What to tell your libertarian friends

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This is libertarian capitalism, stagnating incomes and exploding medical and education cost at one end, inequality zooming up and vast accumulation of wealth at the other end, skewing everything. A sort of Uber economy.

The crisis of income inequality in America is well-known, but there is another economic crisis developing much faster and with worse consequences. I’m talking about inequality of wealth. The wealth gap is now staggering. In the 1970s, the wealthiest tenth of Americans owned about a third of the nation’s total household wealth. Now, the wealthiest 10 percent owns about 75 percent of total household wealth. America’s richest one-tenth of one percent now owns as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent.

Wealth isn’t like income.  Income is payment for work.  Wealth keeps growing automatically and exponentially because it’s parked in investments that generate even more wealth. Wealth is also passed from generation to generation. An estimated 60% of the wealth in the United States is inherited. Many of today’s super-rich never did a day’s work in their lives.  The Walmart heirs alone have more wealth than the bottom 42 percent of Americans combined. America is now on the cusp of the largest intergenerational transfer of wealth in history. As wealthy boomers die, an estimated $30 trillion will go to their children over the next three decades.

Over time, this wealth will continue to grow even further – without these folks lifting a finger. This concentration of wealth will soon resemble the kind of dynasties common to European aristocracies in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Robert Reich

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This doesn't really need regulating either as it just involved expendable people. The masters of the universe live at safe distances..

A total of 1.6 million Americans live next to the most polluting incinerators in the country, with lower-income and minority communities exposed to the vast majority of pollution coming from these waste-burning plants. The burning of household and commercial waste can give off a stew of pollutants, including mercury, lead and small particles of soot. This pollution isn’t evenly distributed, however. Of the 73 incinerators across the US, 79% are located within three miles of low-income and minority neighbourhoods, according to research by the Tishman Environment and Design Center at New York City’s New School. In total, 4.4 million people live within three miles of an incinerator in the US. Of this total, 1.6 million live close to the top 12 incinerators measured in terms of pollutant emissions across mercury, lead, particulate matter, sulfur dioxide, nitrous oxide and carbon monoxide.

Revealed: 1.6m Americans live near the most polluting incinerators in the US | Environment | The Guardian

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Universities used to be rather cosy places until they got shaken up by a dose of market incentives, stressing money and the number of publications, pitting everybody against everybody in a libertarian survival of the fittest:

One academic said: “I remember a time of camaraderie and collegiality. Now, the external pressures isolate and spotlight individuals.” Another said: “One of the key skills in current times is working against isolation. If you can’t, then it can be a very lonely job.” Dennis Guiney, educational psychologist and co-author of the research, explains: “Lack of collegiality was a big concern for the academics we spoke to. Rather than focusing solely on money, they felt university managers should be building this. Academics need to feel valued. Praise is important.”

His research found that academics felt under much more pressure to deliver within the competitive new market in higher education, and this meant a sense of loss of control over their job. The report quotes one academic saying: “You have to do all you can to keep student numbers high. Otherwise, next year one of your colleagues might lose their job.”

‘It’s cut-throat’: half of UK academics stressed and 40% thinking of leaving | Education | The Guardian

So it's not only at the bottom where people feel the pressures of the free market..

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Industrial policy can actually achieve something, which might come as a surprise to libertarians:

Commuters trundling aboard at rush hour don't seem to realize this is one of the few electric buses—300 last year, to be exact—in America. In China, an electric bus wouldn’t be unusual at all. Out of almost 425,000 e-buses worldwide at the end of last year, some 421,000 were in China.

“There’s no industrial policy in the U.S. for e-buses,” said Nick Albanese, a New York-based analyst at BNEF. “So unless the U.S. manages to become a big exporter of e-buses, China will continue to stand apart.” China takes a typically top-down approach to its manifest destiny of vehicle electrification: establish national mandates, subsidize manufacturers, and nurture policy competition among its cities.

The U.S. Has a Fleet of 300 Electric Buses. China Has 421,000 - Bloomberg

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And if you think these guys are principled, think again..

Back in February 2018, I sat down with two leaders of the House Freedom Caucus to discuss, among other things, whether fiscal conservatism had gone extinct. A few days earlier, with encouragement from his budget director, Mick Mulvaney, President Donald Trump had signed a budget deal boosting federal spending by nearly $300 billion. I told the leaders, Mark Meadows and Jim Jordan, that it seemed precisely the kind of deal that Mulvaney, a self-professed fiscal hawk and a founding member of the Freedom Caucus, would have railed against during his time in Congress. Meadows shrugged. “He wouldn’t have been supportive of it,” the North Carolina congressman told me. But “he’s got a different boss now.”

The Freedom Caucus’s hardening role as Trump’s protector would probably surprise those familiar with the group’s origins. Jordan, Meadows, and others founded the caucus in 2015 as a check on Republican leadership, which they felt had usurped power such that rank-and-file members no longer had a voice in legislative proceedings. Moreover, they were tired of watching Republicans acquiesce to massive spending packages, even as most of them continued to campaign on stemming the deficit. They were effective in quickly building out their ranks, and were soon large enough to block any legislation from passing a GOP-led House. As former Speaker John Boehner and his successor, Paul Ryan, quickly learned, to keep the conference running smoothly was to keep the Freedom Caucus happy.

And that was no small task: Agitation was in the group’s DNA, after all. But in those first years, some variation of conservative principle always seemed to underlie their grievances, whether they were frustrated by a cushy omnibus package or an expansion of guest-worker visas. It seemed natural, then, that so many group members were uncomfortable with Trump during the 2016 presidential race, preferring established conservatives such as Senator Ted Cruz and deficit hawks like Rand Paul. “I don’t think he is a conservative,” the former Idaho representative and Freedom Caucus co-founder Raúl Labrador said of Trump during the primary. Less than a week before the election, Mulvaney—who is now also the president’s acting chief of staff—said he thought Trump was a “terrible human being.”

Justin Amash, Impeachment, and the Freedom Caucus - The Atlantic

[url=https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/05/justin-amash-impeachment-and-freedom-caucus/590113/][/url]

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“Half of the world’s surface is unclaimed by any government.” So begins the introductory video on the website of The Seasteading Institute, a non-profit organisation that aims to solve all of humanity’s problems by creating autonomous floating communities at sea. Set up in 2008 by Patri Friedman, the grandson of the libertarian economist Milton Friedman, it has attracted millions of dollars in tech investment, most notably from the billionaire disaster-crab Peter Thiel: Facebook board member, co-founder of PayPal and Donald Trump campaign donor.  For the seasteaders, traditional land-based models of society have finally failed humanity. With the planet overheating, the world’s population growing and nation-states on the verge of meltdown, the only solution is to cut loose, raise anchor, and start your own floating utopia: free of regulation, free of government interference, free of any lingering sense of responsibility towards your fellow humans, and – most importantly of all, you suspect – free of taxes.

Why the Champions League clubs’ brazen attempt to set up their own closed shop is no surprise | The Independent

The libertarian principles of the football elite, an interesting perspective..

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Just 27% of public, four-year schools are affordable for low-income students More than half of the nation’s most affordable colleges are still unaffordable for low-income students. That’s one takeaway from a report released this month by the National College Access Network, a membership group for organizations committed to college access. Less than half, or 48%, of the nation’s community colleges are affordable for students who qualify for Pell grants, the money the federal government provides to low-income students to attend college.

More than half of community colleges are too expensive for low-income students - MarketWatch

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But Ash, Chen, and Naidu find that the training in the programs had a conservative/libertarian bent, and that this shows up in the behavior of judges who attended. Attendees were less likely to rule in favor of environmental or union regulations and gave longer prison sentences to federal defendants. The study provides evidence that the seminars, and the broader Law and Economics movement promoted by conservative philanthropies like the Olin Foundation, pushed American courts to the right. That makes the democratic dilemma posed by groups like Olin (and present-day political donors like the Koch brothers or Tom Steyer) even starker.

Manne seminars: how econ classes for judges turned courts rightward - Vox

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Consumerism isn't everything

American homes are a lot bigger than they used to be. In 1973, when the Census Bureau started tracking home sizes, the median size of a newly built house was just over 1,500 square feet; that figure reached nearly 2,500 square feet in 2015. This rise, combined with a drop in the average number of people per household, has translated to a whole lot more room for homeowners and their families: By one estimate, each newly built house had an average of 507 square feet per resident in 1973, and nearly twice that—971 square feet—four decades later. But according to a recent paper, Americans aren’t getting any happier with their ever bigger homes. “Despite a major upscaling of single-family houses since 1980,” writes Clément Bellet, a postdoctoral fellow at the European business school INSEAD, “house satisfaction has remained steady in American suburbs.”

To be clear, having more space does generally lead to people saying they’re more pleased with their home. The problem is that the satisfaction often doesn’t last if even bigger homes pop up nearby. “If I bought a house to feel like I'm ‘the king of my neighborhood,’ but a new king arises, it makes me feel very bad about my house,” Bellet wrote to me in an email. The largest houses seem to be the ones that all the other homeowners base their expectations on. In neighborhoods where the biggest houses are more modest, Bellet told me, expanding the size of one’s house can be 10 times as satisfying as undertaking such an expansion in a neighborhood where the biggest homes are palatial.

Are Big Houses Making Americans Unhappy? - The Atlantic

Here is were libertarians go wrong:

• Welfare, after basic needs are met is much more dependent upon relative consumption, rather than absolute ones. We're social animals, something libertarians ignore completely.
  
• In fact, status anxiety as a result of rising inequality (the inexorable by-product of libertarian economic policies) has produced more misery, despite increased consumption opportunities and this shows up in a host of social statistics (suicide, substance abuse, loneliness, etc.) and the lack of increase in reported happiness.