The liberal left are among the most cognitive dissonant, and yes, they are often immature (literally)

The cognitive dissidence’s of liberal-left people are really quite immature. They preach and go on and on about tolerance of racial and cultural diversity. However, their belief in tolerance does not include political and economic diversity.

From “Green Mars” (the 2nd novel in Kim Stanley Robinson’s “Mars” trilogy), pp. 328-329, 1994 Hardcover edition:

“”The transnationals have collapsed down into the couple dozen largest of them,” he said in response to one question,” all of which have enterred into development contracts with more than one national government. We call those the metanationals. The biggest are Subarashii, Mitsubishi, Consolidated, Amexx, Armscor, Mahjari, and Praxis. The next ten or fifteen are also quite big, and after that you’re back down to transat size, but these are being quickly incorporates into the metanats. The big metanats are now the major world powers, insofar as they control the IMF, the World Bank, the Group of Eleven, and all their client countries.”

Sax asked him to define a metanational in more detail.

“About a decade ago we at Praxis were asked by Sri Lanka to come into their country and take over the economy and work on arbitration between the Tamils and the Singhalese. We did that and the results were good, but during the time of the arrangement it was clear that our relationship with a national government was a new kind of thing. It got noticed in certain circles. Then some years ago Amexx got into a disagreement with the Group of Eleven, and pulled all of its assets out of the Eleven and relocated them in the Philippines. The mismatch between Amexx and the Philippines, estimated in gross yearly product to be on the order of a hundred to one, resulted in a situation where Amexx in effect took that country over. That was the first real metanational, though it wasn’t clear that it was a new thing until their arrangement was imitated by Subarashii, when they shifted many of their operations into Brazil. It became clear that this was something new, not like the old flag-of-convenience relationship. A metanational takes over the foreign debt and the internal economy of its client countries, kind of like the UN did in Cambodia or Praxis did in Sri Lanka, but much more comprehensively. In these arrangements the client government becomes the enforcement agency of the metanational’s economic policies. In general they enforce what are called austerity measures, but all government employees are paid much more than they were before, including the army and police and intelligence operations. So at that point, the country is bought. And every metanational has the resources to but several countries…”

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This scenario is obviously being depicted as a “bad” thing (there is something of an exception to that, though…), but I’m guessing this scenario connects in some ways to some of the ideas/thoughts/issues discussed on this site. (I wish I had been able to post this beneath the “Free Zones” post or the “Innovation and Letting a Thousand Nations Bloom” post….)

You are falling victim to the romance of democracy, the idea that whatever the govt does to you is justified as long as you got a vote. If the majority votes to kill every man shorter than 5′ 6″, is my murder OK because I have a “representative”?

I’m not claiming that these issues are easy, or that one can construct an ideal political process where everyone is represented. Pretty much everyone disagrees with everyone else, even with libertarianism, about the details, so there have to be compromises where people don’t get their way – lots of them. But I think that libertarians can meaningfully claim to be disenfranchised, despite having a nominal vote, due to having few to no actual representatives. This is the same reason why regions that are ethnically and culturally homogeneous but are inside a larger state frequently want to secede. The Kurds don’t feel “represented” in a simple proportional voting system in Iraq – can you really blame them?

“Don’t you dare vanish, Hank Rearden! America needs you! You wouldn’t be so selfish?” amirite?