The wrecking crew
What's the Matter with Kansas?, a jaw-dropping investigation of the decades of deliberate--and lucrative--conservative misrule In his previous book, Thomas Frank explained why working America votes for politicians who reserve their favors for the rich. Now, in The Wrecking Crew, Frank examines the blundering and corrupt Washington those politicians have given us. Casting his eyes from the Bush administration's final months of plunder to the earliest days of the Republican revolution, Frank describes the rise of a ruling coalition dedicated to dismantling government. But rather than cutting down the big government they claim to hate, conservatives have simply sold it off, deregulating some industries, defunding others, but always turning public policy into a private-sector bidding war. Washington itself has been remade into a golden landscape of super-wealthy suburbs and gleaming lobbyist headquarters--the wages of government-by-entrepreneurship practiced so outrageously by figures such as Jack Abramoff. It is no coincidence, Frank argues, that the same politicians who guffaw at the idea of effective government have installed a regime in which incompetence is the rule. Nor will the country easily shake off the consequences of deliberate misgovernment through the usual election remedies. Obsessed with achieving a lasting victory, conservatives have taken pains to enshrine the free market as the permanent creed of state.
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What Hacker News says
- The Wrecking Crew by Thomas Frank is good for the lay public.
Much denser is The Road from Mont Pelerin by Philip Mirowski.
- And how do you imagine these "massive penalties" would be enforced? Perhaps by government regulation? Can't recall the last time I heard a Libertarian talk about a lack of that, or say anything favorable about labor unions. I think a lot of Libertarians think of Libertarianism as economic Conservatism, except it all works out magically because Free Markets and legal marijuana! Both sides tend to have an misplaced trust in the free markets to solve problems, and have a knee-jerk reaction against any increase in the size of Big Government, new regulations or labor union-strengthening measures.
I've been both a conservative and libertarian myself in the past, and I would agree that these outcomes are not considered desirable by adherents of those viewpoints, but unfortunately this sort of thing is very often the result of the policies and philosophy they thought would make everyone's lives better.
My two cents. Or if I'm more honest, Thomas Frank's two cents. http://www.amazon.com/The-Wrecking-Crew-Conservatives-Govern... Good read, that.
- "Libertarian ideas are revolutionary. I've been told that Trotsky once said "Every revolutionary should study chess."
The best book on chess that Libertarians should read is The Wrecking Crew by Thomas Frank, which left me certain after many years that I was absolutely no Libertarian, and more than that, embarrassed to have ever been one."
What a clown. Libertarians are not revolutionary. Second, that book has nothing to do with chess, and Trotsky's quote was literal.
This doesn't even warrant a rebuttal, but I'll continue.
"Republican Presidents and legislators use Libertarian arguments to advance policy decisions which benefit business, then conveniently forget those same arguments when it comes to issues of government debt or unnecessary military spending."
Republicans and Libertarians share certain conservative values. For what it's worth, one point of libertarianism is that the government's first job is national defense.
Ugh, this stuff is awful.
"If politics were chess, Libertarians would be trying to win by holding up the pawn, saying "my pawn has a machine gun!", and making little pew-pew noises. It just doesn't work that way."
Politics is not chess. The writer's introductory quote associates revolution with chess. The writer may want to use an outline next time.
Here's a summary: The government uses Libertarian arguments for purported corrupt scheming between itself and big business. Thus, Libertarianism as a political ideology is, according to the writer's ham-handed "arguments," flawed.
I want my three minutes back; I could've made toast.
