I’ve had an eclectic set of posts lately, perhaps more even than usual. Someone asked me if there’s a theme to them, and there is. These recent posts reflect a libertarian view (although not exclusively a libertarian one.) I’ll list some posts, with a few remarks on each.

First, what do we believe? Libertarians support individual liberty, limited & responsible government, free markets, and peaceful international relations.

Optimism.

There’s great reason for optimism. Libertarians are naturally optimistic, as they believe in the ability of common men and women to ‘live, work, and play’ without dependency on a meddlesome, paternalistic government. People are naturally smart and capable. They need no small and self-promoting elite to guide them.

I tweeted recently that “Blogging in Whitewater WI is part history, part advocacy: recalling what others selfishly forget & proposing reforms so one need not forget.”

I have no doubt that Whitewater’s future will be a bright one. Our present problems are serious, and some will get far worse before they get better. Conditions will thereafter improve, however, and we’ll have a better politics. Much of the present order will slip away, or be discarded. Many who have distorted our politics will be forgotten, or remembered only as bad examples. The future favors a freer, more open community, with a better, more honest politics.

Public Choice Theory and Its Opposite.

When government officials hold themselves out as tribunes of the people, or of the common good, etc., their claims are false and selfish. There’s abundant self-flattery in a bureaucrat’s idea that he ‘exists’ for a better community. Public office does not repeal human nature, a nature that finds officials as self-interested as any other person. Government should be limited and responsible, but it cannot be so when officials use public positions to whet their selfish appetites and ambitions. All the while, they pretend they’re above narrow interest.

Instead, officials do best when they advance plainly a specific and defined cause.

God and gods.

People may pretend that they’re rational beyond faith, impartial beyond belief, but everyone worships something, whether God or a god. Yet, if not God, then how sad that that the object of worship descends to mere politicians, through acceptance of their self-promotion (however altruistically styled).

Nietzsche and the Dark Hope Against a Better Local Politics.

Mediocre career politicians and bureaucrats hope others lack memory of past political blunders, so that they need not be accountable. Dissembling politicians (unlike honest ones) have this in common with lunatics: they think that if they say something, then it’s true, then and there, because they’ve said it. What happened yesterday, last week, last year — they just ignore it. They hope, expect, and sometimes demand that others forget, too.

Not a chance.

The Beat Sweetener.

Newspapers occasionally curry favor with politicians through sugary, flowery stories of honey-thick praise. The problem isn’t the occasional, but the frequent: when bureaucrats and Babbits assume that they’re entitled to use the press as their public relations firm. It’s worse when newspapers conduct themselves as though they were a public relations firm.

More than Money.

I’ve written more than one post about dishonest or excuse-making officials. There are more important things than money, and libertarians typically begin an explanation of their beliefs with those things: individual liberty and limited, responsible government. There’s nothing responsible or limited about an official’s false, dissembling claims.

Whitewater has been afflicted with something worse than mediocre bureaucrats: she has a few mediocre and mendacious bureaucrats. It’s not cheerleading to misrepresent law and fact, to display on a public stage, at public expense, a disregard for truth that would shame a common man. That’s the point of an older post like Anatomy of a Municipal Bureaucrat’s Explanation. (Sadly, it’s the point of so many posts since).

It’s true, as a Common Council member once remarked, that homeowners shouldn’t always rely on government for redress of their economic losses. True, indeed.

It’s even more true, though, that a community should not have to bear a bureaucrat who repeatedly distorts basic concepts (like the difference between liability and insurance coverage) and then repeats again and again these same false, self-serving contentions. That’s not mere cheerleading, that’s not conventional boosterism — it’s error repeated and compounded to the point of absurdity.

In those cases, the municipality owes citizens redress; residents can avoid the cost of subsequent mistakes by sacking those responsible and appointing better leaders.

Whitewater deserves better, and one day she’ll have better.

The value of the individual is why I’ve written (more than once) about the failed, immoral policies of John Chianelli, the abuses of Ken Kratz, and Whitewater bureaucrats’ repeated dissembling. It’s not money that’s at stake; it’s something much more. (It’s why I will never be able to support Scott Walker — when he was Milwaukee County Executive, he had a duty to stop mental health abuses early on, not later when politically expedient. Nothing makes up for that.)

There are difficult choices before Whitewater, and all Wisconsin. And yet, and yet — the path ahead to a better situation, however long, is assured.