insurance is very expensive, and I doubt the poor in New orleans could’ve afforded it. So I don’t see why for profit companies would care about what happened to them anymore than pharmacetical companies care about malaria.
Walmart caters to several economic classes, not just the poor so that is not a good example because by ‘wealthy’ I do not mean millionaires, I just mean people above a certain limit (maybe household incomes of 30k or so). When my brother & his wife made 20k a year they shopped at walmart and when they made 100k a year they shopped there.
It’s worked for them in the past; why not now?
Are the CIA classed as “conservative”?
Whether they are or not, it would appear that extreme climate events merely serve up a new load of enemies for conservatives to advantageously demonise, and the electorate will fall for it yet again in 2009.
I don’t think the public will stand for it. With 9/11 I didn’t really care that the gov. tried to avoid any/all responsibility. But with this we had tons of warnings about the levees breaking, and FEMA’s management was grossly incompetent and FEMA is headed by a crony with no real world experience. I will be enraged if the bush admin tries to avoid any/all responsibility for this and just gives medals to everyone.
That may be true in the broader meaning of liberalism and conservatism.
However, roles have reversed between the two parties in my lifetime with respect to prudence and pessimism. For a generation, the Democratic party has been the party to support if you want somebody in charge who’s aware that things can go wrong, and wants to be ready just in case; and the GOP is the party of massive riverboat gambles, like the Reagan and Bush II tax cuts, the war in Iraq, and the failure to do anything serious about gasoline conservation. And on an ongoing basis, the Dem party is the party of spending those comparatively small amounts of money to deal with problems before they get big; the GOP is the party of cutting spending where they can’t ladle serious contracts to their donors.
I’ve always wanted a government that was prudent and pessimistic; that’s why I left the GOP in 1980, and it’s why I became a Dem during the Clinton years.
How does that differ from a typical Will column?
The guy’s been coasting on reputation for a couple of decades. Can someone take both Broder and Will out behind the barn and shoot them? It seems to be what one needs to do to retire an incompetent columnist from the nation’s editorial pages. It’s like they’ve got tenure or something.
That’s gonna be awfully difficult. The GOP slime machine has set an exceedingly high standard in recent years. Can you say “Swift Boat”?
Well, I agree that Will has been coasting on his rep for a long time. No doubt.
But this bit:
Urgh. It’s always been my impression that politics arises from the desire to control the actions of others. It’s the interaction of competing standards of behavior that most players wish to impose on others. Dress is up as ‘security’ or ‘social norms’ or ‘fairness’ or whatever…in the end it’s about controlling others.
That’s the dirty secret of the political process.
The news that the crust of civilization is thin and perishable is really going to terrorize the generations that I’ve taught that have lived in the projects or friends that live from paycheck to paycheck.
The Lefties at the Guardian seem to understand the exact same thing
The recognition that the veneer of civilisation is thin is not unique to left or right - the arguments about who has the best method of preserving it are not new.