The Libertarian Dilemma - and yes, Papa Heinlein would be pissed

Before getting to my libertarian jeremiad, a couple of items.

Know someone who might make a good candidate for office? Not just Congress, but even more important are state legislature seats in states that might get flipped out of gerrymander hell, if we get a big enough wave? Here’s a primer. 

Civics and the Future of Democracy: Yep.  Many - including Richard Dreyfuss - have pushed for re-establishment of civics curriculum in US schools. I agree. But what is never mentioned is how civics requirements at university would be a spectacular weapon in international culture war. A million foreign students in the U.S. would be exposed to insidious time bomb ideas they would then take home.  Oh, and our kids would be better citizens. That too.

And yes, much about this in Polemical Judo. 

== Again, the libertarian dilemma ==

I wince when many of you speak up about libertarianism, because, generally, folks don't have a clue what they are talking about, picturing smarmy-smug, lapel-grabbing Ayn-Randroids who rave their solipsistic superiority without a scintilla of life accomplishment to back it up .  Yes, those irritating yammerers exist... as do the incredibly similar far-lefty flakes and sanctimony junkies who wreak harm on every cause they claim to support. Neither group represents anything cogent. (See my thorough take-down of Rand-ism.)

(Key difference. Liberalism contains a ditsy far-left. Todays entire right consists of toxic delusion.)

I know the variants of libertarianism pretty well, from genuine followers of the soulful and insightful enlightenment genius, Adam Smith, to those reciting Murray Rothbard's hypnotic catechisms and the followers of Milton Friedman, whose 'advice' led to reducing the ROI investment horizons of American business from ten years, to five... to three months. I even witnessed - almost first-hand - the birth of the neo-feudalism movement -- incel-ingrate monsters who insist they would be top dogs in a medievalist world, such as I portrayed in The Postman. 

But it is the middle of that spectrum -- decent folks who sincerely believe that they are championing in freedom -- where some real opportunities... and dangers... lie.

In fact, I've just been invited for the sixth time to speak at a major libertarian gathering... that's twice the number of times I've been invited to major Democratic ones. The most remarkable (to me) mainstream libertarian trait is that maybe a quarter of them exhibit a willingness to argue and enjoy a good tussle, and many of those wind up on the speaker committees. Hence, I get invited back, even after raising uncomfortable points...

...like the fact that the core word for the entire movement should be competition, the greatest creative force in the universe. Competition provides freedom with all the pragmatic justification it needs, exposing many of the vague, moralizing shoutings of the "F-Word" as both unnecessary and often sanctimonious excuses for its opposite.

I'll get back to that in a moment. But first a necessary-contemporary riff.

== Choose a different 'second choice" ==

The one thing you always hear at these gatherings is "I hate both Republican and Democrat parties! Liberals want freedom in the bedroom and Republicans want freedom in the boardroom. I want both and won't compromise!"

Except they do. The Koch brothers bought and paid for the Cato Institute and the Heritage Foundation, top whorehouses pushing that aristocratic hierarchy means freedom. Steve Forbes threw decades of lavish parties at libertarian get togethers with one aim... to ensure the GOP will remain categorized as "less-bad than Democrats," so that a couple of million libertarians will hold their noses and keep checking GOP boxes in the voting booths. They know that if these folks ever do see how they've been had, they'll influence millions more to stop supporting the party of oligarchy.

Okay. The cliché is "Liberals want freedom in the bedroom and Republicans want freedom in the boardroom." Except... is it true? It is! If you define "boardroom" to mean a narrow, incestuous caste of 5000 CEO golfing pals appointing each other onto corporate boards, allocating winners and losers and dividing up markets, re-creating the same tediously stupid feudal owner-lord pyramid that repressed enterprise in 99% of societies for 6000 years. The same oligarchy Adam Smith denounced and that the Founders and the real Tea Party rebelled against.

If instead you want freedom to engage in vigorously creative competitive enterprises in flat-fair markets, then things are different. Democrats promote both. Republicans neither. Period. 

Heck, make that more than an assertion. Let’s bet on it! Deposit $5k in escrow with a reputable law firm so I’ll know I’m not wasting my time with another Kremlin-boy blabbermouth. I'll take your cash, sure.

Hypocrisy test! Illinois is the latest blue state to end the war on pot users - name the reds who are ending the Drug War or criminalization of 'deviance.' The GOP supports assassination to spark war without due process and over the objections of professionals. Monopoly skyrockets under GOP rule... yet libertarians cling to the notion that Republicans are somehow "less-bad" than democrats, under whom deficits decline and at least some efforts are made to encourage market competition.

And hell yes, I prove all of the above in Polemical Judo.

== Is liberal meddling always bad for markets? ==

I said the true test is whether a libertarian - like followers of Adam Smith - wants freedom along with plenty of creative competition... or if they have been suborned to fulminate passionately about a fundamentally unlimited right to property. 

Oh, property rights are important, to the degree they protect our ability to seek Smithian betterment and wealth through creative activities. But like water, air, food, alcohol etc.... all good things become toxic in excess. And the one thing all non-Smithian libertarians refuse to do is look at what propertarianism did to 99% of human societies, across 60 centuries.

What about liberal meddling? All that do-gooder flood of "programs" to help the poor etc. A standard reflex of the right is to declare - against all evidence - that such interventions are counter-productive and hurt those they intend to help. And above all, they undermine our competitive drives.  But Adam Smith knew that for a false incantation and an utter lie, 250 years ago.

Dig it. If an activity markedly increases the number/fraction of people who are liberated from inherited, non-chosen constraints ... if they are freed to engage their talents and work and all pertinent knowledge to compete in open-fair-flat markets... then a burden of proof falls on anyone who claims "that's an assault on freedom!" Even the doyen of capitalist economics, Friedrich Hayek, said the most fundamental need of an "invisible hand" economy is to maximize the number of knowing, empowered and confident market participants, and what better way to maximize that number than by reducing the number of children with malnourished, or empty, or pollution-tainted brains?

And yes, that means libertarians should favor public education, public health, anti-poverty interventions, civil rights and infrastructure development... efforts that are COOPERATIVE, that wind up enhancing COMPETITION. 

While vigorously criticizing specifics of implementation -- proposing less-governmental and less-paternalistic approaches -- any honest libertarian would admit that a baseline of state involvement just makes sense.

== Quote Heinlein at them! ==

Heinlein did! Try reading his prescriptive utopia BEYOND THIS HORIZON, which portrays a wild and woolly competitive future in any realm that involves creativity, but in which his alter ego character says "Of course, food and shelter are free! What kind of people do you take us for?"

Again: Robert Heinlein saw it all in our future - America diving into  “Crazy Years.” Throttle your rightist or libertarian sci fi fans into reading these lines from Papa H! Better-yet, read to them aloud! I tell you, for a select but important subset of our population, there’s nothing more effective. Especially the 3rd excerpt!

“As for ... the idea that we could lose our freedom by succumbing to a wave of religious hysteria, I am sorry to say that I consider it possible. I hope that it is not probable. But there is a latent deep strain of religious fanaticism in this, our culture; it is rooted in our history and it has broken out many times in the past.

“It is with us now; there has been a sharp rise in strongly evangelical sects in this country in recent years, some of which hold beliefs theocratic in the extreme, anti-intellectual, anti-scientific, and anti-libertarian.”

Heinlein tore into the potential for an alliance of oligarchs and pulpit pounders taking over America... a cabal that would –

“–promise a material heaven here on earth, add a dash of anti-Semitism, anti-Catholicism, anti-Negroism, and a good large dose of anti-‘furriners’ in general and anti-intellectuals here at home, and the result might be something quite frightening – particularly when one recalls that our voting system is such that a minority distributed as pluralities in enough states can constitute a working majority in Washington.”

And yes, see this riff and many like it, in Polemical Judo.

== Arise you AdamSmithian moderates and heroes of enlightnment! ==

Alas, feudalist-oligarchs have used oceans of money -- and whore-shill faux "academes" like Cato and Heritage -- to subsidize a tsunami of invectives shifting the libertarian movement's focus from Competition to the P-Words... utter defense of Property, Power and Privilege, at all cost. This despite the blatant historical fact that 99% of nascent flat-fair-open market systems across all of history were destroyed not by government bureaucrats or do-gooder socialists, but by feudalist-oligarch owner-cheater lords, bent on replacing flat-fairness with inheritance of Power for their sons, who never created any goods or services at all.

The varied oligarchies are uniting against us. Communist hierarchs and "former" communist boyar-mafiosi, petro-sheiks and coal barons, gambling moguls and Wall Street parasites. There are no greater enemies of flat-fair-open competition, which threatens their sons with the worst of all possible fates... having to earn their own way in the world.

Those oligarchs are desperate to maintain this hypnotic trance. They know that libertarians would have influence far beyond their numbers, if they ever rediscovered the C-Word and its fundamentals. Hence, at all of these gatherings, you see giant screens raving against bureaucrats and socialists and nosy lib'ruls... and nothing at all about those who were the foremost Enemies of Freedom across nearly all of the last three hundred generations.

=================

Housekeeping announcement. I was proud of the fact that I was among the last public figures whose blog allowed unmoderated comments. CONTRARY BRIN is one of the oldest blogs extant (from the 1990s) and the comment community is pretty terrific, with a few odd irritant regulars who are sometimes a bit... endearing. But all innocence ends and ours lasted until the 2020s! Moderated comments are a bit slower. Be patient... and fight for a civilization worthy of the stars.

Are they plotting to 'save US Conservatism?'

At the end of this weekend posting, I'll speculate on signs of desperate scheming among residual "elders" of the Republican Party and their backers who, like Prussian nobles of 1933, are murmuring "what have we done?"

== Competition vs cooperation ==

My friend (and RASR) investment guru John Mauldin knows something's wrong. He knows the U.S. right has gone insane, but keeps trying to couch it in terms that "balance" the blame. This time he refers to the brilliant economic pundit Michael Lewis whose seven-part podcast called Against the Rules "begins by talking about referees, specifically the referees who toil at NBA games. Later episodes deal with the “referees” in financial markets, courts of law, civil society, and government."

Now you know I'm one of the folks most avidly pushing rediscovery of Adam Smith. Competition is great! But as Smith reiterated, competitors will cheat. They always have, across at least 4,000 years. For the last couple of centuries we've taken gradual, then major (if incomplete) steps toward solving the problem through careful regulation. 

I've long said that regulation to prevent cheating sits at the core of our five great competitive arenas... DEMOCRACY, MARKETS, SCIENCE, COURTS and SPORTS... the last one proves the point. And I'm glad to see Michael Lewis working it.

Blatantly, sports would collapse without close regulation. Science mostly successfully self-regulates with fierce reciprocal accountability, though some institutions are required. Courts are meticulous, but can be poisoned with 3rd rate judges (a top GOP priority.)

Democracy and markets must have cheating-prevention protocols thoroughly legislated, as our parents knew in the Greatest Generation. And since Reagan, the top goal of the GOP has been to tear down (not update) those cheating-prevention tools. And as a result, now Democracy and Markets are in freefall collapse.

Alas, John M. then tries to get away with the last stand of RASRs -- Residually Adult-Sane Republicans -- crying out "Both sides are at fault!"

It's not true. It's not even remotely true. 

"But the overarching theme on both left and right is that the “referees” are no longer fair or impartial." 

Riiiight. Except at the level of a few cherry-picked anecdotes and some loopy campus lefty-flakes, there is no equivalence to hide behind.  (Example: blue states institute paper ballots and auditable elections while red states buy no-audit machines from companies with Russian ties. How do you call that equivalent?)

A RASR who also loves America and civilization - and honest-competition, and hope for a decent future - has one option. Help kill the Republican Party dead. Be confidently assured that the Democratic Party, after restoring the Rooseveltean contract of the Greatest Generation, along with science and active leadership solving real problems, and restoring accountability... 

...will then break apart! The half that forms a new "right-ish" party - the Adam Smith wing - will be pro-entrepreneurship! While also believing in facts, justice, equality, facts, honest elections, facts, science, competitive markets and and saving the Earth... and facts. It will be everything you want. But first you must help us slay a vampire elephant.

== The Smart-Rich: are they awakening? ==

A crucial divide is between those oligarchs who think insatiable cheating will perch them atop a neo-feudal pyramid of inherited wealth and power vs. those who can smell inevitable revolution. 

“It’s not whether we should be capitalist or socialist. It’s how do we make sure that capitalism is working the way it has in the past,” said top investor Alan Schwartz at the recent Milken Conference, warning of “class warfare.” He noted that salaries and wages as a percentage of the economic pie are at a postwar low of 40%, prompting a “throw out the rich” mentality that would require some form of income redistribution to head off.

Mega investor Ray Dalio further warned that unless the American economic system is reformed so “that the pie is both divided and grown well” the country is in danger of “great conflict and some form of revolution that will hurt most everyone and will shrink the pie.”

Not to mention Anthony Scaramucci, who in the last week or so seems to be trying to create an anti-Trump wing of the Republican party.

And most recently, the Business Round Table (of all conservative groups) in August 2019 issued a powerful statement finally rejecting an old cornerstone, Milton Friedman's manifesto that executives owed duty only to their stockholders' immediate value, and nothing and nobody else. That monstrous ethos is now seen as catastrophic, even by the BRT, who say that all stakeholders -- employees, contractors and suppliers, and the environment and civilization over the long term, should get full consideration and voice.

Let’s be clear. Capitalism did not “work” well across nearly all of the last 6000 years, because elites foiled or slowed its competitive creativity with relentless cheating. It’s what powerful males will do, 99% of the time, and that history led Marx to confidently predict a violent, proletarian-revolution end game. But it turned out that there was another path: curb the cheating. Successive waves of reform across the last 200 years started with the American Founders seizing and redistributing up to a third of the land in the former colonies, ending feudalist oppression. 

But other cheats flourished and it wasn’t till the Rooseveltean social contract that markets became flat-fair-open-competitive enough to really take off, growing an unprecedented middle class, while making shared investments in infrastructure, science, education, health, R&D and children… the greatest success story in history. 

That is, till that contract suffered slash-burn attacks, starting in the 1980s. And every retraction of that balanced approach – every “supply side” restoration of cheating – led to slower growth and skyrocketing disparities.

Maintaining a civilization of empowered citizenship -- the "diamond-shaped social structure" about which I often speak -- is a dilemma well described by famous historians Will & Arial Durant, in The Lessons of History:

"…the unstable equilibrium generates a critical situation, which history has diversely met by legislation redistributing wealth or by revolution distributing poverty.”

Doubt it? The works of Karl Marx, lately thought consigned to history's dust-bin, are flying off the shelves now, on university campuses and in worker ghettos around the globe. And the smarter billionaires are starting to consider what kind of society will serve their enlightened self-interest. In EARTH and in EXISTENCE I forecast that some members of the world wealth aristocracy would start holding meetings about this. Perhaps we are seeing crude, preliminary signs.

Okay... we're ready for what I promised, the aroma I am sniffing of rats desperately seeking to bail... or get off a sinking ship.

== Schemers hoping to "rescue" the GOP ==

I've been (as you know) tracking signs of an underground movement by retired or retiring GOP figures, simmering and trying to scheme for the "salvation of US conservatism." 

I doubt that either of the two who have stepped up, so far, are in on it. ex-Gov. Bill Weld is a former Libertarian Party presidential candidate who -- in a sign of how low we've sunk -- appears to be taking Trump on from the president's "left." Just yesterday Joe Walsh, a conservative radio show host and former Republican congressman from Illinois, telegraphed he is running against Trump from the hard right. Nor would be the stand-up Schindler-figure, Justin Amash (like Oskar Schindler, a creep who refuses to sink further into outright evil.) 

Certainly Mitt Romney is scheming. That's a given, no matter what else! But the recent wave of Texas retirees from the House? Who knows?

The figure we aren't seeing, who is doubtless talking to desperate zillionaires is Paul Ryan. (Remember him? You will, soon. Oh bet on that.)

Deterring all of this, of course, is the 88% approval rating of Trump among Republican voters, daunting almost everyone from uttering a word, let alone standing up to the madness openly.

Left out of those polls? The plummet in self-identified Republicans, nationwide, threatening with extinction the zombie implement that has served Murdoch and Putin so well. (And yes, I deeply worry what will happen when Two Scoops is seen by them as more a liability than asset: don't eat anything fed to you by your commie pals, Don, lest you be more valuable to them as a martyr.) (God bless the US Secret Service!)

Also, just how brittle is that 88% Republican support? I recall Watergate, when Nixon's devoted support collapse, like sediment raining from a supersaturated solution, or like sentiment draining from tens of millions of Republican women.

Final thought: these oligarchs should ponder deeply the fate of the Junkers-caste prussian oligarchs in 1930s Germany, who thought they could control a populist beast they helped stir into hydrophobic frenzy.

Surprise, surprise! In its froth, the beast threw its riders and a gifted svengali leaped aboard, grabbing the reins. (Remember the line from CABARET: "Do you still think you can control them?")

The beast is not to be blamed as much as the beastmasters who crafted this outbreak. You who thought you could control this were not anywhere near as smart as you thought you were. And the smartaleck "fact-people" you've waged war against are not as stupid as you envision.

History would have predicted this. If you bothered to learn any.

Mueller, the Sanders Tax, Rand and Revolution...

Today's political posting can't compete with the Mueller hearings, which established clearly that RM would have indicted Two Scoops for obstruction, had he not been shielded by the dubious OLC memo on presidential immunity. (Note when we get Congress back from Putin, we can amend that, carefully. I favor the concept of "slow indictment." Criminal and other proceedings against a sitting president may move forward so long as they demand from him or her - in total - no more than say ten hours a week of distraction/attention from other duties.) 

What I wanted from Mueller was a very clear description of "criminal conspiracy" as primly defined in a free society that gives all benefit of the doubt to the accused. If that benefit were less strong, would "preponderance of the evidence" have led Mueller to indict on that charge, as well? In the dictionary definition of "collusion," which is not a legal one at all, would he conclude that the Trumpists colluded with Moscow, even if criminal conspiracy wasn't proved? The answer in both cases would be resounding yes.

So much for that, for today. This posting features a few interesting items...

== Bernie goes to a matter of importance! ==

Sen. Bernie Sanders has introduced a bill that would tax trading of stocks, bonds and derivatives at rates ranging from 0.005% to 0.5%. "A so-called financial transactions tax could raise between $776 billion and $2.4 trillion over 10 years, economists estimate.The U.S. hasn't taxed financial trades since the 1960s, although the 2008 financial crash brought the idea back in vogue.”

Sanders noted that Great Britain has levied such a tax since the late 17th century, while dozens of other countries also use one. In more recent years, France started taxing trades in 2012, and a wider tax went into effect in the European Union in 2017.

“Research suggests a transaction tax would have the greatest impact on hedge funds and other speculators, which make hundreds or thousands of trades a second, profiting from faster technology or advance information. … While each trade might yield only a fraction of a cent in profit, the sheer volume of trades make it lucrative. Nearly half the volume on a given day is made up of this type of speculative activity.”

“A Forbes contributor likened it to a cigarette tax: "It would pick up some revenue while discouraging dangerous activity.”

Oh, but it is much, much more important than that.  See where - almost a decade ago - I proposed this as a way to save us from rogue AI! 
“A Transaction Fee Might Save CapitalMarkets... and Protect Us From The Terminator!”

== Adam Smith knew it ==

Many of you I know I deem Evonomics to be an important site for moderate liberal thinkers to reclaim the legacy of Adam Smith, who (along with the American Founders) knew that oligarchy by cheater-lords has always been to main enemy of flat-fair-competitive-creative enterprise and markets. 
    
This article - Eight Reasons Why Inequality Ruins the Economy - lists 8 possible theories for why slower growth correlates with widening wealth disparities. In other words, cheater lords once again poisoning the very markets they depend on and sowing seeds of revolution.
    
All eight correlations likely have some validity, though I believe #1 is both inarguable and paramount.

== Combat your enemy, not a strawman, or straw – Rand ==

On the Evonomics site, true market liberalism – Smith's flat-fair-competitive enterprise – finds its actual champions. It finds them where they have always been, especially during the Greatest Generation -- slightly left of center. 

Still, sometimes an intelligent writer misses the point. Sorry, but this take-down of Ayn Rand, while cogent in many places, utterly fails to grasp her main weaknesses. I'll try to summarize. From Locke and Adam Smith to the U.S. Founders, "liberal" society sought a middle ground between competition and cooperation. 

Competition is the greatest creative force of all - and libertarianism is founded on that true fact, then drifts and loses its way by ignoring one pure fact we see across the last 4000 years: that competition is spoiled by cheaters!  And history shows that human males (lords/kings/owners/priests) will cheat with any excuse. The commissars who Ayn Rand saw in her youth weren't "altruists" at all, but were simply the latest wave of male cheaters, using Marxist cant to give themselves a slightly different-colored version of rapacious feudal power. 

Rand and her followers extoll the creative power of competition - which empowered liberal societies to vast wealth and fecundity - while frenetically ignoring the element that made it possible, keeping our competitive arenas -- markets, democracy, science and courts -- flat and fair.

The conditions for fecund COMPETITION require social and democratic COOPERATION, in order to provide healthy markets with two essentials: anti-cheating regulation and maximization of opportunity for new competitors. 

(Liberal programs to uplift poor children require no justification on moral grounds! They are how we maximize our input-feedstock of skilled and confident competitors and prevent the recurring failure mode of oligarchy. Libertarians who oppose such programs are thus utter hypocrites.)

Rand portrays ubermensch heroes prevailing via impudent genius and creativity over the opposition of entrenched cheaters... whereupon she then ignores what has always happened next, until our liberal revolutions. The new lords just replicate the pattern, use their wealth to suppress new competitors, and cheat to give their sons unfair advantage. 

Actually, she knew this! It's why, across thousands of pages of Randism, only on one single page does she ever mention children, reproduction, new generations. Because if her New Lords procreate, the reader will start to ponder what's next, and recognize that she solved nothing.

Hence, alas, while Dr. Cummins says many wise things in her Evonomics take-down, she is not arguing directly with Randians or going to their core weakness. For more in this in detail, see:  http://www.davidbrin.com/nonfiction/aynrand.html

== Signs of revolution ==

The pool of smaller, affordable starter houses is low. And increasingly, first-time homebuyers are competing with investors who are buying up these homes. 

Look up the British "enclosures crisis" and similar events in Rome etc, and other ways the rentier caste cheated to rob the middle. This trend proves one thing above all else. That aristocracy does not equate to intelligence. The smart zillionaires... Buffett, Gates, Bezos etc ... can see where this leads. They cry: "raise my taxes!" not just for moral reasons, but to keep tumbrels from coming after them.

Not all aristocrats have foresight. An infographic on how some of today’s rich are seeking bolt-holes or Patagonian ranchos or other survivalist means to survive an apocalypse of their own making. And – um – they think that the smart people they’ve been waging war against don’t know where all of these “refuges” are located? 

You actually think that all the folks who know stuff and how to make and use stuff won’t be able to find you?

== A related aside... ==

Take a peek at the ideas of Douglas Rushkoff, whose new book Team Human is about ways that we might restore our shared sense of forward purpose, dissecting some very old, false ideas about competition, individuality, scarcity, and progress. “We needn’t embed these values in the digital landscape of tomorrow.” Elsewhere, Rushkoff described how some of the business elite are going about preparing for a doomsday, Salon ran an article: “We asked psychologists why so many rich people think the apocalypse is coming.”

Among the insights: “Though we tend to think of the apocalypse as negative, the idea may counterintuitively be attractive to some,” he said. “In a world in which life feels uncertain and often unfair, in which people struggle to find a sense of personal purpose, the idea of an apocalyptic ending, though terrifying, can also feel meaningful." ... "This is obvious when we think about certain religious apocalyptic beliefs, but even among more secular types or those who do not believe in a particular religious apocalyptic narrative, apocalyptic ideas can be seductive... like people dreaming of a “better world."

... “Some are attracted to these ideas because they would be tested and could find their true purpose, maybe even emerge as heroes or people of importance in a new world,” he said... “And some like to imagine the possibility of a simpler life, what might be almost a form of nostalgia.”  

Of course, this is one of the malignant, cancerous mind-memes that I addressed, at some depth” in The Postman, and later in Existence.

== Spread this concept == 

Again,  consider ways to get someone, anyone in power to look at my gerrymandering solution, one that takes three sentences, is simple, does not impose a commission or complex formula, and would give a big sop to Chief Justice John Roberts's rationalization -- his need to allow legislative sovereignty. Yes, a state legislature's sovereign right to cheat its own citizens. 

Alas, I had no way to tunnel it into the sincere and hardworking but microcephalic heads of the plaintiff lawyers in this case.

Rediscovering Adam Smith Part II: Bringing in Darwin!

While I'm off to Worldcon, let me finish my explication about the rediscovery (especially by liberals) of a co-founder of their movement.

In Part One, I showed how I am no longer a lonely voice, calling for revival of interest in a co-founder of our revolution, Scottish economist and philosopher Adam Smith.  Indeed, among the stupidest failings of today's liberal-moderates has been their failure grasp Smith's importance, and potential usefulness in fighting today's confederate-oligarchic madness.

Again, Smith is most prominently discussed at the moderate-liberal-savvy Evonomics site, where creative market competition merges with compatible notions of public responsibility and a tide of wealth that truly lifts all boats. Those who study Smith are realizing (surprise!) that he despised above all the oligarchic owner lords who cheated in 99% of human cultures -- the same caste the American Founders truly rebelled against.

Here's an amazing slide show of quotations from brilliant modern economists who talk about ways to make market economics more sapient and avoid the one failure mode that always ruined it across 6000 years. 

How weird is it that "libertarians" -- now totally suborned by oligarchs who bought the movement, top to bottom -- now avoid any mention of Adam Smith, or the "c-cord."

Competition.

== Getting part right... and some wrong ==

Ah, but even when smart people dial in to that word, the results can be mixed.

In The Darwin Economy Liberty, Competition, and the Common Good, Robert H. Frank argues that Adam Smith had a poor understanding of competition, compared to Charles Darwin. Unfortunately, the capsule summaries of many books – intending to propel reader interest and potential sales, are often misleading or miss the point. Take this example from the book’s own publisher.

“Smith's theory of the invisible hand, which says that competition channels self-interest for the common good, is probably the most widely cited argument today in favor of unbridled competition--and against regulation, taxation, and even government itself. But what if Smith's idea was almost an exception to the general rule of competition? 

"That's what Frank argues, resting his case on Darwin's insight that individual and group interests often diverge sharply. Far from creating a perfect world, economic competition often leads to "arms races," encouraging behaviors that not only cause enormous harm to the group but also provide no lasting advantages for individuals, since any gains tend to be relative and mutually offsetting.”

That cribbed summary, alas, does Robert Frank no good. (Do online summaries ever convey a book’s core idea well?) This one reveals a stunning lack of understanding of Smith, who said that unregulated competition is exactly what ruined all past societies, because it leads to winners who then cheat, in order to prevent further competition. The resulting pattern - feudalism - always destroyed market creativity… and feudal societies were also immoral. (So said Smith, the author of The Theory Of Moral Sentiments.) 

In fact, Frank in his book debunks the notion that Smith believed in unregulated competition -- unlike the objectivist extremists who have seized on his 'invisible hand' idea.  A direct quote: 

"Smith was well aware that unregulated markets didn't always produce the best outcomes. For the most part, the market failures that were his focus involved underhanded practices by business leaders in a position to wield power."  

Says one of the author’s defenders: “Frank goes beyond Smith in saying that, even in the absence of cheating, even in the absence of incomplete information and irrational choices and all the other ways in which markets fall short, competition for relative goods will by its very nature produce undesirable outcomes, just as competition for mates will produce bull elk that are encumbered by outsize antlers.”

To which I answer… meh. Adam Smith made clear that a society’s fundamental values can be incorporated into weighting various market forces, through incentives, taxes or criminal deterrence. 

And sure, I my libertarian side notes that social incentivizing is dangerous! Race and gender discrimination laws (Jim Crow) reflected earlier generations’ values, as did Prohibition and the insane War on Drugs. Tobacco subsidies and those that encouraged generations of shortsighted water mismanagement join with fossil fuel incentives in a long list of socially or politically-driven market interferences that proved at-best counterproductive or that later generations deemed to be downright evil. Indeed, all past civilizations regulated in ways that favored both the priesthood and the owner-lordly caste, and the priesthood issued declarations that ‘This imbalance of power Is Good.’   

Still, we know that for every example of horrifically awful regulation, there’s likely to be several good ones. Kids in Los Angeles can breathe the air now without feeling (as I did, growing up) as if they were collapsing in a Flanders 1918 gas attack. Tobacco and alcohol taxes decidedly reduce those vices without creating a criminal black market. People now fish from the riverbanks in Pittsburgh and the 1994 CAFÉ auto efficiency standards gave us better cars, saved us tens of billions at the pump and promoted energy independence while hurting the U.S. auto industry not one iota. 

What we are talking about is the weighting of markets to include externalities, like the health of our children and the sustainability of a planet they’ll depend on. The anti-monopoly laws passed by previous generations – and gutted by the recent GOP – were pro-enterprise! Just as today’s Republican Party relentlessly seeks to end flat-fair competition in every way imaginable.  

Smithian market weighting, should always be questioned, skeptically! That is a legitimate role for a vigorous-sane libertarian movement! (Rather than today's lickspittle-lackey obeisance to oligarchs.) 

But it is about augmenting the general wisdom of invisible hand mass-market with some actual wisdom from the most-advanced of all human organs – our prefrontal lobes.

== They want us not to even look ahead where we’re going ==

The Rand-Friedman wing of libertarianism - ranting the FIBM (Faith in Blind Markets) message at its extreme - has proved to be stupifyingly insane, spewing endless incantations that civilization should never use those prefrontal organs of foresight, that a hundred thousand generations of human ancestors strove so hard to develop. Their cult belief in perfect, distributed, enlightened self-interest have been disproved from every angle – psychology, human behavior, brain scans, micro-economics and the most brutally market test of all – failure of their beloved predictions to ever, ever and I mean ever come true. 

Friedrich Hayek did have a point, that we should maximize the number of competent market participants. But that - ironically - turns into an argument for liberalism, since interventions to raise up poor children, to build infrastructure and to combat unthinking prejudice all help us to stop wasting talent and instead maximize the number of ready competitors.

Just as any sporting league needs constant regulation, lest each game collapse into a maelstrom of cheating, what works in the economy is well-regulated markets, fine-tuned according to a civilization that strives to keep competition flat-fair-open.

== Willingness to re-evaluate ==

Mind you, this entails finding a sweet spot. And if our parents made calamitous Drug War and talent-wasting gender assumptions, and their parents did it with Prohibition and racism, then can we be sure we’re not gumming the works with our own interventions? Certainly the Soviet state planners felt so sure of their models, which worked well in forging primary industry like steel, and horribly at making a refrigerator anyone would want.

 The Chinese engineer-lords in today’s CPR politburo are sure they’ve solved that problem and I go into that elsewhere. But we still prefer the method that brought us to this festival of wealth and freedom and improving insight – a flatter, more evenly balanced approach, that avoids the failed model of the past – hierarchy.

Alas, misunderstanding of Adam Smith is rampant, only matched by general ignorance of Darwin, whose heirs now know that a healthy ecosystem is made up of a myriad competitive units, but the overall effect is the appearance of healthy cooperation. 

Ecosystems collapse when some predator escapes all feedback loops of restraint, as happened every time small groups of human males - armed with metal implements and priestly justifications - take everyone else’s women and wheat.

== An aspect that is... interesting ==

Robert Frank (see *note below) asserts that – as one supporter put it - there is a homeomorphism between, on the one hand, natural selection and economic competition for absolute goods, and, on the other hand, sexual selection and economic competition for relative (positional) goods.  

Well well. Interesting. And if so, it would explain why half of today’s rich – the stoopid half, mostly – care far more about their relative power over other humans, than about fostering a generally creative society where all boats rise alongside their yachts.

I was skeptical, at first. But yes, this does mesh with one of my own riffs… that we are all descended from the harems of feudalist cheaters who took other mens’ women and wheat. And even though today’s lords might have vasectomies to prevent unwanted complications, they act - reflexively and un-thinkingly - as if driven by an urgent need to win at reproduction.  I get the point, then.

But it still reveals no insight into Adam Smith, who urged that we try to be sapient about all this!  That even if today’s males inherit fantasies from those harem-keeping ancestors, we can choose - both individually and collectively - not to act on them. That even if shortsighted oligarchs - driven by ego, instinct and flattery - threaten to bring back the cheater hierarchies against whom the American Founders rebelled, we can choose – with help from some of the Good Billionaires – to stymie that reflex without falling into the extremes. 

Reform without the bloodiest kinds of revolution.

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== Use Halloween to help end the freak show ==

Here's your costume for Halloween, a week before the US mid-term elections. But wear it all of October. Don't let it start a fight. Just let it speak for itself. Especially if others do it, doo. (And if so, supplies may run out, so order now.)

Here it's cheap enough to buy several as favors/gifts. Pass it along. It's a thing.

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*NOTES: Frank proposes that instead of taxing productive economic activity, such as earnings or sales, government should raise money from activities (including relative goods) whose pursuit is a pernicious drag on society as a whole.... extending "sin taxes" (e.g. on tobacco) to other harmful cycles. At first sight, it's hard to imagine how this might scale-up to levels that would pay for essential services, like infrastructure or uplifting all children. But anyone familiar with Adam Smith and Teddy Roosevelt would know the answer.

Define as a harmful "sin" - and hence taxable - the ways that accumulations of property generally become toxic. Monopoly. Duopoly. And the reflex of aristocrats to stay rich by investing in "rent-seeking," rather than creative or productive enterprise. In other words, the exact opposite to every single "Supply Side Reform."

Healthy markets need incentives and it is right that Elon Musk get richer by working with engineers to give us keys to the Solar System. That's not the same thing at all. And the cult of risk-free, rentier accumulation by a lordly caste is the very opposite.  It is the old enemy of enterprise, across 6000 years.