You may have heard that Wisconsin Supreme Court justice David Prosser allegedly put his hands around the neck of justice Ann Walsh Bradley in an argument in her office. Justice Bradley has accused Justice Prosser of doing this just before the vote that upheld the union busting bill.

It appears that after Justice Bradley made the accusation, Bill Leuders of the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism wrote a news story that said, “Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice David Prosser allegedly grabbed fellow Justice Ann Walsh Bradley around the neck in an argument in her chambers earlier this month.” Which is true; it is alleged that Prosser did that.

Then, as more information on the story unfolded, the story was revised to include this new information, which alleges that Prosser was defending himself from a frenzied onslaught by Justice Bradley. The newer story replaced the older one. And it clearly says that the story has been changed from an earlier version.

This is an old practice going back to the days when wire services sent updates to newspapers via those old machines that were installed in every newsroom and which continuously spewed out typed copies of stories sent via telegraph. My mind is going blank over what we used to call them. But if there was a breaking story, over a period of time you’d get several versions of the same story, each one rewritten to include whatever new information or corrections came to light, with instructions that this version replaced the earlier version. Newspapers would print whichever version was most recent when the paper was “put to bed” and ready for printing.

New information was not just tacked on to the end of the story but incorporated into it, so that it was ready to be typeset into newspapers without revision. It was the practice in those days to write news stories with the essential information at the top, so that if the text ran too long to fit the column allocated to it, you could just lop off the last few paragraphs and not lose anything essential.

But Ann Althouse, apparently assuming that journalists go by blogger’s rules, smells a rat.

Yesterday morning, I first read the story written by Bill Lueders [note: link didn’t work at the time I wrote this, but I’ll put it in anyway — B.] — of the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism — saying that “Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice David Prosser allegedly grabbed fellow Justice Ann Walsh Bradley around the neck in an argument in her chambers earlier this month.”

I’m linking to the publication of the article in the Wisconsin State Journal, because it seems to be the original version of what Lueders wrote. The version that now appears at the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism has been — according to a note in red at the top, time-stamped 10:15 p.m. — “updated to reflect reports of a statement from Prosser denying the allegations.” But “updated” does not mean that there is an update at the bottom of the original text, adding new material or noting mistakes. The article has been rewritten, so the flaws that I am going to write about here can no longer be detected.

Well yes, Ann, that’s kind of standard practice when a story has changed substantially from an earlier version. And stories change because more information comes out over time. This is how news works. Often the first reports of an incident have errors or missing pieces, because if you sit around and wait for all the information to come out, you will have been scooped by the other newsies by several hours. So you run with whatever information you do have that seems solid, usually draped with a lot of “allegedlys,” and then send corrected stories as updates, with the stories rewritten so that new information is incorporated into the text.

One reason this is still done is that it’s assumed most readers don’t get past the first paragraph or two. So if you’re just adding new information or corrections to the end of the old story, a lot of people won’t see the corrections. Is that what you want?

So far, I haven’t seen any news report that says Justice Prosser really did try to strangle Justice Bradley, just that Justice Bradley alleged that he tried to strangle her. It is beyond dispute that Justice Bradley made the allegation. And when one state supreme court justice accuses another of assault, that’s pretty big news. That’s not a story any newsie would sit on waiting for all the counter-accusations to come to light.

Althouse is picking news stories apart trying to show that there was some dastardly plot afoot to make Justice Prosser look bad. But news is what it is. And you know that if a liberal justice were accused of assaulting a conservative one, she’d be screaming her head off for all the gory details to come out NOW NOW NOW.

Via Steve Benen — Georgia recently passed a law that drove undocumented workers out of the state. But there were unintended consequences —

The resulting manpower shortage has forced state farmers to leave millions of dollars’ worth of blueberries, onions and other crops unharvested and rotting in the fields. It has also put state officials into something of a panic at the damage they’ve done to Georgia’s largest industry.

Oopsie!

The fire-breathing nativists who blame all social ills on illegal immigrants need to face up to the fact that chunks of the American economy require undocumented labor to function as they are functioning. Even if, hypothetically, we decide it’s all right to pay more for our groceries to reduce agriculture’s dependence on undocumented workers, that would also mean American food products would be uncompetitive in the global market.

Given high unemployment, would American-born workers be able to take up the slack?

According to the survey, more than 6,300 of the unclaimed jobs pay an hourly wage of $7.25 to $8.99, or an average of roughly $8 an hour. Over a 40-hour work week in the South Georgia sun, that’s $320 a week, before taxes, although most workers probably put in considerably longer hours. Another 3,200 jobs pay $9 to $11 an hour. And while our agriculture commissioner has been quoted as saying Georgia farms provide “$12, $13, $14, $16, $18-an-hour jobs,” the survey reported just 169 openings out of more than 11,000 that pay $16 or more.

In addition, few of the jobs include benefits — only 7.7 percent offer health insurance, and barely a third are even covered by workers compensation.

In other words, this is very hard work that doesn’t pay a living wage. So what’s the free-market solution? Oh, wait — undocumented workers are the free-market solution. Never mind.

Watch senators Franken and Sanders try to explain arithmetic to a tree stump:

See also Steve Benen and the Booman plus “Rand Paul, Making a Name for Himself.”

I haven’t had time to think much about the announced troops withdrawal from Afghanistan. The commentaries I have seen have all complained it is either too much or not enough. The Washington Post says the plan is going over well in Europe, though.

Meanwhile — Robert Greenwald writes about the way the Koch brothers use money to plant falsehoods in our collective brains and thereby manipulate public opinion. You know the story — they pay “experts” in the think tanks they support to crank out “authoritative” arguments for the crackpot ideas the Kochs want to put over on the public. And these crackpot ideas become conventional wisdom in media, repeated over and over without critical evaluation, and soon most Americans have been properly indoctrinated into believing whatever the Kochs want us to believe.

Now, this isn’t new, and it isn’t just the Koch brothers. In fact, the Koch brothers are relatively new to the propaganda biz. The Heritage Foundation, for example, was founded in 1973 with money from Richard Mellon Scaife and Joseph Coors.
The Koch boys are just adding to a propaganda-catapulting infrastructure built by the previous generation.

The right-wing echo chamber became so effective that sometime in the 1980s genuinely progressive ideas were shouted out of mass media and the nation’s public political discourse. For many years the only opinions expressed in mass media were degrees of conservatism (this includes the media figures frequently called upon to represent liberals, but who were actually moderate conservatives). It was only because of the Web that a few lonely voices — once again, I salute the pioneering site Media Whores Online — were able to find a national audience and begin to push back.

But reading through the comments to Greenwald’s post revealed that few of them grasped what he was talking about. One couldn’t see the difference between what the Koch brothers are doing and lobbying. Most of the comments amount to bickering over the status of Social Security, the particular issue that Greenwald uses to illustrate Koch brother influence. They aren’t seeing the bigger picture and its implications.

It occurs to me that this is something like a corporation that is “too big to fail,” because if it fails the entire economy will go down with it. Likewise, the VRWC is a conspiracy so immense, or complex, to grasp. Or, apparently, many people lack the mental capacity to grasp it. And at this point, if it were to fail, entire worlds of views and beliefs that people have constructed around themselves would fail, also. Which is why it won’t fail.

Stephen Metcalf’s “The Liberty Scam” is a must-read, even though a number of critics have found some factual errors — Brad DeLong, for example, questions a quote attributed to John Maynard Keynes.

And a central conceit of the article — that a fellow who helped build the philosophical foundations of today’s libertarianism eventually disavowed libertarianism — is overstated, it seems. Robert Nozick’s views became more moderate, but I believe he continued to call himself a libertarian to the end of his days.

Nevertheless, I think Metcalf’s larger argument is spot on: The “liberty” promoted by libertarians is a scam. It’s a utopian fantasy that assumes individuals acting in rational self-interest will create an economically just society in which people are rewarded according to what they contribute, and a free market naturally will generate and distribute what goods and services people need.

The fly in the ointment is that humans rarely act according to rational self-interest. Indeed, consumerist capitalism depends on our not being all that rational and buying a lot of stuff we don’t actually need. And the accumulation of wealth so vast one has to contrive things to spend it on also has nothing to do with rational self-interest. Most of us are a twitching mass of desire, insecurity, and social programming, irrationally reaching out to whatever we think will soothe our existential angst.

But libertarians are people irrationally in love with a grand idea, and they refuse to see that their beloved not only doesn’t love them back, but is using them and probably turning tricks on the side. Predictably, true believers at Cato and Reason reacted to Metcalf with a petulant defense of their beloved’s charms while ignoring the core of his arguments. The Reason reactor, Matt Welch, asserts that libertarians do not approve of grossly overcompensated bankers being propped up by guarantees by the Federal Reserve, while being oblivious to the fact that such bankers are the inevitable result of cockamamie libertarian ideas about deregulating everything.

Nozick’s role in libertarian history was to write a book titled Anarchy, State, and Utopia. “Prior to Anarchy,” Metcalf writes, “‘liberty’ was a virtual synonym for rolling back labor unions and progressive taxation, a fig leaf for the class interests of the Du Ponts and the B.F. Goodriches. After Anarchy, ‘liberty’ was a concept as worthy of academic dignity as the categorical imperative.”

Nozick wrote his book in the early 1970s, the point at which regulations and progressive taxation had made the distribution of wealth in the U.S. as flat as it has ever been, before or since. And academics like Nozick were at the peak of their incomes, before or since.

Buccaneering entrepreneurs, boom-and-bust markets, risk capital–these conveniently disappeared from Nozick’s argument because they’d all but disappeared from capitalism. In a world in which J.P. Morgan and Cornelius Vanderbilt have been rendered obsolete, reduced to historical curios, to a funny old-style man, imprisoned in gilt frames, the professionals–the scientists, engineers, professors, lawyers and doctors–correspondingly rise in both power and esteem. And in a world in which the professions are gatekept by universities, which in turn select students based on their measured intelligence, the idea that talent is mental talent, and mental talent is, not only capital, but the only capital, becomes easier and easier for a humanities professor to put across. Hence the terminal irony of Anarchy: Its author’s audible smugness in favor of libertarianism was underwritten by a most un-libertarian arrangement–i.e., the postwar social compact of high marginal taxation and massive transfers of private wealth in the name of the very “public good” Nozick decried as nonexistent.

And the screw takes one last turn: By allowing for the enormous rise in (relative) income and prestige of the upper white collar professions, Keynesianism created the very blind spot by which professionals turned against Keynesianism. Charging high fees as defended by their cartels, cartels defended in turn by universities, universities in turn made powerful by the military state, many upper-white-collar professionals convinced themselves their pre-eminence was not an accident of history or the product of negotiated protections from the marketplace but the result of their own unique mental talents fetching high prices in a free market for labor. Just this cocktail of vanity and delusion helped Nozick edge out Rawls in the marketplace of ideas, making Anarchy a surprise best-seller, it helped make Ronald Reagan president five years later. So it was the public good that killed off the public good.

Metcalf also points out,

I like to think that when Nozick published Anarchy, the levee broke, the polite Fabian consensus collapsed, and hence, in rapid succession: Hayek won the Nobel Prize in economics in 1974, followed by Milton Friedman in ‘75 [1976], the same year Thatcher became Leader of the Opposition, followed by the California and Massachusetts tax revolts, culminating in the election of Reagan, and … well, where it stops, nobody knows.

Thus began the long, slow slide downward in the quality of life and real income of the American middle class.

But because the libertarian definition of “liberty” really is the fig leaf for class interests of the very wealthy, who these days can use their wealth to manipulate public opinion through mass media, the phantom promises of libertarianism are turning us all into the serfs of corporatism.

When Hayek insists welfare is the road is to serfdom, when Nozick insists that progressive taxation is coercion, they take liberty hostage in order to prevent a reasoned discussion about public goods from ever taking place. “According to them, any intervention of the state in economic life,” a prominent conservative economist once observed of the early neoliberals, “would be likely to lead, and even lead inevitably to a completely collectivist Society, Gestapo and gas chamber included.” Thus we are hectored into silence, and by the very people who purport to leave us most alone.

See also “The Failure of Rational Choice Philosophy.”