Mathew Yglesias replies to a recent Cato unbound topic here.  While I can humbly accept many of Mathew’s points, the one part I am generally confused by is this:

The libertarian utopia is no more realistic than the socialist utopia of a perfectly informed and perfectly benevolent central planner.

I’ve heard this argument before. Typically it will launch into a degrading debate on “it’s never been tried before” by libertarians who will then put themselves into the position of supporting a fallacy that is far too common at the Internet-level of discussion.

The argument I raise is that where we have some factual examples of socialism at work throughout history. We know through historical study and the realistic outcomes of socialist (and communist) utopianism that it falls far from its promises. The reality of socialism requires compulsion, if not force, to ensure the ideal can meet fruition. By some course of action, you must dehumanize man to compel him to betray his own natural ways.

Libertarianism is far different. I must acknowledge that I’m painting with broad strokes, so my argument is may not fit everyone’s bucket. Matt illustrates one area where progressives fail to understand libertarians. Libertarian utopianism is not modeled on a perfected society - nor does it fit the conventional assumptions made of the ‘utopian’ definition.While there is an ideal libertarian state, it is far removed from the trappings of “perfection” or an “ideal society”. What a progressive labels as libertarian utopianism is nothing more than an assertion of the nature of man and the constraints of an individual within society. Libertarianism makes no claim on the form or motives of any given society. Rather, libertarianism deals specifically with the individual actor in the socio-political economy.

I fail to see where Yglesias derives his concept that libertarian utopianism is “no more realistic” than a socialist one. My question to Mathew would be: why? Given, progressives have, for the most part of a century, ruled the American political roost while wearing the stripes of both political parties. For all the evidence we have, given America’s hell-bent adherence to a mixed economy, we can say that progressivism has failed to achieve its own unrealistic utopianism of a well-managed government with a highly regulated and efficient business environment. Why? Because progressivism ignores many basic facts. You have to be willing to suspend belief in unintended consequences, ignore the reality of scarcity, and be willing to negate individual liberty if it suits the needs of the majority. If anything, progressive policies attempting to deliver on progressive utopianism have failed on a greater order of magnitude. Yet few progressives are willing to admit this, if even to themselves.

When Congress was granted certain powers to regulate trade those powers created the incentivization system. As politicians worked the system, it brought new mouths to the trough - both consumers and businesses alike. Every subsequent regulation that occurred was nothing more than dealing with the unintended consequences of its own predecessor. If the regulation did not have a predecessor, child regulation would evolve to counteract the unintended consequences of the parent.

Progressivism has never and will never deal with the reality of the position they advocate. They can hurl insults against the wealthy and businesses but they still can not come up with a plausible and sensible argument supporting wealth redistribution or provide any means of thanks for all of the loot plundered. Progressives never quite stop to ask whether forcing someone to give up what they rightfully own is truly right or virtuous. Instead, the argument is largley nothing more than “deal with it.”

Progressives and libertarians are often at odds simply because progressives have been winning the debate in which they, not libertarians, frame the statements to be argued. Again, to be progressive, you need to ingore certain facets of reality. When progressives attack big business, libertarians often come to the defense largely because progressivism attacks the defensible parts of business. Libertarains know and distrust businesses seeking enrichment at the public trough. But the argument is never quite framed this way.

No one questions progressives on who supports the public trough or why they believe it can be effectively managed or remedied when the same entities running government are the same entities running corporations: humans. Progressives and the ever-optomystics (sic) relentlessly badger and harp on just how horrible corporations are. Most libertarians would not disagree. A business is only as “good” or “evil” as its employees make it. Except the libertarian solution isn’t quite good enough. Where libertarians would dis-incentivize the political world by removing regulation and the ability of government to create new incentives that breed rent-seeking. Progressives would rather perpetuate this system with a few tweaks to the rules of engagement.

Progressivism clings to this notion that human idealism established and pursued through government is somehow more noble and less afflicted by the reality of self-interest. All this comes on the back of a promise that you can and will have your cake and eat it too.

Admittedly, the libertarian philosophy can be tough on the outside. Progressives have pursued a policy of education without question - take everything at face value and thrive on emotion over appying reason; libertarianism pursues education through individual pursuit and reason applied prior to emotion.

Libertarians often apply boiler-plate arguments, not because they are unreasoned, but because they are reasoned (to some degree) as truths. Progressivism holds that there can be no truths, only variations oof truths that can be adapted to fit the situation. And in this sense, Progressivism does win many arguments. Progressivism panders to idealism. Libertarianism panders to reason.

Idealism itself isn’t bad. However when you apply progressive thought on the subject, you often find progressivism, not libertarianism, is unbounded by reality. The failures of progressivism are not those of libertarianism although many progressives would ask you to believe otherwise.

I’m reminded of that scene in “Little Miss Sunshine” where the family is on the road to the pagent and Duane and the little girl are doing eye tests.  It ends up being that Duane is color blind. All Duane wants to do is fly fighter jets in the military. Duane’s uncle turns around and tells Duane that he won’t be able to fly jets.

Libertarians tend to point out the reality of the situation. Progressives would continue to push the fantasy forward no matter how improbable the goal. The exception is that living in the fantasy is fun for a long time - until reality sets in and takes its course.

But hey, that’s just my unqualified opinion.

Don’t let the title of the post fool you. I’m not talking about people. I’m pretty much talking about technology. I was going through Google Finance, checking out eBay’s stock price. I typically avoid the forums as it’s swarmed with nutters. But one thing did catch my attention:

There was a link to so-called “news” from PRNine.com which can be found here. The article is bad enough. Yet another “outraged” eBay seller griping about his/her misfortunes on eBay and how eBay “stole” her money. She tries to provide an “example” of just how horrible eBay’s pricing is. Yes, her analysis is, well, bad for a self-admitted MBA.  Her assumptions are all wrong. In essence, she treats eBay and PayPal’s fees as the same when they are different. For example, she would, in most cases, pay some form of fee for payment processing to someone else. Whether the fees end up at eBay or PayPal is irrelevant.

The second point, and one she goes on to nag about incessantly is that her poor margins are slim. ~10%. She is then upset that on 182 items, she made less than minimum wage. Yet, in reality, most brick and mortar stores have far more than 182 products on the shelves. I could go on, but I won’t. It is pretty sad to see someone this inept writing such garbage. Eh, GIGO I guess.

What does amuse me though is that with all of this newfangled new media technology, it is still pretty stupid. PRNine should be a bit ashamed for publishing such a horribly written PR piece. While most PR releases are fluff pieces, this letter breaks every rule of PR releases with no shame. So PRNine isn’t filtering their content for garbage and Google is sucking up without filtering garbabe and so now we all see the garbage.

So there’s the money making idea: How do you create a technology that can filter out the human induced garbage? This isn’t the first time I’ve found crap in Google. Google pretty much dumps wholesale garbage syndication into the Finance section.

Humans can filter this data down when the reliability and quality of the content is pivotal to their core business. In Google’s case, they provide the service for free. What is incentive for providing free service? Traffic. Yet when you begin to let the garbage creep in you also greatly reduce the potential for quality traffic landing on your site.

The problem is that Google is now making it harder for the consumer to filter out the garbage from the good - something Google supposedly does better than any other search engine.