WARNING! THE ABOVE VIDEO IS EXTREMELY LOUD! So if you want to see it, turn your volume way down first…
Just before routinely deleting another release from Libertarian Gary Johnson, I glanced at the content:
June 25, 2012, Santa Fe, N.M. – In a new video, “The Vote for Freedom is Never Wasted,” Libertarian Party presidential nominee Gary Johnson has words for Democrats and Republicans who are worried his candidacy will take votes away from Barack Obama and Mitt Romney.
“I say, ‘Good,'” states Johnson in the video. The former two-term governor of New Mexico continues, “They deserve to lose your vote. Take as many votes as possible away from the people in both parties keeping us in a state of perpetual war, increasing unsustainable debt, record joblessness, and a bipartisan economic death wish ruining America for 330,000,000 of us.“You have stated you want a third choice, and now you have one in me.”
Yeah. OK. Here’s the thing, Gary…
When I complain about the choices I have, it’s really not much help to offer me a much, much worse third option. I mean, by your logic, I should be happy for the chance to vote Nazi, or Communist, because it would be a third way.
The only thing worse than the two parties we have is pretty much every party that has emerged to challenge them in this country. Look at the biggest of the pygmy parties — the Libertarian. It takes the worst thing about the main two parties and takes it to a greater extreme. OK, the second-worst thing.
The second-worst thing about the Democratic and Republican parties is their drive toward ideological purity, as opposed to sensible, pragmatic approaches to policy. (What’s the worst thing? The worst thing is party solidarity — or whatever you want to call the phenomenon whereby a member of Party A greets the stupidest thing a fellow member of Party A says as wisdom, while dismissing as foolishness the wisest thing that a member of Party B says.)
Just because something is an alternative doesn’t mean it’s a good one. Not by a long shot. And in this country, the “alternatives” are generally just plain awful.
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But as long as that Nazi had a sensible, pragmatic approach to his policies, you’d at least consider him, right?
I thought of you when I read this interesting piece by Michael Tomasky in the Daily Beast. Rather than the elusive third party, there needs to be an aggressive push-back against ideological purity and extremism, towards moderation and common-sense-ness, and one party clearly needs that much more than the other, as Tomasky describes.
I propose you drop the Unparty quest, come out as a assertively moderate and undogmatic Republican and launch a kind of latter-day Ripon Society. A quixotic effort in SC especially, to be sure, but no more so than a third party quest. As he says, we just plain need more moderate Republicans to stand up and be counted.
I guess the primary character traits you admire are capitulation and compromise. If you can only achieve half of what you believe in, you are a success.
The only real hope we have for any kind of pragmatic future is to vote for the Democrats. Brad is half right about the ideological purity problem; it’s endemic in the GOP. But the Democrats offer a much more diverse, yet sensible, approach to dealing with the nations problems. During the health care debate the Democrats offered a wide variety of solutions from single payer to the public option to the approach we finally settled for. And the Republicans? All they’ve done is dig their heels in to fight anything that the president tried to do EVEN IF it was to oppose policies they had previously proposed.
If we could ever get rid of the GOP pox that afflicts our nation we could have a reasonable public debate about the issues that affect our nation. We could address the sluggish economic situation with real solutions rather than simply making it easier for the “job providers” by giving the richest in this country tax breaks. Once the economy returns to a normal situation we could begin to address the budget deficits that will only get worse going forward. The Democrats and the Democrats alone are trying to solve our nations problems. So let’s get behind them, whether you’re a liberal, moderate or conservative you can find yourself a home in the Democratic party. If we don’t get behind the party of pragmatists and soon it may be too late. Let’s do the right thing before the ideologues in the GOP destroy everything.
@Doug– Indeed, half a loaf is better than none. The current unwillingness on at least one side to move an inch has led us back to the brink of a government shutdown. If I am at 10 and you are at zero, and I move to 5, but you are unwilling to move at all, how can we ever get anything done?
but to you that’s not a bug, that’s a feature….
The piece that Phillip linked to contained a statement with which I agree (though perhaps not quite in such absolute terms as it was written):
“Politicians only really respond to one stimulus: The fear that they might lose the next election.
That’s certainly a big motivating factor, right? Look at two of the President’s recent actions: the executive order on immigration and the endorsement of gay marriage. Both of those came after pressure from constituency groups not blind support.
That’s why I can’t get behind bud’s call for lining up behind the Democratic Party and pledging my vote . Where’s their incentive to do right by me? Why should I just put my faith in them when, in bud’s own words, President Obama, the leader of their party, “continues to cowtow to the corporate elites and big bankers” and continues policies of a “death list and continued occupation of Afghanistan”?
@Kathryn
If you were $100K in debt and your husband said “Let’s buy a Ferrari!” and your response was “No, but we will buy a Range Rover instead” – is that a half a loaf win-win situation?
We have a massively broken system that won’t be fixed through compromise but through making tough choices. We need 100% solutions, not 50% solutions. If the Republican philosophy is so clearly wrong, all you have to do is vote them out. It really is that simple. Win elections, change the system. The people have spoken (so far) and what they want is what they’ve got.
A big part of the problem is the large number of people who believe that capitulation and compromise are one in the same.
I make my living striking deals. It amazes me how many people see a bargain as a sell-out. That always amuses me, especially whrn
…when they often then proceed to cut off their nose to spite their face.
Maybe we do need to encourage more liberal arts in education; life ain’t binary.
So you believe in winner-take-all? So in 2008, Obama and the Dem-controlled Congress should have had free rein to stimulate the economy to its heart’s content, pass single-payer health care, and, heck, while we’re at it, nationalize the too-big-to-fail banks?
@ ‘Kathryn – and yet, the stimulus was not (very) effective, they didn’t pass single-payer healthcare and basically made the too-big-to-fail banks even more powerful.
It’s like they weren’t even trying.
Actually, Kathryn, I do wish that one party would get its way for some period of time so we could prove once and for all whether they are right or not. My guess is that we did everything Obama wanted for a few years, we’d never have to worry about the Democrat party again.
And, Mark, if you are renting a property with a listed rate of $1000 a month, what would you consider a compromise? $500? $950? or would you try your best to get $1000 and maybe settle on $900? If I offered you $250 would you be offended?
When we have enormous government deficits, offering to spend 1% less is not compromise. It’s a lowball offer that should be rejected out of hand.
Here’s what compromise would look like: the Democrats would commit to cutting spending to match revenue. After that, we can talk about raising revenue. That’s compromise. Because when you raise revenue first, they (both Republicans and Democrats) never seem to get around to the cutting spending part.
@Mark–although there’s the part where we all like to feel we got a discount….
All the deals are above-average!
I also think many of us see the world as zero-sum. Sometimes it is, but a lot of times it isn’t.
Many comments correctly point out that the Democrats are not perfect. But they at least attempt to do the peoples work for the benefit of the majority of Americans. The GOP has just completely lost it’s way.
As for Gary Johnson and the libertarians it would be nice to see them have a bit of influence on the political process. Perhaps we could restore some of the freedoms that were lost during the Bush years and cut military interventionism. Seems like the Dems are far too slow to act in those areas. A little nudge from the Libertarians might not be such a bad thing.
@ Doug – The part that gets me, is that Congress counts a failure to increase spending as a cut – as in: Last year we spent 100M and this year we were planning to spend 110M but we will only spend 105M, hence we have cut 5M from the budget.
Then under your plan they’d want to raise revenues by 5M to match the nonexistent “cut” that they made.
Well, that would at least move us toward a balanced budget…
Spending cuts and a balanced budget would be counter productive right now. I say let’s spend like drunken sailors. There are plenty of good infrastructure needs in this country and interest rates are at historic lows. Why all the obsession with a balanced budget while unemployment is running at 8+%?
The stimulus was effective. It could have been more effective, and perhaps achieved a tipping point had it been greater. Don’t take my word for it–Nobel Laureate economist Paul Krugman has said it repeatedly.
Speaking of Paul Krugman, check out this bit of hyperbole from the other side of the fence, from Sen. Tom Davis over on Facebook:
‘Edited excerpt from today’s Asia Times on “what if” Obama is re-elected: “At last Paul Krugman’s dream policy of perhaps $2 trillion in wasteful public spending financed by $2 trillion of ‘quantitative easing’ Fed purchases of Treasury bonds will be tried once and for all. The result should be spectacular — spectacularly awful, that is. The dollar will collapse, as will US credit, and US unemployment will be prevented from rising to Greek levels only by reducing its inhabitants’ living standards to those of China.”‘
@ bud –
1) We ALWAYS spend like drunken sailors!
2) There aren’t any really good infrastructure needs to fill at this point. At least not any that can be filled in a reasonable amount of time. It takes years to plan and build major projects.
3) Keynesian spending has never worked, not ever. WWII got us out of the depression, not a bunch of make-a-work projects.
Seriously, what if this (8+% official unemployment, 40+% real unemployment) is the norm, and the last few decades of lower unemployment and high growth were unsustainable? Imagine that worker productivity and automation has increased to the point where a very small (productive) segment of society can meet the needs of the entire population. It takes a very small portion of the population to grow food, extract raw materials, manufacture and deliver stuff. We’ve got the larger portion of people involved in services, but at some point that sector may be overfilled too.
What do we do if we’ve passed the tipping point though? Do we just make fake jobs for all of the extra people? Pay them not to work? Institute a 32 hour work week and make extra vacations mandatory? Take care of them? Seems like we’ve been doing a lot of that for years and things are only getting worse. I’m not advocating starving anyone or sterilizing the masses, but what do we do if 40% of the population is unemployable in a productive sense?
@ ‘Kathryn – The stimulus was effective at one thing- it prevented many state and local governments from laying off workers by plugging their budgets during a dip in tax revenues.
I’d argue that it prevented some short term carnage at the expense of making neccessary adjustments. Unfortunately, if we ever return to full employment/tax revenue they won’t make any adjustments then either.
There aren’t any really good infrastructure needs to fill at this point.
-Silence
Silence we disagree alot but I don’t think I’ve ever seen you make such an outrageous assertion. The nations water mains are in dire straight right now and there are many, many projects just waiting for funding. Our nations pipes are literally collapsing from neglect. Roads, bridges, the electric grid and others areas are in want as well. The original Obama stimulus was very effective at reducing unemployment from 10 to 8% but it was much too small to deal with the collapse of the housing market, not to mention the banks.
Perhaps we are at a new normal in unemployment. I suspect not but if we are then that makes it even more imperative to raise taxes on the rich and use it to help those who are unemployed.
As for the Keynsian statement, just what do you think WW II was about? It was a huge spending program. Most obvious example of government spending our way out of a depression I could think of.
@Bud
How many of the unemployed can or would do work on infrastructure projects? How many people can build roads, bridges, and water mains? And if those activities are not within a driving distance for the unemployed, what do THEY do? Move?
We have a problem in that we have a segment of the population with few skills and little motivation. What does society owe those people? Isn’t 100 weeks of unemployment pay enough?
Tell me what jobs a high school educated, 45 year old woman can expect the government to provide?
bud – 1) Water/Sewer pipes are a local government function. Outside of DoD property, I can’t think of any federal water pipes or sewer systems. Why didn’t their owners (usually self-funding water districts or municipalities like Columbia) fix them when they had the money? Columbia has been siphoning off $5M a year from the water system. It doesn’t need or deserve federal stimulus spending for the profitable water system!
2) There’s no “federal electric grid” either. It’s a transmission system owned by a bunch of private (publicly traded) companies, and a few federal entities like TVA or Bonneville. So how much tax money should we give to SCANA to upgrade their grid? How much should Duke get, and how much should Con-Ed get? The answer is none, because the rate-payers already pay for grid maintenance, upgrades and modernization, as it should be.
3) There aren’t a lot of US and interstate highway bridges and roads collapsing. Last time I checked, anyways. Sure, there are lots of smaller state/local bridges and roads that needed upgrades – and a lot of roads that already got repaved, which I’ve ranted about before. Anyways, if you want to go building a bunch of new bridges you need months of engineering & design work before you even break ground, and that’s after you figure out which ones are worth fixing and funding. Road projects aren’t as stimulative as they used to be either – the work is a lot more mechanized and equipment intensive. While some of the work may be worthwhile, it’s of limited value as “stimulus”.
4) I don’t think you’ll find a lot of support for raising taxes on anyone to help out the willfully or permanently unemployed. I could be wrong though. I do agree that we need a safety net for the temporarily unemployed or for people who are a bit down on their luck, but it shouldn’t mean a lifetime on the teat. I think most Americans would agree with that. I hope.
5) I was hoping not to go into detail about WWII – when you totally mobilize a countries’ resources and manpower in a fight for survival you have full employment by necessity. First, remember that we were coming out of a period of isolationism and underspending on defense, so we had to build up forces and equipment very quickly. Also, much of the equipment we did have was outdated or obsolete very early in the conflict – think WWI vintage battleships vs. the Yamato or Bismarck.
Then about 16 million Americans served in the military during the war. The US population in 1940 was 132 million, so about 12% of the total population – pretty much everyone who was able and not needed elsewhere. (Right now our active duty troop strength is about 1.6M and our population is 309M just for comparison.) So sure, we deficit spent and employed everyone building tanks, planes, ships, munitions, atomic bombs and whatnot, because we had to.
But the kicker was – after the war, the other “industrialized” nations in the world didn’t have much industry left. Japan, Germany, Britain, France, The USSR – they were all in ruins and took years or decades to rebuild. Britain was on rations for years after the war! With the rest of the world’s economy in ruins, guess who built stuff and sold it to them? That certainly helped us out after the war, when vets came home and needed jobs. Then we also had a baby boom which took a lot of women out of the workforce as well.
So the moral of the story is, if you want Keynesian economics to work, first you need a complete mobilization of the nations industrial base, and you need a total war to destroy all of the other nations capacity to make stuff. Then they will need steel and cars and machine tools and ships and planes and food and they will have to buy it all from you. That’s the ONLY time it’s worked.
I’m up for trying that again. Can I be Ernie Pyle? Hey, I’d settle for being Gomer…
Yes, I was being Swiftian there. But only partly…
@Brad – “Stick with Tom Swiftian.” Silence said, suggestively.
I happen to know a thing or two about battleships. We actually had two new battleships commissioned before Germany invaded Poland, the North Carolina and the Washington. They boasted 9 16″ 45 caliber naval guns and the best fire control system in the world. They would have been more than a match for the Bismarck class ships with it’s 8 15″ guns.
As for the Yamato, is was a true beast of a ship and just freshly commissioned before WW II. With it’s huge 18″ guns Yamato was the biggest, most powerful battleship afloat. But it was a relic of a bygone era and neither it, nor it’s sister ship Musashi ever fired it’s guns at an enemy capital ship. Both were sunk by American naval aircraft.
So what does this have to do with our economic discussion? Not much really other than to show how people’s perception of history is sometimes a bit different than reality. The Germans and Japanese spent prodigious amounts of money on military armaments but eventually were defeated while the Americans spent just what was needed to actually fend off real threats. In the end that proved to be the sensible approach to defending our nation. And at a far lower cost (at least in terms of human casualties) than any other major power. Why can’t we learn the proper lessons from history?
No, Bud, no! Our production of war materiel was no minimalist, “we’ll just make exactly what we need to defend ourselves, and that’s it” approach! It was the most massive production of weapons and materiel in the history of the world!
We made MOUNTAINS of planes, ships, tanks, trucks, jeeps, artillery pieces, grenades, ammunition, boots, uniforms, C rations, K rations. We BURIED Germany and Japan in the stuff. We didn’t necessarily make the best stuff — even the Russians made better tanks — but we just made so MUCH of it, with mountains left over when the war was over, plenty to sustain us in our new role as dominant power in the world.
If we’d taken a minimalist approach — done “just what was needed to actually fend off real threats” — we’d have beefed up security at Pearl Harbor, probably evacuated the Philippines, put up barrage balloons on the East and West coasts, let Europe fend for itself, and hunkered down. We still would probably never have seen a German or Japanese boot step on U.S. soil.
But we would have been living in a pretty lousy world, dominated by totalitarianism rather than Western liberal democracy. We were out there fighting for our values, not just in self-defense.
Please, please, do not revise history in order to fit your notions of how meek and mild the United States should be today! The U.S. wasn’t just defending itself from 1941-45. It was stepping out and planting a big, fat bootprint on the world — and the world is better off for it. I shudder to think what it would be like if America had continued in its isolationism.
You say we had no choice, that we were attacked? Not really, not the way we were on Sept. 11, 2001. At least, not according to the lights of an “enlightened,” postcolonialist sensibility. After all, what in the world were we doing having all those ships and other military presence in Hawaii? What was that but a vestige of America’s adventures in imperialism? Shouldn’t we have been “humbled” and withdrawn to our own borders? You know, to avoid antagonizing the Japanese, the way we antagonized Osama bin Laden by having troops in Saudi Arabia?
The truth is, FDR led this nation to defend and assert liberty wherever we could, in an extraordinarily aggressive fashion. It wasn’t self-defense. We went from being the “Arsenal of Democracy” (producing what others, not just we, needed to protect their freedoms) to being its principal, direct agent, on battlefields all over the globe. We did it to defeat tyrants who were directly threatening only other nations, not our own (in the restrictive sense of our own, the way antiwar rhetoric would usually have it).
Brad, you missed my point. After Pearl Harbor we spent an unprecidented amount of money on the military. That’s what got us out of the great depression in a very Keynsian way. But BEFORE Pearl Harbor and especially BEFORE September 1, 1939 the US spent a very small amount on the military. That contrasts with the Germans, Japanese and Italians who spent huge amounts during the 30s. And guess who came out on top. The real lesson to be learned is a huge amount of money spent on armaments does not buy national security.
After the war we did a magnificent job rebuilding Europe and Japan. But those missions should be over now. We continue to waste money in an area that should be fully capable of it’s own defense at least since the 80s. I would maintain that a secondary lesson to be learned from WW II and it’s aftermath is how difficult it is to extract our military once committed to a region. In the case of WW II that may be one of the long-term prices we had to pay. But in these other places we’re just burdening ourselves unnecessarily.
@ Brad – excellent reply as always to bud’s comment. You left a few things out – in the interest of brevity I’m sure.
By the time that BB’s 55 & 56 were authorized in 1937 it was pretty clear that we were going to war. Germany had failed to meet its obligations under part V of the Treaty of Versailles – Hitler had repudiated the treaty in 1935 and begun rearming and conscripting soldiers. The Saar basin had also been reunited with Germany, Italy had invaded Ethiopia, and Japan was already at war with China.
As far as the battleships, I was making the point that most of the capital ships in service at the onset of the war were WWI vintage. Nobody really knew how naval aviation would change naval tactics and strategy, really until after Midway, but my point was that the fleet was pretty long in tooth by 1941.
Last up, if we’d only spent what we absolutely needed to, we’d have never had the Manhattan Project. That alone is proof that we were going “all in” as they say.
@ bud – you are right. No amount of money that the Continental Europeans could have spent prior to 1939 could have bought them the English Channel, the Atlantic Ocean, or the Pacific Ocean. Physical distance and isolation provided a security that no Maginot Line or Panzer division ever could.
Well, they should have thought of that before they bought in that neighborhood.
They’re as thoughtless as those disadvantaged kids in this country who aren’t careful enough in choosing their parents.
People should think ahead…
@ bud – I also don’t dispute that we/they did a great job rebuilding Europe and Japan after the war. One thing that happened though was that two of the most martial societies in the history of the world became two of the most pacifistic. Keeping bases open in Europe and Japan is certainly costly, but there are certain benefits. Logistics, security, forward operating capabilities, and the likelihood of engaging a potential enemy away from the American mainland among them. Plus it gives many young Americans an exposure to foreign cultures that they might not otherwise have the opportunity to get.
Plus it gives many young Americans an exposure to foreign cultures that they might not otherwise have the opportunity to get.
-Silence
Ok. Let’s spend a trillion/year on military crap so that our young folks can be exposed to foreign cultures. And I thought you were a small government guy. That pretty much discredits that.
The only legitimate purpose for our military is to defend our nation from foreign attacks. We don’t need forward bases to do that. The one great disappointment I have with our government right now is how everyone on both sides of the aisle wants to spend money on the military equal to the next 10, 20 or 30 nations combined.
“Because when you raise revenue first, they (both Republicans and Democrats) never seem to get around to the cutting spending part.”
And when you cut taxes, government programs become cheaper to current citizens. How is that supposed to cut the deficit or discourage the growth of government? I think that pretty much every Republican administration of my lifetime has born that out.
Actually paying for the government we have is probably the best “limited government” option going for this country.