Ward of the state Glenn Reynolds

So the notion that war is the friend of big government seems questionable to me, based on things that have happened in the past century at least.

Anyone can become a law professor. Witness government functionary and glibertarian Glenn Reynolds, who has the temerity to say that after 7 years of war, a doubling of the national debt, ballooning entitlement programs, and government ownership of banks, insurance companies, and, in short order, automakers, too, that the proposition that war is the health of the state is “questionable to me.”

Ok, Glenn.

Yankee soldier, he wanna shoot that skag

Matt Yglesias:

But I worry that it may actually be counterproductive for some people to gloss over the fact that if you spend ten years smoking a pack or more a day (like me!) and then decide to stop, it’ll really really suck. For example, they say that after 24 hours “your sense of taste and smell will return to a normal level.” That’s nice. But, again, if you haven’t been at a “normal” level for years, it’s actually quite unpleasant. And the idea that at 72 hours your “overall energy level will rise” is a fantasy. I’m sure there’s some technical sense in which that may be true, but I spent over a month feeling pereptually drowsy, confused, and un-motivated. The health reason to quit smoking really is “so that you don’t get cancer and die.” But it’s not fun.

The same kind of propaganda is used to dissuade people from using drugs. Now, pointing out the long term health effects of heroin is important. People should not use heroin.

But claiming that heroin is horrible from the get go has a counterproductive effect. Heroin is in fact, I’m told, really really fun at first, which is why people use it. The high is awesome. The problem is that routine use of heroin is really really bad. But saying that heroin is bad all of the time undercuts the real message because people find out that hey, they’ve been lied to, heroin is in fact, awesome at first.

Le plus horrible jour de ma vie

What I imagine Republicans were feeling on Election night:

An Aphorism

Criminal Procedure? Harmless Error!

Glibertarians Heart eHarmony

I think it’s awesome that so many libertarians are outraged that eHarmony is now forced to open its website to gay dating.  I’m referring to Glenn Reynolds, here, not Radley Balko (for whom I have tremendous admiration). 

Unlike Balko, Reynolds has spent the last 8 years defending unlawful detentions, waterboarding, and the like all in pursuit of the war on terror. So the confiscation of private tax dollars for those ends didn’t worry him at all. 

But a gay rights group forces eHarmony to open up its service, and it’s tremendous assault on the “freedom to associate” and “private property.”

What’s so wrong with deflation?

I get how deflation works: it’s a general decline in the price level.  I also get why rapid deflation, just like rapid inflation, is bad.  I don’t understand, however, why gentle deflation is any more pernicious than gentle inflation. 

I understand that gentle inflation encourages people to consume now, but it doesn’t seem to me that that behavior is necessary the behavior we should pursue.  Anyway, I’m open to explanations.

Too easy!

This is too easy. Jonah Goldberg, complaining about Kathleen Parker’s description of elements of the Republican Party as “oogedy-boogedy”, writes::

What aspects of the Christian Right amount to oogedy-boogedyism? I take oogedy-boogedy to be a perjorative reference to absurd superstition and irrational nonsense. So where has the GOP embraced to its detriment oogedy-boogedyism?

To which I respond:

Big jet airliner

It’s perplexing to me that so many so-called libertarians harbor a real antipathy toward unions and the deals they’re able to secure for their workers: namely pensions and health care benefits.

Of course, there are a lot of structural reasons to worry about corporations that defer payment of relatively generous benefits into the future as part of deals with unions.  The result is a company burdened by enormous obligations for decades after people have left the workforce.

But that’s not, exactly, the fault of union workers. It’s not like they didn’t work for those benefits, or haven’t come to rely upon those benefits. But one need only take a gander at Megan McArdle’s scribblings for some good old fashioned class warfare, describing the UAW in fairly unflattering terms while sparing such scorn for Wall Street types.

Anyway, that’s sort of the thing Matt Yglesias is alluding to when he observes that Ford and GM CEOs like their corporate jets.

When maturity doesn’t mean grown up

I notice that my libertarian paradise can only sustain itself in a world with stable communities and self-governing individuals, and the only thing capable of producing either is tradition. If I want to live among mature individuals capable of citizenship in a libertarian state, I’d better defend the social norms that make it possible to bring up those people. If I think that organic communities obviate the need for government intervention, then I’d better preserve those communities, even if they engage in soft coercion. If some of their norms treat women differently or even disadvantageously, that might be good or bad but, in any event, is a matter for that community to decide for itself.

Helen Rittelmayer says that. 

When Kerry Howley says that she doesn’t “know what it means to say that ‘the only thing capable of producing self-governing individuals is tradition,” that’s because she’s too kind to say: stop being so goddamn coy.

Helen’s claim isn’t so much of an argument as it is a series of preferences that hang not on the verbs, but on the adjectives: stable communities, mature individuals capable of this or that.

One could simply say stable, mature, and capable people form communities that eschew violence. All of that requires a significantly lower level of social coercion to maintain.

But Helen probably has quite different standards, ones that require suitably religious individuals living in traditional gender roles. Now, of course, Helen believes that adherence to traditional religious and gender values produces a non-violent community, but that’s open to debate.

The important lesson for us is that Helen doesn’t argue fairly.

Joe Blows

I can see the liberal blogosphere is all “wtf!?” at the decision by the Senate Democratic caucus to let Joe Lieberman keep his crappy chairmanship.  After all, Joe was just exercising his freedom of speech when he endorsed John McCain, spoke at the RNC, and traveled throughout the country campaigning for the McCain-Palin ticket.  Also, when he said Barack Obama was unqualified and would abandon Israel, he really didn’t mean it.

Me? I’m like: what the hell did you expect? This is politics. The Republicans still love on Tom DeLay and Newt Gingrich, one a crook, the other a philandering moron, after all of these years. Did you think the Dems would do any different?