Sail Away

In America you'll get food to eat
Won't have to run through the jungle
And scuff up your feet
You'll just sing about Jesus and drink wine all day
It's great to be an American

Ain't no lions or tigers ain't no mamba snake
Just the sweet watermelon and the buckwheat cake
Ev'rybody is as happy as a man can be
Climb aboard little wog sail away with me

CHORUS
Sail away sail away
We will cross the mighty ocean into Charleston Bay
Sail away-sail away
We will cross the mighty ocean into Charleston Bay

In America every man is free
To take care of his home and his family
You'll be as happy as a monkey in a monkey tree
You're all gonna be an American

- Randy Newman

Our approach to and conceptions of Liberty and Libertarianism, Freedom and Slavery, State Corporatism and Liberal Fascism, are being expressed in a somewhat inchoate fashion in our attitudes toward the Tea Party movement.  I suspect Simon has it right:

Not Interested In Politics

This is about the best take on the Tea Party participants (as opposed to the "leaders") that I have read so far.

Beyond their fiscally conservative principles, the ideology of the people involved in the tea party movement tends to vary dramatically. So far, tea party activists "haven't been interested in politics," Fitton said.

I also suspect that some of what confuses people about Barack Obama is that he is as much a Corporatist as any Republican who has ever been a captive of the Military-Industrial Complex that our Liberal friends are always so concerned with, but his Corporatism is more well hidden (because it exists in an MSM blind spot) and more parsimonious to the Left. 

Consider Mark Safranski's comments this morning about Google, a giant information processing corporation which aims to "do no evil":

Google as a Dishonest Broker?

This strikes me as an exceedingly bad idea from Google:

From Drudge:

GOOGLE FRANKENSTEIN: MACHINES TO CHOOSE YOUR NEWS
Mon Apr 12 2010 08:15:34 ET

GOOGLE CEO and Obama political activist Eric Schmidt declared this weekend that his machines will help decide what news you receive!

...

If this no-choice ”opposing view” meme sounds familiar, that’s because a prominent friend and appointee of President Obama, former U. of Chicago law professor Cass Sunstein, has, for several years, articulated a sophisticated  theory on the need for government to regulate speech, “reformulate” the 1st Amendment to ensure greater “diversity” and compel the presentation of “opposing views”. While I share Sunstein’s concern that many people are deliberately corrupting their OODA Loops by only reading sources with which they already agree, forcing legal adults to read something else isn’t the answer. It’s a free country and with liberty comes the right to be left to wallow in ignorance in peace.

Getting the Congress and states to turn the free speech and free press clauses on their head is a task with small chance of political success. Persuading or pressuring a small number of friendly CEO’s of search engine companies to optimize their own systems to produce politically favorable results for the administration and the Democratic Party is a lot easier, far less transparent to the public and more difficult for the GOP and conservatives (or for that matter, dissident progressives and unpopular minorities) to combat.

To put it simply, the long term strategy here is that the information aggregators - Google being the 800lb gorilla - will become the new “gatekeepers” with their finger on the scales that determine the page rank of opposing views on controversial issues.

The MSM were traditionally our gatekeepers for news, but until the internet, most of us were unaware of this feature and unaware of how it was used.  Google will fail if they try to recreate the halcyon days of the last century.

Most Americans have not been terribly engaged with politics, especially in the last 30 years since Ronald Reagan came along and slowed the move toward an ever expanding state and ushered in a long period of (mostly) economic expansion.  As long as they were able to be left alone to take care of themselves and their families, most Americans were happy to leave the governing to those who were most interested in the effort. 

George W. Bush mobilized the Left, in part, by his feared expansion of the State's power to survey and monitor people in the name of national security.  (Tellingly, none of the Bush "excesses" have been repudiated by the Obama administration; they offer lip service, though with decreasing volume, but have done nothing to dismantle the apparatus established by Bush.) 

Now Barack Obama has come along and has mobilized the vast middle of the electorate, who fear the exponentially larger expansion of the State in the name of Liberal ends, which justify all sorts of potentially illiberal means.

There is an interesting discussion going on at Crooked Timber which neatly illustrates how people can talk past each other while believing they are addressing each other's points.  This post was authored by John Holbo:

Adventures in Libertarian Blind Spots

One of Boaz’ fellow libertarians, Jacob Hornberger – cited by Boaz as a case in point of this odd Golden Age-ism – made a response which made the same damn obvious mistake all over again. His post – “Up from Serfdom – How to restore lost liberties while building on the positive strides America has made since 1776” – hearkens to the good old days of the 80’s – 1880’s, that is:

Let’s consider, say, the year 1880. Here was a society in which people were free to keep everything they earned, because there was no income tax. They were also free to decide what to do with their own money—spend it, save it, invest it, donate it, or whatever. People were generally free to engage in occupations and professions without a license or permit. There were few federal economic regulations and regulatory agencies. No Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, welfare, bailouts, or so-called stimulus plans. No IRS. No Departments of Education, Energy, Agriculture, Commerce, and Labor. No EPA and OSHA. No Federal Reserve. No drug laws. Few systems of public schooling. No immigration controls. No federal minimum-wage laws or price controls. A monetary system based on gold and silver coins rather than paper money. No slavery. No CIA. No FBI. No torture or cruel or unusual punishments. No renditions. No overseas military empire. No military-industrial complex.

As a libertarian, as far as I’m concerned, that’s a society that is pretty darned golden.

...

Obviously [Arnold] Kling and [Jacob] Hornberger could not have done a better job of proving Boaz’ original point. It’s tempting to accuse them of just not caring about liberty for anyone except white men. How else could they miss this stuff? But I doubt that’s it. (Anyway, aren’t they Jewish? It’s hard for me to imagine men named Kling and Hornberger seriously believe they, personally, would be made more free by being transported back to the late 19th Century.) It seems to me the most probable explanation of this truly bizarre blind spot – it really is bizarre and there’s no other word for it – is a sort of strange entrapment in the conservative ‘restoration’ narrative, but perhaps induced by Hayekian rather than conservative rhetoric. If the 20th Century was the Road To Serfdom, it can hardly have been a long march to increased freedom. If progressives and liberals are the authoritarian enemy, it can hardly be that their victories have, on the whole, made us more free. Since the 20th Century was when the bad stuff really got going, how can it NOT be appropriate to be thoroughly nostalgic for the 1880’s as a Lost Golden Age?

I cannot do the exchange justice with excerpts so suggest you read the posts and follow the links to an interesting discussion in which 1880's apples are being compared to 2010's oranges. 

In 1880 many people were not free.  Beyond that, few people had actually developed the idea that more people should be free.  A culture is stuck in its time.  In 1880 the idea that women, or blacks, or immigrants were inherently equal and deserving of equal rights was a thought-not-yet-thought.  To imagine that the rules of 1880 society could be adopted in 2010 is "not even wrong."  It simply makes no sense.

Yet what many Americans are reacting to in the Tea Parties is the sense that our government has now grown so large, with ambitions even larger, that it is inevitably infringing upon our basic liberties.  More and more, we are not just being "left alone" by our government and their infringements are becoming more and more noxious and overt.

For example, when I was a Psychiatric resident in training, we were required to enter chart notes on a daily basis, documenting every interaction with our patients.  By my fourth year, a new state mandated requirement had come into existence.  We were now being required to document written treatment plans.  There were a long list of elements necessary for the treatment plans; writing them was annoying and time consuming an did little to improve patient care.  The time spent on the TPs was time not spent with patients.  The TPs did provide work and a rationale for the establishment of an office in the State Health Department devoted to ensuring compliance with the regulations on TPs.   Today, 30 years later, in the clinic where I work Part time, we are required by the state accrediting agency to have an initial TP, 30 pages of documentation on assessments of pain, drug and alcohol use, cigarettes smoking, past history, quality assurance, and various other forms for the cause du jour.  Every three months a new TP is required, even for those chronic patients who have merely been maintained in a relatively stable state and whose plan is to continue to maintain them out of the hospital.  Needless to say, when a newly mandated form comes down from the state, none of the old forms are dispensed with; new forms are just added to the pile.  (The unfortunate Social Workers spend half their time filling out forms such that they have now been forced to offer 30 minute Psychotherapy sessions instead of the customary 45 minutes; they simply do not have the time to see patients.) 

Now take this experience and multiply it in every area where the government has involvement.  We are being snowed under by rules and regulations.  New taxes are metastasizing to support the increasingly cumbersome bureaucratic apparatus required to make sure each of us behaves in the prescribed manner.  Our rulers even want to add regulations concerning our very breathing! (As luck would have it, we emit CO2 with every breath.)  The Tea Parties are responding to a sense of government growing out of control, with favored groups and corporations receiving public largess while the majority become cogs in a machine designed primarily for the benefit of the governing class. 

The 1880s appear to be a Golden Age because people lived unencumbered by the thousands of laws and millions of pages of regulations which seek to define every aspect of our lives.  And for those for whom even the 1880's were too stultifying, there still existed the frontier.

1880 was not a Libertarian paradise; too many had their horizons too constrained by custom and law.  Yet the 1880s also were a time when those who were most free appear, from here, to have been more free than most of us today.