Month: August 2004

Swift Boat Veterans for Truth

Let them slug it out with Kerry and his minions. The truth, to the extent it can ever be known, will come out in the process — which will generate much more heat than light. But that’s the way of politics.

It’s far better than the alternative, which is to suppress political speech. We’re almost there, thanks to McCain-Feingold, Bush’s decision not to veto, and the Supreme Court’s abandonment of the First Amendment in upholding McCain-Feingold’s most oppressive elements.

If free speech is on the way out, as it may well be, at least it’s going out with a bang.

That’s all I have to say. I’m sorry to disappoint you if you found this post because you were searching for something meaty about the Swift Boat Vets. But, as long as you’re here, have a look around. There’s some rather meaty stuff on other issues.

Distilling the Essence of Modern Libertarianism

In an earlier post I traced the underpinnings of modern libertarianism to their origins with John Stuart Mill and Friedrich A. Hayek. I used a lot of space (though far from enough) to spell out their arguments for the primacy of the individual as against the state. Wikipedia nicely summarizes the philosophy that results from their arguments:

Libertarianism is a political philosophy which advocates individual rights and a limited government. Libertarians believe that individuals should be free to do anything they want, so long as they do not infringe upon what they believe to be the equal rights of others. In this respect they agree with many other modern political ideologies. The difference arises from the definition of “rights”. For libertarians, there are no “positive rights” (such as to food or shelter or health care), only “negative rights” (such as to not be assaulted, abused, robbed or censored), including the right to personal property. Libertarians further believe that the only legitimate use of force, whether public or private, is to protect these rights.

In summing up the reasons for subscribing to that statement, I said:

Mill instructs us that personal freedoms should be preserved because through them we become more knowledgeable and more capable; therefore, the state should intervene in our lives only to protect us from physical harm. Hayek then makes the case that the personal and the economic are inseparable: We engage in economic activity to serve personal values and our personal values are reflected in our economic activity. Moreover, the state cannot make personal and economic decisions more effectively than individuals operating freely within an ever-evolving societal network, and when the state intervenes in our lives it damages that network, to our detriment. That is the essence of modern libertarianism.

The closing sentence of Mill’s On Liberty reminds us of what happens when the state prevails against the individual:

The worth of a State, in the long run, is the worth of the individuals composing it; and a State which postpones the interests of their mental expansion and elevation, to a little more of administrative skill, or that semblance of it which practice gives, in the details of business; a State which dwarfs its men, in order that they may be more docile instruments in its hands even for beneficial purposes—will find that with small men no great thing can really be accomplished; and that the perfection of machinery to which it has sacrificed everything, will in the end avail it nothing, for want of the vital power which, in order that the machine might work more smoothly, it has preferred to banish.

The economic cost of statism is high, as I have argued here and here. The social costs are incalculable.

A Telling Truth

Experimental economics is being used to create data about economic behavior, with which to test economic theories. An economist has even won a Nobel prize for his work in experimental economics. In a earlier post I argued that

A controlled experiment involving human behavior doesn’t yield valid results if its subjects know they’re participating in an experiment or if their environment is manipulated for the purpose of an experiment.

It happens that some behavioral psychologists are conducting laboratory studies to see if liars can be detected by their behavior. Critics of those experiments make this point:

Some researchers think…that the design of the laboratory studies is responsible for the poor rates of lie detection. “People are very good liars when nothing is at stake,” says Aldert Vrij of the University of Portsmouth in England. “But a lab setting is not real life.”

In most experiments, researchers tell the subjects whether or not to lie, and the lies have no effect on their lives. There’s no significant reward for a liar who’s believed or punishment for a judge who’s duped.

“There is definitely a lack of real-life stuff in this field of research,” says Vrij.

Exactly!

Modern Art: Less of It Is Better

Munch’s famous ‘Scream,’ ‘Madonna’ stolen. That’s the headline from AP (via al.com). Here’s a bit of the story:

A French radio producer, Francois Castang, said he was visiting the Munch Museum in Oslo when thieves burst in and made off with the paintings, including the painter’s depiction of an anguished figure with its head in its hands.

“What’s strange is that in this museum, there weren’t any means of protection for the paintings, no alarm bell,” Castang told France Inter radio.

“The paintings were simply attached by wire to the walls,” he said. “All you had to do is pull on the painting hard for the cord to break loose — which is what I saw one of the thieves doing.”

Well, who’d have thought they were worth stealing?

Understanding the Essence of Modern Libertarianism

A lot has been written about libertarianism, but most of it is superficial. Take this definition from Wikipedia, for instance:

Libertarianism is a political philosophy which advocates individual rights and a limited government. Libertarians believe that individuals should be free to do anything they want, so long as they do not infringe upon what they believe to be the equal rights of others. In this respect they agree with many other modern political ideologies. The difference arises from the definition of “rights”. For libertarians, there are no “positive rights” (such as to food or shelter or health care), only “negative rights” (such as to not be assaulted, abused, robbed or censored), including the right to personal property. Libertarians further believe that the only legitimate use of force, whether public or private, is to protect these rights.

That’s all right, as far as it goes, but it doesn’t say why today’s libertarians believe what they believe about the primacy of the individual as against the state.

To learn that, we must begin with John Stuart Mill (1806-1873), who advanced the principles of libertarianism beyond their 18th century origins in John Locke (who believed in divinely bestowed inalienable rights) and Adam Smith (who understood that the “invisible hand” of the market translates economic self-interest into general well-being). A look at the Wikipedia entry for Mill tells us that his long essay, On Liberty is

about the nature and limits of the power which can be legitimately exercised by society over the individual. One argument that Mill formed was the harm principle, that is people should be free to engage in what ever behaviors they wish as long as it does not harm others.

That’s the sum of Mill’s argument. Now let’s turn to the meat of it.

First, with regard to freedom of speech, Mill says, in Chapter II of On Liberty:

We have now recognised the necessity to the mental well-being of mankind (on which all their other well-being depends) of freedom of opinion, and freedom of the expression of opinion, on four distinct grounds; which we will now briefly recapitulate. First, if any opinion is compelled to silence, that opinion may, for aught we can certainly know, be true. To deny this is to assume our own infallibility. Secondly, though the silenced opinion be an error, it may, and very commonly does, contain a portion of truth; and since the general or prevailing opinion on any subject is rarely or never the whole truth, it is only by the collision of adverse opinions that the remainder of the truth has any chance of being supplied. Thirdly, even if the received opinion be not only true, but the whole truth; unless it is suffered to be, and actually is, vigorously and earnestly contested, it will, by most of those who receive it, be held in the manner of a prejudice, with little comprehension or feeling of its rational grounds. And not only this, but, fourthly, the meaning of the doctrine itself will be in danger of being lost, or enfeebled, and deprived of its vital effect on the character and conduct: the dogma becoming a mere formal profession, inefficacious for good, but cumbering the ground, and preventing the growth of any real and heartfelt conviction, from reason or personal experience.

In other words, freedom of speech advances the truth, and we are better off for knowing the truth, however much we might resent hearing it in some instances. Similarly, in Chapter III Mill argues that we are better off if we respect individuality rather than impose uniformity of behavior:

As it is useful that while mankind are imperfect there should be different opinions, so is it that there should be different experiments of living; that free scope should be given to varieties of character, short of injury to others; and that the worth of different modes of life should be proved practically, when any one thinks fit to try them. It is desirable, in short, that in things which do not primarily concern others, individuality should assert itself. Where, not the person’s own character, but the traditions of customs of other people are the rule of conduct, there is wanting one of the principal ingredients of human happiness, and quite the chief ingredient of individual and social progress.

Having established the importance of freedom of speech and action, how does Mill balance these freedoms in a societal context? At the onset of Chapter IV, Mill says this:

What, then, is the rightful limit to the sovereignty of the individual over himself? Where does the authority of society begin? How much of human life should be assigned to individuality, and how much to society?

Each will receive its proper share, if each has that which more particularly concerns it. To individuality should belong the part of life in which it is chiefly the individual that is interested; to society, the part which chiefly interests society.

Though society is not founded on a contract, and though no good purpose is answered by inventing a contract in order to deduce social obligations from it [touché, Rousseau], every one who receives the protection of society owes a return for the benefit, and the fact of living in society renders it indispensable that each should be bound to observe a certain line of conduct towards the rest. This conduct consists first, in not injuring the interests of one another; or rather certain interests, which, either by express legal provision or by tacit understanding, ought to be considered as rights; and secondly, in each person’s bearing his share (to be fixed on some equitable principle) of the labours and sacrifices incurred for defending the society or its members from injury and molestation. These conditions society is justified in enforcing at all costs to those who endeavour to withhold fulfillment. Nor is this all that society may do. The acts of an individual may be hurtful to others, or wanting in due consideration for their welfare, without going the length of violating any of their constituted rights. The offender may then be justly punished by opinion, though not by law. As soon as any part of a person’s conduct affects prejudicially the interests of others, society has jurisdiction over it, and the question whether the general welfare will or will not be promoted by interfering with it, becomes open to discussion. But there is no room for entertaining any such question when a person’s conduct affects the interests of no persons besides himself, or needs not affect them unless they like (all the persons concerned being of full age, and the ordinary amount of understanding). In all such cases there should be perfect freedom, legal and social, to do the action and stand the consequences.

That is, for the sake of preserving individuality, a person who actually harms another person may be punished by the state. But a person who merely says or does something that offends others may be punished only by the force of opinion and reason, to which he may or may not choose to bow. Mill applies his principles in Chapter V:

The maxims are, first, that the individual is not accountable to society for his actions, in so far as these concern the interests of no person but himself. Advice, instruction, persuasion, and avoidance by other people if thought necessary by them for their own good, are the only measures by which society can justifiably express its dislike or disapprobation of his conduct. Secondly, that for such actions as are prejudicial to the interests of others, the individual is accountable, and may be subjected either to social or to legal punishment, if society is of opinion that the one or the other is requisite for its protection….

In many cases, an individual, in pursuing a legitimate object, necessarily and therefore legitimately causes pain or loss to others, or intercepts a good which they had a reasonable hope of obtaining. Such oppositions of interest between individuals often arise from bad social institutions, but are unavoidable while those institutions last; and some would be unavoidable under any institutions. Whoever succeeds in an overcrowded profession, or in a competitive examination; whoever is preferred to another in any contest for an object which both desire, reaps benefit from the loss of others, from their wasted exertion and their disappointment. But it is, by common admission, better for the general interest of mankind, that persons should pursue their objects undeterred by this sort of consequences….

Again, trade is a social act. Whoever undertakes to sell any description of goods to the public, does what affects the interest of other persons, and of society in general; and thus his conduct, in principle, comes within the jurisdiction of society: accordingly, it was once held to be the duty of governments, in all cases which were considered of importance, to fix prices, and regulate the processes of manufacture. But is now recognised, though not till after a long struggle, that both the cheapness and the good quality of commodities are most effectually provided for by leaving the producers and sellers perfectly free, under the sole check of equal freedom to the buyers for supplying themselves elsewhere. This is the so-called doctrine of Free Trade, which rests on grounds different from, though equally solid with, the principle of individual liberty asserted in this Essay. Restrictions on trade, or on production for purposes of trade, are indeed restraints; and all restraint, quâ restraint, is an evil: but the restraints in question affect only that part of conduct which society is competent to restrain, and are wrong solely because they do not really produce the results which it is desired to produce by them. As the principle of individual liberty is not involved in the doctrine of Free Trade, so neither is it in most of the questions which arise respecting the limits of that doctrine….

Thus, despite his acknowledgment that commerce is a social act, and despite having made a good defense of free trade, Mill believes there is an essential difference between personal and economic freedom.

Now comes Friedrich A. Hayek (1899-1992) to unify personal freedom and economic freedom. Virginia Postrel, writing earlier this year for The Boston Globe, explains:

Hayek’s most important insight, which he referred to as his “one discovery” in the social sciences, was to define the central economic and social problem as one of organizing dispersed knowledge. Different people have different purposes. They know different things about the world. Much important information is local and transitory, known only to the “man on the spot.” Some of that knowledge is objective and quantifiable, but much is tacit and unarticulated. Often we only discover what we truly want as we actually make trade-offs between competing goods.”

The economic problem of society,” Hayek wrote in his 1945 article [“The Use of Knowledge in Society”], “is thus not merely a problem of how to allocate `given’ resources — if `given’ is taken to mean given to a single mind which deliberately solves the problem set by these `data.’ It is rather a problem of how to secure the best use of resources known to any of the members of society, for ends whose relative importance only these individuals know. Or, to put it briefly, it is a problem of the utilization of knowledge which is not given to anyone in totality.”

The key to a functioning economy — or society — is decentralized competition. In a market economy, prices act as a “system of telecommunications,” coordinating information far beyond the scope of a single mind. They permit ever-evolving order to emerge from dispersed knowledge….

Information technology has strengthened Hayek’s legacy. At MIT’s Sloan School, Erik Brynjolfsson uses Hayek to remind students that feeding data into centralized computers doesn’t necessarily solve a company’s information problems. In any complex operation, there is too much relevant information for a single person or small group to absorb and act on.

“As Hayek pointed out, the key thing is to have the decision rights and the information co-located,” says Brynjolfsson. “There are at least two ways of achieving that. One is to move information to decision maker. The other is to move decision rights to where the information is.”

This analysis, which applies as much to culture as to economics, informs Hayek’s best-known work, The Road to Serfdom, which he wrote as a wartime warning to a popular audience. Published in 1944 and dedicated “to the socialists of all parties,” the book argued that the logic of socialist central planning implied the erosion of personal freedoms. Britain’s well-intended socialists were headed down the same path as the National Socialists whose rise Hayek had witnessed in Austria….

[H]e argued that to fully control the economy meant to control all aspects of life. Economic decisions are not separate from individual values or purposes. They reflect those purposes.”We want money for many different things, and those things are not always, or even rarely, just to have money for its own sake,” explains Jerry Z. Muller, a historian at Catholic University….”We want money for our spouses or our children or to do something in terms of the transformation of ourselves — for everything from plastic surgery to reading intellectual history or building a church. These are all noneconomic goals that we express through the common means of money.”

Hayek argued that only in a competitive market, in which prices signal the relative values placed on different goods, can people with very different values live together peacefully. And only in such a market can they figure out how best to meet their needs and wants — or even what those needs and wants are…

There you have it: Mill instructs us that personal freedoms should be preserved because through them we become more knowledgeable and more capable; therefore, the state should intervene in our lives only to protect us from physical harm. Hayek then makes the case that the personal and the economic are inseparable: We engage in economic activity to serve personal values and our personal values are reflected in our economic activity. Moreover, the state cannot make personal and economic decisions more effectively than individuals operating freely within an ever-evolving societal network, and when the state intervenes in our lives it damages that network, to our detriment. That is the essence of modern libertarianism.

The Main Causes of Prosperity

UPDATED 08/21/04

In an earlier post, I reported that government intervention in the economy since 1906 has reduced per capita GDP in the U.S. by about 40 percent. What happened?:

First, the regulatory state began [in 1906] to encroach on American industry with the passage of the Food and Drug Act and the vindictive application of the Sherman Antitrust Act, beginning with Standard Oil (the Microsoft of its day). There followed the ratification of Amendment XVI (enabling the federal government to tax incomes); World War I (a high-taxing, big-spending operation); a respite (the boom of the 1920s, which was owed to the Harding-Coolidge laissez-faire policy toward the economy); and the Great Depression and World War II (truly tragic events that imbued in the nation a false belief in the efficacy of the big-spending, high-taxing, regulating, welfare state).

The Great Depression also spawned the myth that good times (namely the Roaring ’20s) must be followed by bad times, as if good times are an indulgence for which penance must be paid. Thus the Depression often is styled as a “hangover” that resulted from the “partying” of the ’20s, as if laissez-faire — and not wrong-headed government policies — had caused and deepened the Depression.

You know the rest of the story: Spend, tax, redistribute, regulate, elect, spend, tax, redistribute, regulate, elect, ad infinitum. The payoff: GDP per capita was almost $38,000 in 2003; without government meddling it might have been as much as $68,000.

Now that the U.S., like most other countries, has attained a high level of government spending, taxation, regulation, and welfare, how is the U.S. able to maintain its outstanding record of economic performance?

The relative prosperity of a market economy* today depends mainly on three things: the rule of law, free trade, and educational attainment. I base this conclusion on statistical analyses of data for 59 countries. I used the indices of economic freedom for 2000 from Economic Freedom of the World** and 1998 data for average national IQ and GDP per capita published by La Griffe du Lion (who derived the data from an article by Richard Lynn and Tatu Vanhanen, “National IQ and Economic Development: A study of Eighty-One Developing Nations,” in Mankind Quarterly (Summer 2001).

I correlated GDP per capita with the various indices of economic freedom. Based on those correlations and some preliminary regression analyses, I found that GDP per capita can be explained mainly by two indices: The rule of law (Area 2: Legal Structure and Security of Property Rights) has a significantly positive effect on GDP per capita; the mean tariff rate (Area 4.A.ii) has a significantly negative effect on GDP per capita. The rule of law is a measure of the independence and integrity of the judicial system and the degree to which intellectual property rights are protected. The use of law to regulate the economy is captured in various other indices, of which the tariff rate is one.

IQ (verbal IQ to be precise) has a significantly positive effect on GDP per capita. IQ, in this instance, probably measures education, which should be the proximate cause of prosperity, at least up to the point where education ceases being an investment and becomes conspicuous consumption.

(For the statistically minded, the R-squared of the regression equation is 0.89 and the t-stats for the independent variables are as follows: rule of law, 7.55; mean tariff rate, -4.03; verbal IQ, 4.47.)

I don’t mean to imply that prosperity is determined solely by the rule of law, free trade, and education. Those three factors simply yield powerful statistical relationships. My analyses of the indices of economic freedom also point to several other significant factors, especially transfers and subsidies as a share of GDP, bribery as a cost of doing business with government, and the regulation of business. Most of the countries in the data set have large welfare programs (transfer payments) and impose a heavy regulatory burden on business. Thus those activities are unlikely to show up as statistically significant in a multivariate analysis of cross-section data. Similarly, it is hard to find a country with a robust economy that doesn’t impose high taxes on its citizens.

The moral of the story is that, although we in the U.S. could adopt policies that would make us worse off (e.g., eliminating patents and raising tariffs), we would be significantly better off if we hadn’t veered from the path of laissez-faire capitalism a century ago. The main cause of prosperity is economic freedom.

__________

* Command economies are excluded from the analysis because their performance is so far below that of market economies. For example, as of 1998 (the year of the IQ and GDP data) China was far from a market economy. If China had a market economy, and if that economy operated under the same rule of law and tariffs as the U.S. economy, the per capita GDP of China would have been about the same as that of the U.S. because China’s average IQ was about the same as that of the U.S. In fact, China’s per capita GDP was about one-tenth that of the U.S. That’s the cost of decades of political repression and central planning.

** The compilation of indices of economic freedom in Economic Freedom of the World is a continuing endeavor of The Fraser Institute of Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. There are 37 individual indices. The individual indices are organized into five areas, each of which has a weighted index. And there is a summary index, which is a weighted index of the area indices.

The Folly of Being Nonjudgmental

It’s a sin to be judgmental in the brave (old) world of liberal wimp-speak. Mustn’t judge other cultures by our standards. Mustn’t condemn Islamists out of hand, they have a point of view and “legitimate” grievances (sorry, I just have to use quotation marks there). Consider the causes of crime (broken homes, poverty, etc.) and be less judgmental about criminals. And on, and on.

It makes me wonder what it would take to get a hemorrhaging cardiac organ (bleeding heart) to judge anyone. How about when she’s in line to buy tickets for a Bruce Springsteen concert; would she judge me if I cut in line ahead of her? How about when he’s cruising down the freeway in his SUV, while talking on his cell phone, and I cut across his bow as I spot the exit I’ve been looking for; would he judge me then? You get the idea.

It’s easy to say “don’t be judgmental” until someone violates your personal space. But if you wait until that moment to be judgmental, you will have waited too long.

Another Blow to Climatology?

FuturePundit (again) points to an article at NewScientist.com:

Cosmic ray link to global warming boosted

10:27 17 August 04

The controversial idea that cosmic rays could be driving global warming by influencing cloud cover will get a boost at a conference next week. But some scientists dismiss the idea and are worried that it will detract from efforts to curb rising levels of greenhouse gases.

At issue is whether cosmic rays, the high-energy particles spat out by exploding stars elsewhere in the galaxy, can affect the temperature on Earth. The suggestion is that cosmic rays crashing into the atmosphere ionise the molecules they collide with, triggering cloud formation.

If the flux of cosmic rays drops, fewer clouds will form and the planet will warm up. No one yet understands the mechanism, which was first described in the late 1990s. But what makes it controversial is that climate models used to predict the consequences of rising levels of greenhouse gases do not allow for the effect, and may be inaccurate [emphasis added].

Some proponents of the theory argue that changes in the number of cosmic rays reaching Earth can explain past climate change as well as global warming today [emphasis added]. Nir Shaviv of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Israel, and Jan Veizer of the University of Ottawa in Ontario, Canada, claimed in 2003 that changes in cosmic-ray flux are the major reason for temperature changes over the past 500 million years [emphasis added]….

You want more examples of research that suggests global warming may have little to do with human activity? FuturePundit has them.

Watch Out for Mr. Potato Head

As a public service, Ohio State University’s Research News warns us:

AGGRESSIVE TENDENCIES MAY BE REVEALED BY ASYMMETRY IN BODY PARTS, STUDY FINDS

COLUMBUS, Ohio – Researchers may get some indication of how aggressively an angry person will react by measuring the size relationship between a person’s ears and other body parts, according to a new study.

Research showed that the farther certain paired body parts were from symmetry – if one ear, index finger or foot was bigger than another, for example – the more likely it is was that a person would show signs of aggression when provoked….

Now you know why Quasimodo and Frankenstein’s monster are so scary.

(Thanks to FuturePundit for the tip.)

Let’s Not Lose Sight of the Real Issue

Mike Rappaport at The Right Coast says this about Alan Keyes’s conversion on reparations:

I don’t favor reparations, but Keyes’s proposal does show that reparations need not be unduly statist. Reparations in the form of exemptions from taxes would be a lot better than reparations in the form of a government welfare program.

Yes, and being punched in the gut is a lot better than being shot in the gut, but a punch in the gut is still a brutal assault.

Don’t Let the Door Hit You on the Way Out

Headline: 9/11 Commission Formally Disbands. Good. Now the commissioners can go back to doing something less useless than second-guessing and imparting fatuous advice.

What’s in a Name?

Many liberals have stopped calling themselves “liberal” in favor of “progressive” — a term that hasn’t yet become a vile epithet. Let’s help it along.

A “liberal” is a person who is liberal with others’ money and liberal in the use of the law to tell others how to live their lives.

A “progressive” is a person who believes in progressively raising taxes, as an excuse for spending others’ money, and who believes in progressively broadening the power of government to tell others how to live their lives.

How’s that for a start?

When Must the Executive Enforce the Law?

There has been a brisk exchange of views about the respective responsibilities of the legislative, executive, and judicial branches for determining the constitutionality of laws. It all began with Jonathan Adler’s piece at National Review Online about “Suicidal Folly”. Some recent entries in the debate can be found here and here. This is my take:

1. Congress enacts laws for whatever reasons it will. Members of Congress may have stirring debates about the constitutionality of a particular law, but in the end Congress will do what it will do. It’s true that Congress should enact only constitutional laws, but that’s like saying children who live in a match factory shouldn’t play with matches.

2. If the executive doesn’t like a particular law for any reason (one of which may be his opinion that the law is unconstitutional) he may veto the law. If his veto is overridden, the law is the law.

3. In the absence of a specific judicial decision nullifying a specific law, the executive is bound to enforce that law. That is what the Constitution contemplates: The legislature legislates and the executive executes. There’s nothing mysterious or arcane about that.

4. If a party with standing challenges a law, it’s up to the courts to decide whether or not it’s a constitutional law. As it says in Article III, Section 2, of the Constitution:

The judicial Power shall extend to all Cases, in Law and Equity, arising under this Constitution, the Laws of the United States….

Which means, as far as I’m concerned, that the executive must defer to judicial decisions about the application of a specific law.

That should do it. Why make it needlessly complicated when we have the structure and words of the Constitution to guide us?

Look in the Mirror

Liberals want to regulate everything because they don’t trust other people to do the right thing for themselves or for others. Why don’t they trust other people? What do they know about human nature that I don’t know? Well, they know their own nature, that’s for sure. I must conclude, therefore, that liberals want to regulate everything because they don’t trust themselves to do the right thing for themselves or for others.

(Of course, there’s also noblesse oblige and guilt.)

Liberal Condescension…

…is no secret. But I couldn’t resist linking to this commentary about it at Tech Central Station (which today has more than its usual number of good reads). Here’s Joshua Elder, writing about “Liberal Noblesse Oblige”:

…[A]s Robert Fisk, Middle East correspondent for the left-wing British newspaper The Independent, put it after being viciously beaten by a group of thugs at the height of the recent Afghan War: “I couldn’t blame them for what they were doing. In fact, if I were the Afghan refugees of Kila Abdullah, close to the Afghan-Pakistan border, I would have done just the same to Robert Fisk. Or any other Westerner I could find.”

It’s a rare man (heck, a rare masochist) who can receive a savage, unprovoked beating and come to the conclusion that he probably deserved it. I attended a lecture by this unique individual two years ago at Northwestern University and took the opportunity to ask him if he would still consider the attack justified had the roles been reversed — if it had been an Arab journalist attacked by a group of grieving American relatives of those who died in the World Trade Center. He told me no, that Americans were too educated and too civilized to ever do something like that.

And there you have it. Americans (and Brits like Fisk, presumably) have agency. They are in control of their own destinies and can be held morally accountable for their own actions. Afghans, Pakistanis and all the other poor, brown-skinned people from that part of the world, however, simply cannot. They aren’t like us, you see. Nor do they matter except for the way that their failures reflect negatively upon us. Their failures are our failures and therefore our responsibility.

Unsurprisingly, the French have a term for this; they call it noblesse oblige. Defined as “the inferred obligation of people of high rank or social position to behave nobly or kindly toward others,” it is the philosophical cornerstone of the entire modern liberal project — at home as well as abroad. Leftists are self-anointed saviors, enlightened elites that will bring about a new golden age for mankind if only the American people will embrace their ideas and vote their candidates into office….

Add guilt for being wealthy, stir well, and you have a Hollywood liberal.

Brains Sans Borders

Dominic Basulto writes about “The Brain Gain” at Tech Central Station. He makes this point: “Only by keeping its doors open to talented immigrants can the U.S. hope to maintain its competitive advantage over the nations of Southeast Asia.”

A much deeper point is overlooked by Basulto, and almost everyone else: The U.S. doesn’t need a competitive advantage. International trade isn’t — or shouldn’t be — a contest in which there are winners and losers. International trade is simply an increasingly significant component of cooperative economic activity in which international borders are becoming less and less relevant.

With truly free international trade — no tariffs, no restrictions on imports and exports — and open borders (barring terrorists, of course), it doesn’t matter whether products and services originate in Southeast Asia or beautiful downtown Burbank. I don’t care whether my car is made in Ohio or Tennessee, as long as it’s made by a manufacturer with a record of building reliable cars. Why should I care whether my computer chips are made in California or Taiwan?

Americans will be better off with free trade and open borders, regardless of how many “brains” we attract and keep. It doesn’t matter whether Joe Brain works in Palo Alto or Taipei. Joe Brain should be able to work wherever he wants to, and I should be able to buy his products and services, wherever they originate, with no strings (or tariffs) attached.

Now, if I buy Joe Brain’s products and services, I may stop buying things from some of my countrymen, like Harry Pain. Others may follow suit, and Harry may have to find another line of work. But why should a lot of American consumers pay more for products and services just because Harry lives in the U.S.?

The moral of the story: We don’t have to import “brains” when we can import their products and services.

Double Trouble

Captain Ed at Captain’s Quarters writes amusingly about “Ted Kennedy — A Danger In The Air?”. Along the way he quotes an Agence France-Press report:

At a hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee Thursday, the Massachusetts Democratic senator described having endured weeks of inconvenience after his name ended up on a watch list barring persons deemed to pose a threat to civil aviation or national security from air travel.

Captain Ed also reports this:

TSA confirmed that two incidents occurred where Kennedy had been denied access to board flights, and that only the intervention of higher management had allowed him to travel as planned. TSA insists that the problem was a confusion between the Senator and a real watch-list suspect with a similar name. Kennedy used the experience to challenge DHS Undersecretary Asa Hutchinson and assert that homeland security policies make life too tough on the average citizen.

Ted Kennedy an average citizen? Come on!

Anyway, Paul at Wizbang! has it right when he says that “Kennedy should be on the no-drive list.”

So, Teddy’s a double-threat man: danger in the air and on the road.

I wouldn’t want to be on the same boat with him, either.

UPDATE:
Professor Bainbridge adds: “Well, I suspect he’s killed more people than most folks on that list.” Z-i-i-n-g!!!

Does Libertarian-Conservative Fusion Have a Future?

It does, if you believe Kenneth Silber’s article, “The Fusionist Path”, at Tech Central Station. Silber almost derails his argument by listing some issues on which most libertarians and conservatives are unalterably opposed: “government spending, faith-based programs, gay marriage, abortion, the Patriot Act, [and] the Iraq War….”

Putting aside government spending as an artifact of government policy, Silber has listed some issues on which there’s a chasm between most libertarians and most conservatives:

Faith-based programs. Most conservatives love it, because “faith” is a key word for them. Libertarians can rightly abhor these programs because, even if they weren’t faith-based, they would inject government into matters outside its legitimate sphere.

Gay marriage. Conservatives hate it. Most libertarians are reflexively for it. Those libertarians who have thought about it say that government should go out of the marriage business.

Abortion. Conservatives hate it. Most libertarians openly favor it. I think they’re wrong, but I’m in the vast minority.

The Patriot Act. Another point of difference, though it hinges on esoteric details.

Iraq war. (Silber should have added preemptive war, just for completeness.) Here, too, I’m in the vast minority of libertarians, who generally oppose the Iraq war and preemptive war.

Throw in issues like flag-burning, prostitution, and drugs and you wonder if there could ever be a libertarian-conservative coalition.

On the other hand, libertarians and conservatives generally see eye-to-eye on so-called social programs, affirmative action, Social Security reform, school vouchers, campaign-finance laws, political correctness, and regulation. Libertarians will never see eye to eye with conservatives on all issues, but it seems to me that they see eye to eye on enough issues to make a political alliance worthwhile.

If libertarians were pragmatic they would adopt this view: An alliance with conservatives is, on balance, more congenial than an alliance with liberals because conservatives are closer to being “right” on more issues, and their theocratic leanings are unlikely to prevail (the social norms of the 1940s and 1950s are gone forever). If libertarians were to approach conservatives en bloc, libertarians might be able to help conservatives advance the causes on which there is agreement. If libertarians were to approach conservatives en bloc, libertarians might be able to trade their support (and the threat of withdrawing it) for influence in the councils of government. Libertarians could use that influence to push conservatives in the right direction on issues where they now differ with conservatives.

Many libertarians will reject such a strategy, but they would be wrong to do so. We will never attain a libertarian nirvana — whatever that is — but we can advance some libertarian causes. We shouldn’t let the “best” be the enemy of the “good”.

This Is a Test

Here we have Iran, warning of a preemptive strike on U.S. forces in Iraq. According to the linked news story, Iranian Defense Minister Ali Shamkhani warns that Iran might launch a preemptive strike against U.S. forces in Iraq to prevent an attack on its nuclear facilities. Shamkhani also makes the usual belligerent statements about Israel.

Here’s the first question. Suppose we have good intelligence and warnings that Iran is about to launch a preemptive strike, either against U.S. forces or Israel. Should we preempt Iran’s preemption? I say yes. Why should we wait to be attacked? Where’s the sense in that? If someone is going to die, it should be our enemies, not Americans or our friends in Israel.

Now, let’s make it harder. What about attacking Iran’s nuclear facilities if we have good intelligence that those facilities are in fact ready to produce nuclear weapons. Again, I say yes. Iran is clearly belligerent to the U.S. and Israel. Why wait until Iran can produce weapons that might be used against U.S. forces or Israel? I say it again: If someone is going to die, it should be our enemies, not our Americans or our friends in Israel.

What’s so hard about that?

It’s Worth Saying Again

All the premature hysteria about balloting in Florida leads, inevitably, to a discussion of the Florida results of 2000. Richard A. Baehr of The American Thinker addresses some of the premature hysteria, after having dealt a death blow to “The Myth of the Stolen Election”. Dave Kopel at Independent Institute, in this section of a piece on “Fifty-nine Deceits in Fahrenheit 9/11”, also puts the myth of the stolen election to rest (for those who are open to reason).

What needs to be said, once more with vehemence, is that it is the voter’s responsibility to cast a ballot correctly. Chads don’t hang unless voters allow them to hang. Touch screens don’t record votes incorrectly unless voters are careless about using them and fail to review their selections before pressing the “vote” icon. And so on.

When election results are contested this year — as they surely will be — the main cause of controversy will be voter error. Remember that in the hysteria that ensues November 2.