Yes. Here’s a thought experiment for you. How many years could we run a budget deficit of $1 on our current government revenue of > 1 trillion $/yr? The only constraint are interest costs. After 100 billion years, at current interest rates, we’d be paying interest of perhaps 0.003% of current revenues ($100 billion in debt, 3% interest).

Obviously, these are much larger deficits, but interest rates float. The trend has been nothing but down since at least the 1970′s, and there’s no sign of it much turning around. Meanwhile, the above analysis is *too pessimistic”, because tax revenues grow every year, along with GDP.
As long as the growth in your debt is below the growth in GDP and tax revenue as % of GDP stays constant, you can run not only deficits, but steadily larger deficits every year while paying less in interest as a % of total revenue every year than the year before.

Unfortunately the number of Americans who understand this remains at >1%, so the Boogah Boogah Large Numbered Deficits hysteria reigns supreme (this is not to say that current deficit sizes are sustainable forever, they’re not, but at some point between 2020 and 2040, given expected growth rates, ones of this absolute size will essentially be holding even)

abhisaha upthread at 50, for example, says:

Libertarians tend to believe that the right of association is absolute, or at any rate sufficiently important so as to make any law prohibiting private discrimination unjust.

The right of association strikes me as a subcategory of a right to private, and unconstrained, behavior in general.

I’m curious, then, how people here — libertarians in general, or libertarians here, since I don’t know if people here consider themselves representative or a subset — feel about environmental protection laws. As you know, some politicians are calling for the abolition or radical curtailment of the EPA; sometimes they say it’s because it’s too expensive, but mostly they say it’s because environmental regulations infringe on the rights of private entities.

If freedom-to trumps freedom-from, I would think some libertarians (all? I really don’t know) are on board with this line of thinking.

Of course, passing a balanced budget amendment would entail immediate and very large spending cuts, and place drastic limits on all further spending, forever.

How would funding, for, say, public defenders and keeping poor people from being screwed by the justice system fare in this environment of zerogrowth or sharp decline in government spending? How would the Republican Party, which is basically running the country right now for appropriations, prioritize that?

I know you’re not Republicans, but you’re part of their sea of pro-balanced budget in which they swim.

I guess keeping your tax burden low makes it all worth it, though. Or maybe there’s some other important reason I’m missing out on.

Your economic priorities stand in sharp contrast to the purpose of your criminal justice work.

“It’s because those supposed “libertarian buttons” are, from most claimants, just nonexistent. The rhetoric about “jackbooted thugs” is meant to allow white males to evade the IRS and engage in guilt-free sympathizing with the militia movement, not to allow black males to defend themselves from white cops. It mostly functions — and is designed to function — as a very elaborate version of the dog-whistle politics of “small government” in conservatism as a whole, which has never actually been about the size of government.”

Which I stand by as simply true, for the good reason that I’ve been observing libertarianism in a variety of both online and offline settings since the mid-Nineties and have seen ample evidence to demonstrate it. Now, you can object to that as a description of majority libertarianism if you want — I’d think you were wrong — but since that quote says nothing at all about “the left” or “everyone else,” your attempt at characterization of it is precisely an example of the kind of inanity I mentioned in my first post.

Actual libertarian behavior. Persistently stupid, blinkered and inane libertarian commentary like much of what appears on this thread. The funhouse-mirror view of American society that many libertarians seem to have. When largely unchecked corporate power is a big part of your country’s problems, and you’re part of a movement with a large percentage of people who simply can’t and won’t admit that, you’re going to have credibility issues. Deal.

I’ll say it plainly: I think a very large part of libertarianism is simply stupid, most of the parts of it that aren’t are basically just liberalism, and though a great many libertarians squall about the “Republicans who smoke pot” stereotype, the shoe fits in more cases than not. Try as you might to No-True-Scotsman the Tea Party or the Koch Brothers’ or Alan Greenspan’s connections to libertarianism out of existence, it is not possible to do so.

I have respect for Balko’s work and writing because it frequently departs from those patterns. I’m far from “baffled” about how a libertarian does something good. That’s how.

Libertarianism is, unlike modern American liberalism or conservatism, an inherently anti-racist political philosophy. When you believe in individual autonomy and rights, racism is not even a sensible personal belief, let alone acceptable government policy.

The bulk of left-progressives see this case and are surprised by a libertarian helping a black man get out of prison. If instead they looked at the issue as one of a homeowner using a gun to defend his home and his family from wrongful invasion by police, it’d sound a lot more typical of a libertarian.

You’re misattributing those quoted comments to me. I had posted the comments above the ones you quote. Unfogged threads show the commenter’s name at the *bottom* of the comment. So comment 113 quoted above, for example, was posted by LizardBreath.

Hope that makes sense.

Radley, we all labor under the burden of having Ayn Rand identified with our movement.

Following Balko over to HuffPo led me to tweak a few Koch conspiracy theorists on this thread with Koch donations and support to what should be left-friendly causes, particularly the ACLU. The response went somewhere I could never have imagined on my own:

Just to clarify, regardless of what you may think, the ACLU is not actually a ‘liberal’ group. It’s actually a bulwark of what ‘conservat­ism’ used to mean. They support the Constituti­on and especially the Bill of Rights even when it’s unpopular. That can mean the right of the KKK to march as well as the right of blacks to vote.

so… the Kochtopus only supports the ACLU because they are a bunch of conservative racists who support the KKK. Nicely done!