Covid misconceptions. Billionaires don't donate to Biden! And a letter about covid to "Dear libertarians...."

Before talking covid... you know that for years I've warned that a trumped-up "war" with Iran would serve the interests of all our nation's enemies, from the Republican Party to the Iranian mullahs, themselves, and above all Vladimir Putin, who would finally rake in all the chips. I've long praised the US Navy for calmly defusing one provocation after another, avoiding a "Tonkin Gulf" (and you all still do need to stay alert, also knowing the words "Gleiwitz" and "Reichstag Fire.")
So, why am I not beating that drum now? Because our military, intel and other officers have eyes and brains. Given that our entire 'deep state' is on red alert against efforts by Putin/Tehran/Fox/Trump to trigger an October War, what other tricks are possible?
We don't know! That's why I keep saying some zillionaire - instead of just joining the herd donating to the Biden campaign - should try some of the special things I suggested here.
Especially the "Henchman of the Year" Prize, to lure whistle-blowers and tattlers into the open. There is absolutely no better use of a million dollars, than to staunch the nefarious schemes and cheats that are right now hatching in preparation. It's the henchmen who can offer proof! And if nothing else, this would make the plotters distrust their henchmen.
Well, there is one other thing, that could do even more good. Joe Biden could start talking about pardoning the first few to step forward from among the hundreds likely now being blackmailed into treason by the KGB. Whatever they are being blackmailed for, any of them who turned the tables on their blackmailers would be salvageable 'heroes' - at least enough to find some forgiveness and a stairway out of hell. Someone in Biden's campaign should contemplate how good that would look, even if it spurred no defections. But if it did...
And yes, all this and more is in the book.
== Cautionaries about Covid/Covfefe-19 == 

As you might guess, I'm very busy these days, on often one podcast/ interview/ conference a day, sometimes two, even three. Along the way I've learned a lot. About how vaccines work, for instance, and how it's not enough just to make antibodies, or even 'neutralizing antibodies" that are effective against a viral attack. 

Look up Antibody-based Enhancement (Ab), where the victim's immune system manages to stymie one viral strain, only for the next variant to hijack those antibodies and use them as trojan horses, or spears, to attack and invade more fiercely than ever! While rare, this does happen to some promising vaccines, especially in Dengue, where the first wave can be mild and the second devastatingly lethal. Indeed, discovering such potentially dangerous quirks is one reason we have large scale trials before releasing vaccines.

Other immunological side effects happen. With the 1976 Swine Flu vaccine that Gerald Ford rushed out, the Guillame-Barré side effect was so nasty it gave birth to the current anti-vaxxer movement. Anything similar with a covid vaccine could spur vaxxers to plunge us back into the dark ages... 

...like those execrable years before the Greatest Generation saved mine from Polio and Diptheria, And yes, before Jonas Salk became the most-beloved American, terrified parents kept children indoors, away from friends and swimming pools, all summer long. 

What? You think this was our first quarantine? (Salk was the first American to approach the adoration that the Greatest Generation gave previously to Franklin... Delano... Roosevelt.)

All of which is to say that things are more complicated than reflex dogma. Not only is it dangerous to rush out the first vaccine. It's also foolish to ignore the fact that many of today's covid-asymptomatics (35%) and shruggers (the 60% who supposedly shrug it off after two weeks spent moaning in bed) are revealed to have damage afterwards in their kidneys, livers, skin, the G.I. tract and nerves. 

Those Ancillary Effects are what terrify me, since many remain hidden. even now. "Symptom relapse" is another serious problem and everyone I've met online who was infected reports having it. And there are suspected cases of "lurking" -- where the virus seems completely gone, only to spew forth later.

(Note, Spanish researchers have just put out an alert to watch out for MOUTH RASHES, which are much more dangerous than "Covid Toes," since they can make you a super-spreader. And yes I still try to scratch and sniff a lemon, daily.)

"Flattening the Curve" isn't just about making sure we have enough ICU beds, though that has saved innumerable lives. (I was involved across March-April in efforts to design DIY ventilators.)  Curve flattening is also about giving science enough time to catch up and provide situational awareness...

...something we would have had, if testing had been prioritized as a matter of national urgency, instead of sabotaged with suspicious relentlessness. And now the Trump White House is railing against a stimulus bill including money for accelerated testing and contact tracing! Consider how only Putin and his carnival barker would want to sabotage us that way.

Four months or so ago -- about the era of Gilgamesh -- back when we thought this might be just a 'bad flu' restricted to problems with lung fluid excess -- some commentators suggested "this will rock our complacency and get us taking the pandemic threat more seriously, so we'll be better prepared when something really bad hits." Well, this has proved to be worse than a 'bad flu"... 

...but that logic still holds. Some of my past sci fi has been more pertinent than I’d want! My Hugo-nominated story “The Giving Plague” deals with our complex relationships with viruses and such, including the several paths a parasite can go down, in “negotiating” with us hosts. Get it free at on my website.  

== Covid concerns that relate to... Libertarians! ==

Okay, all of that leads to the Great Swedish Experiment in going for "herd immunity," a notion much beloved of some libertarians I know, leading to the latest meme from the White House. When it didn't 'just go away,' and after a dozen other trial balloons, now it's "we're just going to have to live with it."

National Review carried an article extolling wonderful Sweden, and well.... the current condition of National Review has William F. Buckley spinning in his grave so fast that he's generating megawatts of good, clean electricity for Connecticut. (He and Barry Goldwater would have been enraged by the current right's all-out war against science and every other fact-centered profession.) 

Still, it is important to read views that dissent from the near-universal opinion I've seen expressed by sage researchers - that Sweden's experiment is a disaster. 

Consider using the standard formula for epidemics, when a disease has an R(0) replication ratio around TWO, you can make do with herd immunity if HALF of the population is fully resistant and non-contagious. 

But when R(0) gets above FIVE, as does Sars-CoV-2 when there's indoor mingling, you need 80% of the population to be fully resistant and non-contagious to get herd-immunity. And that's if every asymptomatic-infected and shrugger is fully immune and no longer spreading. It ignores the way super-spreaders appear to reach R(0) = 20+.

As for the memic aspect to this, as you know, I am an Adam Smith acolyte who believes that there should always be adult-libertarian voices at the table, questioning government over-reach. What troubles me is the reflex to assume that the major threats to liberty right now are only nanny-state bureaucrats, when human history offers a very different warning. 

Even if we include as "socialist" the murderously oppressive USSR (which in fact was Czarist+ fascist Russia using different symbols and incantations), even so, far less than 0.01% of the generations who suffered oppression had their freedoms and entrepreneurial options crushed by socialism of any kind. The vast majority of our ancestors across the last 6000 years were oppressed by one force... oligarchic-lordly inheritance cheaters of the kind who Adam Smith denounced and the U.S. Founders fought.

Seriously, how can any sincere defender of freedom and markets ignore that dismal tendency in human nature? For those who have elite wealth and influence to use it to cheat instead of letting others compete fairly? A libertarianism that ignores that absolutely central societal flaw - and Adam Smith's remedies -- is not a movement that's anywhere near as cerebral or honest as it thinks it is. 

Nor is it scientific or helpful in a crisis such as this, yammering about 'freedom to not wear a mask' while meekly obeying laws against nudity. Oy.

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.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
--------------------------- Coda ----------------------------------------

== 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.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

*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.

The True Founder of our Revolution - Summing up.

If I seem repetitive, it's because some crucial points keep not being made, in the fight over where to steer civilization. 

Sure, moral issues -- like a narcissistic toddler who steals thousands of children -- belong front and center. But they cannot be the only battle front. Because confederates have been schooled to shrug aside moral arguments.

"While sappy-socialist liberals preach, we are the pragmatic competitors who innovate and invest and make America rich!"  By styling themselves as defenders of enterprise and creative markets, oligarchs offer a rhetoric that attracts populist fervor from hardworking farmers and auto mechanics, who know that life is -- and at some level should be -- highly competitive. 

By ceding this ground to the New Lords, liberals make their worst mistake. Because liberalism is justifiable in practical terms! In the health of creative markets. In terms of measurable outcomes. In the general, rising good of all. And especially in keeping faith with the Great Experiment of Freedom...

... and one of its principal founders: Adam Smith.

== A Great Rediscovery ==

The Financial Times (U.K.) is so vastly better than any of its largely lobotomized (or else oligarchy-suborned) U.S. equivalents. A recently published essay - How Adam Smith would fix capitalism - summons what I’ve pushed for years — a rediscovery of this co-founder — along with Franklin and those Americans — of our great, Periclean experiment. Writer Jesse Norman (a British Member of Parliament) gets Smith, showing that the author of The Theory of Moral Sentiments was a deeply caring man, who wanted a balanced use of market forces to benefit everyone, truly raising all boats. 

Yes, Smith extolled the unmatched creative power of competition. But the author of The Wealth of Nations, gazed across 6000 years of wretched history and drew a clear conclusion — that humans who gain undue power tend to use it to cheat. To warp markets until they no longer function. 

We forget that the actual Boston Tea Party, and the American Revolution, were against a king and his crony oligarchs who commanded that all commerce pass through their docks, paying extortion to lordly monopolists on everything from paper to porcelain, rents that they never earned. The very cheating Adam Smith denounced… and the very opposite lesson of today’s raving “tea-party” confederates.

Those betraying Smith are the ones who most-often claim to extol him, yet do everything in their power to enhance cheating by today’s oligarchs. Says Jesse Norman: 

“…what matters is not the largely empty rhetoric of “free markets”, but the reality of effective competition. And effective competition requires mechanisms that force companies to internalise their own costs and not push them on to others, that bear down on crony capitalism, rent extraction, “insider” vs “outsider” asymmetries of information and power, and political lobbying.”

To Norman’s list, I would add two more vital ways that liberal “market meddling” is highly justifiable in Smithian terms:

1. Adjusting market forces to incorporate “externalities” like the good of our posterity, our grandchildren and the ecosystem they’ll depend upon. Adam Smith wrote repeatedly that a society’s values can legitimately be emphasized, so long as the resulting strictures (e.g. tobacco or carbon taxes) are simple, fair, consistent and not another excuse for cheating. 

2. Stop wasting talent. A nation that chooses to maximize the feedstock of confident, skilled, joyfully ready competitors is one that will maximize the effectiveness of markets. And hence it is a society that invests in children, in education and health and civil rights, maximizing opportunity without meddling overmuch in equalizing outcomes.  Even the doyen of conservative (not-fascist) economics -- Friedrich Hayek -- conceded this point.

Norman makes clear that this is a matter of survival for any system that seeks the immense benefits of flat-fair-open market accountability: 
     “This is a complex and nuanced message, as befits our ever more complex world. It is threatening enough to current orthodoxies that many on all sides, libertarian and socialist, will resist it. Properly understood, however, these Smithian ideas remain absolutely fundamental to any attempt to defend, reform or renew the market system.”

Now, for a shocker that should not surprise. Jesse Norman is the Conservative Party MP for Hereford and South Herefordshire, and the author of a biography of Edmund Burke: The First Conservative.  And clearly, the word “conservative” has an older, better meaning, over there. He has a new book out in September: Adam Smith: Father of Economics.

== The rediscovery continues ==

Evonomics is back on high octane. Jonathan Haidt begins a series called 'Darwin's business' that starts by appraising the CEO of Sears, whose management approach - modeled on Ayn Rand - has taken an American giant and corporate icon to the verge of utter collapse. Also, Peter Turchin asks whether morality can apply to capitalism. 

Ironies abound. For example, Sears earlier (1992) abandoned its 140 year old mail order business at the very moment the first online stores set up on the Web. Can you believe that coincidence? Sears had been poised to own it all... to be Amazon-squared... and threw it all away! 

But the deeper irony in these two articles is simpler. It is only on a liberal site like Evonomics that you find bright folks talking seriously about Adam Smith, and whether it might be possible to rescue market competitive enterprise from its worst enemies across 6000 years...

...not 'socialists,' but cheaters and shortsighted fools.

Alas, liberals are supposed to be the smart ones, on this side of the Atlantic. But you’ll not find one in a hundred who know that their entire movement had a few fathers other than ol’ Ben Franklin and that crew.  And number one on that list was Adam Smith. Reclaim him.

== The roots of the Confederate Counter-Attack ==

I’ve somewhat famously - or infamously - called our present predicament “Phase 8” of an American Civil war that has recurred since 1778, when General Cornwallis knew he would find more romantics loyal to King and Lords, down south. Later, the plantation/slave-owning caste filled the top niche that all-too easily plunges into cheating, while crushing fair competition - the same corrupt modality that Adam Smith denounced.

What about the “Greatest Generation” (GG) that overcame the First Depression, smashed Hitler, contained communism, built American science, got us to the moon, and crafted the greatest middle class in history? Is that “when America was great?" (Ask that question incessantly!)

You mean back then the GG's favorite living human was FDR? In that era of strong unions and spectacular economic growth — when the great push to reform our racial and gender and other blindnesses began? When we achieved a social structure (for white males at first, but then others) flatter than any ever known.  Markets were regulated to keep competition flat, and the results were inarguable.

Except there were a few arguing for a return older ways. Based upon a core germ of truth — that government regulation can sometimes become cloying or stifling -- they began a cult that grew to declare evil any and all regulation to keep competition flat or fair…  a cult filled with incantations of loathing against the Greatest Generation’s methods for controlling cheating.

I’ve spoken of Milton Friedman, whose incantations led to the shrinking of corporate ROI (Return on Investment) horizons from ten years to today’s ten weeks. But in a truly scary article, Lynn Parramore describes historian Nancy MacLean’s book - Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America - about Nobel laureate James Buchanan, “who is the intellectual linchpin of the Koch-funded attack on democratic institutions.” 

In works like Property as a Guarantor of Liberty (1993).  Buchanan saw society as a cutthroat realm of makers (entrepreneurs) constantly under siege by takers (everybody else) His own language was often more stark, warning the alleged “prey” of “parasites” and “predators” out to fleece them.

Never mind that feudalism -- (rule by the owner caste) -- had 6000 years to prove its case, and exactly zero examples of good governance. What Buchanan illustrates is the way that aristocrats and their paid priests have suborned our natural, libertarian instincts, so that today hardly any libertarians ever even mention Smith’s core notion of flat-fair competition -- the "C-Word" -- anymore, parroting instead Buchanan’s (and Pharaoh’s) worship of the word, “property.”

“Adam Smith saw human beings as self-interested and hungry for personal power and material comfort, but he also acknowledged social instincts like compassion and fairness. Buchanan, in contrast, insisted that people were primarily driven by venal self-interest.”

If you have time, look at this essay and realize how long we have been complacent about this counter-attack by the old enemy of human freedom and creativity and happiness, a cabal of zero-sum fools who will win nothing, if they succeed in this oligarchic putsch.

Nothing but a ride in tumbrels.

 == Aaaaand... more about... Adam Smith...

I wrote a lot about this fellow, who liberals should rediscover and embrace, in order to free him from the right wingers and libertarians who always, always misquote and betray him.  Well, since OpenSalon dumped my work, let me offer a few quotations here, and a link to Blogging Adam Smith. Or actually read Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, a book that any politically-minded person should know, top to bottom. (See where I tie in Adam Smith with Hari Seldon and Isaac Asimov!) 

Start with what could be a slogan for liberalism.

“No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable.” 

The whole tenor of this next passage would, or should, outrage any Ayn Rand cultist. Smith certainly didn’t take the view that the important agents of capitalism were CEOs or even inventors.

“Observe the accommodation of the most common artificer or day-labourer in a civilized and thriving country, and you will perceive that the number of people whose industry a part, though a small part, has been employed in procuring him this accommodation, exceeds all computation.”

Then there is the natural trend, described by Marx, for industries to drift into monopoly or conspiratorial duopoly, a trend that our parents and grandparents wisely fought down under both Roosevelts.

“The monopolists, by keeping the market constantly understocked... sell their commodities much above the natural price... The price of monopoly is upon every occasion the highest which can be got. The natural price, or the price of free competition, on the contrary, is the lowest which can be taken....”

And another passage skipped over by the libertarians: “We rarely hear, it has been said, of the combinations of masters [cartels]; though frequently of those of workmen. But whoever imagines, upon this account, that masters rarely combine, is as ignorant of the world as of the subject. Masters are always and everywhere in a sort of tacit, but constant and uniform combination, not to raise the wages of labour....” 

Modern context? See how Robert Reich explains the “Monopolization of America.” And be outraged that the Boomers let slide the wisdom of their parents and grandparents who adored Roosevelts for good reasons. (And why can't we find one?)

== Choose a side, libertarians ==

Finally, what all of this comes down to is a tactic for this civil war. Again and again I will remind you it is worthwhile ministering to libertarians! 

They share with you a central reflex -- Suspicion of Authority (SoA) -- though clever oligarchs have spent gushers to divert the movement away from ever casting that suspicious eye on them! 

Cozened into defending property at all cost, and forgetting the word competition, most of the libertarian movement is currently under complete control by those who bought and paid for it – Steve Forbes, the Kochs, and the lords’ wholly-owned propaganda arm, the Cato Institute.

It’s a pity! Libertarians – were they to learn from their endless failures at both election and prediction – might become a real force on the landscape of both ideas and political reform.  No one is asking them to stop questioning Big Government!  But to recognize a core historical fact:  that monopoly and feudal oligarchies have destroyed more glimmering eras of freedom and market creativity than all the government bureaucrats who ever lived.

Minister to them! They share so many of your basic, impudent, pro-freedom instincts. (See this FB group for "Cyber-Libertarian Democrats.") Tell your libertarian friends: 

"Stop letting the worst enemies of freedom bribe you into only hating on a secondary foe! The original American Revolution was not hatred of “government,” but a king and his cronies who used a gerrymandered Parliament to pass laws favoring the owner-lord aristocracy, forcing all American commerce through their ports and wharves, buying from their monopolies. Do fight to keep the hand of government regulation light! But also fight to keep the hands of oligarchy off of our republic."

Cite a fellow who no libertarian ever reads anymore, so much wiser and smarter and more effective than Ayn bloody Rand that they aren’t arguably the same species.

Dear Professor Krugman – how to cut the libertarians’ leash

This week in Las Vegas, Freedom Fest will feature the “debate of the century!” pitting Keynsian economist and Nobelist Professor Paul Krugman against Steve Moore, supply-sider and Wall Street Journal columnist.  

(And here's a late news flash... Freedom Fest will also feature visits from Marco Rubio and... Donald Trump. See below where I explain why the Hijackers of Conservatism are so desperate to reach out to libertarians, and maintain a special effects fantasy-illusion that the two movements are somehow siblings.  Desperate, indeed.)

Let me start by saying Freedom Fest is way-fun!  I was invited to speak at last year’s event, and I found that my message – as a lonely acolyte of Adam Smith among fervid followers of Ayn Rand and Murray Rothbard – was both rare and greeted with attentive respect. The Smith-Heinlein branch of libertarianism is rarely heard, nowadays, but I can think of few conclaves of political zealotry where a dissenting voice would be treated so courteously. Certainly not in gatherings of today's fervid far-left or today’s raving, fanatical entire-right.

I expect Professor Krugman – famed in sci fi circles more as an acolyte of Isaac Asimov, than for his Nobel – will be similarly welcomed. Though, if you look at the Freedom Fest web site, you can see that the masters of (hijacked) conservatism are pulling out the stops, sparing no expense or effort to keep libertarianism tethered, like a dog who is deeply unhappy, but cannot break the masters' leash.

Severing that chain was my own aim, last year. It is forged out of lies, misconceptions and manipulations… but also by the neglect of moderate liberals who have shrugged and assumed that outreach to libertarians will be a lost cause.  This is foolishness of the highest order. Especially since Adam Smith was the founder of both liberalism and libertarianism.

And hence, I wrote to Paul Krugman, offering him suggested “bullet points” for his upcoming debate with one of the front men for Rupert Murdoch and the ongoing attempted oligarchic putsch.  Points that truly strike home with sincere and openminded libertarians.

 Ways to make his debate less like a sumo match, in which the right always wins, through sheer obstinacy and mountains of cash… and more like judo, in which the right wing dinosaur must stumble over its own inconsistencies.

Alas, though we have exchanged correspondence, in the past, Krugman never answered me, this time.  Well, well. Famous people and all that.  I have a backup plan, then…

…to share my advice right here, publicly.  Hoping that the message somehow will get through.

== Judo tools for separating libertarians from the mad right ==

Dear Professor Krugman,

We’ve corresponded. I’m the astronomer/science fiction author who Janet and Robin Asimov asked to tie up Isaac’s loose ends in the Foundation universe, with my novel Foundation’s Triumph.  

I see you’ll debate Steven Moore at Freedom Fest, where I spoke last year, ministering to libertarians, a movement that’s been (alas) largely hijacked by oligarchy.  

May I offer suggestions? After years trying to draw out the Rand-Rothbard poison, I’ve discovered some effective counter-catechisms that you are welcome to use.

1) The word “competition” is key! It underpins the saner libertarianism of Adam Smith and Robert Heinlein, not the present cult’s substitute obsession with -- “propertarianism.”

When I point this out, the truly intelligent libertarians get guilty looks. They know these two words can be opposites!

All good things – oxygen, water, food... and property – become toxic when overly-concentrated. Smart libertarians know this. They suspect, inside, that the Murdochian hyperbole for utterly unlimited concentrations of economic power cannot be justified.

Propertarianism -- beloved of Forbes, Norquist, Murdoch and would-be feudal lords -- is opposite to the teachings of Smith and the American founders, who knew competition is only effective/creative when it is flat-open-fair. 

(The Founders seized and redistributed 1/3 of the land in the former colonies, for example, far more “leveling” than FDR ever tried.) 

Friedrich Hayek himself called for maximizing the number of knowledgable decision makers, which is not what you get when the economy is controlled by a secretive cabal of 3,000 mutually-conniving CEO golf-buddies.

Smith showed that competitive-creative arenas fail when cheaters can manipulate, as lords did in every feudal society for 6000 years. He despised feudalism far more than socialism. So why is no one using Adam Smith and “competition” against the right? I find it effective to juxtapose Smith against Rand, showing them to be opposites! With Rand's "lords" inevitably leading to feudalism's repetitiously boring and destructive song.

Were democrats to reclaim Smith, it could be a prodigious judo move. (See: Liberals Must Reclaim Adam Smith.)

Key to this… Steve Moore won’t expect it! Show that all GOP efforts -- especially Supply Side -- actually undermine competition. Top to bottom and in all ways. Today’s version of conservatism is the diametric opposite of libertarianism. At least Adam Smith’s kind.

2)  One relentless conservative meme is nostalgia, especially for the 1940s, 50s and 60s, when America was led by the stalwart "Greatest Generation." Only there's a rub. Our parents in the Greatest Generation adored one man above all others -- the very same person who moguls of the right now call antichrist. 

Our purported golden era of capitalism – the 1950s and 1960s – happened when FDR’s tax rates kept things flat-open-fair.  These are facts that demolish the nostalgia part of the right’s hypnotic mantra.

3) Refer to science fiction!  These geeks mostly love the stuff. (It’s why they invite me, even knowing I’ll diss their icons.) Talk about the future. Mention Heinlein, who was as much a liberal as a libertarian. Then ask why they ally themselves with the most reactionary, anti-science and anti-future forces in America.

4) “If this society is so awful, how come it made more libertarians than any other?” In fact, the more children of the poor and disadvantaged get healthy and educated, the more of them will become libertarians, too!

5) This one is potent. Yes, democrats and Keynsians want the state to help people… and yet, which party DE-regulates bloated government, more often?

Challenge them to name an industry the GOP - for all its ranting - ever actually de-regulated! Other than Wall Street/Finance and Resource Extraction – and those two exceptions only unleashed moguls to rape us all.

In contrast: when the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) and Civil Aeronautics Board (CAB) became festered-captured wreckers of competition… Democrats abolished them!

And they deregulated Trucking, too. Or take Bill Clinton’s deregulation of the GPS system, freeing it for use by all. AT&T’s breakup ignited a golden age of cell-phone competition.

Above all, Al Gore’s bill unleashing the Internet was the greatest deregulation in history! Make them face that irony! Then demand to see the GOP's de-regulatory history, by comparison... and recall the Republicans owned every single lever of power from 2001 through 2007.  They passed anything they really cared about.  And deregulation got only lip service. Anyone who believes their promises, this time, is simply a fool.

6) Then ask why only blue states are backing away from the damned Drug War. This really makes libertarians sit up.

7) Distinguish between “liberals” and “leftists.” Yes, the latter can act crazy, supplying anecdotes for Fox to claim “Dems are even worse than Republicans! So come home to the GOP on election day you libertarians!”

But the DP is not run by its lefty radicals!  It is run by millions of moderates who want only to negotiate. (E.g. leftists may want “equalized outcomes” but liberals want all children uplifted to equal starting blocks for subsequent fair competition. A huge difference, and the reason why Adam Smith was “The First Liberal.”)

In contrast, the Republican Party is the most disciplined partisan force since 1865. (Use that word – disciplined – libertarians know it is true. And facing that truth about the GOP, they will recoil!) The so-called "differences" among GOP candidates are minuscule bits of meaningless theater. All of them repeat Roger Ailes talking points, daily. And Barry Goldwater is spinning now, at 5000 RPM. 

8) Just as "competition" is a better word to focus on than "propertarianism," so we need to address the current libertarian reflex that the word "government" is the sole and entire human sin.  

Sure, go ahead and have a reflex to hold that elite under suspicion!  (I share it!)  We need the libertarian  impulse to worry about Big Government, since that is one (but only one) of the possible ways Big Brother might arrive.

But also do look at 6000 years of human history. Recall that freedom and flat-fair competition and opportunity were repressed FAR more often by owner-oligarchies. Adam Smith recommended neutral civil servants as counters to the old, feudal sickness. 

Here is the plain fact: 
Bureaucrats can stifle flat-fair competition, if not carefully watched.  
Oligarchs always stifle flat-fair competition.

The reflex to always pour hate only at "government" (and on scientists) is being pushed by... can you guess who? That's right. Owner-oligarchs.

9) Sure, liberals and libertarians will always disagree.  We both want a better world than this one.  Libertarians think it will happen through unleashing the maximum number of free and empowered competitors into flat-fair-open markets. 

Guess what… so do liberals!  Where they differ is that liberals see a central need for committed investment… in infrastructure, education and public health... in order to maximize the number of 25 year olds who reach equal starting blocks in that flat-open-fair arena!  

And without the slightest doubt, many past Rooseveltean efforts have increased the fraction of kids reaching that free and confident readiness to compete.  Do you guys want to try some more market-oriented ways to eliminate poverty and disadvantage?  Great! Bring your plans to the table.  But remember, today's mad conservatism does everything in its power to destroy the negotiating table! 

(10) The crux:

a) Liberals are not leftists!  The latter want to equalize outcomes.  The former want just enough common action to ensure that talent is not wasted by poverty and so we'll get more equality of opportunity and starting blocks.  Sometimes this boundary is fuzzy and confused.  But in their hearts, liberals can be negotiated with, and even talked into ending obsolete programs. Liberals can be talked into emphasizing programs for the young and old and leaving adults much less coddled. Leftists make no such distinctions.

b) Libertarians are not right wingers!  Or, they wouldn’t be, if they remembered Adam Smith. If they recalled 6000 years of awful feudalism. If they weren’t suckered by propaganda financed by oligarchs and confederate fanatics.

If liberals and libertarians argued, debated fairly and negotiated, they might find surprising common ground. Overlaps that the mad-dogmatic far-left and the raving insane entire-right will never perceive.  But these distinctions need to be made, first. 

Paramount is this – libertarians must sever the oligarchy’s leash on their movement. Just look at the money that the oligarchy is spending, sending missionaries to Freedom Fest. They are terrified you all might wake up and rebel.

Libertarians must banish this notion that “I know the Republicans betray us, every time, but they are still home.”

No, they are not home.  

They are puppetmasters. 

Tell us they are ‘home’ when you can show us pro-freedom measures they ever took. 

All right. Guns. I’ll admit they talk more about guns. Talk. 

Meanwhile, it’s the dems who dissolved the CAB and ICC and ATT and unleashed GPS and the Internet and are ending the Drug War… and dems aren't even proposing much more than some tepid-tiny ideas about guns.  And scientists, the smartest folks alive, are fleeing the party of oligarchy as fast as they can.

Come on guys.  Look at actual facts.

Laugh at the oligarchic shills they keep sending to events like Freedom Fest. Tell them you won't be holding your nose and "coming home" in 2016.  The Murdochians need you in order to supply a gloss of intellect atop their heap of rationalizations for a return to feudalism.

The fellow you need to remember - and come home to - is a guy named Adam Smith.

====

Okay that's it.  My "capsule" list of talking points for libertarians.  Sorry, Professor Krugman. I know my input was unsolicited. And I know your own emphasis will be on pointing out that Supply Side (Voodoo) Economics has never been correct in its predictions -- not even once -- across 35 years, a track record that would have invalidated any theory based on science... 

...which is why the right hates science, so.

Still, do not miss this opportunity to reach out in other aspects. My own Freedom Fest experience suggests you might use some rhetorical jiu jitsu.  These polemical tools have been effective. I hope you’ll find use in one or two of them. Especially the contrast between "competition" and "propertarianism," in the contaxt of 10,000 years of feudalism.

Because these folks are worth the effort!  They represent a major streak in the American psyche... one of irascibly independent belief in the creative power of competition. These aren't fools, though oversimplification can make them seem foolish.

They are worth reaching out to, if only to help free them from the puppet masters who would end creative competition forever.

With cordial regards,

David Brin

http://www.davidbrin.com

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*** ADDENDUM for the rest of you, out there:  Sorry, I can't help it.  I see that Glen Beck will be speaking at Freedom Fest.  OMG, the oligarchy truly is cranking up the message that "libertarians and right wingers are cousins! We bicker but we're the same team!" They are terrifed the "libertarian wing" of the GOP may bolt.

Glen Beck.  Eep. I am hoping someone in Beck's audience will draw him out on just one of the ten thousand limbs of deceit that Savanarola has regularly spun. This one is a doozy.

"Mr. Beck, you claim that George Soros is a really scary guy.  So devilishly clever and manipulative that he personally toppled eight foreign governments. Is Soros still worrisome?"

That is just part 1 of the question. It's purpose: getting Beck to scoot down the branch with a fervid rant about Soros.  But the audience questioner should then ask this followup:

"Mr. Beck, not one person in your TV audience... nor a single person at Fox, where they endlessly repeated your truisms about Soros... has ever asked about those eight foreign governments the scary George Soros 'toppled.'  That dittohead failure of curiosity is what I now want to correct.

"Would you now please NAME THEM FOR US? Right now, please NAME the eight foreign governments that George Soros personally toppled?"

Oh, to be there, with a phone cam aimed at Beck's face, when this happens!  Please, oh please someone do this and record it? 

Because yes! George Soros did help to topple eight foreign governments. It's true! On this one occasion, Glen Beck didn't lie!

Only when those "eight toppled foreign govenrments are named - when you stare at the list, in stunned, ironic amazement - you will all despise yourselves for ever having ever listened to a word shouted by Glen Beck or the Fox shills.  You will never again heed a further word they say.  And you will learn the value of asking followup questions. The value of science.