Seattle vs. Jakarta: The Monorail Challenge - Part 11
Inching to our fiery death with helmets on - in pursuit of liberty
Last November, Seattle voters killed the Monorail project. The last remaining parcels of land owned by the Monorail commission have now been sold off. The Seattle Monorail project became a serious boondoggle, with politics and sketchy accounting convincing Seattle voters to finally pull the plug. So with Seattle down and out, a poster at the Skyscraper City message boards named 'Zorobabel' was ready to declare victory for the Indonesian capital:
At the end of the January 31 funding deadline set by Jakarta's governor, the Monorail Commission claimed to have secured a US$500 million loan from a Dubai-based bank. However, some doubts were raised when someone discovered that no Dubai bank was invested in Indonesia because of their bad credit rating. A week later, the bank in Dubai confirmed this. Despite this, the Jakarta Post announced that construction was set to resume and Governor Sutiyoso checked out the station designs. The completion date was set for March 2008.
A few days later, a poster named 'Insiders' then claimed that on the day Monorail director Sukmawaty was supposedly signing the agreement with the Dubai bank, she was actually in Singapore shopping. A few days later, she started changing her story and saying that it was actually a group of Dubai banks rather than just one. However, in the itinerary of her upcoming trip to Dubai, there was still no mention of any financial closing meeting. 'Insiders' clarified that there was only a meeting to convince the Dubai investors that Jakarta was truly committed to building this thing.
In March, more problems arose. One of the two major partners in the Monorail consortium, Omnico, decided to sue the Monorail Commission for misstating their financial status and diluting their share value in the project. Both Omnico and the Monorail Commission eventually began hurling accusations of financial misdeeds at each other. A week later, the Jakarta Post reported that an expert on public transportation thought the future of Jakarta's Monorail project was bleak. Then, at the beginning of May, it was again announced that a loan was secured from Dubai to help pay for the project, but it was once again a false alarm. Finally, in late June, the central government offered a blanket loan guarantee for the project.
Meanwhile, construction continued along the Monorail route throughout this entire time.
"Put your helmet on, we'll be reaching speeds of 3"
- Crow T. Robot
This post is not just Part 11 of the Monorail Challenge, but it's also the second post in the Mutinyblogging series, my tribute to the Mystery Science Theatre 3000 classic Space Mutiny. During the movie's thrilling chase scenes, the hero pictured above, David Ryder, pursues the head of the mutineers, Kalgan, in adult-sized bumper cars called 'Enforcers'. They were marvels of futuristic engineering, combining the speed of a Segway with the turning radius of a shopping cart. But even as the hero and villain chased each other throughout thewarehouse spaceship, they always made sure they were wearing their helmets.
I've traveled from left to right and back again throughout my life, but there hasn't been a time where I didn't think of myself as a libertarian. Despite being called Moonbat of the Day recently by a commenter at Sound Politics, and helping to start up Seattle's Drinking Liberally events, I still think of myself as more of a libertarian than a liberal. Whenever I post something about this on DailyKos, however, I get a bunch of people claiming that there's no difference between what issues I support and what ones they support. This is true in the world of DailyKos, where your political outlook is determined solely by how much you disagree with President Bush. But there are differences between what I believe and what the average liberal believes, even if it tends to be mostly on smaller issues...like helmet laws.
If there's one thing I've discovered since becoming sucked into this bizarre world of online politics, it's that the word libertarian means something different to everyone, so I understand if people think that my attempt at defining it for myself is the ultimate act of uselessness. But the core of my political philosophy has always been centered around the importance of free will and the framework left by those who established this country as a refuge from tyranny. I believe that when the Bill of Rights was created, the founders laid out the game plan for a system that, if followed properly, would ensure that people would be free of having any type of morality imposed on them and therefore would be unimpeded in a pursuit for personal wealth. In other words, no person or group could dictate your behavior, unless your behavior had a direct negative effect on others, and this would lead to the strongest society possible. Government could not be discriminatory when it came to an individual's thoughts, faith, race, property, or belief systems. Over two centuries later, this ideal is still not a reality (and getting much worse in recent years), and making it a reality is what motivates me to post my inane scribblings on the internet every day.
But I'm not going to pretend that every issue we encounter has a cut-and-dry libertarian solution based upon what I've said above. Most issues we face involve situations were the perceptions of liberty for many people are involved, and you can't just point to a solution where everyone's free will is satisfied. True liberty in a society can not be achieved without rules dictating our interaction within an infinitely complex economy and a democratic process to develop those rules.
When it comes to major issues of any type, I believe that problems are best solved at the lowest common denominator - although I'm not sure if how I approach this is the same as others do when they talk about federalism. For example, traffic laws have to exist. We can't possibly have a system of roads in this country without rules. But I feel very strongly that establishing a nationwide 55 MPH speed limit was anti-libertarian (or anti-federalist), in that it was a decision made from a higher authority with no appropriate justification. Things like speed limits should be decided locally, by the people who actually share that road every day. But I also believe that if a community got together and said that certain people couldn't drive on a particular road, it would be up to a higher judicial authority to prevent that from happening. Is that still federalism? If I didn't waste my time taking classes like Thermodynamics and Helicopter Theory in college, I might know the answer to that. For now, I'll just keep calling that federalism until someone at Reason tells me not to.
The reason I place so much value on these libertarian ideas is because I believe that it plays a much bigger role in the overall health of a society than the implementation of any particular economic theory. When people have less obstructions to their free will, that manifests itself in economic progress, regardless of whether an economic system tilts to the left or right. If you're still awake, you probably just noticed that I'm starting to reveal where I have a major difference with many other libertarians. I believe that when a community needs something, true liberty comes not from simply choosing the more free market solution over the government solution, it comes when those who have a stake in what's being done are able to choose for themselves between a government solution and a free market solution. Much of America's foundation is rooted in competing interests and a balance of powers, and I believe that this is a vital one to preserve, the ability for people to demand that government fix a problem when it loses faith in the free market's ability to do so, or vice versa.
A good example of where this leaves me is how I view problems within our education system. If you ask different people how they'd fix the schools in this country, a liberal is likely to say that it requires more government investment, a conservative (or the average libertarian that I talk to) is likely to say that it requires more privatization. I don't really think either approach will work or is more effective than the other. The problem with our schools is an extension of certain aspects of our society as a whole. The key to a child's education is parental involvement, and the fact that we have such staggering numbers of parents behind bars in this country and so many others working long hours to scrape by in low-end jobs, and so many others who just don't care, we doom ourselves to failure, no matter how much money the schools have to work with. When you focus on the issues that keep parents from being more involved, the downstream effects are magnified, and investing in the education process pays off regardless of who's paying what. And, of course, I think that giving communities more control over how to run their own schools can also be a big part of that.
I think the two most important metrics for determining how much liberty exists in a society are 1) how many people are in jail and 2) how easy it is for children in low-income areas to achieve upward mobility. In both of these cases, America is really failing right now, and this shapes my entire rationale when looking at politics. This trend is also being followed by a shift to the Democrats among libertarians, not just because the Bush Administration is the most authoritarian administration in memory, but also because more and more libertarians are starting to question old assumptions about the free market. Why I think this is happening is demonstrated by Radley Balko in a recent column at Fox News:
The reality is that government has some ability to affect our behavior both positively and negatively, but nowhere near as much as most people believe. Consider smoking bans. While I strongly disagree with how sweeping many of the smoking bans have been, many people in areas with smoking bans have found it easier to quit smoking as a result. But situations like that aren't common, and they tend to be indirect affects of government. At the opposite end of the responsibility spectrum, however, I find it laughable to believe that welfare programs are the driving force behind the existence of so many single mothers out there. It simply doesn't make sense to believe that government can be so powerless in getting people to be responsible, but Herculean in its ability to make people irresponsible.
But Balko is absolutely right that sin taxes, bans, and prohibitions do virtually nothing to stop people from exercising their free will. And this is where I find the most common ground with the standard libertarian outlook. It's not just largely inconsequential issues like helmet laws that matter here, it's also a very big one, the drug war. Telling people that they can't take certain mind-altering substances, simply because society deems that behavior immoral, is the most damaging transgression of our country's libertarian ideals at this time. And as a result, it continues to exacerbate the two major problems I mentioned earlier. We now have record numbers of people behind bars which fuels the socio-economic divide between the rich and poor (and black and white) that now severely limits social mobility.
As for sin taxes, though, while I agree that things like sin taxes can't be used to make people responsible, I do recognize that sin taxes could be useful for funding a potential health care expenditure that results from that irresponsibility. There's a distinction to be made about government forcing people to be responsible and government actually doing responsible things. I don't think there's anything particularly anti-libertarian about admitting that government is sometimes the necessary vehicle for addressing a problem and that a community can decide to use taxation or to allow government to make rules as the fairest way to do it. But the libertarian movement today hasn't been about presenting communities with a choice between government-based solutions and free market solutions, it's been about establishing the mindset that the free market choice is the only valid choice for liberty, and that taxes and government involvement are very, very, very bad. And as a result, we've been riding the winds of the free market, mocking those European and Latin American socialists, until it's become evident to many of us that it might not be getting us more liberty in all places.
What does this have to with monorails? Not a whole lot, but the debate over the monorail here in Seattle made me appreciate the difference between my concept of liberty and the concept of many others who call themselves libertarians. As Seattle debated how to build the monorail, I found many people who believed in the central contradiction above - i.e. that if government was collecting taxes and writing the checks, the only outcome possible was one of greater irresponsibility - and that the only way to succeed was to let the invisible hand of the free market lay down the elevated tracks. In the end, though, the one factor that stood above all else in Jakarta's looming victory is that they needed a monorail way more than Seattle did. Having a monorail was more central to the liberty of Jakartans than it was to the liberty of Seattlites. Did it really matter in the end whether the $500 million needed for the Jakarta project came from a bank loan in Dubai or from the Indonesian government? Hell, the workers were building it for months before they even knew where that money was coming from. How were they supposed to know how irresponsible they were supposed to be?
"Damn, I'm losing speed because I'm also trying to buff the floors"
- Crow T. Robot
As I mentioned earlier, there's been a shift underway driving many libertarians to support Democrats right now. It's been driven in large part by the Republicans in Congress and the White House, who've become so authoritarian on many basic justice and civil rights issues that it overshadows the long-running economic biases against Democrats, taxation and regulation. Many libertarians believe in an extreme form of property rights when it comes to these two issues and it runs squarely against what many Democrats advocate for curing certain social ills. In a post discussing the shifting of libertarians to the left, Hilzoy at Obsidian Wings challenges these principles here:
Describing net neutrality can be a challenge, especially if you're a 107-year-old Senator from Alaska. But one thing that needs to be understood is that the ISPs (Telco's like SBC and AT&T) have a legitimate beef with net neutrality. The best way I've found to describe this is to use roads as an example, but with some very important differences between roads and the 'series of tubes' that make up the internet. Imagine that a few companies like UPS and FedEx actually owned the secondary roads throughout the country. UPS and FedEx also still have their businesses of delivering packages for people, but other newer companies could also use the roads without having to pay anything extra beyond what they pay for the roads that connect their warehouses to the highway. Eventually, UPS and FedEx's competitors start using the roads so much and using larger and larger trucks that the roads need to be expanded. The problem is, UPS and FedEx have to do it, so they demand that all their competitors who are using the roads should pay for it, but there's a rule of non-discrimination (road neutrality, I guess) that prevents them from charging the people who are using the roads the most.
This is basically what's happening on the internet. Companies that compete with the Telco's (like Vonage) only have to pay an entry fee to get on the internet, but can send as much data as they want. This puts the Telco's in the position of having to continually upgrade the parts of the internet they own so that their competitors can continue to do business efficiently. For Telco advocates, the solution is simple - just get rid of the non-discrimination rules and allow them to control the content being sent across the internet. This solution feels right to many free market advocates who believe in the absolutist view of property rights. The Telco's own the tubes and should not be interfered with in controlling the tubes. Julian Sanchez from Reason Online recently discussed the issue and came to the following conclusion:
Sanchez believes that the laws of the free market will do a better job of keeping the Telco's honest. Attempts to extract monopoly rents will be 'shortsighted' because customers will be so outraged that they'll switch their service to the most superior product offering. Anybody who's actually worked in the high tech field, though, knows full well that it doesn't work that way. The dustbin of the high tech world contains many superior products that were at some sort of competitive disadvantage. Even as a former Microsoft employee, I recognize that they ended up in a situation where they were able to use their operating system dominance to boost their own products that operate on that system against competing products that were clearly better. Sure, some people began to use Linux, but the vast majority of PC users still used Windows. The solution involved setting rules for what Microsoft could and could not do. And few people in the high tech world doubt that this was the right way to go.
If net neutrality is scrapped, there's no question that the Telco's could use their position as gatekeepers of the web to take on companies like Google and Amazon by building a competing service and then trying to extract monopoly rents from them, or by partnering with them and making it impossible for anyone else to enter the market. There are a number of ways in which Telco's would find it advantageous to stifle competition and limit competing innovation. This is not hypothetical, it's the likely outcome. But Sanchez has visions of benefits that we haven't hypothesized yet, a belief rooted in nothing more than his faith in the magical powers of the free market.
As supporters of net neutrality understand, the amount of innovation that will arise from the internet is not primarily a function of the money invested in it (although that is a factor), it's more a function of the number of people who have access to it. It flies in the face of the notion that profits alone drive progress, a central belief among many free-market libertarians. The open source movement in software proved this, as large numbers of unpaid people began to develop freeware products that rivalled what was being produced at some of the world's largest software firms. It turns out that people are motivated by more than just money.
The one thing that struck me most in following the Jakarta Monorail message boards was how much pride there was among Jakartans to have their city rival other emerging third-world metropolises like Kuala Lumpur or Bangkok. Jakarta Governor Sutiyoso staked his legacy on building it, and as has been clear from the last few months, Jakartans have been willing to look past a whole lot of incompetence from their public officials to get it done. This was hardly seen at all in Seattle (well, except for the incompetence from public officials). There was (and still is) a strong sentiment among many in and around Seattle that using any taxes to invest in public transportation is a waste of money. Some people are so dedicated to this sentiment that it drives them to complete madness.
I'm not saying that the free market can never work to push the economy forward, or is always a detriment to progress. What I'm saying is that as America competes with the rest of the world in the race to dominate the 21st century global economy, we should understand that profits are not the only thing that can drive progress, but that government can also lay the groundwork for greater liberty and greater innovation through certain projects and investments - and that American pride can be the motivator, just as it was when we made it first to the moon. America is well behind many other countries in broadband access, which is putting us at a growing competitive disadvantage in the modern world. Believing that scrapping net neutrality is the right path to closing the gap will just be the latest example of how free market libertarians have just become the conservatives who manage to get their numbers straight before reaching the wrong conclusion.
"He shouldn't have been carrying that case of cleaning fluid ... and nitroglycerin ... and gel ignite in there"
- Crow T. Robot
At the thrilling climax of Space Mutiny, our hero overcomes his crippling lack of acting ability and dives from his 'Enforcer' seconds before it crashes into Kalgan's, engulfing him and the two death cars inside a gigantic fireball. Kalgan somehow lives through this and is seen waking up in the spaceship's boiler room as the movie mercilessly fades to credits. It's hard to know what was more ridiculous though; that someone thought they might be making a sequel to this gigantic turd, or that cars for use on a spaceship wouldn't be a little more fireproof. It is this unanswerable question that I dedicate to the most ridiculous libertarian of them all - John Stossel.
At a time when the President of the United States is blocking investigations into his ability to secretly spy on American citizens, Congress changes the laws to protect him while the media reports the opposite, the 4th Amendment is being torn to shreds, people have gone on cable news to make threats against journalists and accuse the New York Times of treason, prominent media personalities and other crackpots have spoken of killing Supreme Court justices, and the number of blacks in American prisons reaches 578% higher than apartheid South Africa, the most prominent libertarian in the national media is furious that we can't sell our organs for cash.
It was a few months ago that I got my first exposure to Stossel, as he essentially agreed with Stephen Colbert when Colbert questioned the need for the FAA. It was at that point when I began to question whether or not I should really be calling myself a libertarian. Having actually tested flight control software at Boeing (I left there in 2000 to work at Microsoft), it's mind-boggling for me to think that someone could actually believe that. Stossel is right when he says that companies have an incentive to be safe, but it's still absolutely necessary when developing something as complex and costly as an airplane to have advocates for safety who aren't beholden to the company bottom line. I was there in the years after TWA 800 and the FAA imposed valuable requirements that added significant costs to certain projects. It's naive to think that these things would happen just as easily without a neutral advocate with a very strict baseline for safety. The FAA is definitely not perfect, but that shouldn't be an excuse to get rid of it, it should be an excuse to improve it.
This is not to say that libertarians are doomed to uselessness. I have a lot of respect for Radley Balko and the efforts he's put into issues of criminal justice. There are too few people who appreciate the degree of injustice in the drug war and how it affects minority communities, and he does as much as he can with his corner of the Fox News media empire to convince people that libertarianism still matters. But sadly, when one talks of a libertarian revolution these days, it doesn't evoke images of our founding fathers and other great thinkers of colonial America who valued basic rights and the value of dissent over tyranny. It brings to mind a bunch of well-off Young Republicans shaking their fists at the IRS.
The most pressing problem with this flavor of libertarianism is that it derives from the aforementioned contradiction (that government can make you irresponsible, but can't make you responsible) and therefore prevents the libertarian movement from ever achieving many of its goals. It has instilled in people the belief that the average person is much more prone to irresponsibility. As a result, the belief that it's dangerous for government to "condone drug use" by implementing a safe-injection site for heroin addicts actually seems realistic to people who are already conditioned to believe that thousands of poor women decide to have kids just because the government was willing to support them. As for selling organs, I wouldn't have a problem with a system where willing volunteers could sell non-vital organs for a set amount of money. What I have a problem with is putting someone like John Stossel in charge of it.
It's possible that Seattle wouldn't have been able to build this monorail no matter what. But I do think that the notion that government is inherently ineffective has played a big role in the perceptions of voters in this region when it comes to public transportation. It makes a difference in how easy it is for projects like this to get the funding they need. It comes down to a central question; how much will individuals sacrifice for greater collective liberty? As a libertarian, I only believe in one absolute here, that we don't sacrifice our individual free will and our basic rights in order to be safe from threats to our security. Other libertarians believe in a second economic absolute, rejecting the use of government to achieve greater liberty through collective taxation. I'm not on board with that second absolute, and I guess whether or not I'm really a libertarian depends on whether or not one thinks that's a requirement. All I know is that if we carry John Stossel's absolutes to their extreme, we'll all eventually be inching around in individual carts that might blow up like a box of M-80s when they hit a pothole. It won't really matter at that point if someone is making us wear a helmet as well.
Last November, Seattle voters killed the Monorail project. The last remaining parcels of land owned by the Monorail commission have now been sold off. The Seattle Monorail project became a serious boondoggle, with politics and sketchy accounting convincing Seattle voters to finally pull the plug. So with Seattle down and out, a poster at the Skyscraper City message boards named 'Zorobabel' was ready to declare victory for the Indonesian capital:
Well, looks like Jakarta won the Jakarta vs. Seattle monorail challenge. Seattle's is dead, and Jakarta's comes back to life.Not so fast there. According to the official rules of the contest (which I'm clearly making up as I go), Jakarta still has to finish in order to win. But for now, they're the only project with a pulse. How has Jakarta managed to avoid letting politics and sketchy accounting derail their project? Let's recap the last few months:
At the end of the January 31 funding deadline set by Jakarta's governor, the Monorail Commission claimed to have secured a US$500 million loan from a Dubai-based bank. However, some doubts were raised when someone discovered that no Dubai bank was invested in Indonesia because of their bad credit rating. A week later, the bank in Dubai confirmed this. Despite this, the Jakarta Post announced that construction was set to resume and Governor Sutiyoso checked out the station designs. The completion date was set for March 2008.
A few days later, a poster named 'Insiders' then claimed that on the day Monorail director Sukmawaty was supposedly signing the agreement with the Dubai bank, she was actually in Singapore shopping. A few days later, she started changing her story and saying that it was actually a group of Dubai banks rather than just one. However, in the itinerary of her upcoming trip to Dubai, there was still no mention of any financial closing meeting. 'Insiders' clarified that there was only a meeting to convince the Dubai investors that Jakarta was truly committed to building this thing.
In March, more problems arose. One of the two major partners in the Monorail consortium, Omnico, decided to sue the Monorail Commission for misstating their financial status and diluting their share value in the project. Both Omnico and the Monorail Commission eventually began hurling accusations of financial misdeeds at each other. A week later, the Jakarta Post reported that an expert on public transportation thought the future of Jakarta's Monorail project was bleak. Then, at the beginning of May, it was again announced that a loan was secured from Dubai to help pay for the project, but it was once again a false alarm. Finally, in late June, the central government offered a blanket loan guarantee for the project.
Meanwhile, construction continued along the Monorail route throughout this entire time.
"Put your helmet on, we'll be reaching speeds of 3"
- Crow T. Robot
This post is not just Part 11 of the Monorail Challenge, but it's also the second post in the Mutinyblogging series, my tribute to the Mystery Science Theatre 3000 classic Space Mutiny. During the movie's thrilling chase scenes, the hero pictured above, David Ryder, pursues the head of the mutineers, Kalgan, in adult-sized bumper cars called 'Enforcers'. They were marvels of futuristic engineering, combining the speed of a Segway with the turning radius of a shopping cart. But even as the hero and villain chased each other throughout the
I've traveled from left to right and back again throughout my life, but there hasn't been a time where I didn't think of myself as a libertarian. Despite being called Moonbat of the Day recently by a commenter at Sound Politics, and helping to start up Seattle's Drinking Liberally events, I still think of myself as more of a libertarian than a liberal. Whenever I post something about this on DailyKos, however, I get a bunch of people claiming that there's no difference between what issues I support and what ones they support. This is true in the world of DailyKos, where your political outlook is determined solely by how much you disagree with President Bush. But there are differences between what I believe and what the average liberal believes, even if it tends to be mostly on smaller issues...like helmet laws.
If there's one thing I've discovered since becoming sucked into this bizarre world of online politics, it's that the word libertarian means something different to everyone, so I understand if people think that my attempt at defining it for myself is the ultimate act of uselessness. But the core of my political philosophy has always been centered around the importance of free will and the framework left by those who established this country as a refuge from tyranny. I believe that when the Bill of Rights was created, the founders laid out the game plan for a system that, if followed properly, would ensure that people would be free of having any type of morality imposed on them and therefore would be unimpeded in a pursuit for personal wealth. In other words, no person or group could dictate your behavior, unless your behavior had a direct negative effect on others, and this would lead to the strongest society possible. Government could not be discriminatory when it came to an individual's thoughts, faith, race, property, or belief systems. Over two centuries later, this ideal is still not a reality (and getting much worse in recent years), and making it a reality is what motivates me to post my inane scribblings on the internet every day.
But I'm not going to pretend that every issue we encounter has a cut-and-dry libertarian solution based upon what I've said above. Most issues we face involve situations were the perceptions of liberty for many people are involved, and you can't just point to a solution where everyone's free will is satisfied. True liberty in a society can not be achieved without rules dictating our interaction within an infinitely complex economy and a democratic process to develop those rules.
When it comes to major issues of any type, I believe that problems are best solved at the lowest common denominator - although I'm not sure if how I approach this is the same as others do when they talk about federalism. For example, traffic laws have to exist. We can't possibly have a system of roads in this country without rules. But I feel very strongly that establishing a nationwide 55 MPH speed limit was anti-libertarian (or anti-federalist), in that it was a decision made from a higher authority with no appropriate justification. Things like speed limits should be decided locally, by the people who actually share that road every day. But I also believe that if a community got together and said that certain people couldn't drive on a particular road, it would be up to a higher judicial authority to prevent that from happening. Is that still federalism? If I didn't waste my time taking classes like Thermodynamics and Helicopter Theory in college, I might know the answer to that. For now, I'll just keep calling that federalism until someone at Reason tells me not to.
The reason I place so much value on these libertarian ideas is because I believe that it plays a much bigger role in the overall health of a society than the implementation of any particular economic theory. When people have less obstructions to their free will, that manifests itself in economic progress, regardless of whether an economic system tilts to the left or right. If you're still awake, you probably just noticed that I'm starting to reveal where I have a major difference with many other libertarians. I believe that when a community needs something, true liberty comes not from simply choosing the more free market solution over the government solution, it comes when those who have a stake in what's being done are able to choose for themselves between a government solution and a free market solution. Much of America's foundation is rooted in competing interests and a balance of powers, and I believe that this is a vital one to preserve, the ability for people to demand that government fix a problem when it loses faith in the free market's ability to do so, or vice versa.
A good example of where this leaves me is how I view problems within our education system. If you ask different people how they'd fix the schools in this country, a liberal is likely to say that it requires more government investment, a conservative (or the average libertarian that I talk to) is likely to say that it requires more privatization. I don't really think either approach will work or is more effective than the other. The problem with our schools is an extension of certain aspects of our society as a whole. The key to a child's education is parental involvement, and the fact that we have such staggering numbers of parents behind bars in this country and so many others working long hours to scrape by in low-end jobs, and so many others who just don't care, we doom ourselves to failure, no matter how much money the schools have to work with. When you focus on the issues that keep parents from being more involved, the downstream effects are magnified, and investing in the education process pays off regardless of who's paying what. And, of course, I think that giving communities more control over how to run their own schools can also be a big part of that.
I think the two most important metrics for determining how much liberty exists in a society are 1) how many people are in jail and 2) how easy it is for children in low-income areas to achieve upward mobility. In both of these cases, America is really failing right now, and this shapes my entire rationale when looking at politics. This trend is also being followed by a shift to the Democrats among libertarians, not just because the Bush Administration is the most authoritarian administration in memory, but also because more and more libertarians are starting to question old assumptions about the free market. Why I think this is happening is demonstrated by Radley Balko in a recent column at Fox News:
The article focused on the emerging idea among some public policy thinkers that too many Americans make "bad" decisions. Thus, we need government to nudge us in the right direction, be it through sin or vice taxes, public relations campaigns, or in some cases, outright prohibitions.According to Balko, government is totally incapable of making us responsible but also wildly effective at making us irresponsible. How is that possible? If government can affect our behavior, it can't be a one-way street.
...
Where large numbers of Americans have historically made bad decisions, those decisions tend to have been influenced by government. The dramatic, 30-year rise in fatherless babies among the poor, for example, corresponded with a social welfare system that inadvertently incentivized single motherhood.
The reality is that government has some ability to affect our behavior both positively and negatively, but nowhere near as much as most people believe. Consider smoking bans. While I strongly disagree with how sweeping many of the smoking bans have been, many people in areas with smoking bans have found it easier to quit smoking as a result. But situations like that aren't common, and they tend to be indirect affects of government. At the opposite end of the responsibility spectrum, however, I find it laughable to believe that welfare programs are the driving force behind the existence of so many single mothers out there. It simply doesn't make sense to believe that government can be so powerless in getting people to be responsible, but Herculean in its ability to make people irresponsible.
But Balko is absolutely right that sin taxes, bans, and prohibitions do virtually nothing to stop people from exercising their free will. And this is where I find the most common ground with the standard libertarian outlook. It's not just largely inconsequential issues like helmet laws that matter here, it's also a very big one, the drug war. Telling people that they can't take certain mind-altering substances, simply because society deems that behavior immoral, is the most damaging transgression of our country's libertarian ideals at this time. And as a result, it continues to exacerbate the two major problems I mentioned earlier. We now have record numbers of people behind bars which fuels the socio-economic divide between the rich and poor (and black and white) that now severely limits social mobility.
As for sin taxes, though, while I agree that things like sin taxes can't be used to make people responsible, I do recognize that sin taxes could be useful for funding a potential health care expenditure that results from that irresponsibility. There's a distinction to be made about government forcing people to be responsible and government actually doing responsible things. I don't think there's anything particularly anti-libertarian about admitting that government is sometimes the necessary vehicle for addressing a problem and that a community can decide to use taxation or to allow government to make rules as the fairest way to do it. But the libertarian movement today hasn't been about presenting communities with a choice between government-based solutions and free market solutions, it's been about establishing the mindset that the free market choice is the only valid choice for liberty, and that taxes and government involvement are very, very, very bad. And as a result, we've been riding the winds of the free market, mocking those European and Latin American socialists, until it's become evident to many of us that it might not be getting us more liberty in all places.
What does this have to with monorails? Not a whole lot, but the debate over the monorail here in Seattle made me appreciate the difference between my concept of liberty and the concept of many others who call themselves libertarians. As Seattle debated how to build the monorail, I found many people who believed in the central contradiction above - i.e. that if government was collecting taxes and writing the checks, the only outcome possible was one of greater irresponsibility - and that the only way to succeed was to let the invisible hand of the free market lay down the elevated tracks. In the end, though, the one factor that stood above all else in Jakarta's looming victory is that they needed a monorail way more than Seattle did. Having a monorail was more central to the liberty of Jakartans than it was to the liberty of Seattlites. Did it really matter in the end whether the $500 million needed for the Jakarta project came from a bank loan in Dubai or from the Indonesian government? Hell, the workers were building it for months before they even knew where that money was coming from. How were they supposed to know how irresponsible they were supposed to be?
"Damn, I'm losing speed because I'm also trying to buff the floors"
- Crow T. Robot
As I mentioned earlier, there's been a shift underway driving many libertarians to support Democrats right now. It's been driven in large part by the Republicans in Congress and the White House, who've become so authoritarian on many basic justice and civil rights issues that it overshadows the long-running economic biases against Democrats, taxation and regulation. Many libertarians believe in an extreme form of property rights when it comes to these two issues and it runs squarely against what many Democrats advocate for curing certain social ills. In a post discussing the shifting of libertarians to the left, Hilzoy at Obsidian Wings challenges these principles here:
One might think that any set of rules other than one in which I can do whatever I like with my property and transfer it without being subject to taxes would violate my freedom. After all, one might think, it's my property, and I am entitled to do whatever I want with it. And any constraints on what I can do, or taxes placed on ownership or transactions, are violations of that right.The idea that an extreme absolutist view of property rights is the only key to liberty has held a lot of appeal among libertarians. Hilzoy is right to point out that in reality, too much of what we own is shared, and that absolutist view is not necessarily the one that leads to the greatest amount of liberty. I think the best example of this right now is the issue of net neutrality. This issue demonstrates very clearly how establishing rules for things that someone may own, but we all share, is vital for maximizing what we all perceive to be greater liberty.
This argument assumes that we should take a system in which I am entitled to do whatever I want with whatever I own, and to all the proceeds of any transaction I enter into, as a sort of baseline. This system is presumed to be legitimate, and any deviation from it has to be justified as a constraint imposed on me, or a taking of my property.
I don't think that this argument works. This is not because I don't think that there can be any objections to the justice of various constraints and/or taxes. It's just that I don't think that this particular argument against them works. Unrestricted property rights are not a neutral baseline that we can start from. They are one among the many forms that a system of private property might take, and have no privileged status.
Describing net neutrality can be a challenge, especially if you're a 107-year-old Senator from Alaska. But one thing that needs to be understood is that the ISPs (Telco's like SBC and AT&T) have a legitimate beef with net neutrality. The best way I've found to describe this is to use roads as an example, but with some very important differences between roads and the 'series of tubes' that make up the internet. Imagine that a few companies like UPS and FedEx actually owned the secondary roads throughout the country. UPS and FedEx also still have their businesses of delivering packages for people, but other newer companies could also use the roads without having to pay anything extra beyond what they pay for the roads that connect their warehouses to the highway. Eventually, UPS and FedEx's competitors start using the roads so much and using larger and larger trucks that the roads need to be expanded. The problem is, UPS and FedEx have to do it, so they demand that all their competitors who are using the roads should pay for it, but there's a rule of non-discrimination (road neutrality, I guess) that prevents them from charging the people who are using the roads the most.
This is basically what's happening on the internet. Companies that compete with the Telco's (like Vonage) only have to pay an entry fee to get on the internet, but can send as much data as they want. This puts the Telco's in the position of having to continually upgrade the parts of the internet they own so that their competitors can continue to do business efficiently. For Telco advocates, the solution is simple - just get rid of the non-discrimination rules and allow them to control the content being sent across the internet. This solution feels right to many free market advocates who believe in the absolutist view of property rights. The Telco's own the tubes and should not be interfered with in controlling the tubes. Julian Sanchez from Reason Online recently discussed the issue and came to the following conclusion:
It's true, of course, that ISPs could misuse their control of the onramps to the Internet in a shortsighted attempt to extract monopoly rents, rather than benefit consumers. But that's not a reason for preemptive regulation; it's a reason to see what happens. "In my view," said then–Federal Communications Commission Chair Michael Powell after blocking one local telephone/broadband provider's attempt to cut users off from Internet telephone services, "the surest way to preserve 'Net Freedom' is to handle these issues in an enforcement context where hypothetical worriers give way to concrete facts and, as we have shown today, real solutions." That's sound advice: Hasty regulation that responds to hypothetical abuses may also prevent us from discovering benefits we haven't yet hypothesized.This is where you end up when you accept the central contradiction of free market libertarianism. You become convinced that the less government involvement there is, the greater responsibility will result. Sure, the ISPs could be irresponsible and misuse their position, but what could government possibly do about it if government only has the power to make people irresponsible?
Sanchez believes that the laws of the free market will do a better job of keeping the Telco's honest. Attempts to extract monopoly rents will be 'shortsighted' because customers will be so outraged that they'll switch their service to the most superior product offering. Anybody who's actually worked in the high tech field, though, knows full well that it doesn't work that way. The dustbin of the high tech world contains many superior products that were at some sort of competitive disadvantage. Even as a former Microsoft employee, I recognize that they ended up in a situation where they were able to use their operating system dominance to boost their own products that operate on that system against competing products that were clearly better. Sure, some people began to use Linux, but the vast majority of PC users still used Windows. The solution involved setting rules for what Microsoft could and could not do. And few people in the high tech world doubt that this was the right way to go.
If net neutrality is scrapped, there's no question that the Telco's could use their position as gatekeepers of the web to take on companies like Google and Amazon by building a competing service and then trying to extract monopoly rents from them, or by partnering with them and making it impossible for anyone else to enter the market. There are a number of ways in which Telco's would find it advantageous to stifle competition and limit competing innovation. This is not hypothetical, it's the likely outcome. But Sanchez has visions of benefits that we haven't hypothesized yet, a belief rooted in nothing more than his faith in the magical powers of the free market.
As supporters of net neutrality understand, the amount of innovation that will arise from the internet is not primarily a function of the money invested in it (although that is a factor), it's more a function of the number of people who have access to it. It flies in the face of the notion that profits alone drive progress, a central belief among many free-market libertarians. The open source movement in software proved this, as large numbers of unpaid people began to develop freeware products that rivalled what was being produced at some of the world's largest software firms. It turns out that people are motivated by more than just money.
The one thing that struck me most in following the Jakarta Monorail message boards was how much pride there was among Jakartans to have their city rival other emerging third-world metropolises like Kuala Lumpur or Bangkok. Jakarta Governor Sutiyoso staked his legacy on building it, and as has been clear from the last few months, Jakartans have been willing to look past a whole lot of incompetence from their public officials to get it done. This was hardly seen at all in Seattle (well, except for the incompetence from public officials). There was (and still is) a strong sentiment among many in and around Seattle that using any taxes to invest in public transportation is a waste of money. Some people are so dedicated to this sentiment that it drives them to complete madness.
I'm not saying that the free market can never work to push the economy forward, or is always a detriment to progress. What I'm saying is that as America competes with the rest of the world in the race to dominate the 21st century global economy, we should understand that profits are not the only thing that can drive progress, but that government can also lay the groundwork for greater liberty and greater innovation through certain projects and investments - and that American pride can be the motivator, just as it was when we made it first to the moon. America is well behind many other countries in broadband access, which is putting us at a growing competitive disadvantage in the modern world. Believing that scrapping net neutrality is the right path to closing the gap will just be the latest example of how free market libertarians have just become the conservatives who manage to get their numbers straight before reaching the wrong conclusion.
"He shouldn't have been carrying that case of cleaning fluid ... and nitroglycerin ... and gel ignite in there"
- Crow T. Robot
At the thrilling climax of Space Mutiny, our hero overcomes his crippling lack of acting ability and dives from his 'Enforcer' seconds before it crashes into Kalgan's, engulfing him and the two death cars inside a gigantic fireball. Kalgan somehow lives through this and is seen waking up in the spaceship's boiler room as the movie mercilessly fades to credits. It's hard to know what was more ridiculous though; that someone thought they might be making a sequel to this gigantic turd, or that cars for use on a spaceship wouldn't be a little more fireproof. It is this unanswerable question that I dedicate to the most ridiculous libertarian of them all - John Stossel.
At a time when the President of the United States is blocking investigations into his ability to secretly spy on American citizens, Congress changes the laws to protect him while the media reports the opposite, the 4th Amendment is being torn to shreds, people have gone on cable news to make threats against journalists and accuse the New York Times of treason, prominent media personalities and other crackpots have spoken of killing Supreme Court justices, and the number of blacks in American prisons reaches 578% higher than apartheid South Africa, the most prominent libertarian in the national media is furious that we can't sell our organs for cash.
It was a few months ago that I got my first exposure to Stossel, as he essentially agreed with Stephen Colbert when Colbert questioned the need for the FAA. It was at that point when I began to question whether or not I should really be calling myself a libertarian. Having actually tested flight control software at Boeing (I left there in 2000 to work at Microsoft), it's mind-boggling for me to think that someone could actually believe that. Stossel is right when he says that companies have an incentive to be safe, but it's still absolutely necessary when developing something as complex and costly as an airplane to have advocates for safety who aren't beholden to the company bottom line. I was there in the years after TWA 800 and the FAA imposed valuable requirements that added significant costs to certain projects. It's naive to think that these things would happen just as easily without a neutral advocate with a very strict baseline for safety. The FAA is definitely not perfect, but that shouldn't be an excuse to get rid of it, it should be an excuse to improve it.
This is not to say that libertarians are doomed to uselessness. I have a lot of respect for Radley Balko and the efforts he's put into issues of criminal justice. There are too few people who appreciate the degree of injustice in the drug war and how it affects minority communities, and he does as much as he can with his corner of the Fox News media empire to convince people that libertarianism still matters. But sadly, when one talks of a libertarian revolution these days, it doesn't evoke images of our founding fathers and other great thinkers of colonial America who valued basic rights and the value of dissent over tyranny. It brings to mind a bunch of well-off Young Republicans shaking their fists at the IRS.
The most pressing problem with this flavor of libertarianism is that it derives from the aforementioned contradiction (that government can make you irresponsible, but can't make you responsible) and therefore prevents the libertarian movement from ever achieving many of its goals. It has instilled in people the belief that the average person is much more prone to irresponsibility. As a result, the belief that it's dangerous for government to "condone drug use" by implementing a safe-injection site for heroin addicts actually seems realistic to people who are already conditioned to believe that thousands of poor women decide to have kids just because the government was willing to support them. As for selling organs, I wouldn't have a problem with a system where willing volunteers could sell non-vital organs for a set amount of money. What I have a problem with is putting someone like John Stossel in charge of it.
It's possible that Seattle wouldn't have been able to build this monorail no matter what. But I do think that the notion that government is inherently ineffective has played a big role in the perceptions of voters in this region when it comes to public transportation. It makes a difference in how easy it is for projects like this to get the funding they need. It comes down to a central question; how much will individuals sacrifice for greater collective liberty? As a libertarian, I only believe in one absolute here, that we don't sacrifice our individual free will and our basic rights in order to be safe from threats to our security. Other libertarians believe in a second economic absolute, rejecting the use of government to achieve greater liberty through collective taxation. I'm not on board with that second absolute, and I guess whether or not I'm really a libertarian depends on whether or not one thinks that's a requirement. All I know is that if we carry John Stossel's absolutes to their extreme, we'll all eventually be inching around in individual carts that might blow up like a box of M-80s when they hit a pothole. It won't really matter at that point if someone is making us wear a helmet as well.
posted by thehim at 9:22 PM
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