Hildegarde

Yes, it’s my older son’s birthday, and he is getting what he expressly requested–a day in which he does not have to leave the house, no party or singing, a chocolate cake, and control of the one television in this house so that he can watch his Burns and Allen Vol 1 and 2 collection all day.  The Burns and Allen thing was his main Christmas present.

I like Burns and Allen, too, of course, and the episodes on these two discs are fascinating.  A number of them aired before I was born, and if you think commercials intrude into your television watching these days, you really need to see some of this.  Carnation Evaporated Milk sponsored the Burns and Allen Show, and Carnation Evaporated Milk took up a good broad whack of every single plot they aired.  That’s the plot, not the commercial time.

Oh, and at one point, you get to see the CBS logo as it was before the eye.  They made a really good decision with the eye.

But that said–back to the issue at hand.  I apologize for even more typographical errors than usual, but I can only partially see the screen.  My office is in a sunroom and the sun is creating so much glare on the screen, it might as well be blank.

But, to get back to the business at hand.

Cathy says that personal liberty may be what I’m concerned with, but the libertarians she knows talk more about getting all regulation off business and (possibly) what a utopia we’d have if we could just leave everything to the market.

Every libertarian I know talks almost nonstop about personal regulation (seat belt laws, motorcycle and bicycle helmet laws), and is a libertarian largely because they DON’T think utopias are possible–or anything else but cover stories for attempts at total power.

The fact that this is not what CNN–never mind MSNBC and Fox–say libertarians care about doesn’t change the fact that it is what they care about. 

The best libertarian magazine out there–Reason–spends at least half of every issue on personal liberty issues, has an entire department devoted to highlighting the latest outrages of the regulatory state (no, NOT business regulation,  Things like being told you can’t receive disability payments for a loved one you take care of at home unless you join a government employee’s union.)

Granted, the Libertarian Party isn’t, and that’s a hash–but no, they don’t get to claim the name libertarian any more than the Natural Law Party gets to change the meaning of the term “natural law.”

Second, I’ve read Mike’s new article, and I have a couple of notes.

1) Mike may or may not remember, but I was saying many of the same things about maximizing shareholder value back on the OLD Sechum-L, and I do mean the old one, when it was still owned by the Council for Secular Humanism.

2) We’ve done it again. 

I posted a very direct, completely unambiguous challenge–let’s talk about PERSONAL liberty, it’s why I’m not a registered Democrat any more (okay, I’m also not a registered Republican)–

And I might as well have been talking to air.  There’s no response of any kind. 

So I’ll repeat–articles of this kind are completely irrelevant to the main question, the main criteria by which I and lots and lots and lots of my fellow libertarians decide to vote for a candidate, or not vote at all.

So, let me ask the question one more time:

If you want me to vote for candidates who will support expanded government regulatory powers over ANYthing:

1) what are you willing to do to insure that such expanded powers will not ALSO expand the powers of the state to insist that I wear a seatbelt whether I want to or not, that OSHA can come into my home and inspect my office and then demand that it conform not to my comfort but to their notions of what’s “safe’ for me or not,  that my children be put on a course of Ritalin even though I think the fact that we don’t know what it will mean down the road to keep a kid on drugs from the time he’s 6 to the time he’s 60?  A constitutional amendment expressly forbidding these kinds of regulations–including the ones “for the children” or “for the elderly”?  The immediate dismantling of the government departments that now make and administer these regulations?  What?

2) What are you willing to do to put an end to the practice–endemic since the New Deal–of government departments and agencies being able to issue regulations which have the force of law, and return the lawmaking power entirely to elected representatives who can be held accountable for their decisions at the next election?

3) What are you willing to do to require anybody who issues any laws or regulations to do so based on clear and objective criteria and not on subjective feelings, intutions, or judgments?  In other words, requiring standards such as “putting your hand on your subordinate’s breasts without her consent is sexual harrassment” rather than “any words or actions that create a hostile enivornment are sexual harrassment.”

4) If you’re NOT willing to do any of the above–or you try to fob me off with ‘that’s not important, we’ll get to that later”–why SHOULDN’T I assume that your major purpose is to increase the regulation of my private life, since, without such precautions as above, that will be the INEVITABLE result of the regulatory state you install?

I don’t vote Republican, for a number of reasons I’ve mentioned before on this blog.

But I do know a number of people who hold their noses and vote Republican on the simple–and completely logical–assumption that if the Republicans “starve the beast,” the kinds of agencies who make the kind of regulations they don’t like will have a much harder time functioning.

Cathy wants to know how to institute a safety net for people who can’t take care of themselves while getting rid of the free riders–it can’t be done, but we CAN get rid of the learned helplessness, by not treating such people as helpless.

I’ll go back to the thing about limiting such programs to things like a negative income tax–you eliminate the social workers and a lot of the need to prevaricate at the same time.

As for what checks and balances are necessary to protect against crony capitalism–the end of subjective regulations whose meaning is whatever a bureaucrat or regulatory board says they are would go a long way to achieving that.

That way, the regulation won’t mean one thing for the friends of the government and another for the outsiders–it will mean the same for everybody.

I’d also end the “public private partnerships” thing. 

The government should not be bailing out businesses, giving start up money (re Solyndra) to its favorite projects, or any of the rest of that.  Nothing is too big to fail.  Insure the deposits, pay off the depositers up to (but not beyond–see S&L mess) the statutory amount, and let them fall into the see.

Then–make it an ironclad rule that if a law is passed, everybody has to follow it.  EVERYBODY.  No exemptions for Congress (see OSHA regulations and insider trading laws, Social Security and Obama’s new health insurance regs), no “waivers” for anybody.

If there’s a program the country is supposed to participate in, then it had better be the WHOLE country.  The waivers and exemption thing is crony government, and it’s as bad as–or worse–than crony capitalism.

This, by the way, is what “all men are created equal means.”  Not that we all have some ‘right” to a vague “standard of living” that somehow just like everybody elses, or at least close enough to–but that we are (should be) all equal before the law. 

I really do not care, at all, about “income inequality.”

I do care about this stuff.

Whoosh.

I ought to at least consider the possibility that the kind–okay, he’s 25–may want something more for dinner than that cake.