Another word for 'nothing left to lose'

Freedom worked as Mel Gibson's last breath in Braveheart, and it worked for Janice Joplin (sort of, she apparently died shortly after recording the famous cover of Bobby McGee).

As a political philosophy though, not so much. If Buddhism is the serious pursuit of happiness, libertarianism is the serious pursuit of freedom.

And it's pretty unpopular. What's going on here?

Well, there are two strains of libertarianism that can get mixed up for one another: the ideological and the practical/pragmatic.

The ideological strain is pretty rare. Pretty much no one is actually committed to the idea of liberty for its own sake. Find someone who says they're pro-freedom. Then ask if they support the right to smoke crack on a park bench. Or sell a drug that wasn't approved by the FDA, or a car that wasn't approved by the NHTSA, etc. The folks who are all about sending soldiers to defend "freedom" aren't exactly talking about Freedom with a capital 'F.' I mean, abortions, gay marriage, these aren't part of their picture.

Now, there are some famous ideological libertarians. Patrick Henry, for one. Thomas Jefferson is popular in some circles. These are not people who would be popular today. Someone who argued for the liberty vs death dichotomy probably wouldn't support a citywide ban on trans fats. TJ wouldn't get caught up in the various models for whether or not single payer health care would work. He'd reject the very notion out of hand.

The pragmatics now, they can kind of fit in. These are economists like Tyler Cowen who note the inconvenient truth that free trade results in things like... prosperity. It's the pragmatic view that Yglesias attempts to espouse in his summary. This view focuses on the fact that economic growth is very good. So good that in the medium- to long-run, the absolute gains coming from compounded growth dwarf any concerns about relative inequality at any point in time.

The central thesis to the pragmatic view runs like so: The poorest among us now is better off than the richest a few generations ago. Today we're complaining that some folks can't afford medical treatments that couldn't have been purchased with the crown jewels 20 years ago. These treatments don't exist without economic growth, and economies grow in proportion to the degree of economic freedom in a society.

Now, there are two major quibbles with this thesis. First, some folks reject the primacy of absolute over relative prosperity. There's all this happiness research you see, that seems to suggest that seeing folks who are way richer than you makes it difficult to enjoy the fact that you have access to things that your great grandparents could never have dreamt of .

Second, some folks reject this idea that, at any point in the scale, more economic freedom will result in more economic growth. No one used to take this quibble very seriously. The US was more economically libertarian than Europe, and grew at a faster rate. The Asian tigers were more libertarian than the US and grew at a faster rate. Europe was more libertarian than USSR... and grew at a faster rate. North Korea vs South Korea. You get the picture. Then the Asian currency collapse happened, and the dot com bubble burst, and the US started financing some expensive wars, and the sub-prime derivatives market popped... and this second quibble started looking a bit more valid.

Neither of those two quibbles, mind you, matter in the least to an ideological libertarian. The trouble of course comes in when you've got a libertarian who's in both camps: sympathetic to the ideological claim, but also to the practical benefits. Such a libertarian is very vulnerable to confirmation bias. Since their desire for freedom is axiomatic, they tend to ignore any evidence that their system isn't also optimal from a utilitarian perspective as well. Many Randians fall into this camp, and they're the ones that have, by and large, made libertarianism a dirty word.

Of course they're not alone. Almost everyone who gets picks a political side for ideological reasons falls victim to confirmation bias. Most fall victim very quickly, and very spectacularly. If you don't believe me, pick a position that you absolutely disagree with, find a blog supporting that position, and read the comments. The folks supporting the hated position are morons, aren't they? Hypocritical arguments, logical fallacies, cherry picking. Yuck. Now go to a site that you agree with and look at the comments... carefully...

Anyway, there are two questions here: would you rather be comfy than free? And, can you be comfy without being free?

Bonus question for another day: which do you fear more: concentrated power in the hands of corporations, or concentrated power in the hands of the government? Why, and what's the difference?

1000 times!

Hey, so xkcd is with me about the whole AIG bonus order of magnitude thing. Good company to be in.

A Bad Analogy

So, consider for a moment, the New England Patriots. The Patriots are lead on the field by a gentleman named Brady. Mr. Brady is well paid, and Mr. Brady's team is highly successful. They've won a bunch of Superbowls, they've gone 16-0, they've set a bunch of records. Then one January, some crazy shit goes down. Some dude catches a pass off the back of his head (yeah, it happened), a crazy drive, the unthinkable. The Patriots, the undefeated team, loses the Superbowl. Fans panic and cancel their season ticket orders. No one wants to watch the team on TV anymore, so ad revenue plummets. The ownership is in trouble. They have to pay rent on a giant stadium, they have to pay players, coaches, staff and facility personnel, they have all the travel expenses of a season. Kraft finally throws his hands up and gets ready to shut the doors on the team.

But wait! Boston won't sit idly by and watch their Patriots fold. Of course, they won't go out and buy tickets to see a team that's no good either. So they do the next best thing. The city council gets together and decides to offer a schload of taxpayer money to the Patriots in order to keep them together. There are some caveats though: the team must now pay its starting quarterback the league minimum, and they aren't allowed to bring in free agents or first round draft picks. Anyone that they hire must be a native of New England.

Kraft, for want of a better option, accepts the proposal. Brady quits and gets a job working for the Jets. The Jets are okay financially, and haven't accepted any rules on compensation, which means that Brady can earn 10 to 20 times as much as the league minimum. The Patriots need a couple of players to replace injuries and retirees, and they fill those slots with the best graduates that Harvard and Boston College have to offer. The Jets meanwhile sign Brett Favre out of retirement and pick up some star players and Heisman candidates from USC and Miami.

New England struggles during the season. Their quarterback has never even played in a bowl game much less the NFL, and their new hires on offensive line are routinely attempting to block players who are 50-100 pounds heavier than they are. The Patriots set a new single season record for sacks allowed, and finish the season 1-15.

The Jets, meanwhile, capitalize on New England's weakness and take the division for the first time in a long time. Favre finds success throwing to the greatest young receivers that the nation produced in the last year, and New York finally gets to beat down on the northern rivals that had been winning more than their fair share during the Brady years.

All the Giants fans are quietly purchasing Jets season tickets and buying season packages from DirecTV. Ownership is thrilled, and announces that they'll finally be able to afford to move their stadium out of @$%!#% New Jersey. Meanwhile, the Patriots are 1-15 and even the die-hard fans who'd been watching this year are canceling tickets and subscriptions. Some Jets jerseys have been spotted in and around Boston. The die-hard fans have been grumbling about it, but not too loudly anymore. Kraft still has to pay for that big old stadium, and the transportation, and the staff, and the coaches, and the facility personnel. So he goes back to the city council...

So I'm sure there's a great reason why capping executive pay and limiting use of H1-B visas is different from capping Brady's pay (and the NFL *already* has a per-team spending cap) and limiting free agency. What is it?

At first blush, it seems like the US government is investing heavily in previously dominant but presently downtrodden firms. As a requirement for that investment, they're severely limiting the ability of those firms to keep and attract top talent. Why would you hamstring a company that you're investing in? Aren't you almost guaranteeing that the bad times will get worse? And if they get worse, what are you going to do? Spend more? You'll have to spend more, since you can't let them fail. If you were going to let them fail, you'd have done that in the first place, right? Right?