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Javier E

Trump Killed Not Just the Libertarian Party But Maybe the Libertarian Movement Too - 0 views

www.theunpopulist.net/...illed-not-just-the-libertarian

libertarian movement party politics history culture crisis trump

shared by Javier E on 25 May 24 - No Cached
  • Though libertarianism as a political philosophy will continue, there is no longer anything resembling a coherent libertarian movement in American politics. That’s because the movement still bearing its name is no longer recognizably libertarian in any meaningful sense of the term. Nor can it still claim to be a political movement, which implies an association organized around not just a consistent set of ideas but a distinct political identity
  • For over a decade now, since Trump has dominated the national stage, longstanding disagreements have boiled over into a complete schism. There are those who have effectively become adjuncts of MAGA, and some who have gone firmly in the opposite direction, while others took a stance more akin to anti-anti-Trump voices who neither endorse nor firmly oppose the former president but train their ire toward those opposing Trump.
  • requires tracing internal libertarian disputes that began long before the rise of Trump. In some ways, they are a microcosm of similar developments in the American intellectual landscape writ large
  • ...18 more annotations...
  • In his 2007 history of the movement, Radicals for Capitalism, Brian Doherty identifies five key figures who most shaped the nascent ideology and its organized advocacy: author Ayn Rand, and economists Ludwig von Mises, F. A. Hayek, Milton Friedman, and Murray Rothbard
  • With one exception, all paired radical free-market and smaller government views with liberal tolerance and cosmopolitanism on social issues. None were religious, and Rand and Mises were both avowedly irreligious. Friedman and Hayek both trended more moderate and pragmatic, and also achieved the highest degree of mainstream intellectual recognitio
  • It was in Rothbard that the divergence began which today has culminated in the Libertarian Party’s convention transforming into a literal Trump rally
  • He was in many ways the most radical—an avowed anarchist—and the most marginal
  • he was also the most involved in creating a self-consciously libertarian movement and many of its institutions. In this he was aided by his skills as a prolific polemicist.
  • From the start, Trump’s brand of illiberal populism had more than a passing resemblance to Rothbard’s paleo strategy—minus, as many classical liberal critics had long predicted, any meaningful moves to actually shrink government
  • By accommodating and embracing conservative culture warriors, even including avowed white supremacists, Rothbard believed he was forming the basis of a political coalition to demolish modern big government
  • As he outlined in a 1992 essay, “Right Wing Populism: A Strategy for the Paleo Movement,” paleolibertarianism was an explicit alliance between small-government radicalism and the extremist far-right.
  • Across the loose constellation of libertarian think tanks, advocacy organizations, and electoral efforts in both the L.P. and the GOP, the embrace or rejection of Rothbard’s “paleo” idea was a source of perennial tension. Rothbard himself was involved for a time in both the Libertarian Party and the Cato Institute, co-founding the latter before being acrimoniously ejected after a few years.
  • the other end of the movement came to embrace the view of libertarianism as fundamentally an extension of the larger liberal tradition, continuous with a classical liberal political philosophy rather than a socially conservative one.
  • Free markets and limited government were still a big part of the picture, but in service to a vision of a dynamic and pluralistic free society.
  • As much as each held a dim view of the other, both continued to work under the “libertarian” label.
  • it included an open embrace of police brutality, fuming about the need to “dispense instant punishment” to “bums,” while railing against efforts to undo America’s white supremacist past. Later, opposition to immigration became one of the paleo posture’s signature issues.
  • it still embodied the burn-it-all-down reactionary ethos that saw tearing down established institutions as a necessary first step, even if that required an unrestrained autocrat
  • After the deadly 2017 neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, the then party leadership denounced the “blood and soil” rhetoric. But to the Rothbardians, this smacked of unacceptable wokeness. Within a few days, the Mises Caucus—named more for the ideas exhibited by the think-tank than the actual economist—was founded. Over the next few years, this group began launching hostile takeovers of state parties and then the national party. As they did so, the party increasingly adopted rhetoric that sounded more like the tiki-torch brigade than one committed to individual liberty.
  • The two camps within the movement—the cosmopolitan and the paleo—already strained to nearly the breaking point, went through the inevitable rupture. A number of differences and disagreements fueled the split, but most central was the divide into MAGA-friendly and anti-Trump sympathies.
  • It is no longer possible to ignore the conflict of visions about what kind of society freedom was supposed to yield. One in which private bigotry and established hierarchies were allowed free rein? Or an open and all-embracing one where different people and lifestyles disapproved by the traditional order could flourish?
  • The only way the libertarian movement’s demise could bring down libertarianism as a political-philosophical framework is if one expected the ideas themselves to disappear. Happily, a robust conviction of the centrality of individual liberty—or of the need to fight a tyrannical state—is in no danger of fully fading away.
Javier E

Revealed: Israeli spy chief 'threatened' ICC prosecutor over war crimes inquiry | Israel | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...-prosecutor-war-crimes-inquiry

spy chief icc prosecutor war crimes inquiry israel mossad trump history politics UN

shared by Javier E on 28 May 24 - No Cached
  • The diplomatic efforts were part of a coordinated effort by the governments of Netanyahu and Donald Trump in the US to place public and private pressure on the prosecutor and her staff.Between 2019 and 2020, in an unprecedented decision, the Trump administration imposed visa restrictions and sanctions on the chief prosecutor. The move was in retaliation to Bensouda’s pursuit of a separate investigation into war crimes in Afghanistan, allegedly committed by the Taliban and both Afghan and US military personnel.However, Mike Pompeo, then US secretary of state, linked the sanctions package to the Palestine case. “It’s clear the ICC is only putting Israel in [its] crosshairs for nakedly political purposes,” he said.
Javier E

Dilemma on Wall Street: Short-Term Gain or Climate Benefit? - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...inancial-industry-climate.html

climate change response environment wall street dilemma prisoners' climate

shared by Javier E on 20 Jun 24 - No Cached
  • team of economists recently analyzed 20 years of peer-reviewed research on the social cost of carbon, an estimate of the damage from climate change. They concluded that the average cost, adjusted for improved methods, is substantially higher than even the U.S. government’s most up-to-date figure.
  • That means greenhouse gas emissions, over time, will take a larger toll than regulators are accounting for. As tools for measuring the links between weather patterns and economic output evolve — and the interactions between weather and the economy magnify the costs in unpredictable ways — the damage estimates have only risen.
  • It’s the kind of data that one might expect to set off alarm bells across the financial industry, which closely tracks economic developments that might affect portfolios of stocks and loans. But it was hard to detect even a ripple.
  • ...27 more annotations...
  • In fact, the news from Wall Street lately has mostly been about retreat from climate goals, rather than recommitment. Banks and asset managers are withdrawing from international climate alliances and chafing at their rules. Regional banks are stepping up lending to fossil fuel producers. Sustainable investment funds have sustained crippling outflows, and many have collapsed.
  • In some cases, it’s a classic prisoner’s dilemma: If firms collectively shift to cleaner energy, a cooler climate benefits everyone more in the future
  • in the short term, each firm has an individual incentive to cash in on fossil fuels, making the transition much harder to achieve.
  • when it comes to avoiding climate damage to their own operations, the financial industry is genuinely struggling to comprehend what a warming future will mean.
  • A global compact of financial institutions made commitments worth $130 trillion to try to bring down emissions, confident that governments would create a regulatory and financial infrastructure to make those investments profitable. And in 2022, the Inflation Reduction Act passed.
  • What about the risk that climate change poses to the financial industry’s own investments, through more powerful hurricanes, heat waves that knock out power grids, wildfires that wipe out towns?
  • “If we think about what is going to be the best way to tilt your portfolios in the direction to benefit, it’s really difficult to do,”
  • “These will probably be great investments over 20 years, but when we’re judged over one to three years, it’s a little more challenging for us.”
  • Some firms cater to institutional clients, like public employee pension funds, that want combating climate change to be part of their investment strategy and are willing to take a short-term hit. But they aren’t a majority
  • And over the past couple of years, many banks and asset managers have shrunk from anything with a climate label for fear of losing business from states that frown on such concerns.
  • On top of that, the war in Ukraine scrambled the financial case for backing a rapid energy transition. Artificial intelligence and the movement toward greater electrification are adding demand for power, and renewables haven’t kept up
  • All of that is about the relative appeal of investments that would slow climate change
  • If you bought some of the largest solar-energy exchange-traded funds in early 2023, you would have lost about 20 percent of your money, while the rest of the stock market soared.
  • There is evidence that banks and investors price in some physical risk, but also that much of it still lurks, unheeded.
  • “I’m very, very worried about this, because insurance markets are this opaque weak link,” Dr. Sastry said. “There are parallels to some of the complex linkages that happened in 2008, where there is a weak and unregulated market that spills over to the banking system.”
  • Regulators worry that failing to understand those ripple effects could not just put a single bank in trouble but even become a contagion that would undermine the financial system.
  • But while the European Central Bank has made climate risk a consideration in its policy and oversight, the Federal Reserve has resisted taking a more active role, despite indications that extreme weather is feeding inflation and that high interest rates are slowing the transition to clean energy.
  • “The argument has been, ‘Unless we can convincingly show it’s part of our mandate, Congress should deal with it, it’s none of our business,’”
  • a much nearer-term uncertainty looms: the outcome of the U.S. election, which could determine whether further action is taken to address climate concerns or existing efforts are rolled back. An aggressive climate strategy might not fare as well during a second Trump administration, so it may seem wise to wait and see how it shakes out.
  • big companies are hesitating on climate-sensitive investments as November approaches, but says that “two things are misguided and quite dangerous about that hypothesis.”
  • One: States like California are establishing stricter rules for carbon-related financial disclosures and may step it up further if Republicans win
  • And two: Europe is phasing in a “carbon border adjustment mechanism,” which will punish polluting companies that want to do business there.
  • at the moment, even European financial institutions feel pressure from the United States, which — while providing some of the most generous subsidies so far for renewable-energy investment — has not imposed a price on carbon.
  • The global insurance company Allianz has set out a plan to align its investments in a way that would prevent warming above 1.5 degrees Celsius by the end of the century, if everyone else did the same. But it’s difficult to steer a portfolio to climate-friendly assets while other funds take on polluting companies and reap short-term profits for impatient clients.
  • “This is the main challenge for an asset manager, to really bring the customer along,” said Markus Zimmer, an Allianz economist. Asset managers don’t have sufficient tools on their own to move money out of polluting investments and into clean ones, if they want to stay in business,
  • “Of course it helps if the financial industry is somehow ambitious, but you cannot really substitute the lack of actions by policymakers,”
  • According to new research, the benefit is greater when decarbonization occurs faster, because the risks of extreme damage mount as time goes on. But without a uniform set of rules, someone is bound to scoop up the immediate profits, disadvantaging those that don’t — and the longer-term outcome is adverse for all.
Javier E

Opinion | How Capitalism Went Off the Rails - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...capitalism-inflation.html

capitalism debt easy money effects history economics politics

shared by Javier E on 20 Jun 24 - No Cached
  • Last year the Edelman Trust Barometer found that only 20 percent of people in the G7 countries thought that they and their families would be better off in five years.
  • Another Edelman survey, from 2020, uncovered a broad distrust of capitalism in countries across the world, “driven by a growing sense of inequity and unfairness in the system.”
  • Why the broad dissatisfaction with an economic system that is supposed to offer unsurpassed prosperity?
  • ...14 more annotations...
  • easy money. In an eye-opening new book, “What Went Wrong With Capitalism,” he makes a convincing case.
  • “When the price of borrowing money is zero,” Sharma told me this week, “the price of everything else goes bonkers.”
  • To take just one example: In 2010, as the era of ultralow and even negative interest rates was getting started, the median sale price for a house in the United States hovered around $220,000. By the start of this year, it was more than $420,000.
  • Nowhere has inflation (in the broad sense of the term) been more evident than in global financial markets. In 1980 they were worth a total of $12 trillion — equal to the size of the global economy at the time. After the pandemic, Sharma noted, those markets were worth $390 trillion, or around four times the world’s total gross domestic product.
  • But the worst hit is to capitalism itself: a pervasive and well-founded sense that the system is broken and rigged, particularly against the poor and the young. “A generation ago, it took the typical young family three years to save up to the down payment on a home,” Sharma observes in the book. “By 2019, thanks to no return on savings, it was taking 19 years.”
  • First, there was inflation in real and financial assets, followed by inflation in consumer prices, followed by higher financing costs as interest rates have risen to fight inflation
  • For wealthier Americans who own assets or had locked in low-interest mortgages, this hasn’t been a bad thing. But for Americans who rely heavily on credit, it’s been devastating.
  • Since investors “can’t make anything on government bonds when those yields are near zero,” he said, “they take bigger risks, buying assets that promise higher returns, from fine art to high-yield debt of zombie firms, which earn too little to make even interest payments and survive by taking on new debt.”
  • The hit to the overall economy comes in other forms, too: inefficient markets that no longer deploy money carefully to their most productive uses, large corporations swallowing smaller competitors and deploying lobbyists to bend government rules in their favor, the collapse of prudential economic practices.
  • “The most successful investment strategy of the 2010s,” Sharma writes, citing the podcaster Joshua Brown, “would have been to buy the most expensive tech stocks and then buy more as they rose in price and valuation.”
  • In theory, easy money should have broad benefits for regular people, from employees with 401(k)s to consumers taking out cheap mortgages. In practice, it has destroyed much of what used to make capitalism an engine of middle-class prosperity in favor of the old and very rich.
  • The social consequence of this is rage; the political consequence is populism.
  • “He promised to deconstruct the administrative state but ended up adding new rules at the same pace as his predecessor — 3,000 a year,” Sharma said of Trump. “His exercise of presidential authority to personal ends shattered historic precedents and did more to expand than restrict the scope of government. For all their policy differences, both leading U.S. candidates are committed and fearless statists, not friends of competitive capitalism.”
  • We are wandering in fog. And the precipice is closer than we think.
Javier E

Group of Austrians Picks 77 Charities to Receive Heiress's Fortune - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...engelhorn-heiress-fortune.html

charities heiress inheritance tax Austria

shared by Javier E on 20 Jun 24 - No Cached
  • Without any laws in place that would tax Ms. Engelhorn’s inherited fortune, she decided to redistribute it herself, and she turned to the public to decide how her money should be spent. She is part of the group Millionaires for Humanity, which advocates wealth taxes, and she co-founded a group called Tax Me Now.
  • Before the project was announced in January, Ms. Engelhorn had publicly committed to giving away at least 90 percent of her inheritance. She is part of a small movement of superrich individuals who want to not only redistribute their money, but also to challenge the structures that allowed them to inherit their riches.
  • Ms. Engelhorn said she would continue to fight for a more equal and fair distribution of wealth in her country. She said she hoped that she would make other people talk about the issue, too.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • “Please talk about money, everyone,” she said. “The more people are active in it, the better the results will be.”
Javier E

Opinion | What Democrats Need to Do Now - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...aga-trump-vance-democrats.html

Democratic party dynamism MAGA class struggle struggle class security 2024 platform culture politics policy

shared by Javier E on 19 Jul 24 - No Cached
  • Over the last eight years, think tankers, activists and politicians have developed MAGA into a worldview, a worldview that now transcends Donald Trump.
  • It has its roots in Andrew Jackson-style populism, but it is updated and more comprehensive. It is the worldview that represents one version of working-class interests and offers working-class voters respect.
  • J.D. Vance is the embodiment and one of the developers of this worldview — with his suspicion of corporate power, foreign entanglements, free trade, cultural elites and high rates of immigration.
  • ...30 more annotations...
  • MAGA has replaced Reaganism as the chief operating system of the Republican Party.
  • If Democrats hope to win in the near future they have to take the MAGA worldview seriously, and respectfully make the case, especially to working-class voters, for something better.
  • In a volatile world, MAGA offers people security. It promises secure borders and secure neighborhoods. It offers protection from globalization, from the creative destruction of modern capitalism. It offers protection from an educated class that looks down on you and indoctrinates your children in school. It offers you protection from corporate predators.
  • the problem with MAGA — and here is where the Democratic opportunity lies — is that it emerges from a mode of consciousness that is very different from the traditional American consciousness.
  • we saw ourselves, as the dynamic nation par excellence. We didn’t have a common past, but we dreamed of a common futur
  • “the Spirit of America is best known in Europe by one of its qualities — energy.”
  • Americans have a zeal for continual self-improvement, a “need tirelessly to tinker, improve everything and everybody, never leave anything alone.”
  • Americans can’t be secure if the world is in flames. That’s why America has to be active abroad in places like Ukraine, keeping wolves like Vladimir Putin at bay.
  • Through most of our history, we were not known for our profundity or culture but for living at full throttle.
  • MAGA, on the other hand, emerges from a scarcity consciousness, a zero-sum mentality: If we let in tons of immigrants they will take all our jobs; if America gets browner, “they” will replace “us.”
  • MAGA is based on a series of victim stories: The elites are out to screw us. Our allies are freeloading off us. Secular America is oppressing Christian America.
  • MAGA looks less like an American brand of conservatism and more like a European brand of conservatism. It resembles all those generations of Russian chauvinists who argued that the Russian masses embody all that is good but they are threatened by aliens from the outside
  • MAGA looks like a kind of right-wing Marxism, which assumes that class struggle is the permanent defining feature of politics.
  • The American consciousness has traditionally been an abundance consciousness.
  • If Democrats are to thrive, they need to tap into America’s dynamic cultural roots and show how they can be applied to the 21st century
  • My favorite definition of dynamism is adapted from the psychologist John Bowlby: All of life is a series of daring explorations from a secure base. If Democrats are to thrive, they need to offer people a vision both of the secure base and of the daring explorations.
  • MAGA is a fortress mentality, but America has traditionally been defined by a pioneering mentality. MAGA offers a strong shell, but not much in the way of wings needed to soar.
  • Americans can’t be secure if the border is in chaos. Popular support for continued immigration depends on a sense that the government has things under control.
  • Americans can’t be secure if a single setback will send people to the depths of crushing poverty. That’s why the social insurance programs that Democrats largely built are so important.
  • offer people a vision of the daring explorations that await them. That’s where the pessimistic post-Reagan Republicans can’t compete
  • champion the abundance agenda that people like Derek Thompson and my colleague Ezra Klein have been writing about. We need to build things. Lots of new homes. Supersonic airplanes and high-speed trains.
  • If Republicans are going to double down on class war rhetoric — elites versus masses — Democrats need to get out of that business
  • They need to stand up to protectionism, not join the stampede.
  • Democrats need to take on their teachers’ unions and commit to dynamism in the field of education.
  • Democrats need to throttle back the regulators who have been given such free rein that they’ve stifled innovation.
  • tap back into the more traditional American aspiration: We are not sentenced to a permanent class-riven future but can create a fluid, mobile society.
  • The economist Michael Strain of the American Enterprise Institute has offered a telling psychic critique of MAGA economic thinking: “The economics of grievance is ineffective, counterproductive and corrosive, eroding the foundations of prosperity. Messages matter. Tell people that the system is rigged, and they will aspire to less
  • Champion personal responsibility, and they will lift their aspirations. Promoting an optimistic vision of economic life can increase risk tolerance, ambition, effort and dynamism.”
  • t aspiration is not like a brick that just sits there. Aspiration is more like a flame that can be fed or dampened
  • “The problem is desire. We need to *want* these things. The problem is inertia. We need to want these things more than we want to prevent these things.”
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