Delusion in the Desert (Don Trump and the Las Vegas Libertarian FreedomFest Convention)

LAS VEGAS -- I'm here at Planet Hollywood as the token liberal to participate in two debates -- one on what is killing the American Dream; the other a mock trial of the Federal Reserve. Paul Krugman is also here, debating the cause and cure of inequality. We're outnumbered about a thousand to one.

The annual FreedomFest convention of some 2,000 libertarian conservatives is doubly surreal. What better setting for libertarian dreams than fantastical Las Vegas -- the free market as casino, made flesh.

Like casino operators, these libertarians live on fantasies. They inhabit an imagined universe where markets never do anything wrong and government never does anything right. This is comforting because it is true by definition and thus resists any evidence to the contrary. Mostly they are very nice, idealistic people, if sweetly delusional about economics.

I like libertarians because they tend to be principled, incurring the ire of ordinary conservatives by resisting government snooping and supporting gay rights. They are best understood as a cult -- true believers who are too far-fetched for the American mainstream but with a creepy degree of influence on the Republican Party.

Brook takes the premise of government as the source of all evils to an instructive extreme. Thus the financial collapse of 2008, weirdly, was not the result of Wall Street financial engineering but of government regulation (don't ask).

All the right people are foaming at the mouth.

If Donald is lying, its a pretty epic lie that is costing him a literal fortune

I’m carefully combing through what he says, but leaning on trust. Still a Cruz guy if the primary makes it to my state. But I’ll tell a pollster Trump to up his numbers to make the media more angry.

As one who confesses to a pesky libertarian streak akin to a virus which lurks somewhere deep in the spinal cord only to erupt opportunistically to unsettle my habitual conservative equipoise, I take issue with the author's oxymoron that people animated by "principle" exercise "a creepy degree of influence on the Republican Party."

By way of illustration, the author takes on libertarianism and blames the financial catastrophe of 2008 on lack of regulation without so much as a nod in the direction of hyper regulation which generated a deadly load of nonfunctioning mortgages in order to appease the gods of diversity and further without a word in the direction of $1 trillion squandered by Obama ostensibly to bring us out of the recession but actually to build the precincts of the Democrat party community organizer style. He thinks that Obama regulates Wall Street in a way that will fend off the next excess there and prevent the next 2008 and he accuses libertarians of regarding Obama to be a Bolshevik but Obama behaves more like Chancellor Hitler cutting deals with big business Cronies who will come across at Donation time. I do not believe the Solandra was a conservative or a libertarian conception.

In those assumptions the author misplaces his labels, it is the Republicans (and the Democrats with whom Republicans exchange jobs from election cycle to election cycle) who are to be found snuggled in bed with the big corporate interests while the conservatives and libertarians are banished to the wilderness where they are crying out in vain for common sense and fiscal prudence.

Why libertarians (or conservatives for that matter) are described as nut jobs by Mr. Kuttner cannot be justified by the facts which he adduces so one must conclude that isolating and personalizing one's adversary comes naturally to liberals, or maybe it just comes with Saul Alinsky's playbook.

Rising inequality is somehow the fault of government, too.....

Is it not government policy which has consciously flooded America with tens of millions of unskilled, illiterate and illegal immigrants who are from day one economically unequal to skilled, literate, and legal Americans?

Is it not government policy which has engaged in trade deals which have hollowed out our jobs rich lucrative manufacturing sector and sent those jobs abroad?

Is it not government policy which is engaged in crony capitalism and lined the pockets of the wealthy and the politically connected?

Is not government policy which has created a educational system which is failing to make Americans Skilled and literate enough to become wealthy?

Is it not government policy which is retarded economic growth in the energy sector and actually devastated whole portions of the energy sector?

Is it not government policy which has burdened the American economy with deadening regulations retarding growth and wealth creation?

Is not government policy which demands the highest taxes in any advanced society which retards economic growth and generates inequality?

"Funny he doesn’t feel threatened by their fiscal beliefs."

He knows that libertarians are being used and abused by corporate America as unknowing shills for crony capitalism.

Yes libertarians are on record as opposing crony capitalism, but while they argue in the public square for free market capitalism, the lobbyists are doing their dirty deeds to give us the bastardized crony version.

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