“I’d rather hang out with the liberals and argue about economics than hang out with the Republicans and argue about Darwin and stem cells.”

Reason, the best damn magazine you’re not reading (assuming, of course, that you don’t already read it), has a decent piece today about liberals and libertarians. This quotation by professor Jacob Levy from McGill University struck me as particularly important:

“If our core liberalism—if our roots in the struggle of common law against the absolutist king, or in Locke, or in Montesquieu, or in the American Revolution mean anything at all to us—then it means a four percentage-point difference in income tax rates is less important than removing the party of torture and detention without trial from power. That’s morally so overwhelmingly important as to make my traditional arguments about libertarians leaving the fusionist alliance with the right seem kind of silly.”

There’s a laundry list of issues on which libertarians and liberals ought to share at least some common ground: torture, war, criminal justice issues, the drug war, gay marriage, immigration, the death penalty, government transparency, privacy, reproductive rights, and free speech.

The Democrats have proven to be a miserable opposition party these last two years, and their excuse seems to have been that they couldn’t do X because the Republicans were running the show. On issue after issue, ranging from the Iraq war to FISA, they’ve proved to be not just incapable of stopping a Republican executive but all too frequently compliant. That excuse is now off the table — they’ve got commanding leads in both houses of Congress and a President with strong popular support. The questions that remain to be answered are how much the Democrats really believe in these values, and how exactly they will prioritize them.

Early results (and by that I mean yesterday’s election) are mixed. High Democratic turnouts helped pass bigoted, civil-liberties bashing state constitutional amendments in Florida, California and Arizona, while Democrats in Massachusetts decriminalized pot and Michigan voters legalized medicinal marijuana. This last issue is one on which President Obama has the potential to do some immediate good: If Obama stays good to his word and stops federal raids on legal, state-sanctioned medicinal marijuana dispensaries, perhaps we can stop ruining the lives of innocent citizens and throwing away tax dollars.

The results of half a dozen ballot initiatives clearly can’t be used as a true gauge of how the new Democratic government will run things; only time can answer that question definitively. But if President Obama decides to prioritize traditional liberal and libertarian values — equal protection under the law, social tolerance, privacy, constitutionally limited powers, and peace — the next four years will be a breath of fresh air.

The atmosphere in New York City

Less than an hour ago, walking from my office in the West Village to the Q train in Union Square, I heard constant shouts, cheers, and chants; passed a young woman singing the Star-Spangled Banner; and saw more smiling faces than I’ve ever seen on a New York street — or any street, for that matter. My wait for the train was accompanied by still more screams and yelps of joy, as each new group of people descended the stairs into the station, giddy and enthusiastic.

I stepped onto a Brooklyn-bound Q train not long after 1am. There was a short, five-second awkward silence. Then a young woman screamed “Obama!” and the entire train car erupted into raucous applause.

This may be short lived…

Our system worked today. The majority of the House of Representatives — which was always intended to be the branch most responsive to the will of the people — rejected what would have been a massive and disasterous government bailout.

I’m happy to say that I was wrong. Last week when I read about Paulson’s initial proposal for the bailout, I thought that the backing of the White House and the leaders of both parties, coupled with an atmosphere of fear and the need to “do something quickly,” would be more than enough to push it through. Instead, a coalition of far-left Democrats and the few remaining free-market Republicans, joined by many members of both parties worried about losing their seats in the upcoming elections, defeated the bill and came out victorious.

My gut still says the bill will resurface and will probably be passed, in some form or another. But today we won, and tomorrow, I’ll be quite happy to be wrong again.

A triumphant return

After months of delays, false promises, and distractions, Unschooled is back.

Since I last posted, dear reader (readers, even?),  much has happened: I graduated from engineering school, started my first full-time job, and moved into a new apartment. There was more, of course, but this site has never been about the nitty-gritty details of my life, and just because I updated the banner graphic does not mean that is about to change.

For the curious, the resurrection of Unschooled was delayed in no small part by the fact that I spent more time geeking out than getting the site back online. I switched hosting providers twice — from bluehost to VPSLink to Slicehost, where the site currently resides. I switched web servers twice — from Apache to nginx back to Apache. And I switched blogging software three times — from WordPress to Byteflow to Movable Type and back to WordPress, albeit a newer version. Needless to say, none of this was actually necessary in order to get the site back up and running.

So, despite my best efforts, the site is back, to which I can only say,

Welcome back.