Month: December 2005

An Insensitive Proposal, or Two

A recent post at Wizbang led me to these observations about parking for handicapped persons:

Unused handicapped parking spaces should be converted to planters for attractive, environmentally correct trees and shrubs (preferably of flowering varieties). Alternatively, all of those unused parking spaces could be metered for general use at, say, $5 an hour. I have no doubt that the spaces would be in almost constant use non-handicapped drivers, most of whom would actually put money in the meters. The proceeds could then be used to provide taxi rides for handicapped drivers, most of whom (in my experience) are a menace to other drivers.

Prof. Bainbridge and the War on Terror

UPDATED 12/18/05

Pseudo-conservative Stephen Bainbridge — last remarked upon here — has once again let down the side. Apropos the leaked story about the use of the NSA to intercept domestic communications, Bainbridge writes:

Okay, the NY Times published a leak:

Months after the Sept. 11 attacks, President Bush secretly authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on Americans and others inside the United States to search for evidence of terrorist activity without the court-approved warrants ordinarily required for domestic spying, according to government officials. Under a presidential order signed in 2002, the intelligence agency has monitored the international telephone calls and international e-mail messages of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people inside the United States without warrants over the past three years in an effort to track possible “dirty numbers” linked to Al Qaeda, the officials said.

Powerline thinks: “The intelligence officials who leaked to the Times should be identified, criminally prosecuted, and sent to prison.” Michelle Malkin opines: “The real headline news is not that President Bush took extraordinary measures to protect Americans in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, but that the blabbermouths at the Times chose to disclose classified information in a pathetically obvious bid to move the Iraqi elections off the front pages.” Hugh Hewitt asks: “Perhaps Special Prosecutor Fitzgerald’s writ could be expanded?”

Leaks are a fact of life. Heck, after the battle of Midway, the Chicago Tribune publishes a story announcing to the world that the US Navy had broken Japanese codes, which makes this leak look like small beer. It’s disingenuous to be shocked about such things. . . .

The word isn’t “shocked,” it’s “outraged.” The leakers and the Times have deliberately exposed a practice that probably has saved the lives of many Americans, both at home and abroad. Leaks may be a fact of life, and so is murder, but that doesn’t make either of them legal or right. Bainbridge has lost his grip on logic.

And there’s more. He goes on to whine about “Coercive interrogations. A gulag of secret prisons.” He’s referring, of course, to the alleged “torture” of unlawful combatants and those formerly “secret” prisons that were exposed recently, also by unlawful leaks to the press.

Tom Smith of The Right Coast comments on the affray:

[H]ere’s my guess of what’s going on. NSA gets the email and phone lists from some big Al Qaeda guy, who had to be water-boarded to hand them over, but that’s another story, and they want to monitor traffic to and from those addresses. Sounds sensible if you want to, say, prevent the release of weaponized death virus 2000 in the land of the free. But wait. Why not just get a warrant? I suspect the reason might be that there are many phone and email addresses you want to monitor. In fact, so many you cannot really even use humans to listen to them. You use classified technology to sift through the volumes of chatter and listen for suspicious patterns, sort of like Gmail searches your emails to see if you are going to Bermuda or interested in refinancing your boat. But it is not really practical to get the Foreign Intelligence court to issue warrants for all those targets. So it is done under a Presidential order instead.

There is probably more involved, but for my money, I am glad the NSA is doing this. I think it is shocking that NSA officials leaked the program to the Times. There really should be an investigation and maybe even a special prosecutor. I mean, really! This is highly sensitive stuff, as sensitive as it gets. Nor is there any particular reason to think any of what NSA did was illegal. We are not talking rogue agents here, but a Presidential finding that sounds like it was thoroughly lawyered up. And noticed to appropriate people in Congress, who knew enough, even in their ethically retarded state, to keep it secret. But no, that’s not enough for the Times. Do they think it’s illegal? How would they know? They just know they don’t like it, so they are going to blow the whole operation sky high. You can bet that all across America, Europe and the Middle East, Al Qaeda is reworking its communications protocols, opting for higher levels of encryption, moving potentially compromised agents around, replacing cell phone chips, moving physical addresses . . . But it’s OK, because the Times has weighed the issue and decided the harm to our national security is outweighed by the extra protection we get for our civil liberties, and they are the experts at making this kind of decision. That is why we elected them, or why they elected themselves.

And of course, the Times publishes the story even though federal officials tell them it will harm national security, and they also time it to have maxium impact on the PATRIOT act debate in the Senate. Is the Times accountable to anybody? Does anybody get to ask them about the ethics of timing publication so as to impact political decisions in Washington? I realize it happens all the time, but jeez, this is an extreme example of it. There really should be an investigation this time. The anti-Bush press and the enemies of the President in the intelligence community need to know they can’t just jeopardize national security by divulging highly sensitive and classified information, just because they sanctify themselves with what they see as high political motives. My bet is that the heros at the Times, if they realized they were not immune from the consequences of breaking the law, assuming, as seems likely, that laws were broken in divulging this stuff, would suddenly become much more circumspect. For really, does anyone really think that if the actions of the Times make it much harder to find out what the cell is doing in San Diego, Chicago or Atlanta, and as a result people die, that the New York Times gives a shit? Even if it happened to other New Yorkers, they would not give a shit, though the names and faces would make nice fodder for a feature of “The Costs of the War on Terror.” I don’t think any given reporter would care if another given reporter ended up being the one who had to jump burning from the building. A lot of people need some serious sorting out on this one.

Has anything illegal happened? I don’t think so. Aggressive interrogation is limited to unlawful combatants. “Secret” prisons are nothing more than detention centers for unlawful combatants, who have to be held somewhere other than Gitmo if they’re to be treated properly as unlawful combatants who really have no right of access to U.S. courts. As for the NSA’s eavesdropping, Mark Levin writes that

[t]he Foreign Intelligence Security Act permits the government to monitor foreign communications, even if they are with U.S. citizens — 50 USC 1801, et seq. A FISA warrant is only needed if the subject communications are wholly contained in the United States and involve a foreign power or an agent of a foreign power.

The reason the President probably had to sign an executive order is that the Justice Department office that processes FISA requests, the Office of Intelligence Policy and Review (OIPR), can take over 6 months to get a standard FISA request approved. It can become extremely bureaucratic, depending on who is handling the request. His executive order is not contrary to FISA if he believed, as he clearly did, that he needed to act quickly. The president has constitutional powers, too.

Undeterred by such considerations, Bainbridge plows ahead:

We’re supposed to be better than this.

“I believe that there are more instances of the abridgment of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachment of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations.” – James Madison

“The history of liberty is a history of the limitations of governmental power, not the increase of it.” – Woodrow Wilson

“America is great because she is good, and if America ever ceases to be good, America will cease to be great.”

Some will say that we need to make trade-offs between liberty and security. But liberty has a price and taking risks is the price we all have to pay if liberty is to be preserved.

“Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take, but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!” – Patrick Henry

Of the Founders who pledged “their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor” as signers to the Declaration of Independence, five were captured as traitors and tortured before they died; twelve had their homes ransacked and burned; two lost their sons in the Revolutionary War; another had two sons captured; and nine died from wounds or the hardship of the war. But too many want to trade their sacrifices away for a mess of security pottage.

We’re supposed to be better than what? Better than the French at surrendering our lives, liberty, and happiness? Bainbridge chooses to forget that the Founders — and the Framers of the Constitution — risked their lives, fortunes, and families so that Americans could enjoy the blessings of liberty. To do that, Americans must be able to defend themselves from predators of the kind against whom our eavesdropping, interrogation, and imprisonment are directed. A main objective of the Framers was, after all, to “provide for the common defence.” Bainbridge and his ilk have lost sight of that objective. Tom Smith, by contrast, hasn’t lost sight of the objective — as he proves once again in this eloquent post.

UPDATE: Captain Ed has the facts about President Bush’s legal authorization of NSA intercepts within the U.S.

Related posts:

Prof. Bainbridge Flunks (11/15/05)
War, Self-Defense, and Civil Liberties (a collection of posts)

Three Truths for Central Planners

1. When more money doesn’t provide more happiness (call it satisfaction or utility, if you will), people stop trying to earn more money. Until then, more money, by definition, buys more happiness.

2. It is impossible to make interpersonal utility comparisons which show that taking money from the rich and giving it to the poor increases the total sum of happiness. There is no such thing as a social welfare function. Those who think there is such a thing must be willing to submit to robbery by poorer persons.

3. There is no such thing as “the economy”; there are crude aggregate measures of economic activity by individuals and firms. Therefore, leisure per se isn’t “bad” for “the economy.” After all, leisure (when sought) adds to the utility of the person who obtains it. The only time leisure is bad is when someone is taxed to support someone else’s leisure.

Whose Liberties Are We Fighting For?

A few weeks ago the media disclosed “secret” prisons overseas, where the CIA apparently has been holding baddies. That disclosure will lead to “investigations,” which probably will lead to the end of the “secret” prison program.

In the past few days we have had:

  • the disclosure of selective, warrantless NSA intercepts authorized in the aftermath of 9/11
  • a “victory” for those who oppose the use of torture, apparently under any condition
  • the Senate’s refusal (thus far) to extend a few provisions of the Patriot Act that are set to expire December 31.

What we have here is a concerted effort to hinder the U.S. government’s efforts to detect and thwart terrorist plots. All of this sensitivity about “civil liberties” (including the “liberties” of our enemies) reminds me of the complacency that we felt before 9/11.

What will it take to shake us from that complacency? You know what it will take: a successful terrorist attack in the U.S. that might have been prevented had the media and “civil libertarians” not been so successful in their efforts to protect “civil liberties.”

If the media and “civil libertarians” really cared about civil liberties they would not be in favor of vast government programs that suppress social and economic freedoms. They are the enemies of liberty, and — thanks to them — innocent Americans probably will die.

The legitimate function of the state is to protect its citizens from predators and parasites, it is not — as the left and its dupes would have it — to protect predators and parasites.

My View of Warlordism, Seconded

UPDATED 12/18/05

Arnold Kling writes:

The conventional view [of anarchy], which I share, is that peaceful anarchy is insufficiently stable. It gives way to warlordism. Warlordism means a situation in which there is no rule of law. A warlord rules by rewarding his friends and punishing his enemies.

In my view, it only takes one warlord to break up a peaceful anarchy. Once one warlord becomes successful, then it is easy for a second warlord to recruit followers, because people either envy or fear the followers of the first warlord. This process continues until everyone is driven to follow warlords.

To break a warlord equilibrium, you need government. That is the Hobbesian solution–a Leviathan that is capable of suppressing the “war of all against all.”

Government is flawed, . . . [but] I would not want to risk a descent into warlordism.

I ended a post on the same subject with this thought:

A wasteful, accountable, American state is certainly preferable to an efficient, private, defense agency in possession of the same military might. Hitler and Stalin, in effect, ran private defense agencies, and look where that landed the Germans and Russians. Talk about subjugation.

UPDATE: The quotation from Arnold Kling is taken from a series of exchanges between he and his co-blogger Bryan Caplan. There are two more entries in the series, here (Caplan) and here (Kling). Worth reading. Kling has the better of it, in my view.

Other related posts:

Defense, Anarcho-Capitalist Style (09/26/04)
Fundamentalist Libertarians, Anarcho-Capitalists, and Self-Defense (04/22/05)
The Legitimacy of the Constitution (05/09/05)
Another Thought about Anarchy (05/10/05)
Anarcho-Capitalism vs. the State (05/26/05)
Rights and the State (06/13/05)

Peter Singer’s Agenda

Peter Singer, euthanasia enthusiast, is piggy-backing on the Schiavo fiasco. This is from WorldNetDaily:

During the next 35 years, the traditional view of the sanctity of human life will collapse under pressure from scientific, technological, and demographic developments, says controversial bio-ethics professor Peter Singer.


Princeton’s Peter Singer (Photo: The Age)

“By 2040, it may be that only a rump of hard-core, know-nothing religious fundamentalists will defend the view that every human life, from conception to death, is sacrosanct,” says Princeton University’s defender of infanticide. “In retrospect, 2005 may be seen as the year in which that position (of the sanctity of life) became untenable,” he writes in the fall issue of Foreign Policy.

Singer sees 2005’s battle over the life of Terri Schiavo as a key to this changing ethic.

The year 2005 is also significant, at least in the United States, for ratcheting up the debate about the care of patients in a persistent vegetative state,” says Singer. “The long legal battle over the removal of Terri Schiavo’s feeding tube led President George W. Bush and the U.S. Congress to intervene, both seeking to keep her alive. Yet the American public surprised many pundits by refusing to support this intervention, and the case produced a surge in the number of people declaring they did not wish to be kept alive in a situation such as Schiavo’s.”

He writes that by 2040, the Netherlands and Belgium will have had decades of experience with legalized euthanasia, and other jurisdictions will also have permitted either voluntary euthanasia or physician-assisted suicide for varying lengths of time.

“This experience will puncture exaggerated fears that the legalization of these practices would be a first step toward a new holocaust,” he explains. “By then, an increasing proportion of the population in developed countries will be more than 75 years old and thinking about how their lives will end. The political pressure for allowing terminally or chronically ill patients to choose when to die will be irresistible.”

The professor, who advocates killing the disabled up to 28 days after birth, was the subject of protests when he was hired in 1999 by Princeton, a school founded by the Presbyterian denomination. A group calling itself Princeton Students Against Infanticide issued a petition charging the Australian professor “denies the intrinsic moral worth of an entire class of human beings – newborn children.”

Singer also is known for launching the modern animal rights movement with his 1975 book “Animal Liberation,” which argues against “speciesism.” He insists animals should be accorded the same value as humans and should not be discriminated against because they belong to a non-human species.

Yes, people say that they don’t want to share Terri Schiavo’s fate. What many of them mean, of course, is that they don’t want their fate decided by a judge who is willing to take the word of a relative for whom one’s accelerated death would be convenient. Singer dishonestly seizes on reactions to the Schiavo fiasco as evidence that euthanasia will become acceptable in the United States.

Certainly, there are many persons who would prefer voluntary euthanasia to a fate like Terri Sciavo’s. But the line between voluntary and involuntary euthasia is too easily crossed, especially by persons who, like Singer, wish to play God. If there is a case to be made for voluntary euthanasia, Peter Singer is not the person to make it.

Singer gives away his Hitlerian game plan when he advocates killing the disabled up to 28 days after birth. Why not 28 years? Why not 98 years? Who decides — Peter Singer or an acolyte of Peter Singer? Would you trust your fate to the “moral” dictates of a person who thinks animals are as valuable as babies?

Would you trust your fate to the dictates of a person who so blithely dismisses religious morality? One does not have to be a believer to understand the intimate connection between religion and liberty, about which I have written here and here. Strident atheists of Singer’s ilk like to blame religion for the world’s woes. But the worst abuses of humanity in the 20th century arose from the irreligious and anti-religious regimes of Hitler, Stalin, and Mao.

(Thanks to my daughter-in-law for the link to the WorldNetDaily article.)

More related posts:

Peter Singer’s Fallacy (11/26/04)
Science, Pseudo-Science . . . , a collection of links to other related posts
Self-Ownership, a collection of links to yet other related posts

Prof. Bainbridge Flunks

Stephen Bainbridge, a self-styled conservative whose conservatism seems to consist of adopting certain attitudes, is especially irritating about the war in Iraq. Instead of figuring it out for himself, he asks:

But why single out Iraq? Pakistan had the bomb, a government with suspicious ties to the Taliban, a security service reportedly riddled with Islamofascist sympathizers, a chief of the nuclear program peddling secrets and technology to rogue regimes worldwide, and uncontrolled tribal areas that probably still are harboring Osama.

Or what of the mad mullahs of Tehran? Iran was pursuing WMDs. And a missile program. Iran had known links to terrorist groups, especially Hezbollah. Why not choose them instead of Iraq? . . .

Out of all the totalitarian regimes in the Middle East, why pick Iraq? A democratic Saudi Arabia might stop using its vast wealth to finance Wahhabist Islam. (Anybody remember that most of the 9/11 bombers were Saudis?) A democratic Iran might stop funding terrorist groups attacking Israel.

In sum, you could make Bush’s case for war as against any number of rogue regimes. Why single out Iraq?

Iraq was the easiest target. The invasion of Iraq gave the U.S. a strategic toe-hold in the Middle East, from which Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and (yes) Syria are within easy reach. The invasion of Iraq sent a message to those regimes, a message that has been heeded to some extent by Pakistan and Saudi Arabia.

The invasion of Iraq, I have always believed, was mainly an excuse for gaining that strategic toe-hold in a region of vital national interest. But that sort of candor is politically incorrect — imagine the outrage if Bush simply admitted the truth of the matter. And so Bush has had to pussy-foot around the truth by talking about Saddam’s inhumanity, the potential threat from Iraq, and its persistent violation of UN resolutions. Bainbridge could see all of that if he were willing to, but he’d rather play neo-isolationist word games and indulge in wine snobbery.

A False Dichotomy

Timothy Sandefur ends an insightful review of the chief justiceship of William Rehnquist on this note:

American constitutional law is caught in a bind between those who believe that individuals derive their significance and their rights from the permissions of the majority, and those who believe that people have certain inalienable rights which government exists to respect.

Sandefur and I once clashed over the origin and essence of rights. I later published (here) my case for a consequentialist view of rights. In brief, Sandefur’s dichotomy is false because he resorts to the concept of inalienable rights.

The rights that we actually enjoy do derive from “the permissions of the majority” or, more accurately, from the permissions of the state, which may or not reflect the views of the majority. The rights that we should enjoy are not inalienable; that is, they are not in our genes, in our character, or gifts from heaven. The rights that we should enjoy are the rights that would make everyone better off if they were honored — everyone but predators and parasites, that is. It is that latter set of rights which the Founders and Framers sought, through war and politics, to deliver via the American state. The rights that we actually enjoy, however, are not the rights envisioned by the Founders and Framers because most Americans — not understanding the consequences of their actions — have sold those rights to the state in return for a false sense of security.

What’s Wrong with Wikipedia?

Robert McHenry, a former editor-in-chief of the Encyclopedia Britannica, tries to explain the source of Wikipedia‘s flaws:

Many revisions, corrections, and updates are badly done or false. There is a simple reason for this: Not everyone who believes he knows something about Topic X actually does; and not everyone who believes he can explain Topic X clearly, can. People who believe things that are not the case are no less confident in their beliefs than those who happen to believe true things. (In case this point interests you, I have written extensively on it.) Consequently, it is far more reasonable to expect that, while initially poor articles may indeed improve over time, initially superior ones will degrade, with all tending to middling quality and subject to random fluctuations in quality. Note that this has nothing to do with the vandalism or the ideological “revert wars” that are also features of Wikipedia’s insistence on openness and that apparently occupy much of the volunteer editors’ time and effort.

But McHenry omits the key explanatory variable. Wikipedia is not subject to the usual discipline of the market:

  • Wikipedia is a hobby-shop, not a business. Its “owners” (volunteer Wikiwatchers) are not interested in making a profit. Even if relatively few persons used Wikipedia, the volunteers (or most of them) probably would continue to volunteer because they enjoy doing so — just as millions of volunteers perform ineptly for non-profit organizations and millions of bloggers maintain obscure, incoherent blogs. Wikipedia‘s owners have no pecuniary stake in it.
  • Because Wikipedia is a hobby-shop, contributors to Wikipedia are not screened by an expert editorial board that solicits paid contributions from credentialed sources. Wikipedia‘s contributors are essentially bloggers who have found another outlet for expression — they have no pecuniary stake in the quality of their contributions.
  • The users of Wikipedia do not pay to use it, either directly or indirectly (by clicking through to advertisers). Wikipedia is used mainly because it is free. It is used mainly by bloggers who do not “re-sell” Wikipedia‘s content and, therefore, have no pecuniary stake in the quality of Wikipedia‘s content. Therefore, unlike the buyers of a defective product who take their business elsewhere, Wikipedia‘s users have no effective way to discipline Wikipedia for its failings.

In sum, you get what you pay for when you use Wikipedia. That said, it’s still very often a useful source of basic facts and links to (sometimes) authoritative sources.

A 32-Year Error

An otherwise spot-on post about 12/12 Democrats* opens with this chronological error:

Today marks the fifth anniversary of the birth of the wing of the Democratic Party which now controls the party apparatus. And while the leaders of that wing do not speak all Democrats, they have become the face (and voice) of the Democratic Party in President George W. Bush’s second term.

The Democrat Party began its veer to the hard left in 1968, with Eugene McCarthy’s anti-war candidacy. McCarthy didn’t win the party’s nomination that year, but his strong showing made reflexive anti-war rhetoric a respectable staple of Democrat discourse.

The Democrats proceeded in 1972 to nominate George McGovern, who seems moderate only by contrast with Ramsey Clark and Michael Moore. Since McGovern’s ascendancy, the left-wing nuts generally have dominated the party — in voice if not in numbers. Nominees since McGovern: Carter (a latter-day Tokyo Rose), Mondale (Carter’s one-term accomplice), Dukakis, Clinton, Gore, and Kerry — all well to the left of the mainstream (to borrow some Democrat rhetoric). Bill Clinton (of the failed plan to socialize health care) became a moderate only because he faced Republican majorities in Congress. Clinton lately has been showing his true colors.
__________
* The U.S. Supreme Court decided Bush v. Gore on December 12, 2000, thus setting off five years of Bush-hatred on the left.

Great Minds and the Constitution

Bill Niskanen, chairman of Cato Institute, comments at Cato Unbound about Nobel laureate James Buchanan’s proposed amendments to the Constitution. Niskanen’s view, like mine, is that Prof. Buchanan’s proposal doesn’t go far enough. Specifically, Niskanen proposes a nullification amendment and a secession amendment. My very own rewrite of the Constitution happens to include such provisions:

Delegations of the States shall convene every four years for the purpose of considering revisions to and revocations of acts of Congress and/or holdings of the Supreme Court of the United States of America. Such conventions (hereinafter “convention of the States”) may revise and/or revoke any act or acts and/or any holding or holdings, in the sole discretion of a majority of State delegations present and voting. . . . (from Article VII)

* * *

Each State retains the right to secede from this Union, but secession must in each case be approved by three-fourths of the members of each house of a State’s legislature and ratified within thirty days by the executive of the State. At least one year must intervene between the ratification of an act of secession and its execution, during which time the act of secession may be nullified by a majority of the total number of legislators of a State. Revocation does not require ratification by the State’s executive. (Article VI, Section C.2)

Niskanen doubts the effectiveness of a secession amendment. I don’t. The prospective secession of a large number of Red States — which contain a disproportionate share of costly-to-replace military installations — might get the attention of those Blue Staters who understand the virtue of “the common defence.”

We Have Met the Enemy . . .

. . . and he is [some of] us. (Apologies to the late Walt Kelly.)

UPDATED BELOW (12/15/05 @ 5:06 p.m.)

Brendan O’Neill, writing at Spiked, opines that bin Laden’s script is written in the West:

Why has Verso brought out a book [link added] of bin Laden’s statements and why is it being treated so seriously, complete with a promotional push in Waterstone’s in Piccadilly, one of the biggest bookstores in Europe? . . . . Is it that the dumbing down of public life is now so complete that even a loon like bin Laden can get five stars from literary pundits for saying things like ‘kill the Americans and seize their money wherever and whenever [you] find them’ (December 1998) and ‘My kidneys are all right’ (November 2001)?

I think there’s more to it than that. I reckon the reason why some commentators in the West seem drawn to bin Laden’s prose is because at times – and I’m not going to beat around the bush here – he sounds an awful lot like them. Seriously, it is uncanny. What comes across most clearly in this 10 years’ worth of rants is the extent to which bin Laden borrows and steals from Western media coverage to justify his nihilistic actions. From his cynical adoption of the Palestinian issue to his explanations for why he okayed 9/11 to his opposition to the American venture in Iraq, virtually everything bin Laden says is a rip-off of arguments and claims made in the mainstream media over here. He has taken the justifications offered by left-leaning pundits for al-Qaeda’s existence and actions (in the words of one commentator: ‘There is a simple reason why they attack the US: American imperialism’) and made them his own (2). And now these pundits have returned the favour by giving him his own book and glowing reviews to boot. It is the unholiest of marriages. . . .

Take Palestine. It is widely assumed that al-Qaeda’s violence is primarily motivated by Israel’s oppression of the Palestinians and will continue until that issue is resolved. Yet bin Laden’s nods to Palestine over the past 10 years tell a different story.

. . . Bruce Lawrence, editor of this collection, has given bin Laden’s first major public pronouncement – made on 29 December 1994 – the heading ‘The betrayal of Palestine’; but when you read it, Palestine is cynically mentioned as part of bin Laden’s spat with Saudi rulers. . . .

Bin Laden sounds like a spoilt middle-class brat sticking two fingers up at his family and former friends (he was once close to various Saudi rulers) for getting all money-obsessed, dude. In fact, that’s exactly what he is: the son of a Saudi billionaire who in the 1970s made a fortune from running one of daddy’s construction firms and drove a white Chrysler, but then went all religious and decided that capitalism is not very nice. If he’d been born in the Home Counties instead of Riyadh, he would probably have been one of those Eton-educated types who turn their backs on privilege and piss off their parents by becoming smelly hippies who smash up McDonald’s. . . .

. . . Even when bin Laden’s statements are liberally peppered with references to Palestine (as often they are), he only mentions it opportunistically and symbolically; there is no real or practical input into Palestinian politics. In 2001, his second-in-command Ayman al-Zawahiri said: ‘The fact that must be acknowledged is that the issue of Palestine is the cause that has been firing up the feelings of the Muslim nation from Morocco to Indonesia for the past 50 years.’

Likewise, bin Laden’s justifications for 9/11 are continually moulded and shaped by Western media coverage. At first – on 28 September 2001 – he disavows responsibility for the attacks, instead trying to pin the blame on some dastardly conspiracy within America itself. . . . Then there are intelligence agencies in the US, which require billions of dollars of funds from the Congress and the government every year. . . .

A secret government that may have executed the attacks itself in order to get more funding for foreign wars of intervention…sound familiar? Bin Laden could have lifted these explanations from any number of blogs or conspiracy sites that swung into action in the days and weeks after 9/11. Later he claims that 9/11 was in retaliation for Palestine (see above). Later still, he starts banging on about 9/11 as part of a bigger ‘plan to bleed America to the point of bankruptcy, with God’s will’. And guess how he tries to prove that this plan has been a success? Yes, by once again pilfering Western media coverage. On 21 October 2001, he says:

‘I say that the events that happened on 11 September are truly great events by any measure…. The daily income of the American nation is $20 billion. The first week [after the attack] they didn’t work at all as a result of the psychological shock of the attack, and even today some still don’t work because of it. So if you multiply $20 billion by one week, it comes to $140 billion…. The cost of building and construction losses? Let us say more than $30 billion. So far they have fired or liquidated more than 170,000 employees from airline companies, including airfreight companies and commercial airlines…. One of the well-known American hotel companies, Intercontinental, has fired 20,000 employees, thanks to God’s grace….’

And on it goes. Can you see what bin Laden is doing here? He has not been ‘wonderfully briefed’ by al-Qaeda’s resident economist, if it has such a thing; rather, he is cherry-picking from the various scare stories and predictions of doom – and indeed real job losses – that were splashed across the media in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 and claiming ownership of them, as if they were all part of his plot. . . . He attempts to attach meaning to his nihilistic assault retrospectively – first by borrowing the Palestine explanation from Western commentators, and then by citing the economic handwringing that also was widespread in the Western media. . . .

Bin Laden’s parroting of Western views is most stark in his later statements about Iraq. Here, he sounds like a cross between Michael Moore and Robert Fisk, with a bit of Koran-bashing thrown in for good measure. In a statement dated 29 October 2004, one bit in particular made me laugh: bin Laden seems to suggest that the weapons inspectors in Iraq should have been given more time before the rush to war! He says:

‘…American thinkers and intellectuals warned Bush before the war that everything he needed to guarantee America’s security by removing weapons of mass destruction – assuming they existed – was at his disposal, that all countries were with him when it came to inspections, and that America’s interest did not require him to launch into a groundless war with unknown repercussions. But the black gold blinded him and he put his own private interests ahead of the American public interest….’

The above statement is like a microcosm of the trendy liberal argument against the war in Iraq: we should have let the weapons inspectors continue their job (bin Laden for Blix!) but because Bush is so addicted to oil (the ‘black gold’) he went ahead with the war anyway. Bin Laden even worries about the war having ‘unknown repercussions’, an echo of debates in the West about the unpredictability of war in Iraq and the concern that it might make all of us less rather than more safe. No wonder bin Laden namechecks ‘American thinkers and intellectuals’ – he got his political position on Iraq directly from them.

By the time of Iraq, bin Laden – who started out as a Saudi obsessive who wanted to make Saudi society even more chokingly religious – has become a fully-fledged Bush-basher, virtually indistinguishable from a new generation of journos and bloggers who see Bush as the most evil president ever and Iraq as the wickedest war of all time (they have short historical memories). He rants that ‘this war is making billions of dollars for the big corporations, whether it be those who manufacture weapons or reconstruction firms like Halliburton and its offshoot and sister companies’. Halliburton has, of course, become the bete noir of the anti-capitalist-cum-anti-war movement. Bin Laden says: ‘It is all too clear, then, who benefits most from stirring up this war and bloodshed: the merchants of war, the bloodsuckers who direct world policy from behind the scenes.’ This is also a popular idea on today’s anti-war left: that a wicked cabal led by Paul Wolfowtiz and Dick Cheney (both of whom have big business links) is leading America to war. (Indeed, I tried my best to find some differences between that sentence uttered by bin Laden and this one uttered by anti-Bush actor Woody Harrelson – ‘the epidemic of all human rights violations all stems from the same sick source, and that is The Beast: these giant frigging industries that control the body politic, our society and certainly our economy’ – but I had no luck.) . . .

In [a] statement ( . . . on 29 October 2004) bin Laden chastises Bush for leaving ‘50,000 of his citizens in the two towers to face this great horror on their own’, because he considered ‘a little girl’s story about a goat and its butting [to be] more important than dealing with aeroplanes and their butting into skyscrapers’. What is he rabbiting on about? You’ll know if you’ve seen, or read about, Michael Moore’s film Fahrenheit 9/11, which opens with painful footage of Bush reading a story called ‘My Pet Goat’ to a classroom of kids on the morning of 9/11 while the planes hit the twin towers. Maybe bin Laden watched a pirate DVD of Fahrenheit 9/11; maybe he just read about the opening scene somewhere on the web. Either way, he seems yet again to borrow from an anti-Americanism that has its origins in the West. . . .

In a nutshell, bin Laden steals from and quotes Western commentators in his justifications for al-Qaeda violence, and then Western commentators re-quote bin Laden’s rehashing of their own arguments as evidence that al-Qaeda is a rational political organisation. Talk about a vicious cycle. In the process, some commentators get dangerously close to being apologists for al-Qaeda. In the introduction to this collection, editor Bruce Lawrence asks ‘Should bin Laden…be described as a contemporary anti-imperialist fighter adaptive to the Information Age?’ He answers his own question by quoting Michael Mann (whom he describes as ‘one of the most level-headed of sociologists’). Mann says: ‘Despite the religious rhetoric and the bloody means, bin Laden is a rational man. There is a simple reason why he attacked the US: American imperialism. As long as America seeks to control the Middle East, he and people like him will be its enemy.’

What these commentators don’t seem to realise is that they provided bin Laden with the cloak of rationality and political reasoning. Their own arguments, often cynically made, about al-Qaeda being an understandable (if bloody and murderous) response to American imperialism have been co-opted – explicitly so – by bin Laden. . . .

Instead of exposing the glaring contradictions in bin Laden’s statements – all the better to undermine al-Qaeda’s violent outbursts and put the real case for a Palestinian homeland and an end to Western intervention in the Middle East – too many on the left read meaning and consistency into his statements, projecting their own political prejudices on to the ranting of a bearded man in a cave. As a result, what is in truth a disparate nihilistic campaign, an incoherent lashing out against modernity, is given the cloth of ‘anti-imperialism’ with which to dress up its crimes.

. . . This collection of bin Laden’s statements reveals that al-Qaeda is the bastard child of a fearmongering right and an opportunistic left.

Enough said, except to point you to some related posts:

Getting It Wrong: Civil Libertarians and the War on Terror (A Case Study) (05/18/04)
The Illogic of Knee-Jerk Privacy Adocates (10/06/04)
Treasonous Blogging? (03/05/05)
Absolutism (03/25/05)
Shall We All Hang Separately? (08/13/05)
Foxhole Rats (08/14/05)
Treasonous Speech? (08/18/05)
Foxhole Rats, Redux (08/22/05)
The Faces of Appeasement (11/19/05)

UPDATE: There is one more thing to say: This woman typifies the enemy within. She hates America because it isn’t perfect and isn’t “run” the way she’d like to run it. Typical adolescent, leftist whining. I’m sick of it.

The Solomon Amendment

Coyote Blog has it exactly right about the Solomon amendment case now before the Supreme Court (Rumsfeld v. FAIR). If you haven’t heard of it, the Solomon amendment

is the popular name of 10 USC Sec. 983, a . . . federal law that allows the Secretary of Defense to deny Federal grants (including research grants) to institutions of higher education if they prohibit or prevent ROTC or military recruitment on campus.

Pro-defense types (as I am) may instinctively applaud the Solomon amendment. I oppose it, for the very same reason as the proprietor of Coyote Blog:

[The Solomon amendment] may be the new template for government control of individual lives. In both Universities and state governments, the Feds use the threat of withdrawal of federal funds to coerce actions (thing 55 mile speed limit, title IX, military recruiting on campus) that the Constitution nominally does not see[m] to give them authority over. Now, there is the distinct possibility that federal funds to individuals (Social Security, Medicare, unemployment) could be used to increase federal authority and coercive micro-management at the individual level.

It’s quite a shell game. Congress takes money from taxpayers, then “gives” it away — with strings attached. And because the money has passed through the hands of the federal government, the recipients of the money must do the bidding of the federal government. This wouldn’t be happening if people were allowed to keep their money and use it as they see fit.

Here’s hoping the Supreme Court upholds the Solomon amendment. That result would give liberals yet another reason to favor federalism.

Amend the Constitution or Amend the Supreme Court?

Many pixels have been devoted in recent days to Nobel laureate James Buchanan’s modest proposal, at Cato Unbound, for amending the Constitution. I wrote earlier about a tangential aspect of Prof. Buchanan’s post. Now I must respond to Judge Alex Kozinski’s official commentary at Cato Unbound. Here’s some of what Judge Kozinski has to say:

Dr. Buchanan advances a vision of government — especially the federal government — that I find attractive. There is, alas, a lingering nostalgia for the vision of the minimalist state as a purer form of government, one that advances everyone’s economic well-being while maximizing personal freedom. While I have a romantic attachment to this vision, I’m far from convinced that it would achieve the goals set for it — that we’d be living in a better world today if only we repudiated the New Deal, or had never adopted it in the first place. Whenever I try to imagine what such a world would look like, I look at the world we do live in and recognize that we don’t have it so bad at all. We have the world’s strongest economy by far; we are the only superpower, having managed to bury the Evil Empire; and we have more freedom than any other people anytime in history. We must be doing something right.

My take (from a comment thread at The Volokh Conspiracy):

Judge Kozinski is right that we have it “good” in spite of the New Deal and its progeny. What he overlooks, however, is how much better we would have it if it weren’t for the New Deal and its progeny. There is the “seen” (what we have) but there is the “unseen” (what we don’t have because of the oppressive effects of taxation and regulation on social and economic freedom). Judge Kozinski focuses on the seen and forgets about the unseen. His “solution” is to repeal the income tax. But that is no solution at all unless government’s power to do things (unconstitutional things, at that) is curbed. The feds might have to replace the income tax with a sales tax, but they’d do it in a heartbeat if that’s what it would take to continue doing to us the things it’s doing to us. Prof. Buchanan is on the right track, which is to strike at the heart of governmental power. The more practical route to that end, however, is to keep appointing Supreme Court justices whose instincts seem to make them likely allies of Justices Thomas and Scalia.

Mr. Clinton’s Magic Economic Machine

UPDATED BELOW

AP reports on a speech made by the erstwhile president to an audience in Montreal:

With a “serious disciplined effort” to develop energy-saving technology, he said, “we could meet and surpass the Kyoto targets in a way that would strengthen and not weaken our economies.”

A free “serious disciplined effort” to develop energy-saving technology? Followed by the free replacement of existing technology?

Well, perhaps the effort could be powered by Clinton’s hot air, which is the only sign of warming — global or otherwise — in Montreal these days.

UPDATE: Follow the money. Always a good bet when it comes to the Clintons. Not that there’s anything wrong with money, but the things some people are willing to do for it . . .

(Hat tip to EconoPundit)

Give Me Liberty or Give Me Non-Aggression?

Are you a libertarian or merely an adherent of the non-aggression principle? (There is a difference, as I will come to.) I have devised a test to help you decide which you are. First, consider this hypothetical situation:

1. In Country A (just as in Country B), the armed forces are controlled by the state. (I don’t want to get off onto the tangent of whether war is more or less likely if defense is provided by private agencies.)

2. The only restriction on the liberty of Country A’s citizens is that they must pay taxes to support their armed forces. Country B’s citizens own no property; their jobs are dictated by the state; their income is dictated by the state; and all aspects of their lives are regimented by state decrees.

3. Though Country A’s armed forces are underwritten by taxes, the members of the armed forces are volunteers. The members of Country B’s armed forces are conscripts, and Country B’s armed forces are, in effect, supplied and equipped by slave labor.

4. Country A would liberate Country B’s citizens, if it could. Country B would subjugate or kill Country A’s citizens, if it could.

What say you, then, to the following questions?

1. If Country B attacks Country A, what limits (if any) would you place on the measures Country A might take in its defense? Specifically:

a. Are civilian casualties in Country B acceptable at all?

b. Are civilian casualties in Country B acceptable if they’re the result of mistakes on Country A’s part or the unavoidable result of Country A’s attacks on Country B’s armed forces and infrastructure?

c. Is the deliberate infliction by Country A of civilian casualties in Country B acceptable as long as Country A’s leaders reasonably believe that the infliction of those casualties — and nothing else — will bring about the defeat of Country B? (Assume, here, that Country A’s leaders try to inflict only the number of casualties deemed necessary to the objective.)

(Assume, for purposes of the next two questions, that Country A inflicts casualties on Country B’s civilians only to the extent that those casualties are the result of mistakes or unavoidable collateral damage.)

2. Should Country A attack Country B if Country A concludes (rightly or wrongly, but in good faith) that Country B is about to attack, and if Country B strikes first it is likely to:

a. win a quick victory and subjugate Country A?

b. inflict heavy casualties on Country A’s citizens?

3. Should Country A attack Country B if Country A concludes (rightly or wrongly, but in good faith) that Country B is developing the wherewithal to attack, and if Country B strikes first it is likely to:

a. win a quick victory and subjugate Country A?

b. inflict heavy casualties on Country A’s citizens?

What I’m trying to get at is whether libertarians should value non-aggression (which serves liberty only when it is an agreed and enforceable principle within a society) over liberty itself. In light of that distinction, my answers are:

1. a. Yes
1. b. Yes
1. c Yes
2. a. Yes
2. b. Yes
3. a. Yes
3. b. Yes

In short, give me liberty. Non-aggression is for those who cannot tell — or refuse to see — the difference between an imperfect nation of laws and its manifestly lawless enemies.

Related posts: War, Self-Defense, and Civil Liberties (a collection of links)

Warming Thoughts on a Cold Day

Today’s high temperature in Austin is 30 degrees below normal. So much for global warming. Nevertheless, if global warming is irreversible — which I doubt — it comes with a silver lining:

“From a purely evolutionary point of view, warm periods have been exceptionally good to us. Cold periods have been the troublesome ages,” [according to Benny Peiser, a social anthropologist at Liverpool John Moores University]. The possible positive side effects of global warming have researchers like Peiser ready for changes to come.

Earth’s temperature is expected to rise 1.4 to 5.8 degrees Celsius between 1990 and 2100, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC. One area where this warming could aid society is in terms of health.

In Britain alone, scientists estimate between 20,000 and 40,000 deaths a year are related to cold winter weather. A report (.pdf) from the United Kingdom’s Faculty of Public Health found that the number of cold-weather deaths increase by approximately 8,000 for every 1 degree Celsius the temperature falls. Peiser estimates there will be only 2,000 more deaths a year due to an equal rise in temperature, because humans adapt better to hot climates and can rely on air conditioning.

“And Britain isn’t even that cold of place in the world respectively,” said Peiser. . . .

. . . While Peiser admits the price of global warming will differ for every region of the world, “the benefits outweigh the costs by far,” he said.

This could be especially true in regions of Russia where the harsh winters can kill hundreds in a single city. . . .

Fred Singer, president of the Science & Environmental Policy Project, a group that has consistently voiced doubts about the veracity of global warming projections, thinks the IPCC report (.pdf) [which sees an economic loss for developing countries and mixed consequences for developed nations] is wrong because “it deals with only part of the problem.”

Singer agrees with conclusions of The Impact of Climate Change. The book finds that a moderate warming will have a positive economic impact on the agriculture and forestry sectors. Since carbon dioxide is used by plants to capture and store energy, there may be a fertilizing effect as levels of the gas rise. This, combined with longer growing seasons, fewer frosts and more precipitation, among other factors, could benefit some economic sectors.

Bring on global warming. I could use some of it today.

Related posts:

Climatology (07/16/04)
Global Warming: Realities and Benefits (07/18/04)
Scientists in a Snit (08/14/04)
Another Blow to Climatology? (08/21/04)
Bad News for Politically Correct Science (10/18/04)
Another Blow to Chicken-Little Science (10/27/04)
Bad News for Enviro-Nuts (11/27/04)
The Hockey Stick Is Broken (01/31/05)
Science in Politics, Politics in Science (05/11/05)
Hurricanes and Global Warming (09/24/05)
Global Warming and the Liberal Agenda (10/12/05)

Personal Responsibility and Bomb Threats

Bleeding hearts must already be gushing about this story:

A passenger who claimed to have a bomb in a carry-on bag was shot and killed by a federal air marshal Wednesday on a jetway to an American Airlines plane that had arrived from Colombia, officials said. . . .

A witness said that the man frantically ran down the aisle of the Boeing 757 and that a woman with him said he was mentally ill.

The passenger, who indicated there was a bomb in the bag, was confronted by air marshals but ran off the aircraft, Doyle said.

The marshals pursued and ordered the passenger to get on the ground, but the man did not comply and was shot when apparently reaching into the bag, Doyle said. Authorities did not immediately say whether any bomb was found.

Passenger Mary Gardner told WTVJ in Miami that the man ran down the aisle from the rear of the plane. “He was frantic, his arms flailing in the air,” she said. She said a woman followed, shouting, “My husband! My husband!”

Gardner said she heard the woman say her husband was bipolar and had not had his medication.

UPDATE (FROM A LATER VERSION OF THE STORY):

The shooting occurred shortly after 2 p.m. as the plane was about to take off for Orlando after about two hours on the ground in Miami. “I don’t know yet if the passenger had been on the plane and was getting off, or was starting to board the aircraft,” airline spokesman Tim Wagner said.

After the shooting, investigators spread passengers’ bags on the tarmac and let dogs sniff them for explosives.

A U.S. official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the information’s sensitivity, said authorities examined the bag and found no explosives.

Assuming the facts are as stated in the story, I conclude two things:

  • The air marshals did their job.
  • The passenger did not. If he didn’t have a bomb, then he made an unfounded bomb threat and acted in an extremely provocative manner because he didn’t take his medication.

Irresponsibility does not excuse disruptive, threatening behavior.

Days of Infamy

December 7, 1941

September 11, 2001

More Commandments of Economics

A few days ago I posted ten twelve commandments of economics. Here are some more (#19 UPDATED, 12/06/05 @ 10:36 PM):

13. The economy isn’t a zero-sum game; for example:

Bill Gates is immensely wealthy because he took a risk to start a company that has created things that are of value to others. His creations (criticized as they may be) have led to increases in productivity. As a result, many people earn more than they would have otherwise earned; Microsoft has made profits; Microsoft’s share price rose considerably for a long time; Bill Gates became the wealthiest American (someone has to be). That’s win-win.

14. Externalities are everywhere.

Like the butterfly effect, everything we do affects everyone else. But with property rights those externalities (e.g., pollution) are compensated instead of being legislated against or fought over in courts. Relatedly . . .

15 . There is no such thing as a “public good.”

Public goods are thought to exist because certain services benefit “free riders” (persons who enjoy a service without paying for it). It is argued that, because of free riders, services like national defense be provided by government because it would be unprofitable for private firms to offer such services.

But that analysis overlooks the possibility that those who stand to gain the most from the production of a service such as defense may, in fact, value that service so highly that they would be willing to pay a price high enough to bring forth private suppliers, free riders notwithstanding. The free-rider problem isn’t really a problem unless the producer of a “public good” responds to requests for additional services from persons who don’t pay for those services. But private providers would be contractually obliged not to respond to such requests, of course.

Moreover, given the present arrangement of the tax burden, those who have the most to gain from defense and justice (classic examples of “public goods”) already support a lot of free riders and “cheap riders.” Given the value of defense and justice to the orderly operation of the economy, it is likely that affluent Americans and large corporations — if they weren’t already heavily taxed — would willingly form syndicates to provide defense and justice. Most of them, after all, are willing to buy private security services, despite the taxes they already pay.

I conclude that there is no “public good” case for the government provision of services. It may nevertheless be desirable to have a state monopoly on police and justice — but only on police and justice, and only because the alternatives are a private monopoly of force, on the one hand, or a clash of warlords, on the other hand. (See this post, for instance, which also links to related posts.)

You may ask: What about environmental protection? Isn’t it a public good that must be provided by government? No. Read this and this. Which leads me to “market failure.”

16. There is no such thing as “market failure.“

The concept of market failure is closely related to the notion of a public good. When the market “fails” to do or prevent something that someone thinks should be done or prevented, the “failure” is invoked as an excuse for government action.

Except where there is crime (which should be treated as crime), there is no such thing as market failure. Rather, there is only the failure of the market to provide what some people think it should provide.

Those who invoke market failure are asserting that certain social and economic outcomes should be “fixed” (as in a “fixed” boxing match) to correct the “mistakes” and “oversights” of the market. Those who seek certain outcomes then use the political process to compel those outcomes, regardless whether those outcomes are, on the whole, beneficial. The proponents of compulsion succeed (most of the time) because the benefits of government intervention are focused and therefore garner support from organized constituencies (i.e. interest groups and voting blocs), whereas the costs of government intervention are spread among taxpayers and/or buyers of government debt.

There are so many examples of so-called public goods that arise from putative market failures that I won’t essay anything like a comprehensive list. There are, of course, protective services and environmental “protection,” both of which I mentioned in No. 15. Then there is public education, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Affirmative Action, among the myriad federal, State, and local programs that perversely make most people worse off, including their intended beneficiaries. Arnold Kling explains:

[T]he Welfare State makes losers out of people who want to get ahead through hard work, thrift, or education. Those are precisely the activities that produce economic growth and social wealth, and they are hit particularly hard by Welfare State redistribution.

The Welfare State certainly has well-organized constituencies. The winners, such as the AARP and the teachers’ unions, know who they are. The losers — the working poor, children stuck in low-quality school districts — have much less political clout. The Welfare State has friends in both parties, as evidenced by the move to add a prescription drug benefit to Medicare.

As the Baby Boomers age, longevity increases, and new medical technology is developed, the cost of the Welfare State is going to rise. Economists agree that in another generation the share of GDP required by the Welfare State will exceed the share of GDP of total tax revenues today. The outlook for the working poor and other Welfare State losers is decidedly grim.

17. Borders are irrelevant, except for defense.

It is not “bad” or un-American to “send jobs overseas” or to buy goods and services that happen to originate in other countries. In fact, it is good to do such things because it means that available resources can be more fully employed and put to their best uses. Opponents of outsourcing and those who decry trade deficits want less to be produced; that is, they want to shelter the jobs of some Americans at the expense of making many more Americans worse off through higher prices.

For example, when Indian computer geeks operate call centers for lower salaries than the going rate for American computer geeks, it makes both Indians and Americans better off. Few Americans are computer geeks, but many Americans are computer users who benefit when they pay less for geek services (or the products with which geek services are bundled). Those who want to save the jobs of American computer geeks assume that (a) American computer geeks “deserve” their jobs (but Indians don’t) and (b) American computer geeks “deserve” their jobs at the expense of American consumers.

See also this, and this, and this.

18. Government budget deficits aren’t bad for the reason you think they’re bad.

Government spending is mostly bad (see No. 15) because it results in the misallocation of resources (and it’s inherently inflationary). Government spending — whether it is financed by taxes or borrowing — takes resources from productive uses and applies them to mostly unproductive and counterproductive uses. Government budget deficits are bad in that they reflect that misallocation — though they reflect only a portion of it. Getting hysterical about the government’s budget deficit (and the resulting pile of government debt) is like getting hysterical about a hangnail on an arm that has been amputated.

There’s no particular reason the federal government can’t keep on making the pile of debt bigger — it has been doing so continuously since 1839. As long as there are willing lenders out there, the amount the amount of debt the government can accumulate is virtually unlimited, as long as government spending does not grow to the point that its counterproductive effects bring the economy to its knees.

For more, see this, this, this, and this.

19. Monopoly (absent force, fraud, or government franchise) beats regulation, every time.

Regulators live in a dream world. They believe that they can emulate — and even improve on — the outcomes that would be produced by competitive markets. And that’s precisely where regulation fails: Bureaucratic rules cannot be devised to respond to consumers’ preferences and technological opportunities in the same ways that markets respond to those things. The main purpose of regulation (as even most regulators would admit) is to impose preferred outcomes, regardless of the immense (but mostly hidden) cost of regulation.

There should be a place of honor in regulatory hell for those who pursue “monopolists,” even though the only true monopolies are run by governments or exist with the connivance of governments (think of courts and cable franchises, for example). The opponents of “monopoly” really believe that success is bad. Those who agitate for antitrust actions against successful companies — branding them “monopolistic” — are stuck in a zero-sum view of the economic universe (see No. 13), in which “winners” must be balanced by “losers.” Antitrusters forget (if they ever knew) that (1) successful companies become successful by satisfying consumers; (2) consumers wouldn’t buy the damned stuff if they didn’t think it was worth the price; (3) “immense” profits invite competition (direct and indirect), which benefits consumers; and (4) the kind of innovation and risk-taking that (sometimes) leads to wealth for a few also benefits the many by fueling economic growth.

UPDATE: What about those “immense” profits? They don’t just disappear into thin air. Monopoly profits (“rent” in economists’ jargon) have to go somewhere, and so they do: into consumption, investment (which fuels economic growth), and taxes (which should make liberals happy). It’s just a question of who gets the money.

But isn’t output restricted, thus making people generally worse off? That may be what you learned in Econ 101, but that’s based on a static model which assumes that there’s a choice between monopoly and competition. I must expand on some of the points I made in the original portion of this commandment:

  • Monopoly (except when it’s gained by force, fraud, or government license) usually is a transitory state of affairs resulting from invention, innovation, and/or entrepreneurial skill.
  • Transitory? Why? Because monopoly profits invite competition — if not directly, then from substitutes.
  • Transitory monopolies arise as part of economic growth. Therefore, such monopolies exist as a “bonus” alongside competitive markets, not as alternatives to them.
  • The prospect of monopoly profits entices more invention, innovation, and entrepreneurship, which fuels more economic growth.

20. Stay tuned to this blog.

For much more, go here and follow the links.