Raising the Barr

As you may have heard elsewhere by now, former US Representative Bob Barr (R-GA) no longer has the "R" in front of his name. He's become a life member of the Libertarian Party and, as of last Friday, now sits as a regional representative on the Libertarian National Committee.

This development has already generated some controversy within the party. I'd be hard put to name anything that doesn't generate controversy within the party. I've participated in some "comment duels" on other blogs about the whole thing, but it's time for a bit of a summary/wrap-up:

First off, I'm glad to have Bob Barr in the LP. This may seem counter-intuitive given my self-identification as a "left libertarian," but I'm also "big tent."

In Congress, Barr was sometimes among the best, and sometimes among the worst, from a pro-liberty perspective. Since leaving Congress, his work has mainly been on the issues where he pulled strongly pro-liberty. He hasn't spent the last four years being a drug warrior or a gay-basher. He's spent the last four years working with groups like the ACLU to roll back the USA PATRIOT Act and other anti-freedom abominations.

I don't have any kind of Deep Throat source on whether Barr's views on marriage, drugs, etc., have evolved in a libertarian direction. I hope they have, and I hope he says so. To the extent they may not have, I'd rather have him in the LP working on the issues we agree on, than outside the LP working on the issues we disagree on.

Questions have already been raised as to whether Barr's affiliation with, and acceptance of a leadership position in, the LP presages a 2008 presidential campaign. This is obviously of particular interest to me, given my role as communications director for Steve Kubby's ongoing campaign.

My initial reaction is that Barr's acceptance of an LNC seat militates against a prospective candidacy. Since the LNC administers the nominating convention, party members would tend to take a dim view of an LNC member simultaneously being a candidate for the nomination. David Weigel's weekend interview with Barr seems to confirm his intent not to run:

reason: Are you going to make a Libertarian run for president?

Barr: No. I'm contemplating no runs for any office. I'm delighted to be asked to work in this capacity for the Libertarian Party, and I'm going to work on range of issues. But I'm not a candidate.

A secondary -- but important -- controversy has emerged on the matter of how Barr's appointment to the LNC was handled: In a word, badly. For more on that, see Melinda Pillsbury-Foster in Liberty For All, or Susan Hogarth at colliething.

I doubt that that sub-controversy will torpedo the accomplishment. And I very much doubt that Barr himself was involved in, or even aware of, the way things were being handled. But it's still a problem. Those who played the secrecy/ukase game on this may have felt like they were being Machiavellian and realpolitickal. In actuality, they were merely eroding their own credibility as party leaders in an attempt to avoid controversies that were bound to come up no matter how they handled things.

The LP is in an interesting and dangerous position. We stand to benefit from a GOP crackup and exodus that's beginning to happen anyway, and Bob Barr is certainly qualified to lead the charge there. The real question is just how much we should be willing to risk on that opportunity. It's certainly not unworthy of our attention and effort.

On the other hand, we have great potential to pick up support on the putative "left" as well, and we need to be careful not to let our constituencies on that side of the spectrum down. It should be a matter of the "right" swinging toward the LP, not the LP swinging toward the "right." If the price of having Bob Barr in the LP means sacrificing our support for religious, medical and marital freedom, or our opposition to foreign military adventurism, it's just not worth it. Fortunately, I don't think that any such sacrifice is even on the table.

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Technorati Tags: Politics, Current Events, libertarian, Libertarian Party, Bob Barr
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Rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated

Y'all,

About noon yesterday, I discovered that Yahoo no longer recognized my long-time userID (thomaslknapp), and that therefore my usual email address (thomaslknapp at yahoo.com) was no longer accessible. Following that, all Yahoo "groups" that I owned -- and which had no co-owners whose Yahoo userIDs remained viable -- "disappeared" as well. This includes the newsgroup through which my "day job," Rational Review News Digest, is published.

At this point, I don't know whether Yahoo is having a bellyache and everything will come back, or whether I'm under some kind of "cyber-attack." If the latter, I have good reason to suspect that said attack is aimed at Steve Kubby's presidential campaign, as at least one other staffer is having a similar experience.

In any case: If you need to reach me, use the address publisher at rationalreview dot com.

If you're a Rational Review News Digest subscriber, don't panic -- the web edition is still up, and we have yesterday's membership roster available to upload to a replacement group (although if this is permanent, we've lost an archive of our first 1,000+ email editions). If you aren't receiving your email edition in the next few days, check this spot for instructions on how to get re-subscribed.

Finally, if you're experiencing similar Yahoo problems, drop a comment or a line -- I'd like to know what's going on here.

Thanks for your patience.

Regards,
Kn@ppster

Because they can, regional edition

For the second time in five months, hundreds of thousands of households (including mine) in eastern Missouri and western Illinois have experienced multi-day blackouts -- and while I'm always ready to "rough it" for a few days when necessary, this is not a minor matter. People died for lack of electricity in July, and people died for lack of electricity this weekend.

The natural first tendency is to demand that someone "do something" about Ameren UE, the utility company that can't seem to keep the damn lights on. Maybe something does need to be "done," but I doubt that most people have a good idea of what.

Let's start from the beginning:

Yes, Ameren UE is a monopoly -- or more specifically it has a monopoly on one service: The provision of alternating current over a large, ubiquitous network of power lines in a particular region.

Ameren UE doesn't have a monopoly on electricity per se -- barring interference from one's local political hacks, one is free to install solar panels or a wind turbine or whatever and tell Ameren to keep their juice. I'm thinking about doing one or both of those things myself.

The ability to do those things (even setting aside the fact that, at the moment, they're more expensive than just paying Ameren, especially with respect to up-front investment) isn't really relevant, though. This is still not a free market. By law, no other company may purchase easements, stick some poles and lines on those easements, and go into the business of pushing alternating current over those lines to paying customers in what government has declared to be Ameren UE's domain.

I discussed the problems of faux-"privatization" with a state-oriented leftist friend of mine this weekend, while we sat around the table in my dark, unheated kitchen. Not surprisingly, we both concluded that faux-"privatization" hits customers with the worst effects of both the private and public sectors (although, as you might imagine, we differed on what to do about it).

For its part, Ameren UE wants to make a profit. Fair enough -- that's what businesses go into business to do. However, the business environment in which it seeks its profits is an artificial one.

In a real free market environment, competition is an omnipresent factor. Even if nobody is actually competing with you at the moment, someone will start competing with you the instant it looks like it can be done so profitably. You either have to beat your competitors, or perform so satisfactorily to your customers that prospective competitors don't bother to challenge you.

For government's part, in a government-conferred monopoly environment, "public utility commissions" are created to protect the customers ... but they can't do so nearly as well as real competition would. These commissions set rates and rules, but being political entities they are subject to political influence. Who carries more influence with such commissions:

- A centralized business with a single agenda and an overriding interest in those commissions' operations? Or

- A diffuse base of customers with varying agendas, most of whom usually have "utilities and utility bills" way down their lists of priorities?

Ameren UE and companies like it put a lot of money into buying political influence, and that influence is relentlessly used for the purpose of securing the company's profits. Most of Ameren UE's customers don't think much about the politics of utilities until the lights go out ... and even if they did, it would take quite an effort to put together an effective lobbying operation on behalf of those customers as a group with a common interest (especially since those customers can't bill Ameren UE for the costs of lobbying, as they bill us).

Ameren UE is free to let its infrastructure decay while it takes profits, to minimize its investment in upgrading that infrastructure, and to cut back its work force so that it has bare minimum staff in normal times and not nearly enough when a storm comes through. It's free to do so for two reasons:

- Because you and I aren't allowed to call up Ameren UE and say "screw you -- I'm switching to Acme Power and Light. Come get your meter out of the way so they can put theirs in;" and

- Because big business naturally has more influence than small customers over the governmental bodies which are supposed to pinch hit for that kind of competition.

Many "progressives" believe that the remedy to such situations is to somehow untangle government power from corporate influence, but history shows us that that's a naive expectation.

It was not customers who called for government control over utilities in the early 20th century -- it was the utilities themselves! See Jan Bellamy's "Two Utilities are Better Than One," in Reason magazine for more historical information.

From anti-trust to the Food and Drug Administration to your local utilities, government regulation has nearly always been pushed and promoted by the entities allegedly to be reined in or controlled ... because those entities knew that it would ultimately be they who held the reins and sat at the controls, or stood over the shoulders of those who did. Regulation would not be permitted to hurt their bottom line -- rather it would enhance it by allowing them to exclude would-be competitors and thus free them from the market's tendency to force better service and lower prices.

Regulation is not a tool of self-defense for consumers -- it is a tool of monopolization for corporations. Faux-"privatization" is particularly pernicious: When the inevitable failures occur, it allows the regulators to falsely blame, and the regulated to falsely cite, the "free market."

The solution is not, as some will no doubt advocate, more government control over Ameren UE. It is less government control -- less government, period -- for Ameren UE and other anti-competitive firms to exploit and influence to their own benefit and their captive customers' detriment.