E@L met a fellow from Georgia last night. Nice guy, a trainer for Company P.
When E@L mentioned that he had had a bunch of Australian Libertarians, including the not-so-young-as-he-thinks John Humphreys, the founder of the
Liberal Democratic Party, at his place for drinks the other night, the Georgian fellow said:
"American Liberations are just Republicans who are too pussy to admit that they are Republicans. Heck, they'll all VOTE Republican ev'ry time..."
LOL.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
John and his buddy Joe are fairly intense people. How do I know them, you ask? John is dating a friend of mine, an ex-Singaporean blogger, who dropped in to catch up with E@L and
Indiana Jones on their way to Cambodia to look at the universities John volunteers at, and to take as many and as varied a range of illicit drugs as they possibly can. Where to get 'shrooms in Phnom Phen was an unresolved dilemma.
That was a very intense evening actually, though no drugs were involved as we were in Singapore, none other than nicotine and alcohol of course. Ironically we came to the E@L GHQ because Party-town Singapore was too expensive for these backpackers - paying $15 for a half-shot of Scotch (not the
butterscotch that first came out) in some dry-ginger ale was not part of their plan for world domination, despite it being merely the free market at work.
Although he was on his home turf, E@L was on the back-peddle on a few occasions in conversation with these guys. To E@L, the problem with Libertarians is that they pick and choose policies amongst the Left and Right and therefore they have no cohesive historical philosophical underpinning other than the Objectivism (which some of them reject) of that rape-fantasist Ayn Rand and the disastrous (see current GFC) Monetarism of Milton Friedman. Therefore it's hard to pin them down because you will always find something to agree with in the cabinet of curiosities which constitutes their policies.
E@L started by assuming that he would completely disagree with them, but on many issues, irrespective of his desire to do so, he could not.
Actually, it may have been John's immense narcissism (charisma, charm, loud voice - call it what you will) that E@L at first felt the need to reject. You just want to bring someone who comes across as such an arrogant bastard down a peg or two; it's an unstoppable Australian urge to chop at the tall poppy. Maybe it's the way his comb-over is so carefully randomized as to look accidental...
We were well into the flow of the discussion/debate/argument/shouting-match when E@L managed to duck John's trick question - "Should people be less controlled or more controlled?" - by saying that the sentence had more implications than its English words suggest and was not so straightforward. "It's just a sentence, a plain English sentence, it has an answer," said John repeatedly.
More or less control, compared to what?
" 'All Cretans are liars'," E@L replied, "is just a sentence too, unless spoken by a Cretan..." Joe at least was stopped by this, perhaps he had never considered the possibility of paradoxes in plain seeming speech.
E@L just had the feeling that John's question was a set-up for some straw-man or extrapolation and that if he agreed that people need more freedom, then he was was agreeing that we should have no government or rules at all and that we should take our Uzis and hide out in the hills lest the Government sends in the troops, a la Waco. So E@L's strategy was to not answer his question in the first place, thus depriving him of the opportunity to develop his argument in his no doubt well-polished way.
Maybe someone should have said, "OK, I'll bite. Man should be more controlled,. Now what?" just to see where it would have gone. For some reason though, E@L was wary and that trail ran out.
To E@L's upbringing, yes, of course freedom is great, but to his experience, no, less regulation over companies and people (less "control") inevitably leads to collusion (see my previous post), exploitation and profiteering, and is not necessarily the most efficient or inexpensive option. Of course less regulation can seem a license to the exploit of economically weaker or more vulnerable persons or groups, in fact capitalism seems to depend upon it. Not to mention the GFC…
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
"I am 100% right in everything I believe," says Joe the Monetarist economist who HATES Naomi Klein with a feral passion ("she's an IDIOT!" he cries through clenched teeth) and disapproves of my John Ralston Saul books as well.
"That's where you're wrong," said E@L vehemently... This is the E@L who scrapped in with 52% for Year12 Economics back in '75 (when Milton Friedman was not quite the libertarian he is considered now*). "Monetarism is chaos!" Joe shook his head and quickly gave E@L the Economics lecture he must have slept through 34 years ago - Monetarism, he said, is the government adjusting the economy by controlling the supply of money, not this playing with the interest rates as E@L had maintained. Whatever.. .
But the supply of money can be changed by Banks making loans, too, so that should be regulated as well…
"Yes, but that's different…" and Joe's eye-glazing and unremembered explanation continued...
But we were all free to agree that beer (or whiskey, or gin or vodka) is good.
We also found common ground on at least one other thing. After seeing a copy of Popper's "The Open Society And Its Enemies" on my shelf, we all agreed that Plato is a
cunt.
Later I reflect on this, amongst several other ironies. Plato said that there is an unattainable world of perfect ideas, yet while these guys claim to eschew that, they are striving to convince everyone that their version of Libertarianism would move us towards that perfect world.
Actually E@L is confused. So do they claim there is no perfection, or do they merely claim that perfection is attainable?
Never got the chance to ask. What part of Plato is wrong - the benevolent philosopher king ruling autocratically? Then why do they love the very concept of Singapore. Of course they are falling that trap that John R Saul had pointed out - these apparently free markets do not necessarily mean free or democratic societies. The collusion of business and government is how Mussolini defined fascism.
As John Gray has pointed out, E@L pointed out, if any group you're in claims that killing large numbers of people is required for that group to fulfill its destiny and create the perfect (pure?) society (religion, world, cup of coffee, whatever...) it's time to get out of that group... It's a millennialist cult. Joe promised to look up Gray's books.
Anyway, all this talk of anarchy and violent - "all rules are violence," says Joe - government oppression made E@L feel like he was actually living in the book he is currently reading: Dostoevsky's
Demons.
For those of you who don't know, Demons (aka 'The Devils' and 'The Possessed') is about a group of dilettantish dinner-party anarchists in 19thCentury Russia that gets one new member who is pretty damn intense... hilarity results. Not! (Though it is quite a humorous almost satirical book, as well.) Coincidentally the 'intense' character in Demons is based on a real radical, a guy whom even quintessential anarchist (and the model for arch-anarchist Sunday in Chesterton's "The Man Who Was Thursday") Michael Bakunin thought was too crazy for anything.
Joe, from Saturday night, also is a big fan of Bakunin it transpires. John, who brought up the
Randian rape thing, reminds me of Dostoevsky's extremist Verkhovensky character… Libertarianism promotes the freedom to believe anything, so long as it is exactly what Libertarians believe. All the animals are more equal than others in the Libertarian farm.
A bunch of nerds, said flat-mate Izzy next morning. She was also in the conversation pit, getting the Economics 101 lecture with E@L. E@L bets she has these sorts of nights all the time.
By 1 am, E@L had to crash, physically and emotionally exhausted, to leave them to their devices and the grog cabinet which was overfull, so E@L didn’t mind. They were free to drink what they liked… That's the open society they REALLY want.
Interesting night.
E@L
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
* Krugman: "Eventually, however, the anti-Keynesian counterrevolution went far beyond Friedman’s position, which came to seem relatively moderate compared with what his successors were saying."
Pasted from <http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/06/magazine/06Economic-t.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1&hpw
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