Non-Fat Latte Liberal

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September 20, 2006

Working for the Man.

I'm a software developer. I spend most days sitting in front of a computer fuming, trying to convince it that I'm right, and, although computers are stubborn, I usually get my way. The software I'm writing has already been bought by a number of organizations. One of them is the US Census Bureau. On Monday my boss asked me to come along to the training session at Census for the previous version of my software. It was painfully boring, I had to get up at six am and watch a power point presentation. But it was also immensely valuable.

After the presentation, people asked questions. Some of them were even embarassed by what they clearly thought were dumb questions, questions my boss dispatched as a matter of course. But for me they were extremely enlightening. As I said, I spend my days interacting with a computer, convincing it to do my bidding, what I don't do was try to use the product.

On my way to the Census Bureau I read an old copy of Reason I had procured courtesy of AFF and stumbled upon this quote:

At the rate that technology is advancing ...people will be implanting chips in our children to advertise directly into their brains and tell them what kind of products to buy.

If I was capable of any sort of cheery utterance at that time of morning I might have laughed out loud. How delightfully absurd! Then I looked down at the author of this load of bollocks- Hillary Clinton. Now, I like Hillary, I think she's plucky and ballsy. Enough for me to forgive nonsense about video games and flag burning, but I do understand that for a true blue libertarian these are unforgivable heresies, especially on the left and I'm not going to argue her case. Besides if you're libertarian in New York, you're pretty well doomed anyway. But I do think it important to remember something: Hillary is not an idiot. Her quote above is, however, idiotic.

Hillary is a politician, she must watch what she says 24 hours a day and this means we'll catch her sometimes. Still there's more to her blunder than this. Hillary spends most days convincing other legislators and being convinced by them, doing this even the smartest person will come up with some absolutely moronic ideas and be convinced of their veracity; group think gets us all at times. What on earth does this have to do with voting Democrat as a libertarian?

My meeting this morning put me back in touch with the people I'm really working for, it jarred me into recognizing their perspective, and what they need from me. If you're a politician, that jarring is quite difficult because, unlike me, a politician has real power and is therefore much more easily lulled into complacency. And much harder to jar. The other side of the isle has had some stunning successes in the last ten years, and all of those have been hard earned, but they have developed a swagger, some have admittedly been better than others but, in general, they've forgotten who they're working for (at least from a libertarian perspective) and they've started working for themselves. Earmarks, Deficits, the largest expansion of Medicare since it's inception, and division and ineptitude on the issues that they actually get right like privatizing Social Security and tax reform. One can't help but look at the last six years and wonder; exactly what has such a striking majority gotten for the everyday libertarian?

In this period we've gone backward not forward. So much so that Democrats are trying to seize upon some libertarian economic ideas. Is this just naked opportunism? Will they act on these promises once they get into office? The better question is, does it matter?

Posted by conryf at September 20, 2006 04:39 PM

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Posted by: Anonymous at September 20, 2006 04:39 PM

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