Libertarians: less voting, more freedom.

One of the more obscure issues on the right is that we should go back to the days when senators were appointed by the states instead of elected. An economics professor says here this is a great idea: with less democracy, our government wouldn’t have to listen to the people and could focus on big, long-range plans for economic growth. According to this review of his work, he’s heavily influenced by Bryan Caplan, who believes anyone who disagrees with Caplan’s economic views (including that the 1800s offered so much more freedom to women than the 21st century) is just too ignorant to vote.

I would agree that there’s a lot of resistance to long-term planning. The government doesn’t spend on infrastructure because that would require either taking money from one of the untouchable sources (some of the $8 billion the Pentagon can’t account for in Iraq, say) or raising taxes. It don’t shore up the social safety net because it would require raising taxes. Some pols want to reduce the safety margins for oil trains regardless of the increased risk of disastrous accident. If appointing the senate would free them of the influence of rich and powerful people to make those kind of long-term national-interest decisions that would be great.

However I’m pretty sure libertarian professors are thinking more of “cut taxes on the rich for economic growth” even though it doesn’t work (it didn’t work under Reagan, or W. Clinton raised taxes and the economy still boomed). They’d much sooner prefer something like this GOP economic plan, I suspect.

And, of course, reducing democracy reduces what little leverage ordinary non 1-percenters have. Libertarian columnist Tibor Machan was the same kind of authoritarian, insisting that true freedom would be achieved when we privatized all government services so that whoever owned the roads/schools/hospitals/police would be able to decide what the rules were and nobody could vote them out of office or otherwise regulate them. Freedom!

It’s been a while since I wrote about that other authoritarian, David Brooks, but his tune hasn’t changed: the poor are barbaric savages who need strong moral leadership; the rich, by contrast, fail the poor by withdrawing into gated communities instead of enforcing a moral order on their inferiors. As Echidne of the Snakes has said, Brooks should be happy with a nation run like Saudi Arabia: an elite imposing a tight religious and moral code on the country. Charles Pierce weighs in on Brooks failings.

And as the dogs have come close to landing on my computer in their bouts of canine parkour, I think I’ll pause here