I asked Noam Chomsky what his thoughts on the current excitement in libertarianism were, and in particular, I asked him what he thought about the idea that libertarians were simply "petite capitalists." He said why not call them "grande capitalists" because apparently "they regard unaccountable private tyranny as fine and dandy."

Note: Chomsky is a self-identified libertarian-socialist, which is completely different than the Ron Paul and Glenn Beck brand of libertarianism that's in vogue.

As much as I love how libertarians are able to find common ground between conservatives and liberals on social issues, such as gay marriage, it comes along with hard-right capitalist ideology.

I believe in the power of labels, and I want to introduce a new term: petite capitalists.

These are people who don't own any capital themselves, but admire those who do, and support policies that primarily benefit capitalists.

Libertarianism seems to be in vogue. More and more wing-nut talking heads are claiming to be libertarian as a way to avoid the well-deserved sting of being labeled a Republican hack.

I was just sent this survey showing that there's a growing percentage of philosophers who subscribe to libertarianism now. Which is unfortunate. Fat Cat Republicans must be laughing themselves silly all the way to the bank, knowing that they finally found a way to dupe intellectuals into accepting economic positions that enable them to make the next big raping of the economy.

It's also pretty arrogant to say that anyone receiving government money from taxes is lazy. Government takes from the hard working and lazy alike and gives to the hard working and lazy alike. You really think a trust fund baby with interest income is working as hard as the waiter with two jobs making minimum wage and qualifies for medicaid?

The Heritage Foundation seeks to answer this question by producing their beautifully rendered multi-dimensional Index of Economic Freedom. From this, they've produced this hyperbolic graph that makes it appear indisputable that economic freedom and economic prosperity are locked:

Upon inspection of what the individual dimensions are, though, they seem to represent economic freedoms that would get a tycoon excited. Never mind the economic freedom of a group of employees to negotiate their own wage, that's irrelevant to the "Labor Freedom" dimension.

Also, the case of China's recent growth prompted me to do my own research, and see whether this graph is a causation-vs-correlation mix-up. I went through Wikipedia's List of countries by GDP growth 1990-2007, took the countries that had a GDP of over $100 billion (since a small country could potentially manage a few large corporations and make more than $10 billion), and graphed their economic freedom vs. their growth. As you can see, the relationship isn't quite so clear:

Apparently this same idea and a similar graph is mentioned in Jeffrey Sachs's The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities.

I really like the way The Left Business Observer referred to "freedom:"

Every year since 1995, the Heritage Foundation and the Wall Street Journal put out an Index of Economic Freedom, ranking countries on their fealty to the precepts of free markets and free trade. Freedom being the unexamined rage since George Bush's second inaugural address (which used the word twenty-seven times), LBO decided to see whether the index had any economic meaning. Sorry to spoil the surprise, but it really doesn't.

Using wikipedia's entry on tax revenue and its list of developed countries, I came up with this table:

Some would argue that America, with its warrantless surveillance and its ban on drugs, gambling, prostitution, and gay marriage, is less free. And that probably has nothing to do with how much money the government has.