i'm really starting to like this dude. nevermind the UBI, but he's addressing real issues with our economy, housing, healthcare, and automation.
“To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public.”
(CNN) — Sen. Elizabeth Warren released an aggressive plan on Friday to break up tech giants like Amazon, Google and Facebook, targeting the power of Silicon Valley with her populist message as sprawling Internet giants face mounting political backlash ahead of the 2020 presidential election.
The far-reaching proposal would impose new rules on certain kinds of tech companies with $25 billion or more in annual revenue, forcing Amazon and Google to spin off parts of their companies and relinquish their overwhelming control over online commerce. The plan also aims to unwind some of the highest profile mergers in the industry, like the combinations of Amazon and Whole Foods, and Google and DoubleClick, as well as Facebook's acquisition of Instagram and WhatsApp.
The proposal from the Democratic presidential candidate is sure to rankle Silicon Valley executives and investors as well as opponents of government regulations, while drawing applause from progressive activists, consumer advocates and a range of lawmakers who have railed against what they see as unsustainable monopolies in the industry.
Warren's presidential campaign shared with CNN details of the plan, which outlines specific measures to break up large tech companies. It marks the Massachusetts Democrat's third major policy unveiling so far this year and is yet another sign that the progressive firebrand intends to set herself apart in a growing Democratic field by laying out an ambitious agenda centered around her campaign's overarching theme of dismantling wealthy and powerful interests.
"Today's big tech companies have too much power -- too much power over our economy, our society, and our democracy. They've bulldozed competition, used our private information for profit, and tilted the playing field against everyone else. And in the process, they have hurt small businesses and stifled innovation," Warren wrote in a Medium post about the proposal. "That's why my Administration will make big, structural changes to the tech sector to promote more competition—including breaking up Amazon, Facebook, and Google."
According to a source familiar with her plans, Warren is expected to promote the new proposal Friday evening in Long Island City, where Amazon recently backed out of its plan to build a massive campus after facing intense political backlash. The senator is also headed to the South by Southwest Conference in Austin, Texas, on Saturday.
The proposal was greeted with a cheer from New York State Sen. Julia Salazar, a Democratic Socialist ally of freshman Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and a vocal opponent of New York's deal to bring Amazon's second headquarters to Queens.
"I'm glad to see the dangers of monopolistic market power being taken seriously by a leading presidential candidate," Salazar said in a statement. "Gov. Andrew Cuomo and other pro-Amazon politicians need to see the danger of sublimating all facets of our daily lives into a single all-encompassing company, which is clearly Amazon's business model." The proposal is likely to spur debate in the rest of the Democratic field, which includes hard-charging candidates like Warren but also others who have taken substantial sums of money from Silicon Valley. A Warren aide told CNN the senator has not yet discussed her proposal with colleagues in Congress.
The plan would pose existential threats to the business models that turned certain giant tech firms into money spigots.
Separating Google's ad business from its Search function, for example, would make Google ads -- on which the company depends for nearly all of its revenue -- much less valuable. So would requiring Google to divest DoubleClick, the company it acquired in 2008 that vastly expanded the reach of its advertising network.
Warren's proposal would also prevent Amazon from selling its own branded products through its platform, resulting in lost revenue for the company but not killing the business model of taking a cut of every other transaction on the website. The move would alleviate one of the biggest concerns of other sellers on the marketplace -- that Amazon can determine which products are featured and promoted more prominently.
Warren's use of the $25 billion in annual revenue as a measure is notable because currently, antitrust enforcement largely depends on complex and ambiguous legal tests around factors like market share and evidence of price gouging.
"I want to make sure that the next generation of great American tech companies can flourish," Warren wrote in the Medium post. "To do that, we need to stop this generation of big tech companies from throwing around their political power to shape the rules in their favor and throwing around their economic power to snuff out or buy up every potential competitor."
Ahead of Warren's visit to New York on Friday, State Sen. Mike Gianaris, who represents Long Island City and whose opposition threatened to scuttle Amazon's deal before the company retreated, said, "I am proud the progressive movement in our country runs through Queens. It's only natural that Presidential candidates are spreading their message in western Queens and I look forward to hearing what Senator Warren has to offer."
I'm torn. I've watched some of the genius of these companies unfold over the years closely. They fought plenty of battles along the way and mostly out maneuvered their competitors by innovating. Without them we would all still be on AOL, lol.
But they damn sure have too much power. Yet they don't really have monopolies IMHO. I think they are like the modern version of the robber barons. They took advantage of opportunity, change, and progress to build empires.
And Liz Warren should be a little more restrained because all three of those companies could be king makers or crash the economy on a whim. That's too much power and you can't put that genie back in the bottle.
How can you expect Warren to to be restrained? We've seen that using restraint and speaking common sense is not how you get to be elected president. Using abject hyperbole, gross exaggerations and flat out lies is how to get elected.
I saw a preview of her next speech writers draft that she will present in the upcoming weeks. It reads, "We're going to break up the monopolies and Mexico is going to pay for it!" From the precedent that's been set it sounds like a winning strategy to me.
But I really don't want to give away any more information than that at this time. You can read more about how all of this works in my upcoming book, "The Making of A President."
Coming this fall to a book store near you.
Intoducing for The Cleveland Browns, Quarterback Deshawn "The Predator" Watson. He will also be the one to choose your next head coach.
a successful Asian entrepreneur who is a progressive offering real solutions instead of just naming the problems most people are already aware of, who voted and supports obama.
i hope to see him on the debate stage.
“To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public.”
a successful Asian entrepreneur who is a progressive offering real solutions instead of just naming the problems most people are already aware of, who voted and supports obama.
“To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public.”
They're not monopolies, but they can single handily crash the economy on a whim?
I'm not debating they are too powerful but IMHO they don't yet meet the definition of a Monopoly.
Quote:
Monopoly Law and Legal Definition Monopoly is a control or advantage obtained by one entity over the commercial market in a specific area. Monopolization is an offense under federal anti trust law. The two elements of monopolization are (1) the power to fix prices and exclude competitors within the relevant market. (2) the willful acquisition or maintenance of that power as distinguished from growth or development as a consequence of a superior product, business acumen or historical accident.
A market condition in which there is only one seller and one buyer is called a bilateral monopoly. A situation where one buyer controls the market is called monopsony.
Facebook has powerful competition in the social media world. Google has plenty of competition in search where they are #1, in advertising they compete with Facebook and a plethora of others, they try to compete on social media and many other tech holdings that compete but are nowhere near dominant. Amazon is much like google in that regard. They sell mostly other people stuff, much like Sears used to do. They have a few proprietary products and spend a lot of money innovating efficiency. The have AWS which competes with Google, Godaddy, and 1000's of others.
So I don't see the monopolies at all, just tech giants. In cyberspace innovation is king. Literally anyone with the right idea and effort can make something competitive and be a big deal. Look at Uber, dating apps, AirBnB, etc. etc. The next tech giant is somewhere in a garage or codelab right now and will likely unseat a current titan.
The real threat IMHO is ISPs, Cell phone companies, and anything that limits access to information, communication, or internet freedom.
Innovation isn't key in Silicon Valley, it is buying start ups before they're able to create goods for consumers, then overseeing the production of those goods. That's how Google has grown to such great lengths. Google is much more than a search engine, they produce phones, but most importantly they run Android. Android is installed on nearly every non-Apple phone. That's exactly what got Microsoft to be branded a monopoly in the 90's, because they pre-installed Windows. The Apple Store and Google store make sure that apps must go through the company before they're allowed to be distributed to consumers. Although Google is a lot more laxed in that regard than Apple.
Amazon is the worst of the monopolies because, yes, they don't produce that many goods, they are producing a lot more goods year after year. This is a problem because their competition has to advertise on Amazon's website.
Facebook has no social media competition. There are three social media sites, all completely different in what they do, but two of them (instagram and facebook) are owned by the same company. Twitter, the only other competition, finally turned a profit this year after failing to do so for a decade. I forgot that Snapchat is a "social media site", and they are also not profitable, but also not owned by Facebook or twitter.
Which brings me to the final point in your post, Uber, Lyft, and a lot of these other tech giants are not profitable. That's why most of them haven't had an IPO yet. The companies that did have an IPO were so flushed for money and their investors could not provide them enough money to stay afloat. There are so many stupid companies running through investors money that, if I knew how to code, I would be banging on Sam Altman's door telling him I had a brilliant innovation that will disrupt x industry by using contract laborers to keep costs down. A lot of these companies just sink investor money, with the longterm goal of taking a gigantic marketshare and then raising prices.
The big 3, Google, Amazon and Facebook are monopolies.
The dead books are on the top floor of Southern Methodist University’s law library.
“Antitrust Dilemma.” “The Antitrust Impulse.” “Antitrust in an Expanding Economy.” Shelf after shelf of volumes ignored for decades. There are a dozen fat tomes with transcripts of the congressional hearings on monopoly power in 1949, when the world was in ruins and the Soviets on the march. Lawmakers believed economic concentration would make America more vulnerable.
At the end of the antitrust stacks is a table near the window. “This is my command post,” said Lina Khan.
It’s nothing, really. A few books are piled up haphazardly next to a bottle with water and another with tea. Ms. Khan was in Dallas quite a bit over the last year, refining an argument about monopoly power that takes aim at one of the most admired, secretive and feared companies of our era: Amazon.
The retailer overwhelmingly dominates online commerce, employs more than half a million people and powers much of the internet itself through its cloud computing division. On Tuesday, it briefly became the second company to be worth a trillion dollars.
If competitors tremble at Amazon’s ambitions, consumers are mostly delighted by its speedy delivery and low prices. They stream its Oscar-winning movies and clamor for the company to build a second headquarters in their hometowns. Few of Amazon’s customers, it is safe to say, spend much time thinking they need to be protected from it.
But then, until recently, no one worried about Facebook, Google or Twitter either. Now politicians, the media, academics and regulators are kicking around ideas that would, metaphorically or literally, cut them down to size. Members of Congress grilled social media executives on Wednesday in yet another round of hearings on Capitol Hill. Not since the Department of Justice took on Microsoft in the mid-1990s has Big Tech been scrutinized like this.
Amazon has more revenue than Facebook, Google and Twitter put together, but it has largely escaped sustained examination. That is beginning to change, and one significant reason is Ms. Khan.
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Momo Is as Real as We’ve Made Her At the S.M.U. library in Dallas, Ms. Khan was finding inspiration from books that predated the price-based era of monopoly law. Credit Brandon Thibodeaux for The New York Times
Image At the S.M.U. library in Dallas, Ms. Khan was finding inspiration from books that predated the price-based era of monopoly law.CreditBrandon Thibodeaux for The New York Times In early 2017, when she was an unknown law student, Ms. Khan published “Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox” in the Yale Law Journal. Her argument went against a consensus in antitrust circles that dates back to the 1970s — the moment when regulation was redefined to focus on consumer welfare, which is to say price. Since Amazon is renowned for its cut-rate deals, it would seem safe from federal intervention.
Ms. Khan disagreed. Over 93 heavily footnoted pages, she presented the case that the company should not get a pass on anticompetitive behavior just because it makes customers happy. Once-robust monopoly laws have been marginalized, Ms. Khan wrote, and consequently Amazon is amassing structural power that lets it exert increasing control over many parts of the economy.
Amazon has so much data on so many customers, it is so willing to forgo profits, it is so aggressive and has so many advantages from its shipping and warehouse infrastructure that it exerts an influence much broader than its market share. It resembles the all-powerful railroads of the Progressive Era, Ms. Khan wrote: “The thousands of retailers and independent businesses that must ride Amazon’s rails to reach market are increasingly dependent on their biggest competitor.”
The paper got 146,255 hits, a runaway best-seller in the world of legal treatises. That popularity has rocked the antitrust establishment, and is making an unlikely celebrity of Ms. Khan in the corridors of Washington.
She has her own critics now: Several leading scholars have found fault with Ms. Khan’s proposals to revive and expand antitrust, and some have tried to dismiss her paper with the mocking label “Hipster Antitrust.” Unwilling or perhaps unable to accept that a woman wrote a breakthrough legal text, they keep talking about bearded dudes.
Ms. Khan was born in London to Pakistani parents who emigrated to the United States when she was 11. She is now 29, an Amazon critic whose Amazon account is largely inactive, newly married to a Texas doctor who uses his Amazon Prime account all the time. Ms. Khan was supposed to move this summer to Los Angeles, where she had a clerkship with Stephen Reinhardt, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals judge and liberal icon, but he suddenly died in March. Instead, Ms. Khan is set to start a fellowship at Columbia this fall, and is considering other projects as well. There is no shortage of parties that want her advice on how to reckon with Big Tech.
“As consumers, as users, we love these tech companies,” she said. “But as citizens, as workers, and as entrepreneurs, we recognize that their power is troubling. We need a new framework, a new vocabulary for how to assess and address their dominance.”
At the S.M.U. library in Dallas, Ms. Khan was finding that vocabulary. These dead books, many from an era that predated the price-based era of monopoly law, were an influence and an inspiration. She was planning to expand her essay into a book, she said in an interview here in June.
Then her life shifted, and she abruptly went from an outsider proposing reform to an insider formulating policy. Rohit Chopra, a new Democratic commissioner at the Federal Trade Commission, pulled her in as a temporary adviser in July, at a time when urgent questions about privacy, data, competition and antitrust were suddenly in the air. The F.T.C. is holding a series of hearings this fall, the first of their type since 1995, on whether a changing economy requires changing enforcement attitudes.
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SIGN UP The hearings will begin on Sept. 13 at Georgetown University Law Center. Two panels will debate whether antitrust should keep its narrow focus or, as Ms. Khan urges, expand its range.
“Ideas and assumptions that it was heretical to question are now openly being contested,” she said. “We’re finally beginning to examine how antitrust laws, which were rooted in deep suspicion of concentrated private power, now often promote it.”
Genuinely original voices are rare in Washington policy circles, and Mr. Chopra is pleased to have Ms. Khan in his camp. “It’s rare to come across a legal prodigy like Lina Khan,” he said. “Nothing about her career is typical. You don’t see many law students publish groundbreaking legal research, or research that had such a deep impact so quickly.”
Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon. Credit David Ryder/Getty Images
Image
Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon.CreditDavid Ryder/Getty Images Then: Rockefeller. Now: Bezos. Ida Tarbell, the journalist whose investigation of Standard Oil helped bring about its breakup, wrote this about John D. Rockefeller in 1905:
“It takes time to crush men who are pursuing legitimate trade. But one of Mr. Rockefeller’s most impressive characteristics is patience. … He was like a general who, besieging a city surrounded by fortified hills, views from a balloon the whole great field, and sees how, this point taken, that must fall; this hill reached, that fort is commanded. And nothing was too small: the corner grocery in Browntown, the humble refining still on Oil Creek, the shortest private pipeline. Nothing, for little things grow.”
When Ms. Khan read that, she thought: Jeff Bezos.
Her Yale Law Journal paper argued that monopoly regulators who focus on consumer prices are thinking too short-term. In Ms. Khan’s view, a company like Amazon — one that sells things, competes against others selling things, and owns the platform where the deals are done — has an inherent advantage that undermines fair competition.
“The long-term interests of consumers include product quality, variety and innovation — factors best promoted through both a robust competitive process and open markets,” she wrote.
The issue Ms. Khan’s article really brought to the fore is this: Do we trust Amazon, or any large company, to create our future? In think tanks and universities, the battle has been joined.
“It’s one thing to say that antitrust enforcement has gotten far too weak,” said Daniel Crane, a University of Michigan scholar who doesn’t agree with Ms. Khan but credits her with opening up a much-needed debate. “It’s a bridge much further to say we should go back to the populist goal of leveling playing fields and checking ‘bigness.’ ”
As Mr. Crane writes in a forthcoming law review article: “Antitrust law stands at its most fluid and negotiable moment in a generation.”
The resistance is fierce and prominent. Herbert Hovenkamp, an antitrust expert at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, wrote that if companies like Amazon are targeted simply because their low prices hurt competitors, we might “quickly drive the economy back into the Stone Age, imposing hysterical costs on everyone.”
Timothy Muris, a former chairman of the F.T.C., and Jonathan Nuechterlein, a former F.T.C. general counsel, published a paper in June that was a response to Ms. Khan and the antitrust reform movement. Called “Antitrust in the Internet Era,” it was about the A.&P. grocery chain.
A.&P. essentially invented the modern supermarket in the 1920s. With its low prices, wide range of products and penchant for disruption, the chain became the leading retailer of its era. It owned 70 factories and eliminated middlemen, which allowed it to keep costs down. Yet, Mr. Muris and Mr. Nuechterlein wrote, “A.&P.’s very popularity triggered a backlash.” The government pursued A.&P. on antitrust grounds during the 1940s, egged on by competitors that could not compete. After decades of decline, A.&P. shut its doors for good in 2015.
The analogies with Amazon are explicit. Don’t let the government pursue Amazon the way it pursued A.&P., Mr. Muris and Mr. Nuechterlein warned.
“Amazon has added hundreds of billions of dollars of value to the U.S. economy,” they wrote. “It is a brilliant innovator” whose “breakthroughs have in turn helped launch new waves of innovation across retail and technology sectors, to the great benefit of consumers.”
Amazon itself could not have made the argument any better. Which isn’t surprising, because in a footnote on the first page, the authors noted: “We approached Amazon Inc. for funding to tell the story” of A.&P., “and we gratefully acknowledge its support.” They added at the end of footnote 85: “The authors have advised Amazon on a variety of antitrust issues.”
Amazon declined to say how much its support came to in dollars. It also declined to comment on Ms. Khan or her paper directly, but issued a statement.
“We operate in a diverse range of businesses, from retail and entertainment to consumer electronics and technology services, and we have intense and well-established competition in each of these areas,” the company said. “Retail is our largest business today and we represent less than 1 percent of global retail.”
“As consumers, as users, we love these tech companies,” Ms. Khan said. “But as citizens, as workers, and as entrepreneurs, we recognize that their power is troubling. We need a new framework, a new vocabulary for how to assess and address their dominance.” Credit Lexey Swall for The New York Times
Image
“As consumers, as users, we love these tech companies,” Ms. Khan said. “But as citizens, as workers, and as entrepreneurs, we recognize that their power is troubling. We need a new framework, a new vocabulary for how to assess and address their dominance.”CreditLexey Swall for The New York Times ‘We’re at the Very Beginning of Solutions to This’ The first time Ms. Khan held power to account involved a Starbucks in suburban New York that was banning students from sitting down. Ms. Khan decided to write an article about the policy; Starbucks wouldn’t answer her questions, but she managed to interview the employees. The New York Times picked up on the tempest, leaning on her reporting. Ms. Khan was 15, a correspondent for her high school newspaper.
Her father was a management consultant; her mother an executive in information services. Ms. Khan went to Williams College, where she wrote a thesis on the political philosopher Hannah Arendt. She was the editor of the student paper but worked hard at everything.
“We were routinely emailing each other on separate floors of the library as it was closing at 2 a.m.,” said Amanda Korman, a classmate.
Like many a wonkish youth, Ms. Khan headed to Washington after graduating in 2010, applying for a position at the left-leaning New America Foundation. Barry Lynn, who headed the organization’s Open Markets antimonopoly initiative, seized on her application. “It’s so much easier to teach public policy to people who already know how to write than teach writing to public policy experts,” said Mr. Lynn, a former journalist.
Ms. Khan wrote about industry consolidation and monopolistic practices for Washington publications that specialize in policy, went to Yale Law School, published her Amazon paper and then came back to Washington last year, just as interest was starting to swell in her work.
In the summer of 2017, Open Markets was ejected from New America amid messy accusations that it displeased Google, a prominent funder, after the company was rebuked by European regulators for anticompetitive behavior. The think tank is now independent.
“Polls show huge concerns about concentrated power, corporate power, but if people are asked, ‘Do we have a monopoly problem?’ they answer, ‘I don’t know,’ ” said Mr. Lynn. “They don’t have the language for it.”
Amazon’s $14 billion purchase of Whole Foods in the summer of 2017 — a startling move into physical retail — was almost a watershed, but not quite. Rep. David Cicilline of Rhode Island, the ranking Democrat on the Subcommittee on Regulatory Reform, Commercial and Antitrust Law, called for hearings but did not get them.
“The whole country has been struggling to understand why the economy is not operating in the right way,” Mr. Cicilline said. “Wages have remained stagnant. Workers have less and less power. All we’re trying to do is create a level playing field, and that’s harder when you have megacompanies that make it virtually impossible for small competitors.” He added, “We’re at the very beginning of solutions to this.”
Somewhere in the midst of all this, Ms. Khan found the time to marry Shah Ali, a doctor now doing a cardiology fellowship in Dallas, which explains why she was camping out at the S.M.U. law library. The honeymoon was in Hawaii. Dr. Ali took Jane Austen’s “Persuasion,” because he hadn’t reread it in a while. Ms. Khan brought a book on corporations and American democracy.
“It’s rare to come across a legal prodigy like Lina Khan,” said Rohit Chopra, a new Democratic commissioner at the Federal Trade Commission. “Nothing about her career is typical. You don’t see many law students publish groundbreaking legal research, or research that had such a deep impact so quickly.” Credit Lexey Swall for The New York Times
Image
“It’s rare to come across a legal prodigy like Lina Khan,” said Rohit Chopra, a new Democratic commissioner at the Federal Trade Commission. “Nothing about her career is typical. You don’t see many law students publish groundbreaking legal research, or research that had such a deep impact so quickly.”CreditLexey Swall for The New York Times ‘The New Brandeisians’ Lacks a Certain Something The battle for intellectual supremacy takes place less these days in learned journals and more on social media, where tongues are sharp and branding is all. This is not Ms. Khan’s strong suit. She is always polite, even on Twitter. One consequence is that she didn’t give much thought about what to call the movement to reboot antitrust. Neither did anyone else.
That presented an opening for the reformers’ critics, who have tried with a limited degree of success to popularize the term “Hipster Antitrust.” Konstantin Medvedovsky, an antitrust lawyer in New York, came up with the label last summer in a tweet that was responding to a tweet that was responding to a tweet by Ms. Khan.
“Antitrust Hipsterism,” he wrote. “Everything old is cool again.”
Mr. Medvedovsky, who calls Ms. Khan’s article “the face of this movement,” said the term was designed to be “playful rather than pejorative.”
Admirers of Ms. Khan and her fellow reformers have sometimes called them the New Brandeis School or the New Brandeisians, after Louis Brandeis, the Progressive Era foe of big business. As brands go, these are somewhat less catchy than “Hipster Antitrust.”
The April issue of the journal Antitrust Chronicle, edited by Mr. Medvedovsky, features a drawing of a bearded man on the cover right above the words “Hipster Antitrust.” In the middle of an article by Philip Marsden, a professor of competition law and economics at the College of Europe in Bruges, there’s a photograph of a bearded man taking a selfie next to the chapter heading “Battle of the Beards.” It is perhaps relevant that only one of the 12 authors or experts in the issue is female.
The Hipster issue was sponsored by Facebook, another sign that Big Tech is striving to shape the monopoly-law debate. The company declined to comment.
Things are moving fast, so there is a lot to write papers about.
Mr. Chopra, with Ms. Khan’s assistance, pushed the argument further on Sept. 6 with a 14-page official comment that suggested the F.T.C. bring back a tool buried in its toolbox: the ability to make rules.
Contemporary antitrust regulation, the commissioner wrote, is conducted in the courts, which makes it numbingly slow and dependent on high-paid expert witnesses. He called for the agency to use its authority to issue rules that would “advance clarity and certainty” about what is, and what is not, an unfair method of competition.
These rules would not be “some inflexible prescription” but standards, guidelines, pointers or presumptions, he wrote. Since everyone affected by a proposed rule would have the opportunity to weigh in on it, the process would be more democratic.
There is more than an echo here of Ms. Khan’s notion that the past can help rescue the future.
“These are new technologies and new business models,” Ms. Khan said. “The remedy is new thinking that is informed by traditional principles.”
Antitrust Foot Soldiers Big Tech’s great strength is that it is everywhere. Hardly anyone can live without it. But that omnipresence can be a weakness too. Just ask Facebook. It was the only global social media network, an enviable position — until it wasn’t. Ideas for regulating Facebook that were once unimaginable are now on the table.
Ms. Khan was not the first to criticize Amazon, and she said the company was not really her target anyway. “Amazon is not the problem — the state of the law is the problem, and Amazon depicts that in an elegant way,” she said.
From Amazon’s point of view, however, it is a problem indeed that Ms. Khan concludes in the Yale paper that regulating parts of the company like a utility “could make sense.” She also said it “could make sense” to treat Amazon’s e-commerce operation like a bridge, highway, port, power grid or telephone network — all of which are required to allow access to their infrastructure on a nondiscriminatory basis.
Ms. Khan put those ideas out there, which is how Rachel Tsuna found them.
Last fall, the Barnard College senior was casting about for a subject for her senior thesis. “What is really interesting to you?” her adviser asked. Ms. Tsuna, now 22, had worked for a chewing gum start-up — yes, there are such things — that sold through Amazon, and knew firsthand the retailer’s tight grip. “Amazon is scary!” she exclaimed.
This impulsive declaration suggested a topic: Did the F.T.C. have the grounds to move against Amazon? Ms. Tsuna made little progress until she came across Ms. Khan’s paper.
“I finally felt like I was pursuing something valid,” Ms. Tsuna said. “Lina Khan gave me the confidence I needed.” The thesis, which is quite fair to Amazon, got an A minus.
That’s the way movements begin. Little things grow.
“This is a moment in time that invites a movement,” said Ms. Khan. “It’s bigger than antitrust, bigger than Big Tech. It’s about whether the laws serve democratic ends.”
It was late at night in late July, and she was eating a burrata concoction at a popular restaurant near the Washington apartment she uses when not in Texas with her husband. After the death of Judge Reinhardt, her options opened up. She had the Columbia fellowship. Maybe she would also write the book. Or go back to the F.T.C. full time. Or somehow do it all.
“Amazon is a monopoly, and I worry that it monopolizes Lina,” said her husband, Dr. Ali. “I learn about what she is doing from looking at her Twitter feed.”
“I throw myself into things,” Ms. Khan agreed. “My life is spread out now.”
With some cajoling, she revealed her Amazon account. There were just three purchases in 18 months. An altimeter for her father, who has taken up hiking, is the only one she will agree to have mentioned, although the other two are incredibly benign. One attribute Ms. Khan shares with Amazon is a strong desire to control the flow of information.
Somewhat to her surprise, she is becoming a public figure. Before beginning her stint at the F.T.C., she said the news of her working there might be no more than a sentence or two at news sites that cover policy intensively. Instead it was a full-fledged story. The Information, a tech news site, declared: “Amazon Antitrust Push Slowly Gains Ground.” Politico just named her one of the Politico 50, its annual list of the people driving the ideas driving politics.
Balancing the attention and the achievement, the expectations and the demands, is difficult, perhaps impossible.
“I don’t think of my work in grandiose terms. I feel an urgency but I’m also wary of hubris,” Ms. Khan said. “Nobody has been expecting this to succeed. I’m awed by the challenge.”
a successful Asian entrepreneur who is a progressive offering real solutions instead of just naming the problems most people are already aware of, who voted and supports obama.
i hope to see him on the debate stage.
He's not a progressive, he's a libertarian backed by Joe Rogan. He wants to gut social programs like SNAP and Medicaid and replace it with UBI.
he actually addressed those other programs in the video i posted. he said it makes no sense to remove them.
“To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public.”
HOW WOULD WE PAY FOR UNIVERSAL BASIC INCOME? December 28, 2017 by Leave a Comment
It would be easier than you might think. Andrew proposes funding UBI by consolidating some welfare programs and implementing a Value-Added Tax (VAT) of 10%. Current welfare and social program beneficiaries would be given a choice between their current benefits or $1,000 cash unconditionally – most would prefer cash with no restriction.
A Value-Added Tax (VAT) is a tax on the production of goods or services a business produces. It is a fair tax and it makes it much harder for large corporations, who are experts at hiding profits and income, to avoid paying their fair share. A VAT is nothing new. 160 out of 193 countries in the world already have a Value-Added Tax or something similar, including all of Europe which has an average VAT of 20 percent.
The means to pay for a Universal Basic Income will come from 4 sources:
1. Current spending. We currently spend between $500 and $600 billion a year on welfare programs, food stamps, disability and the like. This reduces the cost of Universal Basic Income because people already receiving benefits would have a choice but would be ineligible to receive the full $1,000 in addition to current benefits.
he goes into detail on it in the video. apparently you didn't watch it.
“To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public.”
And he is lying on his website that a VAT is somehow going to force businesses to pay their fair share or whatever. Its a consumption tax and the cost gets passed onto customers. Its the European version of a sales tax.
Just No to yet another lying lefty using a dog whistle.
dude wants to be more like malcolm X than MLK, but forgot that malcolm basically got shot by his own people.
“To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public.”
dude wants to be more like malcolm X than MLK, but forgot that malcolm basically got shot by his own people.
Ebro mad corny in his wokeness sometimes, especially since Nessa got on the air there. but Hot has always been the more authentic station, can't blame them for being real. Sway is the best of the morning shows.
progressive policies leads to conservative results.
“To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public.”
He's not a progressive, he's a libertarian backed by Joe Rogan. He wants to gut social programs like SNAP and Medicaid and replace it with UBI.
Giving hand outs from large government programs is not libertarian in any way.
Nah, it's been the big new thing in libertarian thought since 2000's. It's pushed by everyone in silicon valley now. Mainly because libertarian ideas suck so bad that they need to find corrections to the unsustainable theory.
He's not a progressive, he's a libertarian backed by Joe Rogan. He wants to gut social programs like SNAP and Medicaid and replace it with UBI.
Giving hand outs from large government programs is not libertarian in any way.
Nah, it's been the big new thing in libertarian thought since 2000's. It's pushed by everyone in silicon valley now. Mainly because libertarian ideas suck so bad that they need to find corrections to the unsustainable theory.
Pushed by everyone in silicon valley? I'm not quite sure what relevance this has. You still seem confused about what being Libertarian means so I will post the overview in the section below. Perhaps you can learn something today but I doubt it.
Libertarianism, political philosophy that takes individual liberty to be the primary political value. It may be understood as a form of liberalism, the political philosophy associated with the English philosophers John Locke and John Stuart Mill, the Scottish economist Adam Smith, and the American statesman Thomas Jefferson. Liberalism seeks to define and justify the legitimate powers of government in terms of certain natural or God-given individual rights. These rights include the rights to life, liberty, private property, freedom of speech and association, freedom of worship, government by consent, equality under the law, and moral autonomy (the ability to pursue one’s own conception of happiness, or the “good life”). The purpose of government, according to liberals, is to protect these and other individual rights, and in general liberals have contended that government power should be limited to that which is necessary to accomplish this task. Libertarians are classical liberals who strongly emphasize the individual right to liberty. They contend that the scope and powers of government should be constrained so as to allow each individual as much freedom of action as is consistent with a like freedom for everyone else. Thus, they believe that individuals should be free to behave and to dispose of their property as they see fit, provided that their actions do not infringe on the equal freedom of others.
Historical Origins
Liberalism and libertarianism have deep roots in Western thought. A central feature of the religious and intellectual traditions of ancient Israel and ancient Greece was the idea of a higher moral law that applied universally and that constrained the powers of even kings and governments. Christian theologians, including Tertullian in the 2nd and 3rd centuries and St. Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century, stressed the moral worth of the individual and the division of the world into two realms, one of which was the province of God and thus beyond the power of the state to control.
Libertarianism also was influenced by debates within Scholasticism on slavery and private property. Scholastic thinkers such as Aquinas, Francisco de Vitoria, and Bartolomé de Las Casas developed the concept of “self-mastery” (dominium)—later called “self-propriety,” “property in one’s person,” or “self-ownership”—and showed how it could be the foundation of a system of individual rights (see below Libertarian philosophy). In response to the growth of royal absolutism in early modern Europe, early libertarians, particularly those in the Netherlands and England, defended, developed, and radicalized existing notions of the rule of law, representative assemblies, and the rights of the people. In the mid-16th century, for example, the merchants of Antwerp successfully resisted the attempt by the Holy Roman emperor Charles V to introduce the Inquisition in their city, maintaining that it would contravene their traditional privileges and ruin their prosperity (and hence diminish the emperor’s tax income). Through the Petition of Right (1628) the English Parliament opposed efforts by King Charles I to impose taxes and compel loans from private citizens, to imprison subjects without due process of law, and to require subjects to quarter the king’s soldiers (see petition of right). The first well-developed statement of libertarianism, An Agreement of the People (1647), was produced by the radical republican Leveler movement during the English Civil Wars (1642–51). Presented to Parliament in 1649, it included the ideas of self-ownership, private property, legal equality, religious toleration, and limited, representative government.
In the late 17th century, liberalism was given a sophisticated philosophical foundation in Locke’s theories of natural rights, including the right to private property and to government by consent. In the 18th century, Smith’s studies of the economic effects of free markets greatly advanced the liberal theory of “spontaneous order,” according to which some forms of order in society arise naturally and spontaneously, without central direction, from the independent activities of large numbers of individuals. The theory of spontaneous order is a central feature of libertarian social and economic thinking (see below Spontaneous order).
The American Revolution (1775–83) was a watershed for liberalism. In the Declaration of Independence (1776), Jefferson enunciated many liberal and libertarian ideas, including the belief in “unalienable Rights” to “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness” and the belief in the “right” and “duty” of citizens to “throw off such Government” that violates these rights. Indeed, during and after the American Revolution, according to the American historian Bernard Bailyn, “the major themes of eighteenth-century libertarianism were brought to realization” in written constitutions, bills of rights, and limits on executive and legislative powers, especially the power to wage war. Such values have remained at the core of American political thought ever since.
During the 19th century, governments based on traditional liberal principles emerged in England and the United States and to a smaller extent in continental Europe. The rise of liberalism resulted in rapid technological development and a general increase in living standards, though large segments of the population remained in poverty, especially in the slums of industrial cities.
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, many liberals began to worry that persistent inequalities of income and wealth and the tremendous pace of social change were undermining democracy and threatening other classical liberal values, such as the right to moral autonomy. Fearful of what they considered a new despotism of the wealthy, modern liberals advocated government regulation of markets and major industries, heavier taxation of the rich, the legalization of trade unions, and the introduction of various government-funded social services, such as mandatory accident insurance. Some have regarded the modern liberals’ embrace of increased government power as a repudiation of the classical liberal belief in limited government, but others have seen it as a reconsideration of the kinds of power required by government to protect the individual rights that liberals believe in.
The new liberalism was exemplified by the English philosophers L.T. Hobhouse and T.H. Green, who argued that democratic governments should aim to advance the general welfare by providing direct services and benefits to citizens. Meanwhile, however, classical liberals such as the English philosopher Herbert Spencer insisted that the welfare of the poor and the middle classes would be best served by free markets and minimal government. In the 20th century, so-called welfare state liberalism, or social democracy, emerged as the dominant form of liberalism, and the term liberalism itself underwent a significant change in definition in English-speaking countries. Particularly after World War II, most self-described liberals no longer supported completely free markets and minimal government, though they continued to champion other individual rights, such as the right to freedom of speech. As liberalism became increasingly associated with government intervention in the economy and social-welfare programs, some classical liberals abandoned the old term and began to call themselves “libertarians.”
In response to the rise of totalitarian regimes in Russia, Italy, and Germany in the first half of the 20th century, some economists and political philosophers rediscovered aspects of the classical liberal tradition that were most distinctly individualist. In his seminal essay “Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth” (originally in German, 1920), the Austrian-American economist Ludwig von Mises challenged the basic tenets of socialism, arguing that a complex economy requires private property and freedom of exchange in order to solve problems of social and economic coordination. Von Mises’s work led to extensive studies of the processes by which the uncoordinated activities of numerous individuals can spontaneously generate complex forms of social order in societies where individual rights are well-defined and legally secure.
Libertarian Philosophy
Classical liberalism rests on a presumption of liberty—that is, on the presumption that the exercise of liberty does not require justification but that all restraints on liberty do. Libertarians have attempted to define the proper extent of individual liberty in terms of the notion of property in one’s person, or self-ownership, which entails that each individual is entitled to exclusive control of his choices, his actions, and his body. Because no individual has the right to control the peaceful activities of other self-owning individuals—e.g., their religious practices, their occupations, or their pastimes—no such power can be properly delegated to government. Legitimate governments are therefore severely limited in their authority.
Nonaggression axiom
According to the principle that libertarians call the nonaggression axiom, all acts of aggression against the rights of others—whether committed by individuals or by governments—are unjust. Indeed, libertarians believe that the primary purpose of government is to protect citizens from the illegitimate use of force. Accordingly, governments may not use force against their own citizens unless doing so is necessary to prevent the illegitimate use of force by one individual or group against another. This prohibition entails that governments may not engage in censorship, military conscription, price controls, confiscation of property, or any other type of intervention that curtails the voluntary and peaceful exercise of an individual’s rights.
Power
A fundamental characteristic of libertarian thinking is a deep skepticism of government power. Libertarianism and liberalism both arose in the West, where the division of power between spiritual and temporal rulers had been greater than in most other parts of the world. In the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament), I Samuel 8: 17–18, the Jews asked for a king, and God warned them that such a king would “take the tenth of your flocks, and you shall be his slaves. And in that day you will cry out because of your king, whom you have chosen for yourselves; but the Lord will not answer you in that day.” This admonition reminded Europeans for centuries of the predatory nature of states. The passage was cited by many liberals, including Thomas Paine and Lord Acton, who famously wrote that “power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Libertarian skepticism was reinforced by events of the 20th century, when unrestrained government power, among other factors, led to world war, genocide, and massive human rights violations.
Individualism
Libertarians embrace individualism insofar as they attach supreme value to the rights and freedoms of individuals. Although various theories regarding the origin and justification of individual rights have been proposed—e.g., that they are given to human beings by God, that they are implied by the very idea of a moral law, and that respecting them produces better consequences—all libertarians agree that individual rights are imprescriptible—i.e., that they are not granted (and thus cannot be legitimately taken away) by governments or by any other human agency. Another aspect of the individualism of libertarians is their belief that the individual, rather than the group or the state, is the basic unit in terms of which a legal order should be understood.
Spontaneous order
Libertarians hold that some forms of order in society arise naturally and spontaneously from the actions of thousands or millions of individuals. The notion of spontaneous order may seem counterintuitive: it is natural to assume that order exists only because it has been designed by someone (indeed, in the philosophy of religion, the apparent order of the natural universe was traditionally considered proof of the existence of an intelligent designer—i.e., God). Libertarians, however, maintain that the most important aspects of human society—such as language, law, customs, money, and markets—develop by themselves, without conscious direction.
An appreciation for spontaneous order can be found in the writings of the ancient Chinese philosopher Lao-tzu (6th century BCE), who urged rulers to “do nothing” because “without law or compulsion, men would dwell in harmony.” A social science of spontaneous order arose in the 18th century in the work of the French physiocrats and in the writings of the Scottish philosopher David Hume. Both the physiocrats (the term physiocracy means the “rule of nature”) and Hume studied the natural order of economic and social life and concluded, contrary to the dominant theory of mercantilism, that the directing hand of the prince was not necessary to produce order and prosperity. Hume extended his analysis to the determination of interest rates and even to the emergence of the institutions of law and property. In A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), he argued that “the rule concerning the stability of possession” is a product of spontaneous ordering processes, because “it arises gradually, and acquires force by a slow progression, and by our repeated experience of the inconveniences of transgressing it.” He also compared the evolution of the institution of property to the evolution of languages and money.
Smith developed the concept of spontaneous order extensively in both The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) and An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776). He made the idea central to his discussion of social cooperation, arguing that the division of labour did not arise from human wisdom but was the “necessary, though very slow and gradual, consequence of a certain propensity in human nature which has in view no such extensive utility: the propensity to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another.” In Common Sense (1776), Paine combined the theory of spontaneous order with a theory of justice based on natural rights, maintaining that the “great part of that order which reigns among mankind is not the effect of government.”
Free markets
According to libertarians, free markets are among the most important (but not the only) examples of spontaneous order. They argue that individuals need to produce and trade in order to survive and flourish and that free markets are essential to the creation of wealth. Libertarians also maintain that self-help, mutual aid, charity, and economic growth do more to alleviate poverty than government social-welfare programs. Finally, they contend that, if the libertarian tradition often seems to stress private property and free markets at the expense of other principles, that is largely because these institutions were under attack for much of the 20th century by modern liberals, social democrats, fascists, and adherents of other leftist, nationalist, or socialist ideologies.
Rule of law
Libertarians consider the rule of law to be a crucial underpinning of a free society. In its simplest form, this principle means that individuals should be governed by generally applicable and publicly known laws and not by the arbitrary decisions of kings, presidents, or bureaucrats. Such laws should protect the freedom of all individuals to pursue happiness in their own ways and should not aim at any particular result or outcome.
Limited government
Although most libertarians believe that some form of government is essential for protecting liberty, they also maintain that government is an inherently dangerous institution whose power must be strictly circumscribed. Thus, libertarians advocate limiting and dividing government power through a written constitution and a system of checks and balances. Indeed, libertarians often claim that the greater freedom and prosperity of European society (in comparison with other parts of the world) in the early modern era was the result of the fragmentation of power, both between church and state and among the continent’s many different kingdoms, principalities, and city-states. Some American libertarians, such as Lysander Spooner and Murray Rothbard, have opposed all forms of government. Rothbard called his doctrine “anarcho-capitalism” to distinguish it from the views of anarchists who oppose private property. Even those who describe themselves as “anarchist libertarians,” however, believe in a system of law and law enforcement to protect individual rights.
Much political analysis deals with conflict and conflict resolution. Libertarians hold that there is a natural harmony of interests among peaceful, productive individuals in a just society. Citing David Ricardo’s theory of comparative advantage—which states that individuals in all countries benefit when each country’s citizens specialize in producing that which they can produce more efficiently than the citizens of other countries—libertarians claim that, over time, all individuals prosper from the operation of a free market, and conflict is thus not a necessary or inevitable part of a social order. When governments begin to distribute rewards on the basis of political pressure, however, individuals and groups will engage in wasteful and even violent conflict to gain benefits at the expense of others. Thus, libertarians maintain that minimal government is a key to the minimization of social conflict.
International relations
In international affairs, libertarians emphasize the value of peace. That may seem unexceptional, since most (though not all) modern thinkers have claimed allegiance to peace as a value. Historically, however, many rulers have seen little benefit to peace and have embarked upon sometimes long and destructive wars. Libertarians contend that war is inherently calamitous, bringing widespread death and destruction, disrupting family and economic life, and placing more power in the hands of ruling classes. Defensive or retaliatory violence may be justified, but, according to libertarians, violence is not valuable in itself, nor does it produce any additional benefits beyond the defense of life and liberty.
Contemporary Libertarianism
Despite the historical growth in the scope and powers of government, particularly after World War II, in the early 21st century the political and economic systems of most Western countries—especially the United Kingdom and the United States—continued to be based largely on classical liberal principles. Accordingly, libertarians in those countries tended to focus on smaller deviations from liberal principles, creating the perception among many that their views were radical or extreme. In the early 21st century, self-identified libertarians constituted a major current of the antigovernment Tea Party movement in the United States. However, explicitly libertarian political parties (such as the Libertarian Party in the United States and the Libertarianz Party in New Zealand), where they did exist, garnered little support, even among self-professed libertarians. Most politically active libertarians supported classical liberal parties (such as the Free Democratic Party in Germany or the Flemish Liberals and Democrats in Belgium) or conservative parties (such as the Republican Party in the United States or the Conservative Party in Great Britain); they also backed pressure groups advocating policies such as tax reduction, the privatization of education, and the decriminalization of drug use and other so-called victimless crimes. There were also small but vocal groups of libertarians in Scandinavia, Latin America, India, and China.
The publication in 1974 of Anarchy, State, and Utopia, a sophisticated defense of libertarian principles by the American philosopher Robert Nozick, marked the beginning of an intellectual revival of libertarianism. Libertarian ideas in economics became increasingly influential as libertarian economists, such as Alan Greenspan, were appointed to prominent advisory positions in conservative governments in the United Kingdom and the United States and as some libertarians, such as James M. Buchanan, Milton Friedman, F.A. Hayek, and Vernon L. Smith, were awarded the Nobel Prize for Economics. In 1982 the death of the libertarian novelist and social theorist Ayn Rand prompted a surge of popular interest in her work. Libertarian scholars, activists, and political leaders also played prominent roles in the worldwide campaign against apartheid and in the construction of democratic societies in eastern and central Europe following the collapse of communism there in 1989–91. In the early 21st century, libertarian ideas informed new research in diverse fields such as history, law, economic development, telecommunications, bioethics, globalization, and social theory.
Criticism
A long-standing criticism of libertarianism is that it presupposes an unrealistic and undesirable conception of individual identity and of the conditions necessary for human flourishing. Opponents of libertarianism often refer to libertarian individualism as “atomistic,” arguing that it ignores the role of family, tribe, religious community, and state in forming individual identity and that such groups or institutions are the proper sources of legitimate authority. These critics contend that libertarian ideas of individuality are ahistorical, excessively abstract, and parasitic on unacknowledged forms of group identity and that libertarians ignore the obligations to community and government that accompany the benefits derived from these institutions. In the 19th century, Karl Marx decried liberal individualism, which he took to underlie civil (or bourgeois) society, as a “decomposition of man” that located man’s essence “no longer in community but in difference.” More recently, the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor maintained that the libertarian emphasis on the rights of the individual wrongly implies “the self-sufficiency of man alone.”
Libertarians deny that their views imply anything like atomistic individualism. The recognition and protection of individuality and difference, they contend, does not necessarily entail denying the existence of community or the benefits of living together. Rather, it merely requires that the bonds of community not be imposed on people by force and that individuals (adults, at least) be free to sever their attachments to others and to form new ones with those who choose to associate with them. Community, libertarians believe, is best served by freedom of association, an observation made by the 19th-century French historian of American democracy Alexis de Tocqueville, among others. Thus, for libertarians the central philosophical issue is not individuality versus community but rather consent versus coercion.
Other critics, including some prominent conservatives, have insisted that libertarianism is an amoral philosophy of libertinism in which the law loses its character as a source of moral instruction. The American philosopher Russell Kirk, for example, argued that libertarians “bear no authority, temporal or spiritual,” and do not “venerate ancient beliefs and customs, or the natural world, or [their] country, or the immortal spark in [their] fellow men.” Libertarians respond that they do venerate the ancient traditions of liberty and justice. They favour restricting the function of the law to enforcing those traditions, not only because they believe that individuals should be permitted to take moral responsibility for their own choices but also because they believe that law becomes corrupted when it is used as a tool for “making men moral.” Furthermore, they argue, a degree of humility about the variety of human goals should not be confused with radical moral skepticism or ethical relativism.
Some criticisms of libertarianism concern the social and economic effects of free markets and the libertarian view that all forms of government intervention are unjustified. Critics have alleged, for example, that completely unregulated markets create poverty as well as wealth; that they result in significant inequalities of income and wealth, along with corresponding inequalities of political power; that they encourage environmental pollution and the wasteful or destructive use of natural resources; that they are incapable of efficiently or fairly performing some necessary social services, such as health care, education, and policing; and that they tend toward monopoly, which increases inefficiency and compounds the problem of inequality of income and wealth.
Libertarians have responded by questioning whether government regulation, which would replace one set of imperfect institutions (private businesses) with another (government agencies), would solve or only worsen these problems. In addition, several libertarian scholars have argued that some of these problems are not caused by free markets but rather result from the failures and inefficiencies of political and legal institutions. Thus, they argue that environmental pollution could be minimized in a free market if property rights were properly defined and secured.
Libertarianism is for Ayn Rand readers who thinks the "man" is the reason they're a colossal failures. However, the geniuses who actually think it's a worthy proposal, know that it'd be such a colossal failure that their best bet is to provide UBI to keep the philosophy afloat.
Didn't you self identify as a socialist or communist at one point? Below is my boy Rand talking about Libertarianism if you need additional information. I hope he runs in 2020, I think that would be the tops.
Yeah. Doesn't mean I can't understand the political philosophy of a 2nd grader.
Also Rand Paul got his ass whooped on for not clearing his brush and had the dude charged with assaulting a senator. Rand is a bigger joke than his father. And he won't run, because he's Donny's plaything.
Yea, rand Paul pulled a Lindsey graham and went full blown sell out.
“To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public.”
Didn't you self identify as a socialist or communist at one point? Below is my boy Rand talking about Libertarianism if you need additional information. I hope he runs in 2020, I think that would be the tops.
Let's go Rand! Run for the Libertarian Party!
The voice of reason for the American People! And the only politician with any kind of morals!
He doesn't have morals. He charged his neighbor for assaulting a member of congress over a yard waste dispute. Then he sued the guy for 500k dollars. The dude is a joke, who uses federal law when it suits him.
He doesn't have morals. He charged his neighbor for assaulting a member of congress over a yard waste dispute. Then he sued the guy for 500k dollars. The dude is a joke, who uses federal law when it suits him.
He doesn't have any morals because he sued a guy who physically assaulted him and broke 7 of his ribs? Are you mental or just high?
