Open Up Your Eyes As Wide As You Can, And Please Hurry Up

At The Liberty Papers, Brad Warbiany explains himself:

"1) I’m a libertarian. In my world, prostitution would be legal.
2) I’m a libertarian. In my world, the IRS would be illegal."

Absolutely. No contest. Gotta love that all day long.

But look here...

"Thus, I wasn’t all that up in arms about an organization advising someone on how to hide the proceeds of a prostitution business from the IRS. In fact, I was a bit jealous — nobody exists to help me hide MY legal income from the IRS!"

I read that and the rest of the post. Even accounting for Brad's face-front on ACORN, I have to wonder how many quite understand the dimensions of that affair. What you were looking at was the culturalization of virtual nomenklatura in American politics. Many descriptions of the Soviet phenomenon will tell you that it was "small", and this might leave room for scoffing at this idea. However, the essence of it is a necessarily hierarchical arrangement of shadow politics often known these days as "gaming the system". The Soviet nomenklatura was only a concentrated manifestation of what Ayn Rand called "The Politics of Pull".

This was ACORN palming-off political power as a matter of subverting freedom. It's that simple. One excellent proof of this is that you will never see a day when ACORN calls for dismantling IRS as a matter of principle in fidelity to freedom: it is simply not in their interest and this should be almost self-evident.

I just wish more people could analyze these things on these levels. There are lots of benefits to that. For one thing, the dazzle wouldn't be worn off the shiney-object if only it didn't include adolescent girls as if the rest of evil of it would be nothing to get "up in arms" about and everyone could just move along, citizens.

The ability to identify and logically extend principles opens horizons -- for good or ill -- and zooms a lot of little concrete trees out of line-of-sight to the forests.

Ya know?