Paulism, Applied

Yellow for Paul; Green for Grayson

The Republican Primary victory of Rand Paul forced me to bone up on the man, his father, and Libertarianism.  Heretofore, conventional wisdom among liberals was that the Ron Paul and the Tea Party would not be serious threats in November. Or ever.  I wanted to believe that the portion of America that could be so confused was still small enough to be dismissed. Things might be different now.  I needed a little schooling and some exercises in applied minarchy.  I concluded that, in an arena as complicated and churned as America in 2010, simplistic ideas, rigidly applied , are simultaneously the most irrelevant and the most dangerous things on earth.

 I learned that the Pauls adhere to the Austrian School of economics, which originated in Vienna during the Austrian Empire and was influential in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.  The core values were decentralization, and laissez faire market operations.  Contractual agreements and commercial transactions were held to be voluntary and only the most fractional government role was tolerated in the marketplace.

Libertarians try to extrapolate these economic policies to apply to all forms of social contract; they imagine a Libertarian Society...and it's right about here that the schisms begin.  The forms of Libertarianism include (this week):  Anarcho-Capitalism, Geolibertarianism,  Left-Libertarianism, Libertarian Conservatism, Libertarian Socialism (really?), Libertarian Transhumanism, Minarchism, and Mutualism. Isms scare me.  And I'd hate to think how many types of Libertarian Presbyterians there might be or what those transhumans look like.

I wonder if the history of the Austrian Empire has anything to teach us about Anarcho-Capitalism, or Minarchism, or...I guess Paulism, really.  The empire that was formed in 1867 collapsed about fifty years later, which makes it one of the briefest classical empires in history.  It essentially collapsed under the weight of trying to accommodate the ethnic individualities of Croats, Serbs, Czechs, Poles, Rusyns, Slovaks, Slovenes, Ukrainians, Italians, and Romanians--and started the first World War in the process.

After the war, in 1922, the League of Nations had to bail out the economy, which was bankrupted due to inflation, making Austria a ward of the League. Subsequently, Austria was subsumed by The Third Reich.  It's autonomy was eventually returned to it by the peaceful post-war withdrawal of NATO occupation.  Austria is a very rich nation today, but its wealth is largely due to its neutrality--no need for a standing army--rather than to any magical economic formula.  According to wikipedia.com,

Austria is the 12th richest country in the world in terms of GDP (Gross domestic product) per capita, has a well-developed social market economy, and a high standard of living . Until the 1980s, many of Austria's largest industry firms were nationalised; in recent years, however, privatisation has reduced state holdings to a level comparable to other European economies. Labour movements are particularly strong in Austria and have large influence on labour politics.

So much for the Austrian School of unregulated free market economic theory.

Meanwhile, back here at home, in just one day in the news last week, the need for greater regulation was invoked in response to three separate critical issues.  As an exercise in applied Libertarianism, as each of three issues came up in the news, I tried to imagine how Ron Paul and his Tea Party would handle them.  Keeping in mind that, in a debate setting, if asked how he would handle a given situation if elected, the standard Libertarian's dodge is to cite how the problem never would have developed in a society where government was small and interference in markets was nearly nonexistent.

Never mind that dodge.  Elections are real time, in the midst of the crises we're currently facing.  If Rand Paul wins a Senate seat, the Republican Party will think it has seen the direction of its destiny.  And, in that event, Ron Paul will run in 2012 and he will win many more than the 14 delegates he garnered in 2008.  That's a bid to inherit the kind of problems we've faced in the last week of May, 2010.

Try these exercises yourself, if you're so inclined.  I let the logic of the Libertarians apply as far as my imagination would take me.  You won't need my answers to get the picture.

************

The Gulf Oil Spill:  Given that the Ron Paul has asserted that Louisiana should not have received federal aid after Hurricane Katrina ( this, from a Representative whose 14th District stretches along the Gulf Coast from Galveston to Corpus Christi--are we supposed to believe that his call on Katrina aid is more pure somehow, since it could as easily have been Galveston hit hardest by Katrina?), his position on the Gulf and BP is predictable.  Son, Rand, had the following to say on May 21st about BP and the spill:

On the oil spill, Paul, a libertarian and tea party favorite, said he had heard nothing from BP indicating it wouldn't pay for the spill that threatens devastating environmental damage along the Gulf of Mexico coast.

"What I don't like from the president's administration is this sort of, 'I'll put my boot heel on the throat of BP,'" Paul said in an interview with ABC's "Good Morning America." "I think that sounds really un-American in his criticism of business.  And I think it's part of this sort of blame-game society in the sense that it's always got to be somebody's fault instead of the fact that maybe sometimes accidents happen," Paul said.

The senate candidate referred to a Kentucky coal mine accident that killed two men, saying he had met with the families and he admired the coal miners' courage.  "We had a mining accident that was very tragic. ... Then we come in and it's always someone's fault. Maybe sometimes accidents happen," he said. 

Gulf Oil Rigs, From Nov, 2009: HeatingOil.com
"The surge of production from the Gulf of Mexico has led the US
to produce more crude oil than it has since 2004." 

The Exercise:  How would non-interference  and non-regulation in the business of offshore drilling play out ?  Would we, the buying public, make our displeasure with British Petroleum known by cutting up our BP cards?  Libertarians advocate local management of local problems; how would local be defined in this case?

**********

Among J&J's Recalled Products

Johnson and Johnson's Recall:   The FDA had to pressure J&J for a massive recall of over forty kinds of children's medications, from Children's Tylenol to Pediacare this month citing bacteria buildup in the laboratories where the medications were produced.  Regulation is being discussed and criminal action is under consideration.  The FDA has been calling for accountability on J&J's OTC products since last September, but the drug manufacturer has been dragging its heels.  In a Congressional Investigation, (May 26, 2010, AP, Chicago Tribune) :

Colleen Goggins, J&J’s president for McNeil consumer products, told lawmakers the company has already taken steps to fix the problems, including shaking up its management structure.  But she had few answers to questions about an alleged “phantom recall” of more than 88,000 packets of Motrin, a pain reliever containing ibuprofen. According to FDA documents, J&J learned about a formulation problem in November 2008 that interfered with the pills’ dissolving action, causing them to lose potency.  J&J then hired an outside contractor to collect samples of the product — mainly sold in gas stations — and determine whether a recall was necessary.  But instead of sampling the product, the contractor began purchasing large quantities of Motrin and instructing its employees not to mention a recall.

A memo titled “Motrin Purchase Project,” distributed during the hearing states: “You should simply ’act’ like a regular customer while making these purchases. There must be no mention of this being a recall of the product!”

The Exercise:  How does this OTC pediatric medicine problem play out at the hands of a Libertarian administration that calls government interference of business "Un-American"?

**********

Facebook's Privacy Policy Problem:  The name is oxymoronic. Facebook isn't actually interested in your privacy; they are interested short-term in advertising income, which relies on your loosening attachment to privacy as a right and as a moral value.  They are also interested, longer-term, in turning their social network into a social utility as vital to your sense of well-being as telephones were, in their day, and as cell phones are, today.  Given how far Facebook has come in user population since its inception in 2004 (over 400 million active users by 2010), they are well on their way to meeting their goal.  In pursuing their own goals, Facebook periodically resets their privacy controls--on your account--to virtual zero, allowing advertisers to gather information with which to market you more effectively.  The only thing that prevents a default setting of No Privacy is the hue and cry of users who notice and complain.  After a couple of legal problems, Facebook  began informing users of changes to privacy controls...as far as we know. However, until recently, their privacy platforms were so complex that users couldn't exercise full privacy controls with confidence.

The Exercise:  Without regulation, what ultimate outcome would you predict for the future of sites like Facebook,  for their users, and for private information?

**********

So, take your pick.  I firmly believe that the apparent increase in the usual rate at which urgent issues arise is unprecedented. The tipping point has been surpassed for manageable population, viable climate, and available resources.  We have entered a maelstrom.  These are the most dangerous of times and such times give birth to the most dangerous of heroes.  A simple idea, desperate times, an angry power base, and a small man: it all sounds ominously familiar to me.

Follow Up:  Saul Friedman has an excellent post dated Wednesday, June 16, on the Pauls, their policies, the political context of current libertarianism, and on the Paulist vote: "REFLECTIONS: On The Paranoid Style"