Rentiers

This seems to me yet more evidence of the inexorable decline and increasing hollowness of our current economic model – our biggest rewards, obscene compensation, seem directed almost exclusively to those who are siphoning wildly inequitable rewards through mere structure, simply by virtue of their proximity to, intimate connections with, and greedy manipulation of massive resource flows: CEO’s of patent troll “enterprises” as in the linked piece but also hedge fund managers, CEO’s of health insurance companies, media magnates who pervert and undermine journalism, predatory lenders, corporations that find “clever” ways of avoiding their responsibilities for taxes, to workers and to their communities, CEO’s who actively undermine confidence in government while – often corruptly - profiting from privatization of its functions, and the suites upon suites of lawyers and lobbyists and sinecured legislators undergirding and enabling all this. It’s obviously an unsustainable model, and when it collapses it will mean real pain and suffering for all (or at least most). It’s cliché but also unfortunately rings true: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!” These people are compensated so obscenely for not understanding, that the rest of us need to find some way to save us and to save them from themselves. Good luck with that.

Libertarian Summer Camp

Here is something that shines a bright contextual light on much of the current simmering libertarian delusion. The piece describes a libertarian summer camp that reminds us of nothing so much as one of those “Renaissance Faire”[s], where everyone gets to imagine that they are the lords and the ladies and the white knights. In both cases, their reimagining is explicitly designed to simply ignore the infrastructural ugly realities: the stench of raw sewage, the bloodletting, the suffering of the many for the temporary benefit of the few, the institutionalized inequities, the ignorance and the disease and the privation and the famine. So yes libertarians, by all means go play dress-up at your summer camp, but please stop trying to inflict on the rest of us the grim dystopia that would result from the realization of your adolescent willful fantasy.