Flutterby™! : Some political musings

My path away from being a Libertarian has had many incremental steps. A strong one was reading one of the issues of Ayn Rand's "The Objectivist Newsletter" in which she defended the patent system, but talked about the length as being somewhat arbitrary, and that the notion of independent discovery really made the patent system an attempt to create a real estate like limit on knowledge.

Which, of course, led to two "aha": moments: The first was that legal systems were imperfect representations of ethical structures, had knobs that let you tweak the relative return of capital vs labor. The second was that if that knob was tweaked towards capital, then as capital accumulated you'd end up with a monarchy.

Which, of course, is the observation that Picketty made a few years ago.

Another was that in discussions with other people who claimed the Libertarian label, so many were unaware of the externalities of their actions. So many dismissed, for instance, automobile pollution, or were willing to look at the economics of subsidies and policy decisions that created the lifestyle they enjoyed.

But overall, I was willing to accept that there was at least a theory of a place with limited government that didn't deteriorate into Somalia-like warlords; that reducing the ethical notions of violence and compulsory behavior that underpinned society was a laudable direction.

Until now. Until the current rage of Trump supporters who have sprung from the woodwork claiming at the same time that government is an evil that holds us back from market-based cooperation, and that killing political opponents is completely reasonable.

An example from the faux outrage over Rashida Tlaib referring to Trump as "the motherfucker", on a Facebook thread someone said:

Rashida the muslum is not even sworn in, she did not use a Holy Bible, so go get a red dot in her head, i want to scratch it and see if i won again.

Which, initially, I and a few other respondents took to be pretty much awful bigotry, conflating Islam with the Hindu practice of married women wearing a red dot, but in a discussion about why "bigotry" and not "racism" was the correct term, another commenter clarified:

Never said anything about Indians..... just said give her a red dot which refers to banging a barrel into her head leaving a red dot. That’s not racist, it would be if referring to her as an Indian but she’s not nor was the comment. Clearly said she was a Muslim.

I'm just... completely amazed that discussing the desirability of assassinating politicians has become mainstream. Right Libertarians have long said "no, we're not talking about Somalia, with warlords and such", but the public discourse enabled by Trump's popularity has exposed that, yes, the modern Right cares nothing for the rule of law and would freakin' welcome a Somalia-like warloard-ruled death- squad fueld society.

It's pretty freakin' astounding.