Bruce Baugh on the current financial straits

[womzilla]

bruceb used to be one of the people I thought of as a sane libertarian. Now he's not a libertarian at all, and here's a one-paragraph precis of exactly why:

When I was younger, I read Sinclair Lewis' It Can't Happen Here. I liked it. Still do. But I used to think that Sinclair had erred grievously in presenting with obvious approval the opposition leadership calling for what I'd call "social democacy" these days, with a lot more restraints on capital and a much, much more socially active state. Now I see that I was the one who erred. There is no viable opposition to the socially destructive power of those with large sums of money, extensive networks of economic and social controls, and no morals higher than the pits of hell except the institutions of government directed to helping those in need and the nation as whole so as to make great need less common and funded adequately for the job.

It's hard to stop quoting him with one paragraph; here's where he goes from there:

(Not everyone with great wealth is a malefactor, or even close to it, but they won't police their own. This is the fundamental weak spot in the basic libertarian proposal: there are limits to what outsiders can do to any fairly small and intensely woven community, and when the community in question is the wealthiest, there are abuses that simply will go unchecked unless the entire community leadership commits to a course of virtue and keeps it up in perpetuity. And this does not happen.)

And in a parenthetical at the end of the piece, general advice to those who were wrong:

I'm still paying my dues - learning, keeping my trap shut sometimes when people who had the wisdom and insight not to be so wrong in the first place want to say their piece, and backing those who are spreading clues out into the surrounding society. I have done my apologies and am working on my clean-up.

The whole essay, "The Bailout and Me", is well worth reading as a discussion of how these who view money as a big game to played without rules actively harm people who have no idea they've been drawn into the game. If you don't know Bruce, useful background is that he is chronically ill with a number of ailments which keep him from holding a regular job. When he can work, he writes novels and role-playing games, including the award-winning Adventure!.

[ETA: Re-reading my post, it sounds like I think this conversion away from libertarian into social democrat is a recent thing. I'm aware it's not. My main intent was to get people to read a sensible social democrat's essay about the current financial crisis and how it affects the people who are poorly supported by the social safety net.]

Comments

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Not everyone with great wealth is a malefactor, or even close to it, but they won't police their own. This is the fundamental weak spot in the basic libertarian proposal.

Oh dear. This is not a new discovery.

"But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary." - Federalist Papers no. 51

But since they are neither, we need both. This is why I have never been a libertarian, for reasons well and famously expressed 220 years ago.

[jimhenley.livejournal.com]

Kevin, you should hunt up Bruce's November 2004 entry where he first renounced his earlier libertarianism. It's a very strong, personal and challenging piece.

[womzilla.livejournal.com]

I've read it, and I might even have linked to it back in the day. I thought this was a really powerful single paragraph, part of a good overall essay, and thus highlighted it.

More on this

[dmsherwood53.livejournal.com]

There's a book by Ronald Dworkin called something like EQUALITY (Googled it its Ronald Dworkin. Sovereign Virtue: The Theory and Practice of Equality ( 2000)

Inadequate synopsis::::
If differences in Income are allowed to grow beyond a certain degree you get what is technically known as pseudo-speciation; the congretional protections of equality under the Law break down & the Super-Rich become a de facto Aristocracy.