FARK.com - New Liberal Bastion?

[Robert Baratheon]

I used to post regularly on the FARK.com forums, and I remembered the website as being somewhat left-leaning but overall very libertarian-oriented. A fairly large percentage of the posters self-identified as libertarian at the time (2005-2008), and the site was particularly enthusiastic about Ron Paul's candidacy in 2008.

I checked the forum today for the first time since 2009, and I was surprised to find hundreds of leftist comments stomping on libertarian caricatures with very few posters defending:

http://www.fark.com/comments/7869485/This-just-in-The-more-you-personally-rely-on-US-government-to-take-care-of-everything-in-your-life-more-likely-you-are-to-be-a-raging-libertarian

A disappointing number of commenters fell into the lazy, cut-and-paste "libertarians who use roads are hypocrites" attack pattern to which other posters gleefully piled on.

The FARK I remember was full of intelligent, technically inclined people who were skeptical of expanding government and human nature generally - very constrained in their outlook. I hope this massive shift isn't indicative of an overall trend in the U.S. toward progressive/socialist ideology, Obama cult-of-personality, and tolerance for the ever-expanding administrative state. At a minimum, it looks like libertarianism isn't the "cool kid" in the technical/online community anymore. Oh well.

[Dglgmut]

The irony is that socialists cannot help but be hypocrites by benefiting from the self-interested actions of others.

I like what Milton Friedman said about libertarianism and humility (that we cannot be so arrogant to impose rules on others that may turn out to be harmful), though I'm sure many people on this forum would disagree with me.

I think it's important to acknowledge the common value premises we share first when looking at these sorts of disagreements. Libertarianism is obviously very threatening to some people, and that's got to be resolved one way or another. Hopefully we don't need to learn our lesson the hard way, as is tradition.

[Darrell Hougen]

Hi Robert,

I visited FARK and looked at the post you linked just to see what was going on over there. I had actually never visited FARK before but I would agree that most of the comments did indeed fall into the category of snippy attacks on libertarians.

Actually, I am more interested in the subject raised --- the apparent phenomenon that states that are net tax payers tend to lean left while states that are net tax receivers tend to lean right. Superficially, it makes no sense. It would seem that people in states that are net tax payers would want to reduce the size of government in order to reduce their own tax bills while people who are net tax receivers would want to increase government spending so that they could receive more. Yet, according to this link, the opposite seems to be the case. In order to counter the charge that libertarians are hypocrites, I think we need to understand this phenomenon (even if the apparent reversal makes leftists hypocrites as well).

Looking at the Wikipedia table, I did notice a couple of things. For one thing, I was surprised that Delaware topped the list of net tax payers. Delaware is where at least some defense contractors locate their corporate headquarters so they can be close to Washington and their primary source of revenue. However, it may be that the way government revenue and spending are calculated leads to a distorted view. Spending is attributed to the state where the manufacturing plant is located, but some of that money is transferred to corporate headquarters and corporate executive's paychecks in Delaware which then pay their federal taxes in Delaware. So, the revenue is attributed to Delaware and the spending is attributed to another state.

Another thing that struck me was the huge disparity in Florida. I mean, it's not surprising that Florida is a large net tax receiver due to its elderly population. But, a large percentage of those elderly came originally from other states like New York and New Jersey. So, it may be that the same people that paid into the system heavily when they were young are now collecting from the system in their old age, but they're collecting the money in a state different from the one they lived in when they were net payers. So, population migration could be a cause of distortion.

In fact, if we were to look at population migration more closely, I think we would find that a lot of the states in the Midwest have aging populations because many younger people have simply moved away. At one time --- within the lifespan of a lot of elderly people --- a much higher percentage of people lived on farms. However, as agriculture has become more mechanized, younger people have migrated to the cities --- often coastal cities --- to look for work. The result is that elderly people with traditional values are left in the Midwest and, because the populations of such states are elderly, they are net receivers of government spending.

The question is, what will happen going forward? As the elderly population in the Midwest dies off, it is hard to see how those states will remain net receivers. So, the libertarian strain within those states represents, to some extent, the youthful future of those states. The young and middle aged populations within those states are probably not net receivers. In fact, it would be interesting to see the result of stripping out Social Security and Medicare payments and then look at which states are net payers and receivers.

At any rate, I doubt that most "raging libertarians" are likely to be net receivers of benefits since most elderly people aren't "raging" about anything.

Comments?

Darrell

[Robert Baratheon]

The blue states as donors/red states as recipients divide is interesting, but I don't read too much into it. There are major exceptions to that "rule" as well - Texas, for example, tends to be a donor state, and the progressive welfare states of New England (Rhode Island, Maine, Vermont) all tend to be takers. I'm sure it's been studied at length by political scientists and economists. My guess is it mostly has to do with the types of industries in those states and cost of maintaining infrastructure per taxpayer. Red states tend to be sprawled out and heavily invested in agriculture businesses, which receives big federal subsidies. I do view that as a form of hypocrisy, but it's not libertarians who are pushing those types of special interest deals, so it's unfair to use them as a punching bag for them. Organizations like Cato are most certainly against such aid. In any event, red states are more Republican by definition, but there is no reason to believe they are more libertarian in a philosophical sense. Christian conservatives have some major cultural problems, which ironically can often translate into dependency on the state. I'd certainly be less at home intellectually in Mississippi or Alabama than I would be in New Hampshire or New York.