An excellent turn of logic

Here:

"I think (the ultra-wealthy) actually have an insufficient influence," Griffin said in an interview at Citadel's downtown office. "Those who have enjoyed the benefits of our system more than ever now owe a duty to protect the system that has created the greatest nation on this planet."

You don't usually see such straightforward illustrations of the concept of ideology as the representation of class interest as the general interest.

Stocks and bonds are time machines for money

This is obnoxious, arguing against taxes on capital gains:

. . .consider twin brothers who each make $100,000 in wage income. Most people would regard these two people as equally well off, even if one freely chose to consume his income now, while the other chose to consume later. . . .

The mistake people make is forgetting that the present value of $120,000 worth of consumption 20 years in the future is the same as $60,000 today. And in a sense that should be obvious, as both brothers are free to spend their money when they choose in the no-tax situation, so obviously the thrifty brother would not be economically “better off” merely because he chose a different year to consume his income. Both are equally “wealthy”, where wealth is the present value of lifetime consumption.

Invest in the stock market or in bonds through mutual funds, and you can expect to double your money in 10 years or so. (Why the author refers to 20 is beyond me, since it implies a very low rate of return, under 5%.) How to understand this increase in wealth? For the orthodox economist, it can be seen as compensation for the "opportunity cost" of not spending the money now, but instead waiting for several years. And so, as it says above, the "present value" of the spending-in-the-future is actually just the same as the spending it now; it's just a matter of taste which of the options one chooses. Returns to investment--interest on loans and profit distributed through dividends and stock price increases--are thus just the mechanism that transforms money-now into its equivalent in money-in-the-future. Stocks and bonds are time machines for money.

In typical fashion for neoclassical economics, this makes a sudden and totally unexplained jump from, "Returns on investment could be thought of as the compensation of the opportunity costs for delayed consumption" to the statement that "Returns to investment actually are . . . etc." There is no impulse whatsoever to ask whether the little theoretical story he tells about the two twins actually describes any significant proportion of those who receive capital gains income, or whether, instead, what portion is compensation in the form of stock options or the primary form of income for capitalists and rentiers.

I should note that the writer does go on to make some very reasonable arguments on tax policy, saying in effect that whatever form it takes compensation for work or the primary income of an investor should be taxed as regular income. So, really, he admits that much of what is currently taxes as "capital gains" doesn't fit his story, and so is exempt from his argument for not taxing it.

But leaving that aside, the fundamental issue is that dividends and interest do not neutrally convert money-now into money-later. They are, instead, shares of the social product of the economy and so financial assets (stocks and bonds) represent not times machines for money but claims on such shares of the social product--typically either claims on the flow of profit from capitalist enterprise or on tax power of the state. The problem with not taxing capital gains is that it would in effect turn the distribution of profit through interest or dividends into a way to insulate that income from ever having to contribute to the social functions undertaken by the state. This already happens with the special low rate on capital gains.

“Implicit in Aizawa’s confused rhetoric was he idea of an emperor who was both virtue and power, who was being but was involved in doing, who adjusted but also acted”

This comes from Harootunian's Toward Restoration. It's an intellectual history of the lead-up to the Meiji Restoration. This sentence is typical in the way it tried to present that history as a dramatic development: Aizawa was "confused", such that even as he affirmed the well-established delegation of authority by the emperor to shogun and lords, he was laying the "implicit" basis for a different, indeed revolutionary idea, in which the political power of the shogun could come into conflict with the actual manifestation of the authority of the emperor.

On the one hand, I acknowledge in principle the validity of this kind of historiography: historical action occurs within a symbolic environment. Individuals have to make an effort to understand the conditions and forces at work around them, and when they act, it is articulated through the understanding they are able to come to. As conditions change with time and interact with social action, the understanding too will develop, and this is the medium through which social actors adapt to their changing reality. The narrative of this development of the understanding of social reality is thus an important part of making sense of history.

Yet, on the other hand, in a work like Harootunian's, there seems to be a more dubious tendency for the internal drama of interpretations of the world to supplant the complex of social relations of which discursive interpretations are one moment. There is no historical imperative that actions should follow from, or even be compatible with, the principles that intellectuals of a given time and place announce as authoritative. Precisely because historical texts are almost always "confused" on some level, when individuals take the understandings of an intellectual milieu and turn them into action, there is any amount of room for flexibility.

In fact, Tokugawa-era Japan is an excellent example of this, for even as its prominent ideologues (such as Aizawa's teacher Fujita Yukoku, as described by Harootunian) were declaring the need to strengthen the traditional class structure, including the primacy of the "military" ruling class and the division between peasant agriculture and urban commerce, the very reassertion to lordly authority vis-a-vis a "corrupt" shogunate that was being accomplished by the ostensibly traditionalistic kansei reforms of Matsudaira Sadanobu in fact created an opening for various domains to experiment with the promotion of commerce in rural areas and the granting of increased administrative authority to lower samurai and even gentry to accomplish these new economic initiatives. Thus, the intellectual tendency, which Fujita represents quite well, to extol the consolidation of the political position of lords in their domains was indeed a guiding trend of the period, but it manifested itself in policies that cut against the letter of the social order these same intellectuals claimed to defend. Indeed, whether or not the intellectuals acknowledged it, the results of these policies would have deep consequences for the social environment that their successors--not to mention the political leaders they sought to influence--would confront in subsequent decades.

Marx and Engels show a healthy suspicion when, in the German Ideology, they warn against taking historical epochs "at their own word" by reproducing without criticism the representations intellectuals of a given period leave behind of their own society. Leaving aside any mechanical theory that such statements are mere representations of class interests, it does remain the case that they are the product of groups of people whose position in society is based on the prestige of the discursive tradition of which they are the designated guardians. Tokugawa Japan is not unusual in that many of these ideologues are quite literally salaried functionaries, maintained by rulers precisely to teach and write on it. Yet, the practical relationship between the rulers and the intellectuals is in no way fixed in stone: the classic image of ideology, in which intellectuals provide a sugared image of society to legitimate it, is one possibility. Another is that intellectuals are perfectly analogous to the craftsmen, artists, musicians, and so on who elites also tend to support simply to provide an aesthetic gloss to their lives, or to assert all the more powerfully their position as elites--in such a case, it is imaginable that intellectuals are given a certain free hand to develop their discourses that matches with the practical irrelevance of what they write to the actual exercise of their patrons' rule. Yet another is that the intellectuals are technicians of the rulers, producing tools that will indeed--though here again, probably only at the selective discretion--be put into practice by elites in their strategies of domination. Indeed, these possibilities are not mutually exclusive: individuals might do all of them and others at different times or in different contexts.

The point is that the concrete connection between intellectuals and the other relations of society matters immensely for making sense of how the texts such people produce fit into the flow of historical social life. It cannot be presumed that the internal drama of the contradiction and development of principles in the discourse of intellectuals itself amounts to the development of political action or economic behavior or any other kind of social relations. The emergence of a concept of imperial rule is certainly an important historical question about the twilight of the Tokugawa era in Japan, but the relationship between the emergence of such a concept and the collapse of Tokugawa rule in favor of the supposedly direct authority of the Emperor must be understood as an open question--which cannot be answered by appeal only to the logic of the texts in which the concept appears.

The risk of being wrong

Something I hope accomplish by having this blog is to break down, or at least weaken, my inhibition about laying out arguments unless I can and do fully qualify and support each statement. Striving for that is certainly a good impulse, but often it’s only possible to work out the implications of and gather the evidence for a claim once you’ve hammered out its details by putting it down on paper, so that it becomes a solid thing that can be pointed to and checked back on. Sometimes even, I suspect, it’s necessary to glass over one dubious proposition in order to clear the way to investigating, or laying out an explanation for, a more important point. To put it perhaps too dramatically, making an argument requires taking a risk—that you might be wrong. It is impossible to eliminate this risk permanently or with complete certainty, and indeed, writing that refuses to take it on will find itself pushed into claims that are either so conservative or else so obscure that they don’t even warrant objection. It will never have to suffer being told it’s wrong, but neither will it excite anyone’s interest.

Wait, if the CDS weren't a problem what was all the fuss about?

And why didn't Greece tell bondholders to go fuck themselves a year and a half ago? Of course, I wouldn't presume Planet Money is above publicizing pure propaganda:

In the end, though, Greece wound up forcing all bondholders to take a hit. And today, the committee that decides these things said, yes, Greece did default. And yes, CDS on Greek bonds will pay off. (Actually, the committee said a "restructuring credit event has occurred with respect to the Hellenic Republic." Which is the same thing.)

The CDS contracts will be settled by auction later this month, and it seems unlikely that the payouts will cause much trouble in the financial system.

The net payout on Greek CDS will likely be less than $3 billion, and most of that money has already been set aside by the companies who will have to make the payments, according to ISDA, the international body that oversees CDS.

More "market monetarism"

I.e. Scott Sumner

On the other hand NGDP is totally transparent.  It’s easy to understand if Bernanake says he’s printing money so that American incomes can grow at a steady rate of roughly 4% per capita.  If growth in average incomes has slowed due to recession, then it’s easy to understand why the Fed would think higher income growth would help the average American.

This is supposed to an alternative to the Fed targeting inflation. The idea is that when nominal incomes fail to grow steadily--and they either stagnate, fall, or accelerate rapidly--this has a tendency to gum up the works of the capitalist economy. The intuitive sense of these comes from the old problem that capitalism depends on the self-interested independent action of a large number of consumers and, especially, asset-holders, which can result in all kinds of social "irrationality" from individually rational activity. But how much of that irrationality can really be mitigated just by ensuring a steady and predictable nominal growth rate?

(There is also, I should note, a problem of mean vs. median: given the political economy of the past few decades, a 4% increase in per capita income entails much less than that for ~90% of the population and much more for 1%.)

Scott Sumner is a fascinating phenomenon

From this:

In late 2008 the markets were telling us that the Fed was making a tragic mistake by allowing NGDP expectations to plunge.  But the economics profession didn’t listen, as they view stock investors as being irrational.  Economists were obsessed with the notion that the real problem was banking distress, and that fixing banking would fix the problem.  No, the real problem wasn’t banking, the real problem was nominal.

I don't understand the full argument yet, but he advances the position that it is possible to engage in "nominal" planning of the economy, in effect to declare through the control of a fiat currency that the economy would grow at a constant rate in nominal terms. In this way, he seems to claim, the more violent fluctuations of a capitalist economy can be avoided as capitalists and rentiers can, indeed have to, make plans based on a predictable path of the nominal size of the economy (and thus of their money-denominated assets).

But there's a catch

Peter Dorman notes Alex Tabarrok saying nice things about active labor market policies in northern Europe. But, Dorman points out:

Just one thing though.  What makes these apprenticeships so valuable for the students?  And why are employers willing to pay more for well-trained employees than dumbing down the jobs for minimum wages or simply outsourcing as much as possible?  Each country is different, but they all share part of two answers—labor market regulation and stakeholder corporate governance.  The first of these is especially crucial to mass apprenticeship: to maintain demand for high-end labor, there need to be rules mandating employment rights, credentials and, especially, unions.  To minimize outsourcing, labor and the community need a strong voice in corporate management.  In addition, the whole system is nurtured and nudged with multifarious forms of public subsidy.

To put it simply, if you want the social democratic educational strategy, you’re going to need a social democracy to go along with it.  I’m happy to have Alex on board.

Is this last comment supposed to facetious? Let's look at what Tabarrok actually says:

Consider those offered in Europe. In Germany, 97 percent of students graduate from high school, but only a third of these students go on to college. In the United States, we graduate fewer students from high school, but nearly two-thirds of those we graduate go to college. So are German students poorly educated? Not at all.

Instead of college, German students enter training and apprenticeship programs—many of which begin during high school. By the time they finish, they have had a far better practical education than most American students—equivalent to an American technical degree—and, as a result, they have an easier time entering the work force. Similarly, in Austria, Denmark, Finland, the Netherlands, Norway, and Switzerland, between 40 to 70 percent of students opt for an educational program that combines classroom and workplace learning.

In the United States, "vocational" programs are often thought of as programs for at-risk students, but that's because they are taught in high schools with little connection to real workplaces. European programs are typically rigorous because the training is paid for by employers who consider apprentices an important part of their current and future work force. Apprentices are therefore given high-skill technical training that combines theory with practice—and the students are paid! Moreover, instead of isolating teenagers in their own counterculture, apprentice programs introduce teenagers to the adult world and the skills, attitudes, and practices that make for a successful career.

From the perspective of existing social democratic institutions, active labor market policies serve are a way to make those institutions pay for capitalists in the form of more productive workers and a more intensively employed labor force as a whole. It is the carrot to go along with the weakened-but-still-surviving stick of entrenched working-class power. From the perspective of a thoroughly liberal capitalist economy like the U.S., and coming out of the mouth of an avowed libertarian, praise for such policies must give rise to at least a little suspicion. Notice that in Tabarrok's discussion, the apprenticeships are seen only in terms of creating an appealing labor force. Why are they able to get good jobs? Because employers "consider [them] an important part of their current and future work force." "Look," it seems to say, "even the European social democracies are crafting their policies so they benefit employers even as they seek to maintain the living standards of employees! So, of course, the U.S. needs to do the same and not get distracted with coercive policies like the minimum wage, support for unionization, and so on." Dorman's point is a valiant attempt to bend away from this implication to say that, well, no, it's only because there's already a well-established set of institutions enforcing the power of labor and limiting that of employers that these policies work at all, so if we want to follow the lead of the germans and dutch, we're going to have to do a lot of work on both sides of the equation, not just on "labor supply side" policies like apprenticeships.

Sadly, I suspect his point will fall on deaf ears, even though it's far from controversial in the comparative political economy literature.

III. the 18th century equilibrium

A Sketch of the Capitalist Revolution in Europe (III)

Eighteen-century continental Europe had arrived of something like an equilibrium. True, wars between the various states still broke out over territorial and dynastic disputes, but they never approached the duration or intensity of the competition between France and Spain in the 16th c, or the 30-years war at the beginning of the 17th, or even the repeated wars of Louis XIV's reign in France. Likewise, a truce of sorts had emerged in the centuries-long fight between monarchs and nobles: the former enjoyed formal superiority, while the latter maintained (or even reasserted) a dominant position in the offices of the royal administration. Something was brewing in England, which manifested itself in its taking an increasing role in overseas trade at the expense of the Dutch not to mention its victory over the French in the struggle over imperial dominance of the Americas. However, for the rest of Europe this did not have the appearance of the an epochal shift. So what if London was the new Amsterdam, which had anyways only been the new Antwerp, which itself had risen at the expense of the Italian mercantile cities? And after all, England swiftly lost the majority of its North American colonies to rebellion--in a kind of pyrrhic revenge for the French.

Why would I ever read Ross Douthat?

But alas, I made the mistake of skimming this.

He very well might be right on the merits against Julian Sanchez, but who cares? I can think of few things less fun than judging spats between the social conservatives and the libertarians.

However, he also cites (via my favorite bourgeois economist) this passage from Wealth of Nations:

In every civilised society, in every society where the distinction of ranks has once been completely established, there have been always two different schemes or systems of morality current at the same time; of which the one may be called the strict or austere; the other the liberal, or, if you will, the loose system. The former is generally admired and revered by the common people: the latter is commonly more esteemed and adopted by what are called people of fashion. The degree of disapprobation with which we ought to mark the vices of levity, the vices which are apt to arise from great prosperity, and from the excess of gaiety and good humour, seems to constitute the principal distinction between those two opposite schemes or systems. In the liberal or loose system, luxury, wanton and even disorderly mirth, the pursuit of pleasure to some degree of intemperance, the breach of chastity, at least in one of the two sexes, etc., provided they are not accompanied with gross indecency, and do not lead to falsehood or injustice, are generally treated with a good deal of indulgence, and are easily either excused or pardoned altogether. In the austere system, on the contrary, those excesses are regarded with the utmost abhorrence and detestation. The vices of levity are always ruinous to the common people, and a single week’s thoughtlessness and dissipation is often sufficient to undo a poor workman for ever, and to drive him through despair upon committing the most enormous crimes. The wiser and better sort of the common people, therefore, have always the utmost abhorrence and detestation of such excesses, which their experience tells them are so immediately fatal to people of their condition. The disorder and extravagance of several years, on the contrary, will not always ruin a man of fashion, and people of that rank are very apt to consider the power of indulging in some degree of excess as one of the advantages of their fortune, and the liberty of doing so without censure or reproach as one of the privileges which belong to their station. In people of their own station, therefore, they regard such excesses with but a small degree of disapprobation, and censure them either very slightly or not at all.

The thing is, that both he and Cowen misread Smith rather badly, as advancing something along the lines of Charles Murray's recent book, that the sexual revolution, etc., has been integrated within an overall framework of discipline among the elite but has basically served to erode social order among everyone else. In fact, Smith is arguing the exact opposite, that the "common people" are more morally rigorous as a matter of material necessity, whereas the wealthy are libertine as a mark of their status. Indeed, in the section where there passage comes from, he goes on to note to argue, "There are two very easy and effectual remedies, however, by whose joint operation the state might, without violence, correct whatever was unsocial or disagreeably rigorous in the morals of all the little sects into which the country was divided." That is to say, that Smith is not worried--like Murray, Douthat, etc.--about instilling rigorous morality in the masses but instead in tempering the "excessive rigour" that comes from "carrying [the austere system of morals to some degree of folly and extravagance."

Oh no! Demand for labor might be increasing!

“The slowdown in productivity growth is now making it much harder for firms to achieve double-digit rates of earnings growth,” said Erik Johnson, U.S. economist at IHS Global Insight. As a result, he expects the profit share of gross domestic product has likely peaked.

Eric Green, chief rate strategist at TD Securities, says the margin compression will put “more emphasis on top-line revenue growth to justify market valuations.”

The danger, he adds, is that higher unit labor costs driven by higher real compensation could slow future job gains.

“Employers [will] squeeze more out of the existing labor pool as they scramble to maintain profit margins in a growth environment that remains okay, but far from robust,” he warns.

So . . . anything less than employers making out like bandits is a "danger"? No correction to the trend will be accepted?

An alternative translation: "Sorry workers, we just didn't need 10-20% of you for the last couple years, so we couldn't help but pay you less relative to revenues. And don't even think about making up some up the difference now that we want to hire more of you again."

Oh dear

Alex Tabarrok is not my favorite bourgeois economist.

Thus, in Florence, the epicenter of the Renaissance, we see five factors propelling that city's innovation: patents, prizes, education, global markets, and cosmopolitanism, an openness to ideas from around the world. How do these factors apply today? What combination of incentives and foundation will bring the greatest innovation to the modern world? How can we create a 21st-century Renaissance?

These questions are especially important now because the early 21st century has not been kind to the United States. The new century dawned with the destruction of the World Trade Center, and its first decade closed with the worst recession since the Great Depression. We face continuing wars, significant debt and divisive politics. Not all of our problems are recent in origin or likely to be resolved quickly. Most significantly, productivity growth, our best measure of innovation, fell dramatically in the United States in the post-1973 era and has not yet picked up again.

And what was the economic growth like in renaissance Italy (or more specifically, Tuscany)? Per this,

Year	GDP (1420-40 = 1)	Per capita GDP (1420-40 = 1)
1310	1.63	.87
1325	1.57	.83
1350	1.21	.91 (plague does wonders)
1375	.96	.87
1400	1.06	.94
1425	1.01	1.01
1450	1.03	.98 (uh-oh, wrong direction)
1475	1.05	.87
1500	1.04	.82

Going from 1310 to the 2 peaks of GDP per capita (1 in 1365 and 1.13 in 1413), that's a yearly growth rate of .25%. Go innovation! (Yes, that's just barely lower than the growth rate of median U.S. household income from 1978, before the Volcker recession, to 2009, during the current recession.)

The "Great Divergence"

I'm reading the Cambridge Economic History of Modern Europe, which was published in 2010 and represents a digestion of the state-of-the-art in mainstream economic history--which is to say, cliometrics and institutionalism. The final chapter is about the so-called "Great Divergence" between Asia and Europe, and the authors discuss the various positions on the relative levels of economic development of India, China, and the European countries, ultimately coming down against Pomeranz who wants to claim that the most advanced regions in China were comparable to England in the 18th century. They then go on to suggest explanations of the gap.

This is the conclusion of the chapter:

The survey presented in this chapter takes us closer to the traditional position on comparative living standards across Eurasia than to the revisionists. The evidence we have seen indicates that differences in living standards between Asia and northwest Europe had already emerged in the early modern era, and only widened further with the onset of the Industrial Revolution. The advanced parts of Asia – India and China – looked more similar to the backward parts of Europe than to the more advanced northwest. The Great Divergence was well under way in the seventeenth century.

What strikes me strange is that they focus overwhelmingly on the first part (the quantitative divergence between "northwest Europe" and Asia, which is the "Great Divergence" that "was well under way in the seventeenth century") at the expense of the second (the similarity between Asia and "the backwards part of Europe"). Together, however, these two points suggest that the real divergence wasn't so much between Europe and Asia in the 18th century as it was between England and Holland on the one hand (and the latter even falls back a little in early 19th c) and everywhere else on the other, which included both the rest of Europe as well as the major Asian economies. Central Europe diverges from Asia only in the 19th c--i.e. when it is reached by industrialization.

What I think this means is that the (NW) Europe-Asia comparison is a bit of a red herring. The question is what happened in Holland and England before the 18th c, which led to the divergent pattern that is already visible by that century. If we're going to do comparative analysis to try to capture and explain this divergence, shouldn't the first step be to look at the most immediate contrasting cases, namely France and the German principalities, and the Hapsburg Low Countries? That way, political, cultural, even technological, geographical and climactic factors are held relatively constant, as opposed to comparisons between England and China or India or Japan in which those factors are all vastly different.

After that, it would make sense to ask, first, whether what caused the gap to open up between, say, England and France through the mid-19th c also led to a divergence between England and, say, China. Then, second, whether the process by which France (and Germany, etc.) began to close that gap in the 19th c was similar or different to the way that Japan was able to begin to close that gap as well at the end of the century, and what it was that blocked that process from occurring in China and India until the latter half of the 20th c. Indeed, when the question is asked in this way, the role of imperialism seems much more important, in contrast to the authors' position, which is that it can't really explain the appearance of divergence already in the 18th c.

You might as well go all out if you're going to do John Cage

CAGE 18' 12", A Simultaneous Performance of Cage Works
·· Inlets (Improvisation II)
·· 0' 00" (4' 32" No. 2)
·· Duet for Cymbal
·· 45' for a Speaker

I do hope it is really simultaneous and not just sequential.

I was so surprised to learn that Jack Goldstone is into promoting revolutions abroad

Commenting on McCain's "bold" call for NATO intervention

Without substantial material support to the opposition, however, sanctions may have a different effect:  they may prompt Assad to fully crush the opposition as rapidly and completely as possible in order to eliminate any alternative before the external sanctions peel away his remaining support.
If Assad manages to remain in power, the result will be an emboldened Iran, with Syria more deeply in its debt, and greater confidence among Iran’s other regional allies, Hezbollah and Hamas.  Other counter-revolutionary forces in the region will gain confidence as well, and autocrats throughout the world are likely to draw the lesson that crushing any popular opposition quickly and thoroughly is far more likelier than reform to preserve their power.
In the late 18^th and early 19^th centuries, revolutions against absolute monarchies scored success after success, producing new constitutional regimes from 1776 in America to 1789 in France, and on to Holland and Belgium and Greece.  But in 1848 the wave broke and was turned back when Russia supported Austria’s counter-revolution.   Whether Iran and Russia help Syria to crush its popular revolt may similarly determine the fate of democracy across the region for decades to come.

 Ah yes, the neverending game of emboldening and (what's the opposite of emboldening?) Iran, Hezbollah and Hamas. But really, the surprising thing is his reference to "success after success" of 18th and 19th century revolutions . . . I always took him as more of a conservative, "revolutions often cause more harm than good" type. I guess I can see the other side of it though, since he tends to blame the short-sightedness of elites for the crises that lead to revolutions (a criticism he's been extending to the U.S. as well).

Wishful thinking

Noahpinion:

Given my history of critiquing libertarianism, it would hardly be surprising if I felt a flash of gleeful schadenfreude to see the dismay with which so many movement libertarians are reacting to the Koch takeover of the Cato Institute. But I don't. I just feel sad. Here are a bunch of smart people who truly, honestly believe in their worldview - a worldview that shares some key elements with my own - discovering for the first time that they are in fact merely a proxy army for people who don't take them or their worldview seriously at all.
. . .

If I were a meaner-spirited type of person, I would say that this realization is too little, too late - that libertarians spent decades being apologists, water-carriers, and useful idiots for authoritarians, and only now that their masters are reeling in the leash do they suddenly want out. But instead I say: Better late than never. You guys made mistakes before, but now you see the truth. First, realize that the conservative puppeteering of the libertarian movement is not an extremely recent phenomenon, but was always present at some level. And then start thinking about what kind of political agenda and rhetorical emphasis will actually promote liberty in America. 

Freed from the conservative yoke, libertarians will have huge potential to do a lot of real good for this fundamentally libertarian country.

What exactly is the capacity of the libertarian "movement" without the Koch-funded institutional infrastructure?

A friend of mine used to say that libertarianism was for people who were used to thinking of themselves as smarter than everyone around them, but weren't actually all that smart themselves.