Richard Bennett

— The WSJ (link requires subscription) reports:

WASHINGTON — Using strategies dubbed “Death Star,” “Get Shorty,” and “Fat Boy,” Enron Corp.’s energy traders manipulated California’s power system to increase profits during the height of the state’s 2000-2001 energy crisis, documents released by federal regulators show.

The internal company documents were the first to provide evidence of what had been suspected through previous inquiries by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission — that market manipulation was a major factor in sending wholesale energy prices soaring in six Western states.

Turns out the market was gamed after all, folks. The tactics included shipping power outside the state and then back in to escape price caps, and charging the state for moving power and relieving congestion when they hadn’t moved any power or relieved any congestion. And with all of that, Enron still went out of business, but not until a few bucks went into a few numbered bank accounts, I’ll betcha.

— We’re doing a primer on Electoral Politics over at DailyPundit.com. If you understand the value of pragmatism, check it out.

Update: discussion moved to archives.

— The best cure for Anglosphere idiocy is data, so here’s some on the British National Party, the UK’s equivalent of Le Pen’s French National Party. At least one BNP candidate for parliament did as well as Le Pen in recent elections, accoriding to the BBC News:

Mr Griffin, a Cambridge law graduate, is pictured on the BNP website in a family shot with his wife and four children. However, no mention is made of the fact that he too has been convicted of inciting racial hatred.

At the general election in June, he stood for the seat of Oldham West and Royton, where weeks earlier racial tension had led to rioting, and won 16.4% of the vote.

The alienated right-wing fringe is all over Europe, not just on the Continent.

— In one of his more bizarre applications of one-size-fits-all, jingoistic theory, Mr. Anglophile jumps through obscure hoops explaining why there’s not a Le Pen in Great Britain at the moment:

Why is Britain such an exception? Two reasons stand out. One is the lack of a nationalist tradition of the Continental type, in which adulation of the nation-state becomes a pseudo-religion justifying the submersion of the individual in a greater cause. Absent this, patriotism becomes merely a statement of sentiment, a love of community, place and history drawing on elemental emotions.

As if Brits and Americans are any less patriotic than Continentals. Let me refer you to Mr. Nick Denton, that extraordinary Internet troll, who offers a much more sensible explanation for the fact that Brits and Americans don’t vote for Anglosphere Supremacists:

Much as I’d like to believe in the unique qualities of the Anglo-American tradition, there’s one obvious reason for the absence of far-right parties in the UK: the electoral system. A first-past-the-post system, which applies in the US and the UK, punishes smaller political groupings. So far-right voters are forced to subsume themselves within the main conservative party. If the UK and the US had proportional representation or two-round presidential systems, they would have their Le Pens.

Think about it: if Bush were running in a national election against Pat Buchanan with no other choices allowed, wouldn’t Pat most likely poll 15-20% of the vote? He’d get all the far right, and some of the disaffected left who simply don’t want to vote for the mainstream candidate, so of course he would. While it’s an amusing parlor game to connect medieval institutions with object-oriented programming, there’s nothing to it but snake-oil, and it only appeals to people fundamentally ignorant of world culture and politics and correct hyperlink structure.

— Libertarian bloggers
are real excited about the Francis Fukuyama

Op-Ed in the WSJ mounting a weak attack on libertarians for their
anti-war,
pro-cloning viewpoints.
Granted that we all love the conceit of “proving” the correctness of our
positions by ravaging a strawman, Fukuyama’s argument is most flawed in its
assumption that libertarians had any standing to lose on Sept. 11th in the first
place.

In all the major policy discussions of our time, including welfare,
drug policy, regulation of monopolies, global warming, and the encroachment
of Washington on the sovereignty of state and local government, libertarians are
non-combatants. While the rest of the spectrum is engaged in arguing, for
example, about how best to structure a welfare system so as to promote
self-dependence, libertarians simply argue that there shouldn’t be a welfare
system. And while the rest of the spectrum debates the relative utility of drug
courts and treatment to incarceration for drug offenses, libertarians simply
argue that there should be no drug laws. And while the rest of the spectrum
argues about what types of cloning and genetic engineering should be restricted,
libertarians simply say that the government should have no say in decisions that
could have more lasting impact on life on this planet than any technology ever
developed. It’s strange.

There are some policy debates where libertarians provide much-needed levity,
of course, which the Cato Institute does by arguing novel positions. Global
warming is a reality, Cato says, but it’s good for us (link not available because
their site’s down.)

Live from the WTC extends libertarian buffoonery into a new sphere with
this argument that monopolies are good for us:

So in the course of the discussion referenced below, Richard Bennett asked
why libertarians fall silent on the subject of antitrust. And in the course of
answering that (short answer: it doesn’t do any good), I came across a very
interesting piece of data: after the break up of Standard Oil, prices rose.

Actually, I pointed out that libertarians don’t want to talk about monopolies,
since one had said they don’t exist and another that they’re all government-created
before Megan said you can’t do anything about them anyway. Reading her piece,
it’s not clear whether she means gasoline or kerosene prices rose after the SO
break up, but it’s certainly an entertaining viewpoint. Megan also engages in
another fun project, proving that global warming is no big deal by ripping the
Kyoto Treaty. Frankly, I have no problem with the fact that Kyoto is a bogus
approach to dealing with global warming, if there is such a thing, but its defects
don’t tell us anything at all about climate change and the models thereof.

It hurts me to see intelligent people give their minds over to cultish systems,
and there’s no doubt in my mind that libertarianism, in its native guise or when
dressed-up as “Objectivism” or as “Dynamism” is a cultish system, providing
simple answers to complex questions and alienating its practitioners from the
mainstream. It’s always the smart people that are drawn to these quick-fix,
answer-to-everything, pseudo-philosophical systems, of course, because of their
superficial intellectual appeal and their many labor-saving virtues. The thing that
libertarians never seem to grasp is that all mainstream political philosophy is
concerned with liberty, but the differences come in when we consider what things
are the genuine threats to liberty, and how to best limit their effects.

But liberty
isn’t the sole aim of political philosophy: justice is right up there among the top
principles as well, and the most interesting (and important) debates consider the
tension between these two competing values. Libertarians, by focusing solely on
freedom, are literally one-armed men (or people, if you must) in these debates,
and their one-dimensionality leads toward a kind of fanaticism. But it does save
time, of course, knowing what you believe even without understanding the issues.

So what’s up with these new-fangled variations on libertarianism, like Ayn Rand’s
“Objectivism” and Postrel’s “Dynamism?” While they may make some sort of
contribution to the libertarian ideal that I don’t get because I’m not immersed
in the doctrinal struggles of that movement, on the face of it they appear to be
little more than cults of personality centered around a would-be dominatrix.
Postrel says all the traditional distinctions of political philosophy are wrong, and we
simply have to be concerned about dynamism and stasis. Excuse me, but I’m not
personally inclined to throw out Plato, Aquinas, Burke, Voltaire, Locke, Hayek,
and Mansfield just because some redhead from Dallas who likes sexy shoes says
they’re like so last century, dude. This is fundamentally a false distinction, because
nobody seriously argues that change for its own sake is a virtue. We have too
much power for that.

So the message is pretty simple, but hopefully not too
simple: if you want to debate politics, learn something about it. If you then want
to toss aside the Western tradition, fine and dandy, at least you know what you’re
discarding. Similarly, if you want to debate social policy, learn something about
it, don’t just come crashing in with a doctrinaire viewpoint and a small set of received
ideas. That’s not too thuggish, is it?

— THE big political story du jour in California is the $95M, no-bid contract Oracle signed with the state a few weeks ago. Go to Rough & Tumble and see the overwhelming mass of links to it. R & T, BTW, is the the pioneer political blog, the best place to get the lowdown on California politics, and indispensible reading for everyone interested in the politics of this great state.