Reflections  

Unequally yoked — Brink Lindsey of the Cato Institute argued on the New Republic’s web page Dec. 4 that libertarians could drop their electoral alignment with conservatives and have “a new fusionist alliance” with progressives. This would not be just on drugs, civil liberties, presidential power — the easy stuff — but on economic policy as well.

Lindsey allowed that it would be difficult, but said it could be done. He proposed, as an example, that in exchange for private accounts within Social Security, libertarians would accept unemployment insurance, Medicaid, and welfare. This could be done, he said, if there were “some kind of reconciliation between Hayek and Rawls” performed “at the philosophical level.”

And I thought: You’re going to get left-liberals to accept Social Security private accounts? I wonder what they have to say about that? There were several dozen replies on the blog. No progressives agreed to Social Security private accounts. And why would they? On Nov. 7, they won. Said a blogger under the handle “spoonman”: “There aren’t very many people who vote libertarian, so there’s little reason to form a coalition with you people.” Said another, posting as “jet”: “Mr. Lindsey looks like he’s looking for a wagon to hitch his horses to now that his conservative comrades-in-arms won’t be in power for a while.” Yes, that is what it looked like. — Bruce Ramsey

Kind of blue — “Stan Jones, a Montana libertarian widely known for his peculiar blue skin, can arguably be said to have recast the political complexion of the U.S. Senate, turning it from Republican red to the same color as his face,” reported the Washington Post after the fall election.

Running as the most antigovernment candidate in the field in the race for the U.S. Senate, Libertarian Party candidate Jones received 10,324 votes, while Republican candidate Conrad Burns lost to Democrat Jon Tester by only 2,565 votes.

Based on the theory that real libertarian candidates pull more votes away from libertarian-talking Republicans than from high-taxing, income-redistributing Democrats, Mr. Burns would still have his job and the Republicans wouldn’t have lost the Senate if Stan Jones hadn’t tossed his hat into the ring.

That’s an assumption that seems to be especially valid with Jones, “a quirkily conservative kind of libertarian,” as the Post describes him, “opposed to abortion and same-sex marriage” — positions that play well with wide segments of the GOP.

During the senatorial debate on Oct. 9, Jones warned that “the secret organizations of the world power elite” are leading the United States into a “one-world communist government” where we’ll have “a new constitution modeled after the Soviet Union’s constitution.” Again, that’s a position that rings true with certain elements in the Republican Party.

As far as the blue face, a shade described by Washington Post reporter Blaine Harden as “an ashen blue-gray, more suited to the undertaker’s slab than the politician’s stump,” the change in complexion came about as Jones “accidentally turned his skin blue by drinking a homemade antibiotic laced with silver.”

Jones blames his move from Seattle to Bozeman for turning his skin blue. He says he had no trouble when he was using Seattle’s tap water to make his “colloidal silver” antibiotic by sending an electrical charge into two silver wires in a glass of tap water. He started doing that in 1999, because he was afraid that antibiotics would become unavailable after the Y2K computer crash. Bozeman’s tap water, unfortunately, has a different chemical content from Seattle’s. The brew that Jones concocted gave him argyria, a rare condition that permanently stained his skin.

Now, blue or not, Jones is happy, referring to himself as “the guy who changed the country.” There appears to be no guilt about being the spoiler, the guy who put the traditionally big-government, non-libertarian politicians back in power. “Republicans spend and borrow, Democrats tax and spend,” he says. “Whoever is in there — the government grows and grows.”

He’s got that right. The national debt was about $4 trillion when the “Republican revolution” started in 1994. By the time of Bush’s first inauguration in 2001, after six years of Republicans running the spending in Congress, the national debt had climbed to nearly $6 trillion. By the time of Bush’s second inauguration (2005), the national debt had increased to $7.6 trillion. On the day of this year’s midterm elections, it was up to $8.6 trillion.

Ron Paul warns that current trends aren’t sustainable: “If present trends continue, by 2040 the entire federal budget will be consumed by Social Security and Medicare. The only options for balancing the budget would be cutting total federal spending by about 60% or doubling federal taxes.”

By then, tons of people will be sticking wires in their water. — Ralph R. Reiland

Dubya the Hurricane Slayer — The great American philosopher Charles Peirce characterized logic as the ethics of belief. His subtle insight was that just as we should be prepared to allow others to act as we do, so we should allow others to argue or reason as we do. If you really believe that you’ve proven someone’s views on (say) foreign policy to be wrong by attacking their personal failings, then you ought to be willing to see the same reasoning applied to you.

I think of this when I reflect on the media attacks on President Bush back in the hurricane season of 2005. We experienced a large number of hurricanes, several hitting the U.S. with devastating effect. Led by the ever tedious Al Gore, liberal commentators blamed Bush for the hurricanes: if he had only gotten the Senate to ratify the Kyoto treaty, we would have been spared Katrina! (Gore conveniently forgot to mention that when his president Clinton was in office, he likewise never sent the treaty over for confirmation.)

Well, the 2006 hurricane season has ended, without any disasters. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration hysterically predicted “13–16 named storms, 8–10 hurricanes, and 4–6 major hurricanes.” But what we got was a measly nine named storms, five pathetic hurricanes, and only two silly “major” hurricanes, neither of which hit us. Ecofreaks desperate for more disasters were visibly disappointed.

Now, since the Gore-ites blamed Bush for the bad storms of 2005, by parity of reasoning they should give him credit for this season’s lack of damage. If they had any intellectual honesty, they would hail him as the Great Hurricane Slayer and Glorious Protector of the Environment. Somehow, though, I doubt that we’ll see that. So far the liberal media has failed even to mention the mild storm season just past. It seems their post hoc reasoning works only in one direction — to bash people with whom they disagree. — Gary Jason

Schooling parents — Seattle voters routinely approve in referenda, by large margins, taxes to fund social goals of dubious value. Often the taxes are “for the children,” ostensibly used to decrease class sizes or enhance special-ed programs. (Other parts of the country accomplish such tasks with a curious device called a “budget.”)

I am aware of only two sacred limits on Seattlites’ willingness to sacrifice for their public schools. One was expressed in the headline of a Sept. 18, 2003 Seattle Times story: “Latte Tax Creamed,” it proclaimed — even though the proposed tax on coffee was to fund schools. The other is evinced in a story in the Dec. 4 Wall Street Journal, regarding a case heard that day by the U.S. Supreme Court.

A group of parents, mostly white, who sent their kids to public schools were not able to send them to the school of their choice, which was mostly white. They were told they had to send their kids to a different school, mostly nonwhite and, in the parents’ estimation, of lower quality. However, “the school district quietly backed down when the parents started sending their children to private or suburban schools instead of the struggling, majority-black school to which they’d been assigned.”

This is how the district’s assistant general counsel, Shannon McMinimee, responds: “It is disappointing that some families choose to expend their efforts in finding ways around the assignment system based on perception, instead of working with the district to improve all schools.” If I understand the school district’s lawyer correctly, its position is that:

• It is immoral for parents to seek the best opportunities for their children. They ought to send their kids where a bureaucrat tells them to, because the bureaucrat’s long-term social plan is more important than the child’s well-being.
• Parents should do the politicians’ and school administrators’ jobs for them, by acting without remuneration and in some undefined way to “improve all schools.” What exactly this leaves the politicians and administrators to do is not specified.
• The “perception” that one school is inferior to another is an unreliable determinant. Some better means should be employed to distinguish one school from another — transcendental meditation, perhaps, or a reimagining of reality through postmodern narrative. Of course, what her coded language means is that the white parents are racists.

The district’s representatives sound like Marxists even when they’re speaking formally through a lawyer. God only knows what goes on in the classrooms. Is it any surprise parents don’t want their kids under the district’s tutelage? — Patrick Quealy

Word Watch All right, I’ve had it. That’s it. I have issues. Or maybe I should say, I have issues with “issues.” What finally did it was a headline about a basketball team that is said to be “Dealing with Anger Issues.” At first I thought that the “issues” were simply the need for the team’s dramatis personae to control their anger so they wouldn’t get kicked out of the arena. But no. The problem was their purported need to tone their emotions up, to “play with controlled anger,” as one of them said, so they wouldn’t lose any more games. “Issues,” apparently, were to be carefully conserved. And issues, obviously, is a very volatile word. Here are a few of the more familiar uses of “issue” and “issues,” and an attempt to translate what they seem to mean: You’re bringing up an important issue. = All right, I guess I’m willing to talk about what you just said. I want to take issue with that. = I disagree with what you just said. I want to take issue with you. = I dislike what you just said, and I have always disliked you. I have serious issues with that. = I dislike you because you are a racist, sexist pig. I haven’t studied this particular issue, but if that’s your proposal, then I have some serious issues about it. = You are a racist, sexist pig, and nothing you might ever say could possibly convince me otherwise. Our committee is working on issues around equality and diversity. = We are trying to figure out a way to fire everyone who disagrees with us. Tommy’s a good kid. He just has issues right now. = My son is a neo-Nazi thug. Dad is just, like, totally insensitive to my issues. = My father objects when I hit my mother. She has issues. = She’s insane. We all have issues. = You’re insane. I’m working on my issues. = I’m constructing a list of all the ways you screwed me up. And I’m attempting to resolve those issues. = And I’m investigating a way to sue you. Clearly, “issue” and “issues” started out as neutral terms. From their association with politics (“that was an issue in the last election”), they acquired an increasingly strong emotional charge (“she was an issue in the last election”). “Issues” began to be equated with emotions (“I have issues”). Then, with the dawn of identity politics, all hell broke loose (“Why can’t you address MY ISSUES?”). Politics — whether the politics of the family or the politics of the nation — now centered on the question of who I am and how I feel about who I am. If there was something wrong with my feelings, if I wasn’t really comfortable about some emotional something, then I had issues. Oddly, however, those issues (unlike everything else in this world) weren’t actually about me. To think that they were might imply that there was something wrong with the essential me, which would be impossible. So they had to be about someone else. Someone like you. Yes, you! If you disagree with me, any resulting unpleasantness is a property of you. The same if I disagree with myself: someone must be the source of these issues I have, and it couldn’t be me. No, it couldn’t. My God, it’s such a burden, dealing with other people’s issues, especially when the other people insist on saying things like, “Why are you angry? There’s no reason to be angry”; or “Can’t you see that I’m trying to help you?”, or even, “I’m sorry that I hurt your feelings; please forgive me.” That’s just more evidence that they’re not really listening. Admittedly, there’s always something mysterious about issues. They’re just so hard to understand, these things that come out of you and get inside of me. Maybe that’s why people keep saying that they’re trying to define their issues, or they’re having discussions about issues around such and such a problem. It’s like that big lump of fruitcake that somebody gives you at Christmas, then you give it to somebody else, and that person gives it to somebody else again, so that next Christmas, you’ll be certain to see a fruitcake turn up at your house. It just keeps going around. Is it the same fruitcake or not? It’s hard to tell. Nevertheless, the important thing is to deal with the fruitcake. In other words, get it out of your house, and into somebody else’s. The process isn’t new. Back in Genesis, the snake had issues with God, then Eve had issues with God, then Adam had issues with Eve, then Eve had issues with the snake, then God had issues with all of them. Later, Cain had a lot of issues with Abel. In fact, he rose up against Abel and slew him with some heavy object. That was his way of working on his issues. The more modern way is to let the issues wreak their own vengeance. — Stephen Cox

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