This brings me now to the last part of my title, my real interest in this affair. Possibly on one occasion during his life William Kristol told the truth about something. I just don't know what it was. As for Salon and RightWing Watch, they have no following among thinking people. Essentially they serve as gatekeepers and propagandists for Washington and private interest groups. Everyone knows that William Kristol and The Weekly Standard want more war, especially with Israel's enemies, and that left-wing progressives hate people like Ron Paul, who believe in limited government and distrust the left progressives' god, which is government.
What interests me is Steinreich's opinion that I am a suspect supporter of freedom and liberty because I support Social Security and Medicare. Clearly, Steinreich knows little about my positions or the history of Social Security privatization, a debate I started with my Business Week column back in the 1980s.
During the 1980s and into the 1990s I supported Social Security privatization, or perhaps more precisely, looking at it closely. In one of my Business Week columns I wrote about the Chilean government minister who succeeded in privatizing the Social Security system in Chile. I do not know the current condition of Chile's Social Security system, but when I wrote the system had proved to be a success, and many Chileans had become share owners in Chile's economy.
The Chilean minister thanked me profusely for making him world famous. He travelled around the world explaining how he went about the task that he accomplished, and he ended up at the Cato Institute in Washington, at that time a libertarian think tank at which I spent several years before being evicted for being an independent thinker.
Back at the time I was advocating thought about Social Security privatization the Dow Jones was around 1,000. The subsequent rise in the market would have made privatization feasible. More importantly, perhaps, if Social Security had been privatized, it is unlikely Congress would have deregulated the financial system. It is one thing if gamblers wish to risk their money in a casino. It is another if it is the money of Social Security retirees.
Once the financial system was deregulated -- a libertarian objective -- it became impossible to privatize Social Security other than for insincere reasons of letting Wall Street rob retirees. The lack of accountability, which followed the last financial crash, and the declaration of financial institutions being too big to fail, and thus are carried on the nation's budget or the Federal Reserve's balance sheet, also make clear that it is impossible to trust old age security to an unaccountable financial system.
Therefore, being practical and not a libertarian ideologue, I understand that Social Security privatization is no longer possible on the basis of a sound and sincere case. It might still happen as part of the normal corruption that now engulfs the US government.
Neoconservatives have an ideology of US world hegemony and an agenda to achieve it. Everything that they do and say relates to their agenda.
The left-wing progressives and neoliberals have their agendas, and, like the neocons, admissible thought is agenda-specific.
Libertarians have an agenda, an honorable one but largely not practical. In the libertarian mind, it is government that misuses power. The remedy is to place power in private sector hands. Yet as all of history shows, private interests also misuse power.
The solution to the dilemma is countervailing power. Labor unions to offset capitalist monopolies and company stores. Private interests that government must both accommodate and regulate. The division of government power into executive, legislative and judicial, a distribution of power between federal, state, and local governments, and accountability of all to law and the Constitution.
Perfect results would not be forthcoming, but there would be more liberty and more justice than if one power rules us all. The goal is to keep Sauron off the throne.
Being impractical, libertarians have jeopardized a better outcome, and advanced a worse one, as much as have other groups. The rise of jobs offshoring, misinterpreted by libertarians as free trade, destroyed the countervailing power of labor unions. As this domino fell, it knocked over another -- the Democratic Party. The decline in union financial support sent Democrats to the same influence purchasers as patronized by Republicans, with the consequence that the same interest groups now control both parties.
Conservatives worshiping presidential power have supported the accumulation of undue power in the executive branch, power that has over-ridden the Constitution.
America is now a closed-mind country. Minds are closed by ideological agendas, by narrow private interests, and by the view that only conspiracy kooks dissent from official explanations. Dissent and protest are gradually being criminalized. The government does not succeed all at once, but gradually step by step.
Before too long we will have to believe the most fantastic stories or be arrested. That is the path that both government and ideologues have us on.
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