I remember reading about the fire that destroyed 100 pieces of contemporary “art” in Charles Saatchi’s collection. The fire was generally thought to be an an appropriate act of God. Now I know why. See for yourself.
Month: July 2004
Why I Am Not a Conservative
Professor Bainbridge is shocked, simply shocked, by a passage from Randy Barnett’s post about “Libertarians on War”. Bainbridge says:
Do people really believe this crap?…The government as a whole is “unjust”? Please. I doubt whether Barnett believes such nonsense, but his post implies that some people do. Unfathomable.
Here then we find the essential difference between sensible conservatism and the lunacy of libertarian anarchy.
Bainbridge paints libertarians with too broad a brush. Admittedly, there are some sophomoric anarchists among us. Then there are thoughtful libertarians (Barnett and myself, among many) who understand that government has an important, if limited, role to play in the affairs of humankind. Government’s most important role is as the protector of life, liberty, and property.
Bainbridge goes on to quote A Nickel’s Worth of Free Advice, which quotes Russell Kirk:
[I]n any tolerable society, order is the first need. Liberty and justice may be established only after order is reasonably secure. But the libertarians give primacy to an abstract Liberty. Conservatives, knowing the ‘liberty inheres in some sensible object’, are aware that freedom may be found only within the framework of a social order, such as the Constitutional order of these United States. In exalting an absolute and indefinable “liberty” at the expense of order the libertarians imperil the very freedom that they praise.
Wrong, but not too bad. At least Kirk is on the verge of saying the right thing about the role of government. But then he says:
Society requires not only that the passions of individuals should be subjected, but that even in the mass and body, as well as in the individual, the inclinations of men should frequently be thwarted, their will controlled, and their passions brought into subjection.
I agree with Kirk if he means that the state may — in the name of protecting life, liberty, and property — protect us from — and punish — such acts as fraud, theft, assault, and murder. If he means that we must be censored or prosecuted for engaging in solitary and consensual acts that do not harm others, then he has gone down the slippery slope toward oppression. That’s what I fear Kirk has in mind when he says:
The libertarians contend — so far as they endure any binding at all — that the nexus of society is self-interest, closely joined to cash payment. But the conservatives declare that society is a community of souls, joining the dead, the living, and those yet unborn; and that it coheres through what Aristotle called friendship and Christians call love of neighbor.
Calling society a “community of souls” is sheer romantic nonsense, and it’s but a step away from justifying a theocratic welfare state. There’s a lot more to libertarianism than “self-interest, closely joined to cash payment,” but I’d rather have such a “cold” society than Kirk’s suffocating Father-knows-best society.
In my “cold” society, those who choose to believe in “a community of souls” may practice that belief among themselves. They may even practice any form of “love of neighbor” they wish to, as long as their neighbor consents. But they may not impose their beliefs and practices on me. That’s libertarianism for you.
Finally, Bainbridge shouldn’t be too quick to condemn libertarians because some of us are kooks about government. “Kook” is an old and still valid adjective for many conservatives. But I wouldn’t dream of applying it to Professor Bainbridge.
Libertarian Nay-Saying on Foreign and Defense Policy, Revisited
UPDATED
I posted “Libertarian Nay-Saying on Foreign and Defense Policy on June 29. In that post I said
I’ve noticed that most “professional libertarians” — those affiliated with places like Cato Institute and Reason Foundation — have an isolationist (or “hands off”) view of foreign policy and military ventures….
It’s wise to be skeptical about the emanations from Foggy Bottom and the Pentagon. But knee-jerk isolationism is unwise — and unbecoming a libertarian. Libertarians generally take the view that defense is a legitimate function of government. Waiting until the enemy is at our shores or hidden among us isn’t an effective defense strategy….
Libertarian specialists in foreign and defense affairs would be more credible if they would spend more time saying what’s worthwhile and suitable, and less time saying “no” to whatever comes out of Foggy Bottom and the Pentagon.
In sum, libertarian think-tankers should be innovators, and not mere reactionaries, when it comes to foreign and defense policy. A detailed, coherent libertarian statement with a positive vision of foreign policy and military posture could be a compelling document….
P.S. A nutty, Mises Institute-type position paper that tries to explain why defense isn’t a public good will get you laughed out of town and might even cost you some big
I went on vacation the next day, and so I missed Randy Barnett’s June 30 post at The Volokh Conspiracy, in which Barnett says
the time may be ripe for a full fledged debate on the relationship between libertarianism and foreign policy. It appears that there is an assumption on the part of many libertarian intellectuals that libertarian principles entail a very specific version of “noninterventionism” in foreign policy….
I do fear that the recent anti war vociferousness of some libertarian intellectuals, of whom I have the highest regard and respect, may unfairly tag all libertarians with a very particular set of foreign policy positions about which even radical libertarians actually differ….
I confess that my instincts here are driven by the fact that I disagree sharply with the anti war stance of these libertarians, and they with me, but I do not believe my libertarian principles, or my commitment to them, have changed in the slightest….
Today Barnett writes
I was pleased to see that my suggestion a while back that there should be a debate on the relationship between Libertarianism and foreign policy was taken up by some bloggers. Most recently by Brian Doss at the always thoughtful Catallarchy (“The Problem with Libertarians Today”). Some…considered this an invitation to debate the merits of the war in Iraq, but I was more concerned with the degree to which Libertarianism qua Libertarianism says anything about foreign policy. Because Libertarianism is essentially a philosophy of individual rights, I doubt it says much about what policies either individuals or collective institutions ought to pursue other than that they should not violate the rights of individuals in pursuing them.
Even if, as many Libertarians believe, governments themselves inherently violate rights, it does not follow (as some Libertarians appear to assume) that everything such an unjust institution does is a rights violation….One of the biggest errors made by Libertarian anarchists is assuming that because an institution is an unjust monopoly (because it confiscates its income by force and puts its competitors out of business by force), this makes everything such institutions do also unjust. The latter proposition simply does not follow from the former.
As for Iraq, there were a number of valid legal justifications for initiating the latest hostilities, but if I start to describe them here I will provoke a different discussion than I intend. Any such discussion would inevitably implicate international law or The Law of Nations, which I also do not believe follows from Libertarian first principles. Sometimes it appears to me that the governments of “nations” are simply assumed by Libertarians to have the same sorts of rights in the international sphere that Libertarians specifies for individual persons….Other times even these same Libertarians know better.
However legal or justified the war in Iraq may have been, though, this does not make its initiation good foreign policy (though I think it was). And this is my point. I do not think Libertarianism qua Libertarianism tells us much about what good foreign policy may be, any more than it tells us what good business or personal policies may be. As was well-expressed by Duncan Frissell at Technoptimist (in a post with which I have some disagreement):
Libertarianism qua libertarianism is only a political philosophy and lacks theories of esthetics, ethics, theology, epistemology, and personal behavior. Libertarians as individuals are perfectly free within their political philosophy to espouse white supremacy, pacifism, private ownership of nuclear weapons, Anglo-Catholicism, atheism, the worship of Shiva, vegetarianism, the Atkins’ Diet, grammatical prescriptivism, progressive education, etc.
This claim is central to my recent paper “The Moral Foundations of Modern Libertarianism”….
And what does Catallarchy’s Brian Doss have to say?
[S]ince the advent of 9/11 and the War(s), the current Libertarian party and large swathes of fellow small-L ideological libertarians have also seemed to abandon reason and have adopted a single-issue litmus test by which to separate the Elect from the Damned. That issue is whether or not you are against The War, in all of its guises, completely and without reservation, exception, or caveat. If you are, you are a True…Libertarian. If you deviate in the slightest from the orthodoxy / received wisdom on The War, then you are Damned….
There’s a lot more in that vein — and it’s enjoyable reading for a pro-war libertarian like me — but it doesn’t really go beyond what Barnett and I have said about the reasonableness of being a pro-war libertarian.
I’m still waiting for a libertarian who specializes in foreign and defense policy to offer a policy paper that advocates something other than an isolationist foreign policy and a “don’t shoot until you see the whites of their eyes” defense policy. Perhaps this is all there is to say: A legitimate function of the state is to preserve the life, liberty, and property of its citizens. Sometimes the state will be more effective in that respect if it seeks out and destroys its citizens’ enemies before those enemies strike. But I think that the proposition can be elaborated and supported by facts as well as logic. Is there a libertarian foreign-defense policy specialist in the house?
P.S. This, from the LCD, certainly isn’t what I’m looking for, but it’s a good sample of the shallowness of intransigent antiwar libertarians. Jeremy says:
If we follow Rothbard, all libertarian theory must be built up from this axiom: “no man or group of men may aggress against the person or property of anyone else.” And if we add in Jefferson’s statement that governments “deriv[e] their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed,” then Rothbard’s statement applies equally to states. Individuals can only delegate rights that they already possess. If no individual can use force (other than in clear cases of self defense), then no government can do so either. If you have a problem with this, than libertarianism might not be for you.
It is not aggression to seek out and destroy the aggressor before he attacks you, it is self-defense. If you were armed and you knew that another armed person meant you harm, why would you not shoot first? This isn’t just about Iraq, where there seems to be some nit-picking debate about what weapons Saddam might or might not have been making or intending to use, and about what sort of relationship Saddam might or might not have had with al Qaeda. This is a matter of principle. Let’s get the principle right, then argue about the facts.
An American in Europe
Bruce Bawer, a patriotic ex-pat (he now lives in Norway), sees Europeans for what they are.
Culturally superior? Ha!
Yes, many Europeans were book lovers —- but which country’s literature most engaged them? Many of them revered education -— but to which country’s universities did they most wish to send their children? (Answer: the same country that performs the majority of the world’s scientific research and wins most of the Nobel Prizes.) Yes, American television was responsible for drivel like “The Ricki Lake Show” -— but Europeans, I learned, watched this stuff just as eagerly as Americans did (only to turn around, of course, and mock it as a reflection of American boorishness)….And yes, more Europeans were multilingual—but then, if each of the fifty states had its own language, Americans would be multilingual, too.
More sophisticated? Bah!
Living in Europe, I gradually came to appreciate American virtues I’d always taken for granted, or even disdained — among them a lack of self-seriousness, a grasp of irony and self-deprecating humor, a friendly informality with strangers, an unashamed curiosity, an openness to new experience, an innate optimism, a willingness to think for oneself and speak one’s mind and question the accepted way of doing things. (One reason why Europeans view Americans as ignorant is that when we don’t know something, we’re more likely to admit it freely and ask questions.)…Americans, it seemed to me, were more likely to think for themselves and trust their own judgments, and less easily cowed by authorities or bossed around by “experts”; they believed in their own ability to make things better. No wonder so many smart, ambitious young Europeans look for inspiration to the United States, which has a dynamism their own countries lack, and which communicates the idea that life can be an adventure and that there’s important, exciting work to be done. Reagan-style “morning in America” clichés may make some of us wince, but they reflect something genuine and valuable in the American air. Europeans may or may not have more of a “sense of history” than Americans do…but America has something else that matters—a belief in the future.
Open minded? Fah!
Then came September 11. Briefly, Western European hostility toward the U.S. yielded to sincere, if shallow, solidarity (“We are all Americans”). But the enmity soon re-established itself (a fact confirmed for me daily on the websites of the many Western European newspapers I had begun reading online). With the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, it intensified. Yet the endlessly reiterated claim that George W. Bush “squandered” Western Europe’s post-9/11 sympathy is nonsense. The sympathy was a blip; the anti-Americanism is chronic….If Europe’s intellectual and political elite was briefly pro-America after 9/11, it was because America was suddenly a victim, and European intellectuals are accustomed to sympathizing reflexively with victims (or, more specifically, with perceived or self-proclaimed victims, such as Arafat). That support began to wane the moment it became clear that Americans had no intention of being victims.
At least one European intellectual has it right:
To [Jean-Francois] Revel, the tenacity of European anti-Americanism…suggests “that we are in the presence, not of rational analysis, but of obsession” — an obsession driven, he adds, by a desire to maintain public hostility to Jeffersonian democracy. The European establishment, Revel notes, soft-pedals the fact that Europeans “invented the great criminal ideologies of the twentieth century”; it defangs Communism (at “the top French business school,” students think Stalin’s great error was to “prioritize capital goods over . . . consumer goods”); and it identifies the U.S., “contrary to every lesson of real history . . . as the singular threat to democracy.” Revel’s vigorous assault on all this foolishness might easily have been dismissed in France (or denied publication altogether) but for the fact that he’s a member of that revered symbol of French national culture, the Académie Française.
Touché!
Naming Names, Placing Blame, and Safety
The husband of a woman who died at the Pentagon on 9/11 says about the 9/11 Commission’s report, “They don’t name names. No one takes the blame.” Many of the names are known: Osama bin Laden and his lieutenants, Mohammed Atta and the other 18 hijackers, and their co-conspirators in Europe and the Middle East who have been captured. The blame is theirs.
The Commission says the nation is not yet safe. It is safer than it was on 9/10, and can be made even more safe. But nothing is ever perfectly safe. Even nearly perfect safety comes at a very high cost. We can attain a high level of safety by killing as many terrorist bastards as possible.
A Good Summing Up of Libertarianism
Randy Barnett, a professor of law at Boston University and a co-conspirator at The Volokh Conspiracy, has just published “The Moral Foundations of Modern Libertarianism”. Here are excerpts of his conclusion:
Unlike moral or religious theorists, a libertarian, qua libertarian, is not seeking a universal and comprehensive answer to the question of how persons ought to behave. Rather a libertarian seeks a universal answer to the question of when the use of force is justified….Libertarians seek a political theory that could be accepted by persons of diverse approaches to morality living together and interacting in what Hayek called the Great Society.
It works for me, especially when “force” is understood to include coercion by the state.
The 9/11 Report: A Preview
From CNN.com via Yahoo News (excerpts of the news report, with my commentary):
911 panel report: ‘We must act’
Reforms ‘need to be enacted and enacted speedily’WASHINGTON (CNN) — The chairman of the panel investigating the attacks of September 11, 2001, said his commission found that the “United States government was simply not active enough in combating the terrorist threat before 9/11.”
I’d say “no kidding,” but that would be insensitive. I’d add that the terrorists might well have been able to do something atrocious, no matter how vigilant the government, because war isn’t a one-sided affair.
Thomas Kean and his fellow panelists are citing a “failure of imagination” that they say kept U.S. officials from understanding the al Qaeda threat before the attacks on New York and Washington.
A “failure of imagination” is endemic to government. Bureaucracy is inimical to imagination. The best way to defeat terrorists is to give tough, clever, technologically equipped free-lancers a budget and a few ground rules and turn them loose on the problem. There’s imagination for you.
In a news conference Thursday, Kean said that the United States is “faced with one of the greatest security challenges in our long history.”
“Every expert with whom we spoke told us an attack of even greater magnitude is now possible and even probable. We do not have the luxury of time,” Kean said.
“We must prepare and we must act. The al Qaeda network and its affiliates are sophisticated, patient, disciplined and lethal.”
As I was saying.
Commission member Jamie Gorelick said the panel has made a strong effort to show the factual basis behind the recommendations.
She warned that “policymakers ignore that at their peril.
“There are bad consequences to being in the middle of a political season and there are also good ones,” she said, “because everyone who is running for office can be asked, ‘Do you support these recommendations?'”
Gorelick, as you will remember, was a big part of the problem. Now she thinks she’s part of the solution. That’s our government in action.
As expected, the report calls for a national intelligence chief and a counterterrorism center modeled on the military’s unified commands.
It also proposes that a joint congressional committee be created to oversee homeland security.
I’ve read elsewhere that the report also chastises Congress for the meddling that weakened our intelligence services. So, Congress deserves another chance — to meddle some more?
The report concluded that the emergence of al Qaeda in the late 1990s “presented challenges to U.S. governmental institutions that they were not well-designed to meet.”
“The most important failure was one of imagination,” commissioners wrote. “We do not believe leaders understood the gravity of the threat.”
The report concluded that although “imagination is not usually a gift associated with bureaucracies,” because previous al Qaeda attacks used vehicles to deliver explosives, “the leap to the use of other vehicles such as boats … or planes is not far-fetched.”
They had it right about imagination not being associated with bureaucracies. The rest is pure hindsight.
The report lists missed “operational opportunities” it said could have hindered or broken up the plot, blamed largely on lack of communication between the CIA and FBI.
“Information was not shared, sometimes inadvertently or because of legal misunderstandings,” commissioners found.
The Gorelick effect.
“Since the plotters were flexible and resourceful, we cannot know whether any single step or series of steps would have defeated them. What we can say with a good deal of confidence is that none of the measures adopted by the United States government before 9/11 disturbed or even delayed the progress of the al Qaeda plot,” Kean said.
How’s that for bold, imaginative thinking? But what do you expect from a fact-finding commission? I can’t wait to get my hands on a copy of the full report. It’ll make a good doorstop.
The Sentinel: A Tragic Parable of Economic Reality
The principles of economics can be illustrated by the tale of a not-so-mythical country. Its history comprises three eras: life gets better, life stays the same, and life gets worse.
Life Gets Better
1. Self-sufficient individuals, families, and clans (economic units) produce their own goods and services.
2. Specialization and barter lead to greater output of all goods and services, which aren’t distributed equally because the distribution of resources (including intelligence, competence, and ambition) isn’t equal. Some economic units are relatively rich; some are relatively poor.
3. Simple accounting through coins and tallies saves time and promotes greater output, to the benefit of all economic units.
4. Investments in new technology (capital) yield more and/or better and/or newer products and services, to the benefit of all economic units (though the investors reap additional rewards for their foresight and the risks they take when they invest).
5. Credit (borrowing to finance consumption and or investment) enable consumers to ride out bad times and producers to increase their investments in new capital.
6. Population growth yields more economic units, whose efforts — as they become skilled (through education and training by their elders) — cause per capita income to rise.
Life Stays the Same
7. Economic units band together in common defense against criminals and foreign marauders. They select one of their own for the job of Sentinel, and share in the cost of his sustenance. Though the cost of keeping a sentinel reduces their incomes, they consider the resulting protection and peace of mind worth it.
8. The Sentinel diligently performs his mission, year after year, for decades. The economic units of the country continue to pay willingly for his sustenance. The country prospers.
Life Gets Worse
9. A drought descends on the country. It isn’t the first drought, but it’s the worst one the country has experienced. Crops wither and game animals die before they can be taken for food. Many economic units survive the drought because they had emergency stores of food. Others suffer hunger, which makes them less able to fend for themselves and exposes them to the ravages of disease. Death becomes more common and begins to strike young as well as old. The toll of hunger, disease, and death is greater among the poorer economic units.
10. Before the drought ends, as it will in time, the Sentinel (responding to the pleas of the poor and the guilt-ridden rich), and ignoring the arguments of those who understand the country’s economy, begins to impose taxes on those with high incomes and give the money to those with low incomes. That the Sentinel isn’t authorized to redistribute income is another argument he disdains, for he has become addicted to power and seizes an opportunity to expand it.
11. Bit by bit, the Sentinel assumes greater control over economic activity — indeed over the lives of those he was hired to protect. He creates new schemes for transferring income from the richer economic units to the poorer ones, which grow increasingly dependent on the Sentinel. He even creates schemes for taxing all economic units and bestowing special benefits on selected economic units, so that the units receiving the special benefits think they are getting something for nothing. More of the rich decide to support the Sentinel, as they come to see that they can use his power to gain special benefits for themselves. Others continue to support him because they believe that they are better off because of the special benefits he bestows on them. Still others arise and mature without having known life without the all-powerful Sentinel; they assume that the Sentinel has always been and always will be the arbiter of their economic fate.
12. Lonely voices try to explain that almost everyone is worse off because of the Sentinel’s meddling in their affairs. Those lonely voices explain logically that the Sentinel has assumed powers that aren’t rightly his, that the country would have recovered from the great drought without the Sentinel’s help, that the Sentinel’s activities actually diminish the country’s wealth and income by stifling commerce and discouraging thrift and initiative, and that the Sentinel’s actions discourage private acts of charity toward those who are truly incapable of caring for themselves.
13. The lonely voices are ignored, for the lonely voices are drowned by the clamor of those who are dependent on the Sentinel, those who cannot understand how the Sentinel makes them worse off, those for whom the Sentinel has become a totem, and those who simply want the Sentinel to tell others how to run their lives.
14. The mythical country nevertheless survives and thrives because even the Sentinel cannot rob it of its resources or blunt the drive and inventiveness of its economic units. Will it ever thrive to the extent of its potential? That’s unlikely. Will it ever stop thriving and go into a long and perhaps irreversible decline, as have other nations that vested too much power in their Sentinels? It might happen.
Recommended Reading
Recently I mentioned Juno & Juliet, by Julian Gough. It’s a novel about identical twin sisters who have arrived in Galway to attend university. Juliet tells the tale, which is at first hilariously comic and gradually becomes serious and almost tragic. Gough manages the transition gracefully, without the intervention of a sudden accident or disease. The characters remain true to their original characterizations. The narration and dialog remain fresh and witty, even as the mood darkens somewhat. A minor masterpiece of plotting, dialog, and storytelling.
Words of Caution for the Cautious
From “More sorry than safe” (Spiked-online.com), by Brendan O’Neill:
Professor Sir Colin Berry is not a big fan of the ‘precautionary principle’, the idea that scientists, medical researchers, technologists and just about everybody else these days should err on the side of caution lest they cause harm to human health or the environment. Berry is one of Britain’s leading scientists; he has held some of the most prestigious posts in British medicine, including head of the Department of Morbid Anatomy at the Royal London Hospital from 1976 to 2002. Now he watches as his ‘good profession’ threatens to be undermined by what he says is an ‘unscientific demand’ to put precaution first.
One of the most common definitions of the precautionary principle is that put forward by Soren Holm and John Harris in their critique of it in Nature magazine in 1999: ‘When an activity raises threats of serious or irreversible harm to human health or the environment, precautionary measures that prevent the possibility of harm shall be taken even if the causal link between the activity and the possible harm has not been proven or the causal link is weak and the harm is unlikely to occur.’ For Berry, this is one of the biggest problems with the precautionary principle – the notion that we could ever fully predict the outcome of an experiment or piece of research before it is complete, and that if we can’t then we should play it safe. ‘It doesn’t allow for the unknown’, he says. ‘Or for taking a risk in order to do something potentially useful.’
Berry says it is in the nature of scientific and medical research that you start out before you have all the information to hand – indeed, almost all of the great scientific advancements of the past 200 years have been a process of ‘learning as we went along’. ‘Consider blood transfusions’, he says. ‘When we started doing them, we knew about some blood groups but there were others we didn’t know about. We only came to know of these other blood groups when patients started to have transfusion reactions. There was an unknown, but we were able to learn from it and refine the process.’
He wonders whether, if the precautionary principle had been about for the past 200 years rather than the past 20, breakthroughs such as blood transfusions would ever have been made. ‘I certainly don’t think we would have radiotherapy or the various applications of x-rays if Marie Curie had been under pressure to comply with the precautionary principle’, he says. In the early twentieth century, Polish-born physicist and chemist Curie devoted her working life to the study of radium, paving the way for nuclear physics and the treatment of cancer. It cost her her life – she died from leukaemia in 1934, almost blind, her fingers burned by radium. ‘Curie’s work caused her “irreversible harm”‘, says Berry. ‘The precautionary principle would not have permitted her to take such risks, and the world would have been a worse place for it.’…
Berry points to the restrictions imposed on DDT – the pesticide used to get rid of malaria-carrying mosquitoes – as another example of how the ‘application of precaution’ can cause death and disease. In some third world countries where malaria had been all but eradicated over the past 20 years, there have been epidemics of the disease since DDT was restricted. Currently malaria is on the rise in all the tropical regions of the planet; in 2000, it killed more than one million and made 300million seriously ill. ‘Campaigners claimed that DDT was bad for the environment; they said that it caused harm to American birds of prey. I’m sorry, but why should people in the third world at risk from malaria care about American birds of prey? Decisions about these things should be based on local needs and on empirical evidence.’
The same should go for genetically modified crops, reckons Berry. ‘If we want to miss out on this new technology, that’s our lookout. But we should not be in a position to restrict the use of GM in the third world. As an African said recently, “You go ahead and ban GM crops, but can we eat first?”‘ Berry says the restriction of the use of potentially life-saving technologies in the third world is ‘a kind of environmental imperialism – if something is perceived to be bad for some American bird, then no one else in the world can use it either. That is absurd; we really cannot go on like this.’…
‘Almost no new technology can be assured to be risk-free. If your position is that you don’t accept any incremental risk, you are in effect saying no to all new technologies, whether it be a better anaesthetic, a better car, a better aeroplane, a safer environment for children – in fact anything worth having.’
Wisdom about the War on Terror
Ralph Peters, in recent article entitled “In Praise of Attrition”, has this to say about the war on terror:
It isn’t a question of whether or not we want to fight a war of attrition against religion-fueled terrorists. We’re in a war of attrition with them. We have no realistic choice. Indeed, our enemies are, in some respects, better suited to both global and local wars of maneuver than we are. They have a world in which to hide, and the world is full of targets for them. They do not heed laws or boundaries. They make and observe no treaties. They do not expect the approval of the United Nations Security Council. They do not face election cycles. And their weapons are largely provided by our own societies.
Of course, we shall hear no end of fatuous arguments to the effect that we can’t kill our way out of the problem. Well, until a better methodology is discovered, killing every terrorist we can find is a good interim solution. The truth is that even if you can’t kill yourself out of the problem, you can make the problem a great deal smaller by effective targeting….
And we shall hear that killing terrorists only creates more terrorists. This is sophomoric nonsense. The surest way to swell the ranks of terror is to follow the approach we did in the decade before 9/11 and do nothing of substance. Success breeds success. Everybody loves a winner. The clichés exist because they’re true. Al Qaeda and related terrorist groups metastasized because they were viewed in the Muslim world as standing up to the West successfully and handing the Great Satan America embarrassing defeats with impunity. Some fanatics will flock to the standard of terror, no matter what we do. But it’s far easier for Islamic societies to purge themselves of terrorists if the terrorists are on the losing end of the global struggle than if they’re allowed to become triumphant heroes to every jobless, unstable teenager in the Middle East and beyond….
It is not a matter of whether attrition is good or bad. It’s necessary. Only the shedding of their blood defeats resolute enemies. Especially in our struggle with God-obsessed terrorists — the most implacable enemies our nation has ever faced — there is no economical solution. Unquestionably, our long-term strategy must include a wide range of efforts to do what we, as outsiders, can to address the environmental conditions in which terrorism arises and thrives (often disappointingly little — it’s a self-help world). But, for now, all we can do is to impress our enemies, our allies, and all the populations in between that we are winning and will continue to win.
The only way to do that is through killing.
For Baseball Fans
Here’s a site that’s easier to navigate than MLB.com and quite comprehensive: Baseball-Reference.com.
Enough, Already
To Bonnie Raitt, Joan Baez, Linda Ronstadt, John Fogerty, Willie Nelson, and Whoopi Goldberg, and Susan Sarandon, and Tim Robbins, and Sean Penn…
…and to all the other trendy singers and actors who think Bush is evil and America has taken the wrong path, I say this:
Shut up and do what made you rich. Just don’t try to think profound thoughts, you’re not up to it.
The Majority Doesn’t Rule the Blogosphere
I’ve taken two flawed political surveys, here and here. The first asks ambiguous questions; the second doesn’t distinguish conservatives from libertarians. It’s obvious, nevertheless, that lefties dominate the blogosphere, if the surveys capture a representative sample of bloggers. But numbers aren’t everything. Most of the authoritative blogs are libertarian-conservative. Take that, lefties.
Berger Bits
From USAToday.com via Yahoo News:
Berger drops out as Kerry foreign-policy adviser
By Jill Lawrence and Mimi Hall, USA TODAYFormer national security adviser Samuel [Sandy] Berger stepped aside from his work as a foreign-policy adviser to Democrat John Kerry’s presidential campaign Tuesday, after Berger acknowledged that he had mishandled classified documents that were under review by the independent commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks.
Berger, who had been considered a leading candidate for secretary of State in a Kerry administration, has been under investigation by the Justice Department (news – web sites) since October for removing classified documents from a secure reading room at the National Archives.
Will Kerry see if Willie (The Actor) Sutton is available as a replacement? The famed bank robber has been dead 24 years, but so what. Elvis has been dead longer and he’s still making appearances. Then there’s Robert Goulet’s voice…
Berger should join Winona Ryder’s support group for kleptomaniacs. Maybe Winona could give Sandy some dieting tips, too.
I don’t know why Kerry would want a petty thief like Berger as an adviser when he’s got a real pro as a running mate. Edwards has milked taxpayers and consumers for millions in legal awards and settlements, and he’s not under investigation by the FBI.
If Berger really, truly “inadvertently” walked off with classified documents, maybe his old boss, Bill Clinton, really, truly didn’t do whatever it is he says he didn’t do (Whitewater, Paula Jones, Monica Lewinsky, you name it).
Sandy can always plead not guilty by reason of obesity, now that it’s officially a disease. Even if he’s found guilty, he’ll probably get off with 30 minutes a day on the treadmill. A slap on the waist, so to speak.
Some commentators, even those with impeccable libertarian-conservative credentials, are willing to give Berger the benefit of the doubt. But I say: guilty until proven incompetent.
Can you imagine Berger as secretary of state? He’d be visiting the Middle East and leave secret anti-terrorism strategy papers in his trousers, which he would send out for pressing.
Oops, I forgot, Kerry would be president, so there wouldn’t be a secret anti-terrorism strategy. It would have been approved by the United Nations.
You may have heard some of these lines from Letterman or Leno, but I didn’t. I never watch their shows — I’m too old to stay up that late.
A Foolish Consistency
Noam Scheiber, writing on his blog at The New Republic online, says:
Conservative activists tend to lobby on behalf of a fairly comprehensive agenda, stretching from abortion to gay marriage to tax cuts to education spending. (Even conservative organizations set up to lobby on single issues, like business regulation or gay marriage, tend to coordinate pretty closely with other conservative activists….)
Liberal activists, on the other hand, tend to be much more focused on single issues: the abortion rights people don’t get too worked up about labor issues, labor doesn’t get too worked up about environmental issues, environmentalists don’t get too worked up about gay rights, etc.
But they all manage to come together as Democrats, don’t they? So what’s the difference between conservative activists and liberal activists, other than party affiliation? It’s a fairly consistent set of principles — generally present in conservatives and generally lacking in liberals.
Libertarians, on the other hand, are completely principled and hew rather closely to their principles. Perhaps that’s why they’ll never govern.
How Not to Keep a Secret
Captain’s Quarters is exactly right about Sandy Berger’s supposedly inadvertent removal of classified documents from the National Archives:
Perhaps [Berger’s] explanation will fly for those who have never worked around classified documents, but since I spent three years producing such material, I can tell you that it’s impossible to “inadvertently” take or destroy them. For one thing, such documents are required to have covers — bright covers in primary colors that indicate their level of classification. Each sheet of paper is required to have the classification level of the page (each page may be classified differently) at the top and bottom of each side of the paper. Documents with higher classifications are numbered, and each copy is tracked with an access log, and nowadays I suppose they’re tracking them by computers.
Under these rules, it’s difficult to see how anyone could “inadvertently” mix up handwritten notes with classified documents, especially when sticking them into one’s jacket and pants.
Moreover, Sandy Berger — of all people — should know that you don’t just make notes of classified information and blithely stuff the notes in your jacket and trousers. Notes of classified information are classified and must be marked and handled properly. Unless Berger had access to an authorized storage facility, and approval to take the classified notes to that facility, he had no business walking out the the National Archives with classified notes. You don’t simply take them home and stuff them in a desk drawer.
This smells worse than last week’s garbage.
A Roundup of Losers
UPDATED
Worst head of government (next to Jacques Chirac): President Gloria Arroyo of the Philippines
Worst post-Clintonian coverup: Kleptomaniac Sandy Berger
Worst coverage of post-Clintonian coverup: New York Times
Loudest whiners: Moveon.org and Common Cause
Most self-indulgent yuppie couple: Amy and Peter, baby-killers
Always a loser: Yasser Arafat
Always losers: California’s (girlie men) Democrats
Latest blow to the pseudo-science of climatology: The real cause of global warming
Worst “professional” economist: Paul Krugman
Least principled columnist (a lot of competition for this one): Paul Krugman (this is a minute sample)
Worst liar (also hotly contested): Joe Wilson
Worst musical performance: Linda Ronstadt
Eh?
Tom Smith at The Right Coast asks “what is Canadian culture? And is it worth preserving?” Beats me. I say that as an American (I insist on the label, our neighbors north and south notwithstanding) whose ancestors are Anglo-Canadian (father’s side) and French-Canadian (mother’s side).
Canada is the U.S. with a colder climate. (Quebec? Think of Louisiana as a popsicle.) What does Canada have that we lack in the U.S.? Higher gasoline prices, socialized medicine, less freedom of speech, a serious secessionist movement, and a Queen. (Yes, the British Monarch is still considered Queen of Canada, for what that’s worth.)
“Canadian culture” isn’t exactly an oxymoron, it’s more like a talking dog: a bizarre curiosity. Canada has given us some wonderful writers: Robertson Davies, Carol Shields (ex-American), and Elizabeth Hay, to name most of them. But that hardly makes up for Peter Jennings.
Trial Lawyers
I’d rather deter torts and compensate their victims through litigation, and the threat of litigation, than resort to legislation and regulation. (Resorting to legislation and regulation is, as the cliche goes, like taking a shotgun to a fly.) Litigation, however, has become legislation via the courts. And, in most States, it’s really a get-rich-and-stay-rich scheme for a bunch of trial lawyers.
Tort law, as practiced by John Edwards and his ilk, goes beyond deterring and rectifying torts. The mind-boggling awards and settlements gleaned by trial lawyers, with the permission of the States, have bad consequences for consumers: higher prices and fewer products and services — medical services among them. Edwards and company may care about the “little guy” who can bring them big bucks; they care nothing for the many little guys who pay higher prices and find medical care harder to get.
Tort reform is as overdue as a deadbeat’s car payments. But tort reform isn’t possible if Democrats are in power.
Politics and Prosperity 