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Riots, Culture, and the Final Showdown

Prologue

This is about the broader implications of the riotous reaction of Muslims to cartoons that ran in a Danish newspaper last October. For the full story, with commentary and plenty of relevant links, go to Michelle Malkin’s blog and start with her post of January 30, “Support Denmark: Why the Forbidden Cartoons Matter,” then read on to the present.

My jumping-off point is this kind of news:

Protesters in Pakistan Target West

LAHORE, Pakistan – Thousands of protesters rampaged through two cities Tuesday, storming into a diplomatic district and torching Western businesses and a provincial assembly in Pakistan’s worst violence against the Prophet Muhammad drawings, officials said. At least two people were killed and 11 injured.

Three Killed in Massive Cartoon Protests

PESHAWAR, Pakistan – Gunfire and rioting erupted Wednesday as tens of thousands of people took to the streets in Pakistan’s third straight day of violent protests over the Prophet Muhammad cartoons. Three people were killed, including an 8-year-old boy.

The second story continues with this:

The European Union condemned both the cartoons, first printed in a Danish newspaper in September, and what it called “systematic incitement to violence” against European diplomatic missions by some unidentified governments.

Bruce Bawer has more about European groveling, and isolated acts of courage, here. Michelle Malkin has plenty to say about the groveling of major American media outlets at her blog (e.g., here). A recent story from the zone of political correctness the academy, reports the suspension of the editors of the Daily Illini (the “independent” student newspaper of the University of Illinois) for having reproduced the cartoons.

The reactions on the part of the EU, much of America’s press, and (I safely assert) most of academia are manifestations of a widespread urge to appease fanatical Islam, about which appeasement I will say more later in this post.

I write here without animus toward Islam, as a religion. My attitude toward Islam as a cultural amalgam of the religious and the social is expressed ably by Occam’s Carbuncle:

. . . What little I know of [Islam] isn’t very appealing at all. It’s rather medieval if you ask me. Not that I hate Muslims. . . . I just don’t care. . . . I don’t believe what they believe and I’m not about to start. Ever. More importantly, I will read what I want to read and I will express myself as I see fit, not within the strictures of Sharia [the code of law based on the Koran], but according to my rights as a citizen of a liberal democracy. That means Muslims do not have the right to impose upon me their own views of what is or is not proper, what is or is not sacrilege or blasphemy. . . . They may not damage my property or my person as reprisal for anything I might say or write. They may express themselves as freely as I. They may insult me. They may shun me. They might even consider ignoring me. But they may not threaten me. They may not do harm in furtherance of the precepts of their religion, just as I may not do harm to show my objection to their dogma.

The following concepts are central to my analysis of Islamic culture, as a force in the affairs of the world:

Despair: To be overcome by a sense of futility or defeat.

Paranoia: Extreme, irrational distrust of others.

Now, on with the post.

Executive Summary

A sense of futility or defeat can be inflicted upon a people by its enemies, or it can be self-inflicted by the culture of the people. A mass culture that prizes mysticism at the expense of rationality and industriousness will, if only subconsciously, come to envy cultures that profit from rationality and industriousness. But the people of the mystical culture will disavow their envy, because to do so would be to admit the inferiority of their culture. They will, instead, take the paranoid view that their backwardness is somehow caused by other cultures — cultures that are “out to get them.” This paranoia focuses the despair of the backward culture, so that its emerges in the form of rage against the culture’s supposed enemies.

The paranoid leaders of a paranoid culture pose an especial danger because of their ability to marshal weapons of mass destruction, and to deploy those weapons in a “righteous” war. In the case of Islamic paranoia, the handwriting is on the wall — and writ in blood.

The West can either act to prevent repititions of 9/11, Madrid, and London — on a larger scale — or it can do nothing and, in doing nothing, invite the conflagration. The choice is nigh. The will to act is in doubt.

Islam: A Culture of Despair and Paranoia

I am struck by the similarity of the Muslim riots — in France last year and in the Middle East this year — to the riots in the “ghettos” of Detroit, Los Angeles, etc. Those riots, like the Muslim ones, were sparked by specific events (e.g., the murder of MLK Jr. and the beating of Rodney King). But those sparks caused explosions because they touched the volatile fuel of desperation.

Whence that fuel? It is created by the chronic illness of the underlying culture. A chronically ill person experiences stress because of his inability to function normally. Prolonged stress can lead to frustration, anger, hopelessness, and, at times, depression. The chronic, self-generated illness of the Muslim culture is similar to that of the black and white “redneck” culture:

There have always been large disparities, even within the native black population of the U.S. Those blacks whose ancestors were “free persons of color” in 1850 have fared far better in income, occupation, and family stability than those blacks whose ancestors were freed in the next decade by Abraham Lincoln.

What is not nearly as widely known is that there were also very large disparities within the white population of the pre-Civil War South and the white population of the Northern states. Although Southern whites were only about one-third of the white population of the U.S., an absolute majority of all the illiterate whites in the country were in the South. . . .

Disparities between Southern whites and Northern whites extended across the board from rates of violence to rates of illegitimacy. American writers from both the antebellum South and the North commented on the great differences between the white people in the two regions. So did famed French visitor Alexis de Tocqueville.

None of these disparities can be attributed to either race or racism. . . . The people who settled in the South came from different regions of Britain than the people who settled in the North–and they differed as radically on the other side of the Atlantic as they did here–that is, before they had ever seen a black slave.

Slavery also cannot explain the difference between American blacks and West Indian blacks living in the United States because the ancestors of both were enslaved. When race, racism, and slavery all fail the empirical test, what is left?

Culture is left.

The culture of the people who were called “rednecks” and “crackers” before they ever got on the boats to cross the Atlantic was a culture that produced far lower levels of intellectual and economic achievement, as well as far higher levels of violence and sexual promiscuity. That culture had its own way of talking, not only in the pronunciation of particular words but also in a loud, dramatic style of oratory with vivid imagery, repetitive phrases and repetitive cadences.

Although that style originated on the other side of the Atlantic in centuries past, it became for generations the style of both religious oratory and political oratory among Southern whites and among Southern blacks–not only in the South but in the Northern ghettos in which Southern blacks settled. . . .

The redneck culture proved to be a major handicap for both whites and blacks who absorbed it. Today, the last remnants of that culture can still be found in the worst of the black ghettos, whether in the North or the South, for the ghettos of the North were settled by blacks from the South. The counterproductive and self-destructive culture of black rednecks in today’s ghettos is regarded by many as the only “authentic” black culture–and, for that reason, something not to be tampered with. Their talk, their attitudes, and their behavior are regarded as sacrosanct. (Thomas Sowell, at OpinionJournal, paraphrasing his essay “Black Rednecks and White Liberals,” from the eponymous book.)

Islamic culture, broadly speaking, seems much like redneck culture in its preference for mysticism or ritual over rationality and industriousness — as well as in its attitude toward women. The adherents of an irrational, indolent culture who have any exposure to other cultures must know that their culture holds them back materially, and that they would be better off if they were to adopt the rational and industrious ways of other cultures. (The closely held wealth of the oil sheikhs has nothing to do with Islam; it is a fortuitous artifact of the geology of the Middle East and the industry of the West.) But to adopt the ways of wealthier cultures is to admit the shortcomings of one’s own culture — and to break with one’s family, friends, and authority figures.

Thus the adherents of the backward culture remain mired in their self-inflicted despair and, instead of blaming themselves and their culture for their backwardness, they blame the outsiders whose relative success they envy. And when their despair erupts in rage it is (in the paranoid view) legitimate to attack the blameworthy — “city folk,” “honkies,” Korean and Jewish merchants, “infidels,” and so on — because they are responsible for keeping us down.

Islamic Paranoia Writ Large

Paranoia is bad enough when it motivates (sometimes organized) mobs to kill, plunder, and destroy. Paranoia is far worse when it motivates leaders who command (or seek to command) the technology of mass destruction — leaders such as Hitler, Stalin, bin Laden, and Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Ahmadinejad is perhaps best known to Americans for his “alleged” involvement in the Iran Hostage Crisis of 1979 and for his utterances about the United States and Israel; for example:

The establishment of the occupying regime of Qods [Jerusalem]was a major move by the world oppressor [the United States] against the Islamic world. . . .

The Palestinian nation represents the Islamic nation [Umma] against a system of oppression, and thank God, the Palestinian nation adopted Islamic behavior in an Islamic environment in their struggle and so we have witnessed their progress and success. . . .

Our dear Imam [Ayatollah Khomeini] said that the occupying regime [Israel] must be wiped off the map and this was a very wise statement. We cannot compromise over the issue of Palestine. Is it possible to create a new front in the heart of an old front. This would be a defeat and whoever accepts the legitimacy of this regime [Israel] has in fact, signed the defeat of the Islamic world. Our dear Imam targeted the heart of the world oppressor in his struggle, meaning the occupying regime. I have no doubt that the new wave that has started in Palestine, and we witness it in the Islamic world too, will eliminate this disgraceful stain from the Islamic world. But we must be aware of tricks.

For over 50 years the world oppressor tried to give legitimacy to the occupying regime and it has taken measures in this direction to stabilize it. . . .

Recently they [the Israelis] tried a new trick. They want to show the evacuation from the Gaza strip, which was imposed on them by Palestinians [oh, really?], as a final victory for the Palestinians and end the issue of Palestine. . . .

I warn all leaders of the Islamic world that they should be aware of this trick. Anyone who recognizes this regime [Israel] because of the pressure of the World oppressor, or because of naiveté or selfishness, will be eternally disgraced and will burn in the fury of the Islamic nations. (From a speech given in Tehran, Iran, on October 16, 2005, to an Islamic Student Associations conference on “The World Without Zionism.”)

The Culture Clash and the Final Showdown

Ahmadinejad, like bin Laden, whips despair into rage, a rage that is aimed at the imagined “enemies” of Islam. Bin Laden, of course, has succeeded in turning some of those imagined enemies into real ones by attacking them. Ahmadinejad seems bent on following bin Laden’s lead, but on a larger scale.

It is too late to appease such fanatics — much as some Westerners would like to try appeasement — because The West (the United States, in particular) has “insulted” Islamic fanatics in three fundamental ways: by the creation of Israel, by the “exploitation” of the Middle East’s geology, and by the defense of Israel and those Middle Eastern governments that permit the “exploitation.” Given that history, the only way to appease paranoid Islamists is for Americans to don the raiment of mystical asceticism, which might appeal to a select circle of self-flagellants, but to very few others of us.

What I am saying, really, is that a final showdown with fundamentalist Islam is inevitable. Most Americans did not understand the inevitability of that showdown until September 11, 2001 — and many Americans (including most “intellectuals” and many politicians who should know better) still refuse to acknowledge the significance of that day’s events. The doubters seem to be trapped in 1938, waiting for the UN or a Democrat president to announce “peace in our time,” or in 1939-40, unwilling to believe that America could be the target of a fanatical ideology.

It is futile to hope that hard-core Islam can be deflected through political correctness (e.g., banning speech that might offend Muslims), diplomatic maneuverings, support for dissidents, or other such transparently weak responses to aggression, terrorism, and the accumulation of weapons of mass destruction. In fact, such responses are worse than futile; they encourge what they seek to discourage because they display weakness — just as displays of weakness on the part of the United States from 1979 onward encouraged the events of September 11, 2001.

The next stage of the showdown, if it is allowed to happen, will come when al Qaeda (or one of its ilk) acquires and uses weapons of mass destruction in Europe or the United States. The following stage of the showdown, if it is allowed to come to that, will come when Iran acquires nuclear weapons.

I repeat: The question is not whether those events will happen, but when they will happen if they are not thwarted by intelligence-gathering, clandestine operations, conventional military operations, and massive strikes against hard military targets (including nuclear “power” facilities). Force is the only thing that will stop Islamic fanatics; force is the only response that they will heed — just as the Japanese, fanatical as they were, had no choice in the end but to abandon their fanatical ways.

It Is a Question of Will

We had better get used to that idea that war is the answer, and see to it that adequate force is used, sooner rather than later. Those who would use force against us will heed only force. Whether, in defeat, they will respect us or “merely” fear us is irrelevant. We are not engaged in a popularity contest, we are engaged in a clash of civilizations, which Norman Podhoretz rightly calls World War IV.

On our present political course, however, we will suffer grave losses before we get serious about winning that war. The Left (or the Opposition, as I now call it), seems insensitive to the danger that faces us. The voices of doubt and division are many and loud. They range from librarians, academicians and celebrities (too numerous to link), and hypocrites in the media to former vice president Gore and many current members of Congress (e.g., these), some of whom would prefer to impeach President Bush for defending us through a constitutional surveillance program than face up to the enemy without. Their preferred vision of government — strength at home and weakness in foreign affairs — is precisely opposite the vision of the Framers of the Constitution.

Ben Shapiro goes too far in suggesting “that Congress ought to revivify sedition prosecutions,” but he is right about the likely effect of the Opposition’s outpourings; for example:

Let us consider . . . the probable consequences of Gore’s mea culpa [before a Saudi audience] on behalf of the “majority” of his countrymen. No doubt his words will fuel the massive tide of propaganda spewing forth from Muslim dictatorships around the globe. No doubt his words will be used to bolster the credibility of horrific disinformation like the Turkish-made, Gary-Busey-and-Billy Zane-starring monstrosity “Valley of the Wolves: Iraq,” which accuses American troops of war atrocities and depicts a Jewish-American doctor (Busey) slicing organs out of Arab victims and shipping the body parts off to New York, London and Israel. No doubt Gore’s speech will precipitate additional violence against Americans in Iraq and around the globe.

(Not to mention the media’s constant re-hashing of Abu Ghraib.)

Thomas Sowell, as usual, gets to the heart of the matter:

With Iran advancing step by step toward nuclear weapons, while the Europeans wring their hands and the United Nations engages in leisurely discussion, this squeamishness about tapping terrorists’ phone contacts in the United States is grotesque.

Has anyone been paying attention to the audacity of the terrorists? Some in the media seem mildly amused that Palestinian terrorists are threatening Denmark because of editorial cartoons that they found offensive.

Back in the 1930s, some people were amused by Hitler, whose ideas were indeed ridiculous, but by no means funny.

This was not the first threat against a Western country for exercising their freedom in a way that the Islamic fanatics did not like. Osama bin Laden threatened the United States on the eve of our 2004 elections, if we didn’t vote the way he wanted.

When he has nuclear weapons, such threats cannot be ignored, when the choice is between knuckling under or seeing American cities blasted off the face of the earth.

That is the point of no return — and we are drifting towards it, chattering away about legalisms and politics.

Which leads me to the ultimate question, which James Q. Wilson addresses in “Divided We Stand: Can a Polarized Nation Win a Protracted War?” Wilson concludes:

A final drawback of polarization is more profound. Sharpened debate is arguably helpful with respect to domestic issues, but not for the management of important foreign and military matters. The United States, an unrivaled superpower with unparalleled responsibilities for protecting the peace and defeating terrorists, is now forced to discharge those duties with its own political house in disarray.

We fought World War II as a united nation, even against two enemies (Germany and Italy) that had not attacked us. We began the wars in Korea and Vietnam with some degree of unity, too, although it was eventually whittled away. By the early 1990s, when we expelled Iraq from Kuwait, we had to do so over the objections of congressional critics. In 2003 we toppled Saddam Hussein in the face of catcalls from many domestic leaders and opinion-makers. Now, in stabilizing Iraq and helping that country create a new free government, we have proceeded despite intense and mounting criticism, much of it voiced by politicians who before the war agreed that Saddam Hussein was an evil menace in possession of weapons of mass destruction and that we had to remove him.

Denmark or Luxembourg can afford to exhibit domestic anguish and uncertainty over military policy; the United States cannot. A divided America encourages our enemies, disheartens our allies, and saps our resolve–potentially to fatal effect. What Gen. Giap of North Vietnam once said of us is even truer today: America cannot be defeated on the battlefield, but it can be defeated at home. Polarization is a force that can defeat us.

Let us hope — against hope, I fear — that the Opposition comes to its senses before it is too late.

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

Buy Legos

Jennifer Roback Morse explains why.

Office Romance

Lou Michels of Suits in the Workplace writes about the legal perils of office romance:

Given the expansive definitions of hostile work environment contained in recent California cases, and the normal concerns about favoritism/nepotism, there would appear to be very little upside for an employer that doesn’t pay attention to the romantic liaisons in its workforce. Especially crucial are relationships between management and subordinate employees, even where no direct superior-subordinate relationship exists. My experience is that coworkers will always believe that any benefit received by the lower-ranking employee in such a relationship is always a result of the relationship, and not job competence. This perception obviously creates larger problems for everyone as a relationship continues. I regularly counsel my clients to require disclosure of these kinds of relationships at a minimum, and, if possible, prohibit them.

This gets especially tricky when the CEO is a party to an office romance. Everyone else in the company (including the romantic partner) is a lower-ranking employee and therefore off-limits to the CEO — according to policy. But a CEO may simply choose to carry on, heedless or ignorant of the effect of his or her actions on the morale of other employees and on the company’s exposure to legal action. That’s when the VP with responsibility for HR must step in and counsel the CEO. It would be dereliction of duty not to step in.

The Left Is No Longer (in My Lexicon)

I have for too long used “the Left” as a synonym for statist appeasers who oppose economic freedom, freedom of association, free speech, and much else that the Constitution stands for. I will henceforth refer to their ilk as “the Opposition” and — when it is appropriate — “the Disloyal Opposition.”

Modes of Thought

REVISED, 4:26 PM

Hume’s fork (for the philosopher David Hume) says that

statements are divided up into two types:

  • Statements about ideas – these are analytic, necessary statements that are knowable a priori.

Hume’s fork is incomplete because it addresses only statements about logic and facts. There are at least six other possible kinds of statement: intentional, instrumental, creative, incoherent, inconsequential, and exploratory:

  • An intentional statement says that “I” will cause something to happen. Such a statement is not about logic, nor is it about the world that is; it is about the world that will be after “I” take certain actions, either directly or through others.
  • To realize an intention, “I” may question, command, request, plead, or argue in an effort to get others to do what they must do to help me effect the intention. By contrast, a person who would be affected by the intention or involved in its realization may refuse to answer a question (or answer it wrongly) or issue a counter-command, -request, -plea, or -argument in an effort to thwart my intention or his participation in its realization. The truth or falsity of statements (pro or con) is secondary to their effect on the the realization of the intention. Some statements pro or con an intention may be “creative” (see next).
  • A creative statement is an intentional fiction. A novel, for example, is a collection of statements (some of which might be true in the knowable world) that, taken as a whole, depict a world that has not, does not, and will never exist. A political treatise (e.g., the Protocols of the Elders of Zion) may be a concoction of lies, falsehoods, and conjectures that is intended to persuade.
  • An incoherent statement is an unintentional fiction — a statement about logic or the knowable world that is wrong because the person who makes the statement is ignorant or mentally impaired. Such a statement may be made simply “for effect,” that is, not realize an intention but to signal one’s (unfounded) views (e.g., the assassination of JFK was part of a larger plot for world domination by the Elders of Zion).
  • An inconsequential statement is a statement about the world that may or may not be correct but is of no import (e.g., “small talk” about the weather).
  • Finally, there is the exploratory statement — a statement of the kind that one makes in the process of trying to frame a statement that is logical, factual, intentional, commanding, or creative. An exploratory statement may be incoherent, either because (a) the maker of the statement is probing for a logical or factual truth and has not yet found it, or (b) the maker of the statement is on a dead-end track and doesn’t know or care that he is.

Happy Birthday, Mr. Lincoln

In observance of the 197th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s birth, I am reproducing two earlier posts.

The Young Mr. Lincoln

Thanks to American Digest, I found an article by Claude N. Frechette, M.D., “A New Lincoln Image: A Forensic Study,” in which Dr. Frechette documents his authentication of an early daguerreotype of Abraham Lincoln.

Believe it or not — and I believe it after having read Dr. Frechette’s article — the following image is that of Abraham Lincoln in the early 1840s, when he was in his early 30s:

The next image, about which there was no controversy, is that of Lincoln in 1848 at the age of 39:

Finally, we see Lincoln in 1862 at the age of 53:


Lincoln, the Poet President

Abraham Lincoln ended his First Inaugural Address (March 4, 1861) with these words:

We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.

Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address (November 19, 1863) is no less majestic:

…we can not dedicate—we can not consecrate—we can not hallow—this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

Lincoln’s poetry soared again in his Second Inaugural Address (March 4, 1865), weeks before Lee surrendered to Grant (April 9, 1865):

Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said “the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.”

With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.

Let us indeed strive on to finish the work we are in, and — as is our custom — make peace with former enemies who seek peace, while remaining vigilant against those who wish us harm.

Ann Coulter Beats MasterCard

Priceless. (Calvin and Hobbes — and Muhammed, 02/08/06)

(Thanks to Proximo at Southern Appeal for the pointer.)

Time on the Cross, Re-revisited

There has been endless debate as to whether or not the American Civil War was fought over slavery. My own view is that the Civil War was about slavery, in a roundabout way:

  • The mainly agrarian South wanted low tariffs on manufactured goods because high tariffs meant that Southerners had to pay higher prices for manufactured goods. The North wanted high tariffs to protect its new manufacturing industries.
  • Slave labor was fundamental to Southern agrarianism. Abolition was largely a Northern phenomenon.
  • Anti-Northern feelings among Southern elites had been running high for decades. With the rise of the Republican Party, Southerners faced not only the continued prospect of Northern economic dominance but also the prospect that slavery would be abolished. In sum, the election of Abraham Lincoln posed an imminent threat to the Southern “way of life.”
  • War then was inevitable, given the South’s aversion to the North’s economic and abolitionist agenda, on the one hand, and Lincoln’s determination to preserve the Union, on the other hand.

The North’s victory in the Civil War meant an end to slavery in the United States, even though ending slavery was, in Lincoln’s view, secondary to preserving the Union. According to one account of a failed peace parley in January 1865 — an account that is somewhat disingenuous about the South’s interest in preserving slavery — Lincoln

stated that it was never his intention to interfere with slavery in the states where it already existed and he would not have done so during the war, except that it became a military necessity. He had always been in favor of prohibiting the extension of slavery into the territories but never thought immediate emancipation in the states where it already existed was practical. He thought there would be “many evils attending” the immediate ending of slavery in those states.

Be that as it may, the government of the United States did take advantage of the Civil War to eradicate slavery, first partially through the Emancipation Proclamation, then fully through the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution.

Slavery’s demise, as a byproduct of the Civil War, raises two questions:

  • Would slavery have been ended peacefully?
  • Is slavery an indelible stain on American history?

Would Slavery Have Been Ended Peacefully?

There are those who argue that if the North had fought the Civil War over slavery, it had fought an unnecessary war because economic forces would eventually have put an end to slavery. There are others who argue that slavery would not have succumbed to economic forces. Crucial to the debate between the two camps is the validity (or invalidity) of Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman’s cliometric study, Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery (1974), which makes a case that slavery would not have succumbed to economic forces. Fogel and Engerman’s study, however, is fraught with errors. Thomas J. DiLorenzo explains some of those errors:

. . . Fogel and Engerman’s . . . reliance on . . . the price of slaves . . . as “evidence” that slavery could not have been ended peacefully is poor economics. . . . For one thing, the Fugitive Slave Act socialized the enforcement costs of slavery, thereby artificially inflating slave prices. Abolition of the Act, as would have been the reality had the Southern states been allowed to leave in peace would have caused slave prices to plummet and quickened the institution’s demise. That, coupled with a serious effort to do what every nation on the face of the earth did to end slavery during the nineteenth century – compensated emancipation – could have ended slavery peacefully. Great Britain did it in just six years time, and Americans could have followed their lead.. . .

[T]he high price of slaves . . . in 1860 created strong incentives for Southern farmers to find substitutes in the form of free labor and mechanized agriculture. It also increased the expected profitability of mechanized agriculture, so that the producers of that equipment were motivated to develop and market it in the South. This is what happens in any industry where there are rapidly-rising prices of factors of production of any kind. As Mark Thornton wrote in “Slavery, Profitability, and the Market Process” (Review of Austrian Economics, vol. 7, No. 2, 1994), by 1860 “slavery was fleeing from both the competition of free labor and urbanization towards the isolated virgin lands of the Southwest.” Gunderson does not cite any literature past 1974 on this point, so he is probably unaware of such facts.

[T]here is a difference between slave labor being “efficient” for the slave owner and its effect on society as a whole. Of course slavery was profitable to slave owners. This government-supported system helped them confiscate the fruits of the slaves’ labor. But since slave labor is inherently less efficient than free labor, and since so many resources had to be devoted to enforcing the system — most of which were the result of government interventions such as the Fugitive Slave Act, mandatory slave patrol laws, and laws that prohibited manumission — the system imposed huge burdens (“dead weight loss,” in the language of economics) on the rest of society. Free laborers and non-slave owners in the South (at least 80 percent of the adult population) were the primary victims of these government-imposed costs, and would have been a natural political constituency for their eventual abolition. As Hummel concluded, “In real terms, the entire southern economy, including both whites and blacks, was less prosperous” overall because of slavery.

There was net internal migration from South to North, confirming the fact that free laborers in the South were also indirectly exploited by the slave system which forced them into lower-paying jobs. . . .

DiLorenzo — an anarcho-libertarian who despises Abraham Lincoln and is rabidly pro-secession (column archive) — may strike you as a biased source, even though he seems to have facts and logic on his side, in this instance. But we need not rely on DiLorenzo. Fogel and Engerman’s thesis has been attacked, on its merits, from many quarters. Here, for example, are excerpts of a review essay by Thomas L. Haskell, “The True and Tragical History of ‘Time on the Cross’ ” (fee required), from The New York Review of Books (October 2, 1975):

The flaws of Time on the Cross are not confined to its parts but extend to its conceptual heart: the efficiency calculation. No finding raised more eyebrows than the dramatic claim that slaves, through their personal diligence and enthusiastic commitment to the work ethic, made southern agriculture 35 percent more efficient than the family farms of the North. My own nonspecialist’s doubts about this contention . . . have been amply confirmed (and superseded in expertise and weight of evidence) by the work of a half-dozen economic historians.

Fogel and Engerman should have known from the beginning that any comparison of regional efficiency in the antebellum period was fraught with breathtaking difficulties. The basis for their comparison, a rather controversial economist’s tool known as the “geometric index of total factor productivity,” gives results whose interpretation is debatable in even the most conventional applications. . . .

Since the index is based on market value it reflects not only the performance of producers (which is what we have in mind when we talk about productive efficiency) but also the behavior of consumers, whose eagerness for the product helps to determine its market value. Consumer behavior is clearly irrelevant to productive efficiency and the index is misleading to the extent that it is influenced by this factor.

In short, the index is sensitive to demand: if two producers organize their work in equally rational ways, work equally hard, and even produce equal amounts of physical output, the so-called “efficiency” index may nonetheless rank one producer more “efficient” than the other because his product is in greater demand. As David and Temin observe, this is not the accepted meaning of “efficiency.”

Given the sensitivity of the index to demand and the heavy demand for the South’s principal crop, cotton, the index by itself is utterly incapable of justifying the chief inference that Fogel and Engerman drew from it—that slaves must have been hard-working Horatio Alger types and their masters skilled scientific managers. Gavin Wright confirms that the efficiency gap has more to do with voracious consumer demand for cotton than with any Herculean feats of productivity by southern producers. . . .

The bias introduced by cotton demand is only the most obvious of the flaws in the efficiency calculation. Even apart from the inherent frailties of the index in this especially difficult application, Fogel and Engerman’s use of it rests on some extremely dubious assumptions. The choice of 1860 as a typical year for measurement has been sharply questioned. So has the authors’ proposition that an acre of northern farmland was on average 2.5 times better in quality than southern farmland. This extraordinary assumption alone is enough to guarantee a finding of southern superiority in productivity. . . .

Lance Davis of the California Institute of Technology, a prominent cliometrician, singled out the efficiency calculation as the least plausible argument of a generally unpersuasive book. He estimated that Fogel and Engerman’s chances of successfully defending the efficiency finding were about one in ten. This is a telling judgment from the man who introduced the term “New Economic History,” who once called Fogel’s railroad study a “great book,” and who even crowned Fogel himself as “the best” of the cliometricians nine years ago. The efficiency calculation has been closely scrutinized not only by Davis, Wright, Temin, and Paul David, but also by Stanley Lebergott of Wesleyan, Harold Woodman of Purdue, Jay Mandle of Temple, and Frank B. Tipton, Jr. and Clarence E. Walker, both of Wesleyan. No one has a kind word to say for it.

Haskell certainly wasn’t offering an apology for slavery or for any other form of oppression. Nor am I. Slavery was evil, but it existed. The question facing our forbears was how best to eradicate it and then improve the lot of those who had been enslaved. With the advantage of hindsight a case can be made that America’s blacks would be better off today if their ancestors had been freed and integrated into society voluntarily — through economic forces if not social ones. But that is merely hindsight. Regardless of Lincoln’s motivation for prosecuting the Civil War, that war brought an end to slavery. And that — thankfully — is that.

Moreover, Lincoln-hater DiLorenzo gives us good reason to believe that slavery would have died hard in the South. DiLorenzo wants the best of both worlds. He wants to prove that the Civil War was not fought (by the North) because of slavery, and also to prove that the Civil War was fought (by the North) unnecessarily because economic forces would have put an (eventual) end to slavery. The second proposition is inconsistent with the first. DiLorenzo’s inconsistency arises because he is a pro-secessionist who also has the good grace to oppose slavery. He must therefore resort to alternative history in order to justify his secessionist views. His alternative history (sampled above) is that economic forces would have brought an end to slavery in the South, absent the Civil War. But would they have done so? Perhaps eventually, but not for an unconscionably long time.

Economic forces arise from human nature. One facet of human nature is a “taste” that manifests itself in the oppression of “inferior” races (e.g., blacks, Jews, Tutsis, Hutus). Such a “taste” can override “rational” (i.e., wealth-maximizing) forces. The post-Civil War history of race in the South suggests very strongly that slavery would have died hard in the South. Thomas Sowell examines a slice of that history:

The death of Rosa Parks has reminded us of her place in history, as the black woman whose refusal to give up her seat on a bus to a white man, in accordance with the Jim Crow laws of Alabama, became the spark that ignited the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s.

Most people do not know the rest of the story, however. Why was there racially segregated seating on public transportation in the first place? “Racism” some will say — and there was certainly plenty of racism in the South, going back for centuries. But racially segregated seating on streetcars and buses in the South did not go back for centuries.

Far from existing from time immemorial, as many have assumed, racially segregated seating in public transportation began in the South in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Those who see government as the solution to social problems may be surprised to learn that it was government which created this problem. Many, if not most, municipal transit systems were privately owned in the 19th century and the private owners of these systems had no incentive to segregate the races.

These owners may have been racists themselves but they were in business to make a profit — and you don’t make a profit by alienating a lot of your customers. There was not enough market demand for Jim Crow seating on municipal transit to bring it about.

It was politics that segregated the races because the incentives of the political process are different from the incentives of the economic process. Both blacks and whites spent money to ride the buses but, after the disenfranchisement of black voters in the late 19th and early 20th century, only whites counted in the political process.

It was not necessary for an overwhelming majority of the white voters to demand racial segregation. If some did and the others didn’t care, that was sufficient politically, because what blacks wanted did not count politically after they lost the vote.

The incentives of the economic system and the incentives of the political system were not only different, they clashed. . . .

The “incentives of the political system” — a “taste” for racial oppression, in other words — dominated Southern politics until the 1960s. And that was in a defeated South. The determination of Southern political leaders to defend slavery in the first place, and then to salvage the remnants of slavery through Jim Crow, is strong evidence that economic forces might not have been allowed to operate freely in the South, at least not for a long time. The evil (take note, Mr. DiLorenzo) was to be found in Southern political leaders, not in the White House.

Opponents of slavery, unarmed as they were with “sophisticated” (and flawed) cliometric techniques, saw the evil in slavery and eradicated it when they had the opportunity to do so. Uncertain gradualism in the defense of liberty is no virtue. Opportunistic abolitionism in the defense of liberty is far from a vice.

The Stain of Slavery

The fact that slavery existed in the United States for so long is taken by some — especially those of the Left, here and abroad — as evidence that white-male-capitalist-dominated-America is evil incarnate. But slavery in the United States was ended when white, male capitalists still dominated America, whereas slavery still exists in non-white areas of the world.

Strident critics of the United States nevertheless persist in saying that the existence in the United States of slavery (or any other “evil,” real or imagined) means that the U.S. was and is no better than, say, the fascistic Third Reich. (Leftists don’t like to remind us about the longer-lived and equally fascistic USSR.) Such assertions studiously ignore the fact that most Americans always have been freer than the subjects of Hitler and Stalin. The economic forces that could eventually have brought an end to slavery in the United States would not have been allowed to operate in Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union — or in Communist China, Cuba, Saddam’s Iraq, North Korea, and other dictatorial regimes of the kind that Leftists often have defended and even idealized as “progressive” and even “freedom-loving.” Nor should it go without notice that Nazi Germany and the USSR met their demise at the hands of the “militaristic” United States.

It is supremely ironic that Leftists — who like to attack the United States as “fascistic” and “militaristic” — are proponents of government interventions in private affairs that are confiscatory and stultifying in their effects on economic output. All working persons in the United States — and all who depend on them — are in thrall to the “plantation owners” who run our affairs from the Capitol in Washington, the various State capitols, and sundry municipal buildings. The Left applauds that thralldom and agitates for its intensification.

Yes, the fact that slavery existed in the United States for so long is a stain on the history of the United States, but it is not an indelible stain. To err is human, which must come as news to the Left, with its penchant for judging its enemies (mainly conservative, white, American males) by superhuman standards of conduct, while seeking to impose its utopian social and economic order through the power of the state. The Left’s cynicism stands in stark contrast to the vision of the Framers, who sought “a more perfect Union” by enabling the free exchange of ideas and goods.

Slogans for Our Time

UPDATED BELOW

Republican James G. Blaine probably lost the presidential election of 1884 to Democrat Grover Cleveland because Blaine failed to repudiate a Protestant minister who characterized the Democrat Party as the party of “Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion.” (If the significance of that phrase isn’t obvious to you, read this.) The backlash among Irish Catholics apparently tipped New York’s electoral votes, and the election, to Cleveland.

All of that is by way of introduction to these updated versions of “Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion”:

“Buggery, Baby-killing, and Bush-bashing”

“Taxes, Terrorism, and Timidity”

Give me a week and I might come up with something equally offensive to Republicans.

UPDATE: It didn’t take a week, though I do have to change the rhetorical style. The Republican Party is the party of

“Mirthless, Mediocre Milquetoasts”

For good measure, the Libertarian Party is the party of

“Pot, Puerility, and Powerlessness”

Legalism vs. Liberty

We have a Constitution that was written by men who knew what it meant to fight for liberty. As Justice Felix Frankfurter wrote,

we have had recent occasion to quote approvingly the statement of former Chief Justice Hughes that the war power of the Government is ‘the power to wage war successfully.’ . . . Therefore, the validity of action under the war power must be judged wholly in the context of war. That action is not to be stigmatized as lawless because like action in times of peace would be lawless. To talk about a military order that expresses an allowable judgment of war needs by those entrusted with the duty of conducting war as ‘an unconstitutional order’ is to suffuse a part of the Constitution with an atmosphere of unconstitutionality. The respective spheres of action of military authorities and of judges are of course very different. But within their sphere, military authorities are no more outside the bounds of obedience to the Constitution than are judges within theirs. . . . To recognize that military orders are ‘reasonably expedient military precautions’ in time of war and yet to deny them constitutional legitimacy makes of the Constitution an instrument for dialetic subtleties not reasonably to be attributed to the hard-headed Framers, of whom a majority had had actual participation in war. If a military order such as that under review does not transcend the means appropriate for conducting war, such action . . . is as constitutional as would be any authorized action by the Interstate Commerce Commission within the limits of the constitutional power to regulate commerce.

In spite of that, we now have men and women who seem opposed to the notion that fighting a war in order to win it is every bit as constitutional as regulating interstate commerce in order to dictate the labeling of canned goods. How is it that such men and women can go so wrong? Here’s how:

  • They understand, correctly, that citizens may not be deprived of liberty without due process of law.
  • They twist that principle to mean that due process of law is synonymous with liberty.
  • That leads them to challenge any defense of liberty that — in their view — violates due process, even if the result of their challenge is to enable the enemies of liberty

They have, in other words, mistaken means for ends and come down on the side of means, as opposed to ends. That is to say, they prefer the tokens of libert to liberty, itself. And sometimes they seem downright determined to help the enemies of liberty.

Related posts:

Getting It Wrong: Civil Libertarians and the War on Terror (A Case Study)
More about War and Civil Liberties
The Illogic of Knee-Jerk Civil Liberties Advocates
Torture and Morality
The Constitution and Warrantless “Eavesdropping”
NSA “Eavesdropping”: The Last Word (from Me)
Privacy, Security, and Electronic Surveillance
Privacy: Variations on the Theme of Liberty
Words for the Unwise
Recommended Reading about NSA’s Surveillance Program

I Knew It All the Time

I always hated meetings convened for the purpose of “problem solving.” Here’s why:

So you need some fresh, innovative ideas. What do you do? Get a group of your best thinkers together to bounce ideas of each other…? No, wrong answer. Time and again research has shown that people think of more new ideas on their own than they do in a group. The false belief that people are more creative in groups has been dubbed by psychologists the ‘illusion of group of productivity”. But why does this illusion persist? . . .

[I]t’s because when we’re in a group, other people are talking, the pressure isn’t always on us and so we’re less aware of all the times that we fail to think of a new idea. By contrast, when we’re working alone and we can’t think of anything, there’s no avoiding the fact that we’re failing.

But if you’re constantly coming up with good ideas when you work alone, you know that a group endeavor will simply be a waste of your time. And sure enough — it is.

That’s an INTJ for you.

Wishes Are Not Facts

A utopian syllogism:

1. It is human to err.

2. Humans do not wish to err.

3. Therefore, humans can avoid error by wishing not to err.

By (3), the wish (2) overcomes the fact (1), but only in the imagination. Wishes are not facts.

(Inspired by this post at Imlac’s Journal.)

Liberty, General Welfare, and the State

In an earlier post I said that “the economy isn’t a zero-sum game.” That assertion warrants explanation and elaboration. Here it is.

Gains from Specialization and Trade

Imagine a very simple economy in which Jack makes bread and Jill makes butter. Jack also could make butter and Jill also could make bread, but both of them have learned that they are better off if they specialize. Thus:

  • Jack can make 1 loaf of bread or 0.5 pound of butter a day. (The “rate of transformation” is linear; e.g., in Jill’s absence Jack would make 0.5 loaf of bread and 0.25 pound of butter daily.)
  • Jill can make 0.5 loaf of bread or 1 pound of butter a day. (Again, the rate of transformation is linear; e.g., in Jack’s absence Jill would make 0.25 loaf of bread and 0.5 pound of butter daily.)
  • If both Jack and Jill make bread and butter their total daily output might be, to continue the example, 0.75 loaf and 0.75 pounds.
  • Alternatively, if Jack specializes in bread and Jill specializes in butter their total daily output is 1 loaf and 1 pound.

Now, the question for Jack and Jill is this: At what rate should they exchange bread and butter so that both are better off than they would be in the absence of specialization and trade? There is no right answer to that question. The answer depends on Jack and Jill’s respective preferences for bread and butter, and on their respective negotiating skills. But of one thing we can be certain, Jack and Jill will strike a bargain that makes both of them better off than they would be in the absence of specialization and trade.

Consider some possibilities:

  • Jack makes 1 loaf of bread, keeps 0.5 loaf, and trades the other 0.5 loaf to Jill in exchange for 0.25 pound of butter. Jack, with 0.5 loaf and 0.25 pound, is where he would be in the absence of specialization and trade. Jill makes 1 pound of butter and trades 0.25 pound to Jack for 0.5 loaf of bread. Jill, with 0.5 loaf and 0.75 pound, is better off than she would be in the absence of specialization and trade (+0.25 loaf and +0.25 pound). This outcome is unlikely because Jack, seeing his lot unimproved, would have no incentive to specialize in bread and trade with Jill. Jill, therefore, would have an incentive to strike a bargain with Jack that makes both of them better off than they would be in the absence of specialization and trade.
  • At the other end of the spectrum of possible trades, Jill could end up no better off while Jack reaps all the gains to specialization and trade. But this outcome, too, is unlikely because Jill, seeing her lot unimproved, would have no incentive to specialize in butter and trade with Jack. Jack, therefore, would have an incentive to strike a bargain with Jill that makes both of them better off than they would be in the absence of specialization and trade.
  • More realistically, then, Jack and Jill make a trade that leaves both of them better off. For example, Jack trades 0.5 loaf to Jill for 0.5 pound of butter, leaving him ahead by 0.25 pound of butter. Jilll ends up with 0.5 loaf and 0.5 pound of butter, leaving her ahead by 0.25 loaf of bread.

In sum, liberty — which includes the right to engage in voluntary exchange — makes both Jack and Jill better off. Moreover, because they are better off they can convert some of their gains from trade into investments that yield even more output in the future. For example, to continue with this homely metaphor, imagine that Jill — fueled by additional food — is able to produce the usual amount of butter in less time, giving her time in which to design and build a churn that can produce butter at a faster rate.

Liberty advances the general welfare, which means the general well-being — not handouts.

Enter the State

Under a regime of liberty there is no “exploitation” of Jack by Jill, or vice versa, unless one of them cheats or robs the other. In the naïve libertarian view of the world, cheating and theft are irrational. If Jack cheats or steals from Jill, Jill refuses to trade with Jack until he made things right. If he refuses to do so he would face a lifetime of living less well than he could by trading honestly with Jill. Alternatively, Jack would come to understand that this thievery or cheating will weaken Jill and diminish her ability to produce 1 pound of butter a day. That understanding should cause Jack to desist from cheating or thievery.

But Jack would not desist from cheating or thievery if he had a taste for such things, nor would Jill if she had a taste for such things. (Wealth-maximization, contrary to many economists and all naïve libertarians, isn’t necessarily the be-all and end-all of human existence.) Even if neither Jack nor Jill has a taste for cheating or thievery, they must beware predators who have such tastes.

The Delusion of Statelessness (or Anarcho-Libertarianism)

An anarcho-capitalist (or anarcho-libertarian) would have Jack and Jill protect themselves (from each other and outside predators) by hiring a third party to enforce their trading contract and deal with predators. An anarcho-libertarian would call such a third party a private defense agency. But an entity that has the power to enforce contracts and keep the peace is the state, no matter what you call it.

In an effort to avoid the necessity of the state, the anarcho-libertarian posits competing private defense agencies. But if a generally peaceful and cooperative people cannot control one state (or private defense agency), such a people surely cannot control competing states — or warlords — all of them armed and many of them having a taste for dominance.

For a sample of the consequences of warlordism in the American experience, consider the Civil War. An anarcho-libertarian would be quick to call Abraham Lincoln a warlord. But it takes two warlords to foment a war. And so — with the creation of a rival warlord in the South — there was a civil war: a war that resulted in 50 percent more military deaths than did World War II (twice as many deaths per capita); a war with dire, long-lasting consequences for race relations in America (e.g., Jim Crow and “black redneck” culture); a war that would not have happened if the South had not chosen to form a “competing defense agency.” (For more about anarcho-libertarianism and defense, read this post and the posts linked at the bottom.)

The Busybody State

The lesson here is simple, the best way to reap the benefits of liberty is to create a single, accountable state with limited powers — and to be vigilant about enforcing the limits. When vigilance fails, those who control the levers of power will use that power to interfere with the lives, liberty, and property that they were hired to protect. The Framers of the Constitution knew that well, and so they designed a system of checks and balances to circumscribe the power of the state. (The design is still there, on paper, and — with time and the right Supreme Court — can be re-applied.)

The fact of the matter is that the state has no moral standing with respect to its citizens. For example, a person who “fails” to give money or assistance to a fellow citizen owes an apology to no one, especially not to the busybodies who happen to control the state. The state’s moral judgment in such matters is “superior” only in that it is enforceable through the power of the state. Let us not lose sight of this fact: Edward Kennedy and his ilk (of all political stripes) have no claim whatever to moral superiority.

To return to Jack and Jill, suppose that Jill becomes ill and incapable of producing anything. As a result, Jill has no income and Jack is reduced to providing for himself. It isn’t Jack’s fault that Jill is incapable of working; Jack is worse off because Jill isn’t working. It isn’t Jack’s fault if Jill has not somehow insured herself against illness (e.g., by stockpiling bread and butter). Is Jack nevertheless compelled to give Jill some of his reduce income?

Jack, out of empathy for a fellow human being, may wish to give Jill some of his bread and butter. (In fact, absent the busybody state, Jack would be more willing and able to do just that.) Jack may even make an economic calculation and decide that if he gives some of his bread and butter to Jill she will recover and return to work, making both of them better off. But when the state — namely, the controlling faction of busybodies — is empowered to dictate the terms of Jack’s chartity toward Jill, here’s what happens:

  • The busybody state taxes Jack by taking away some of the bread and butter he produces, which is less than he had when Jill was capable of working (a fact that never occurs to the busybody state).
  • The tax (whether it’s an income tax or a consumption tax) makes work less attractive to Jack, assuming that he is producing more than he needs for subsistence.
  • When work becomes less attractive in relation to leisure, Jack chooses more leisure and therefore produces less.
  • As a result, Jack has less “excess” food to stockpile against misfortune or to sustain himself in efforts to improve his bread-and-butter-making technology (which would enable him to give more aid to Jill).

In sum, when the state becomes Jack’s conscience, it is far more likely to make matters worse than it is to make them better. Jill’s plight is unfortunate, but Jack is the only person who is in a position to make the right decision about how to respond to Jill’s plight. It is false and cheap compassion for the busybody state to tell Jack what to do about Jill.

Moreover, the state’s patent willingness to extort aid from Jack has the effect of (a) blunting Jill’s incentive to build a stockpile of food for a “rainy day” and (b) blunting Jill’s incentive to return to work when she is able to do so.

The state’s busybody ways make both Jack and Jill worse off, in the end.

There’s much more to be said for an economic order of voluntary exchange, in which the state’s only role is to enforce contracts and keep the peace. Here’s some of it:

The Destruction of Income and Wealth by the State (start here)
Why Outsourcing Is Good: A Simple Lesson for Liberal Yuppies
Fear of the Free Market — Part I
Fear of the Free Market — Part II
Fear of the Free Market — Part III
Trade Deficit Hysteria
Social Injustice
The Sentinel: A Tragic Parable of Economic Reality
Why We Deserve What We Earn
Who Decides Who’s Deserving?
The Rationality Fallacy
Brains Sans Borders
Why Class Warfare Is Bad for Everyone
Fighting Myths with Facts
Debunking More Myths of Income Inequality
Free-Market Healthcare
Understanding Economic Growth
Socialist Calculation and the Turing Test
The Social Welfare Function
Funding the Welfare State
A Mathematician’s Insight
Giving Back to the Community
Computer Technology Will Replace Concrete
Second-Guessing, Paternalism, Parentalism, and Choice
A Non-Paradox for Libertarians
“The Private Sector Isn’t Perfect”
Whose Incompetence Do You Trust?
Understanding Outsourcing
Much Ado about Donning
Joe Stiglitz, Ig-Nobelist
A Simple Fallacy
Ten Commandments of Economics
More Commandments of Economics
Three Truths for Central Planners
Bits of Economic Wisdom
Productivity Growth and Tax Cuts
Zero-Sum Thinking
Risk and Regulation
Wal-Mart and Jobs
Economist, Heal Thyself

Recommended Reading about NSA’s Surveillance Program

LINKS ADDED 02/07/06, 02/14/06, 03/07/06, 03/24/06

Buried in the middle of my rather long post about “Privacy: Variations on the Theme of Liberty” is a reading list that I update from time to time:

President had legal authority to OK taps (Chicago Tribune)
Our domestic intelligence crisis (Richard A. Posner)
Many posts by Tom Smith of The Right Coast (start with “Thank You New York Times” on 12/16/05 and work your way to the present)
Eavesdropping Ins and Outs (Mark R. Levin, writing at National Review Online)
The FISA Act And The Definition Of ‘US Persons’ (Ed Morrissey of Captain’s Quarters)
A Colloquy with the Times (John Hinderaker of Power Line)
September 10 America (editorial at National Review Online)
A Patriot Acts (Ben Stein, writing at The American Spectator)
More on the NSA Wiretaps (Dale Franks of QandO)
The President’s War Power Includes Surveillance (John Eastman, writing at The Remedy)
Warrantless Intelligence Gathering, Redux (UPDATED) (Jeff Goldstein, writing at Protein Wisdom)
FISA Court Obstructionism Since 9/11 (Ed Morrissey of Captain’s Quarters)
FISA vs. the Constitution (Robert F. Turner, writing at OpinionJournal)
Wisdom in Wiretaps (an editorial from OpinionJournal)
Under Clinton, NY Times Called Surveillance a Necessity (William Tate, writing at The American Thinker)
LEGAL AUTHORITIES SUPPORTING THE ACTIVITIES OF THE
NATIONAL SECURITY AGENCY DESCRIBED BY THE PRESIDENT (U.S. Department of Justice)
Terrorists on Tap (Victoria Toensing, writing at OpinionJournal)
Letter from Chairman, Senate Intelligence Committee, to Chairman and Ranking Member of Senate Judiciary Committee
Letter from H. Bryan Cunningham to Chairman and Ranking Member of Senate Judiciary Committee
Has The New York Times Violated the Espionage Act? (article in Commentary by Gabriel Schoenfeld)
Point of No Return (Thomas Sowell, writing at RealClearPolitics) (ADDED 02/07/06)
Letter from John C. Eastman to Chairman of House Judiciary Committee (ADDED 02/14/06)
FISA Chief Judge Speaks Out, Bamford Misinforms (a post at The Strata-Sphere) (ADDED 03/07/06)
DoJ Responds to Congressional FISA Questions (another post at The Strata-Sphere) (ADDED 03/24/06)

Giving Back to the Community, Redux

I wrote about it here. Don Boudreaux has a very good post, from a slightly different angle, here.

Liberty and "Fairness"

Todd Zywicki at The Volokh Conspiracy posts a question from a student:

I consider myself to be a classical liberal (free trade, freedom of expression, freedom of religion …)with an exceptionally large bleeding heart (there is no excuse for having hungry kids or the mentally ill out on the streets), but I am trying to understand what it means to be a libertarian.

My advice: I recommend Arnold Kling’s Learning Economics, which is available on the web, here. But I would like to deal directly with the student’s implied question, which seems to be how the “less fortunate” would cope under a regime of liberty.

The student implies that there is a tension between liberty and what he or she might call “fairness.” The idea seems to be that some kids are hungry and some mentally ill persons are homeless because . . . because what? Because persons who are not hungry or homeless have taken food and health care from the hungry and homeless? No, that can’t be the answer, if you understand that the economy isn’t a zero-sum game.

Perhaps the hungry are hungry and the homeless are homeless because those who are “more fortunate” aren’t paying enough taxes to provide for our “less fortunate” fellow citizens? On the contrary, taxes (and regulations) stifle economic growth, which benefits everyone who is willing and able to work. That includes the parents of children who might otherwise go hungry. That includes persons who are prone to mental illness but who would have greater access to health care, given a job and/or health-care benefits.

So, a regime of liberty would actually be to the advantage of most of the “less fortunate” among us. The “least fortunate” would benefit from private charity, which is stifled by the present regime, which I call the regulatory-welfare state.

For more about the effects of the regulatory-welfare state on the general welfare, go here. For evidence that taxation suppresses private charity, go here and read to the end.

Anarcho-Libertarian "Stretching"

Tim Swanson, writing at the website of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, announces with glee “An Anarchistic Oasis In The Middle Of The Desert.” The “anarchistic oasis” is the Dubai International Financial Centre (DIFC), which, according to an article quoted by Swanson,

is a free trade area, an enclave with no taxes or customs duties and no restrictions on foreign ownership. That, in itself, is nothing special: Dubai has nearly a dozen [free trade areas] already. But what’s unique about the . . . DIFC . . . is that Dubai’s normal civil and commercial laws do not apply within.

Under a formal decree of the United Arab Emirates, and local laws signed by the late Ruler of Dubai, the two authorities that hold absolute power carved out an area from which they withdrew their own system of laws. The concept is breathtaking: here in DIFC, English common law reigns supreme – and under a British chief justice. Although there are some similarities to the Vatican, Hong Kong and even Gaza, it is thought to be the first time that any state has done this.

State sponsorship of English common law under a British chief justice is hardly the stuff of anarchy, or even of Hayekian spontaneous order. Welcome as the rule of common law may be (and I welcome it), the DFIC is not an instance of anarchy in action. State-imposed anarchy is an oxymoron. The DFIC is an instance of state-sponsored liberty, such as Americans enjoyed (more or less) from 1789 until about 1933 — and moreso from 1865 until about 1933.

"Addicted to Oil"

Are Americans “addicted to oil” as President Bush — borrowing a line from environmental extremists — said in his State of the Union message last night? We are “addicted” to many things, for example breathing, eating, and sleeping — which are unavoidable aspects of living. So, let’s boil it down to an “addiction” to living.

President Bush presumably would not deny us the right to live, so he must want to deny us the right to live as well as we can. Of course, living as well as we can should not encompass cheating, lying, fraud, deception, theft, or murder. (I will resist the urge to pronounce here on politicians and the parasites upon whose votes they depend.) Assuming for the moment that Americans generally do not do such things in order to live, it seems that President Bush is telling us that there must be a limit on how well we should live. Moreover, that limit would seem to apply indiscriminately. The relatively poor person who relies on oil (or its derivative forms of energy) for transportation to work, enough light to read by, and enough fuel to cook with is just as “addicted” as the very rich person who relies on oil for jetting about the globe, projecting motion pictures on a home theater screen the size of Rhode Island, and eating food prepared and served by a small army of servants. (Oops, they’re not called “servants” anymore, are they?)

Thus government, in its wisdom, shall punish poor and rich alike for their “addiction” to living — or at least to living as well as they are able. How will it do that? By taxing us all for research into and development of alternative sources of energy. Isn’t it strange that government should have to do that when the “obscene profits” garnered by oil companies will surely call forth from the private sector the very same kinds of research and development?

Not only would private research and development be funded voluntarily, but it would more assuredly pay off. Private actors who have put their own money at risk do not make perfect decisions, but they make better decisions than politicians, lobbyists, and bureaucrats who get to play with taxpayers’ money. It’s not “real” money to politicians, lobbyists, and bureaucrats — but it’s real money to the rest of us.

And most of the rest of us are not very rich. We’re addicted to living, and trying to live as well as we can. President Bush’s program would punish our addiction and make it harder for us to live as well as we can.

Conservatism, Libertarianism, and "The Authoritarian Personality"

The Myth

There is a renewed effort to identify conservatism with racism and authoritarianism. It’s not quite as overt as that (except on the hard Left), but it goes like this (corrective analysis in brackets):

  • Bush voters (and only Bush voters) are “conservative.” [What kind of “conservative”? A Burkean, limited-government, classical liberal who knows that evolved social traditions contain much wisdom and who therefore opposes change when it is imposed by the state? A neo-isolationist protectionist like Pat Buchanan, who spouts many of the same lines as “liberal” Lou Dobbs? A “redneck” who hates government except when it comes time to pick up his welfare check? A life-long Democrat who goes to church and tries to obey the Ten Commandments? The Burkean is a conservative. The Democrat has conservative tendencies (probably unacknowledged). Pat Buchanan, Lou Dobbs, and the “redneck” simply exude certain attitudes, not coherent philosophies of governance. Define your terms.]
  • Research “shows” that Bush voters are racist. [Actually, an uncontrolled, online “experiment” (see first three links above) purports to find an unspecified degree of correlation between (a) persons whose (unverified) zip codes coincide with congressional districts where Bush prevailed and (b) a somewhat more negative, self-reported (i.e., calculated) reaction to black persons than that of test-takers whose (unverified) zip codes coincide with congressional districts where Bush did not prevail. It would be just as valid to conclude that Bill Clinton is a racist because his daughter did not attend public schools in the mostly black District of Columbia. Actually, Bill Clinton’s condescendion toward black persons does strike me as a form of compensation for latent racist tendencies.]
  • Hitler and his adherents were racist authoritarians. [The part about “racist authoritarians” is an undeniable truth, which — when linked to the myth that Hitler was “conservative” — ties Republicans and “conservatives” (of whatever stripe) to racist authoritarianism. The modern liberal agenda of taxation and regulation is patently authoritarian in nature, yet a “good liberal” — who cannot see that his or her agenda is authoritarian — also denies his or her own racism by bending over backward to seem non-racist, regardless of the truth of the matter.]
  • Therefore, conservatives are racist authoritarians. [The implication here is that conservatism is authoritarian (and therefore racist, by the Hitler analogy). Yet, the reverse is true. Modern liberalism is authoritarian, and Burkean conservatives-classical liberals-libertarians have resisted modern liberalism since its ascendancy in the 1930s.]

The line of “reasoning” that I have just “fisked” illustrates three types of logical fallacy: false dilemma, false choice, and package deal. In this instance, the perpetrators of the fallacies do not know, or care, about their logical failings. Their aim is simply to convey the following message: Conservatism is sociopathic, if not psychopathic. They do not wish to distinguish among brands of conservatism: all are anathema to those who perpetrate and pertpetuate the myth that conservatism is a psychological illness on a par with Hitler’s pathological racist authoritarianism.

Academic Origins and Echoes

The effort to portray conservativism as an aberrant psychological disorder goes back to the publication in 1950 of The Authoritarian Personality, about which I was instructed by Prof. Milton Rokeach, author of The Open and Closed Mind (related links). Here is how Alan Wolfe, who is sympathetic to the thesis of The Authoritarian Personality, describes its principal author:

Theodor Adorno, the senior author, was a member of the influential Frankfurt school of “critical theory,” a Marxist-inspired effort to diagnose the cultural deformities of late capitalism.

Hmm. . . . Very interesting.

Wolfe continues:

Unlike much postwar social science, The Authoritarian Personality did not present data showing the correlations between authoritarianism and a variety of variables such as social class, religion, or political affiliation. Instead the authors tried to draw a composite picture of people with authoritarian leanings: Perhaps their most interesting finding was that such people identify with the strong and are contemptuous of the weak. Extensive case studies of particular individuals were meant to convey the message that people who seemed exceptionally conventional on the outside could be harboring radically intolerant thoughts on the inside.

Despite its bulk, prestigious authors, and seeming relevance, however, The Authoritarian Personality never did achieve its status as a classic. Four years after its publication, it was subject to strong criticism in Studies in the Scope and Method of “The Authoritarian Personality” (Free Press, 1954), edited by the psychologists Richard Christie and Marie Jahoda.Two criticisms were especially devastating, one political, the other methodological.

How, the University of Chicago sociologist Edward A. Shils wanted to know, could one write about authoritarianism by focusing only on the political right? In line with other works of the 1950s, such as Hannah Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism (Harcourt, Brace, 1951), Shils pointed out that “Fascism and Bolshevism, only a few decades ago thought of as worlds apart, have now been recognized increasingly as sharing many very important features.” The United States had its fair share of fellow travelers and Stalinists, Shils argued, and they too worshiped power and denigrated weakness. Any analysis that did not recognize that the extremes of left and right were similar in their authoritarianism was inherently flawed.

Herbert H. Hyman and Paul B. Sheatsley, survey-research specialists, scrutinized every aspect of The Authoritarian Personality’s methodology and found each wanting. Sampling was all but nonexistent. The wording of the questionnaire was flawed. The long, open-ended interviews were coded too subjectively. No method existed for determining what caused what. Whatever the subjects said about themselves could not be verified. The F scale lacked coherence.

Composite pictures, case studies, exclusion of Leftist dogmas, not to mention seriously flawed methods. Wolfe nevertheless defends the flawed methods by saying “social science being what it is, fault can be found with any methodology” — which is really a condemnation of social science, not its critics. (One might use Wolfe’s reasoning to excuse murder.)

Wolfe then tries to deflate Shils’s “political” criticism by arguing as follows:

Certainly the criticisms of Edward Shils seem misplaced 50 years on. Communism really did have some of the authoritarian characteristics of fascism, yet Communism is gone from the Soviet Union and without any influence in the United States. . . .

If one could find contemporary “authoritarians of the left” to match those on the right, the authors of The Authoritarian Personality could rightly be criticized for their exclusive focus on fascism.

Wolfe would have us believe that Communism and fascism are essentially different. They are not, in that both are extreme manifestations of authoritarianism. Wolfe also would have us believe that the official demise of Communism somehow precludes the rise of “authoritarians of the left.” But Wolfe, like a fish in water, is unable to see that liberty in the United States has receded largely because of the efforts of the Democrat Party. “Democrat” simply has a nicer ring than “Communist.” (It’s like the Ministry of Peace in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.) Wolfe sees authoritarianism only when it seems to emanate from the Republican Party. Actually, now that the Communist Party is safely beyond criticism, Wolfe is free to apply the label “authoritarian” in the same undisriminating way that John Birchers used to apply the label “Communist.”

How does Rokeach’s work relate to Adorno’s? Here’s Rokeach, in his own words:

The Open and Closed Mind grew out of my need to better understand and thus to better resist
continuing pressures during my earlier years on my intellectual independence, on the one side from orthodox religion and on the other side from orthodox Marxism-Leninism.

Research as a continuation of adolescent rebellion? Hmm. . . . I wonder what Dr. Freud would make of that?

An Academician’s Corrective

Let’s turn to Australian psychologist John J. Ray, who assesses The Authoritarian Personality, The Open and Closed Mind, and related works in “Does Authoritarianism of Personality Go With Conservatism?“:

The problem that has plagued 30 years of work on authoritarianism is doubt about the validity of the scales used to measure it. From the start there was the apparently inexplicable fact that authoritarian governments on the world scene were at least as likely to be Left wing as Right wing. . . .

We now have data from three separate societies which suggest that when authoritarianism of personality is validly measured, it shows no association with political ideology. To reconcile this with previous findings we must insist on the distinction between authoritarianism of attitudes and authoritarianism of personality. One refers to how a person habitually feels and the other refers to how he behaves. . . .

It was because they failed to make such a distinction that Adorno, Frenkel-Brunswik, Levinson, and Sanford (1950) [The Authoritarian Personality] mistakenly identified the person who tended to admire traditional authority with the person who himself liked to dominate others. . . . One group admires authority because they would like to exercise it themselves while the other group admires it because they are so incapable of exercising it themselves. It is the former group that most of us would identify as authoritarian but the latter group which gets high scores on the F and related scales [devised by Adorno, Rokeach, and others]. . . .

It would seem, then, that if we wish to detect people something like the ones Adorno et al. (1950) had in mind, we need to know their scores on both a scale of authoritarian attitudes and a scale of authoritarian personality. It is only high scorers on both who fit their image of the Fascist personality. Authoritarian personalities alone are equally likely to be found on either side of the Left-Right divide. [All emphasis added by me.]

There’s more in Ray’s article about “Libertarians and the Authoritarian Personality.” Keep in mind, as you read the following excerpts, the proximity of Burkean conservatism to libertarianism:

The literature starts out with the now-famous book by Adorno, Frenkel-Brunswik, Levinson and Sanford, The Authoritarian Personality. This book had its genesis in an attempt by these four Jewish scholars to explain the rise of German Nazism. Most of the research reported in the book, however, was done in California.

These authors constructed a “scale” (list) of authoritarian attitudes which they administered to a wide variety of population samples. They found that those who “scored high” on this scale (endorsed most items on the list) tended to be sympathetic to the political Right and in fact showed “pre-fascist” personalities. . . .

A follow-up book by Christie and Jahoda challenged the California findings on both methodological and substantive grounds. . . . Methodologically, the point was raised that Adorno et al. had included in their list of attitudes only pro-authority items. There were no actual pro-liberty items. One could only express pro-liberty attitudes by rejecting pro-authority statements. . . . A high scorer could be either simply agreeable or a genuine authoritarian; in such circumstances, one could never be sure whether it was acquiescence which was correlating with right-wing attitudes or whether it was genuine authoritarianism.

The substantive point raised against the California studies [by Adorno et al.] was that they were simply obviously false. Right-wingers such as Nazis and Fascists may be authoritarians but equally so are Communists such as Mao and Stalin. Authoritarianism was to be found not at one end of the political spectrum but rather at both ends. . . .

A new proposal that substantially helped to resolve this dilemma was a long overdue reconceptualization of political allegiance along two dimensions rather than one. This reconceptualization was associated with the names of Rokeach and Eysenck. . . . They rightly identified authoritarianism/libertarianism as being at right angles to (unrelated to) the normal radical-conservative dimension of politics. . . .

Communists and Fascists could be shown to fall at opposite ends of the first dimension (radicalism-conservatism) but at the same end (authoritarian) of the second dimension. Democrats and Republicans on the other hand could be shown to fall also on opposite sides of the radicalism-conservatism divide but in the same position on the authoritarianism-libertarianism dimension (half-way between the two). . . .

Neat as this schema was, however, there proved to be a great deal of difficulty in showing that people’s individual attitudes could in fact be ordered in accordance with it. . . .

Rokeach’s scale (the “D” scale) also shared with the Adorno et al. “F” scale, the problem of one-way wording. Again there were no explicitly libertarian items.

Three attempts to remedy this problem were made by [me] using Australian data. . . . Three new scales were constructed wherein there were equal numbers of authoritarian and libertarian items. . . . The results obtained with balanced scales are then much more trustworthy than results from one-way-worded scales.

Thus, at this point, although we have seen that there are theoretical inadequacies in a one-dimensional description of political options and although there have been methodological inadequacies in much of the research in the area, the overall conclusion when all these are taken into account is still the same as that originally drawn by Adorno et al. — it is authoritarians, not libertarians, who tend to be politically right-wing and fascist.

In fact [I] showed that both by the mechanical/statistical procedures of factor analysis and by the criteria of various historical definitions, the Adorno et al. “F” scale was indistinguishable from a measure of conservatism. . . .

There are two very important ways, however, in which the Adorno et al. account has not been shown to be true. First, authoritarians /conservatives can not be shown to be psychologically sick, and, second, authoritarian attitudes can not be shown to go with authoritarian behaviour.

Various measures of authoritarianism have repeatedly been found not to correlate with various measures of maladjustment. . . . Attributes that authoritarianism has been found to correlate with (e.g., rigidity, dogmatism) are obviously not always maladaptive. As “stick-to-it-iveness”, such attributes might in some circumstances be, in fact, rather admired. . . .

The failure of authoritarian attitudes to relate to authoritarian behaviour is . . . a more serious failure of the Adorno et al. account. In fact, to psychologists the attitude/behaviour discrepancy is a familiar phenomenon. It is certainly true in other fields such as racism. . . . One cannot even guess whether the acknowledged motivation is the real motivation or not. . . .

Since a distinction is necessary between authoritarian attitudes and behaviour, a very obvious question becomes: Given that we have seen authoritarian attitudes to be characteristically conservative, is it also true that those who behave in an authoritarian way are conservative? The evidence on this question is not yet extensive but so far all available results show no relationship between the two whatever. . . . People who behave in an authoritarian way are equally likely to be from the Left, the Right or the center. [All emphasis added by me.]

In sum, the authors of The Authoritarian Personality define conservatism to be authoritarian. They then wrongly assert that “authoritarians” (conservatives) are psychologically “sick” and that they behave in an authoritarian manner. The fact, however, is that authoritarian behavior knows no ideological bounds. The histories of Germany, Japan, Italy, Russia, Britain (under Labour), and the U.S. (beginning especially with the New Deal) amply demonstrate that fact.

Obiter Dicta

One can be a rigid Democrat, a rigid Republican, and even a rigid libertarian. Rigidity, like compromise, is sometimes a useful way to approach the world, and sometimes a self-defeating way to approach the world. As a Burkean conservative-libertarian, I find anarcho-libertarianism especially rigid and self-defeating. Anarcho-libertarians are loathe to face the reality that government is unlikely to go away. Their answer to all problems, it seems, is to wish government away. All would be better in their best of all imaginary worlds.

Other libertarians (those whose beliefs are closer to mine) take the prosaic view that half a loaf is better than none. For example, in the best of all possible anarcho-libertarian worlds there would be no Social Security. That “best” world being an extremely unlikely one, pragmatic libertarians applaud Social Security reforms — such as private accounts — that would at least make Social Security something more like a real investment program and something less than the transfer-payment Ponzi scheme that it is.

Rigid, impractical libertarianism is no defense against the authoritarianism of Left and Right.

(Final?) Words about Preemption and the Constitution

Toward the end of “Libertarianism and Preemptive War: Part II” I said that

[t]he decision to preempt is a political judgment in which Congress puts America’s sovereignty and the protection of Americans’ interests above putative treaty obligations. It seems unlikely that a court (the U.S. Supreme Court, in particular) would find that the constitutional grant of power to declare war, which is so fundamental to America’s sovereignty and to the protection of Americans’ interests, can be ceded by treaty to an international body that cannot be relied upon to protect our sovereignty and our interests.

When I quoted a portion of that passage in a comment thread at Catallarchy, Joe Miller took exception in a post at his blog, Bellum et Mores. Joe and I then had an inconclusive exchange in the comment thread. We focused on the constitutionality (or lack thereof) of those provisions of the UN Charter that bear on the conduct of war by members:

The Security Council shall determine the existence of any threat to the peace, breach of the peace, or act of aggression and shall make recommendations, or decide what measures shall be taken in accordance with Articles 41 and 42, to maintain or restore international peace and security. (Article 39)

Nothing in the present Charter shall impair the inherent right of individual or collective self-defense if an armed attack occurs against a Member of the United Nations, until the Security Council has taken measures necessary to maintain international peace and security. Measures taken by Members in the exercise of this right of self-defense shall be immediately reported to the Security Council and shall not in any way affect the authority and responsibility of the Security Council under the present Charter to take at any time such action as it deems necessary in order to maintain or restore international peace and security. (Article 51)

I won’t repeat the whole exchange between Joe and me (which you can read here), just some of my main points:

[The Charter] (in theory) delimits Congress’s authority to declare war, even though that authority isn’t delimited in the Constitution. (There’s no mention there of “self defense,” for example.) The . . . UN Charter, therefore, amounts to constitutional amendment by treaty. That’s not how the Constitution is supposed to be amended. . . .

. . . Our membership in the UN . . . amounts to a general concession that the Security Council (not Congress) gets to decide when we are acting in self-defense and when we can go to war when we are not acting in self-defense (as the Security Council sees it). . . . [T]he provisions of the UN Charter with respect to war do not merely implement Congress’s authority to declare war — rather, they fundamentally modify that authority.

. . . I have no problem with treaties that implement powers granted to Congress and the president (e.g., the negotiation and ratification of trade treaties). I have a fundamental problem with a treaty (the UN Charter) that circumscribes the power of Congress to declare war. That isn’t an implementation of a constitutional power, it’s a denial of a constitutional power. . . .

In ratifying the Charter, the Senate essentially surrendered a good chunk of (if not all of) Congress’s constitutional authority to declare war. . . . In other words, if the U.S. were to abide by the letter of the UN Charter (as interpreted by the Security Council, not Congress), the president and Congress would be prevented from taking actions that they judge to be in the best interest of Americans. That, it seems to me, vitiates the Framers’ intent, which was to place the decision about going to war in the hands of the elected representatives of the people of the United States — and certainly not in the hands of foreign powers. . . .

It all comes down to [this] question: Who gets to decide whether certain conditions [for going to war] are met — Congress or an international body over which Congress has no authority? Answer: international body over which Congress has no authority. The U.S. (in theory) can go to war only with the approval of both Congress and the international authority. Again, I submit that that’s an unconscionable violation of American sovereignty.

Brian Doss says it very well in a post at Catallarchy, which ends with this:

[S]ince the Constitution is the ultimate source of authority in the US government, and as it trumps both law and treaty when there is conflict; and as the Constitution may not be amended by treaty but by manner prescribed by the Constitution; and as it would require an amendment to the Constitution to substantively modify Congress’ warmaking authority; the UN treaty therefore is not a legal constraint upon the US Congress’ warmaking authority, and Congressional [authorizations for the use of military force] or declarations of war are necessary and sufficient for a US war’s legality.

Precisely.

But I’m confident that we’ll be hearing more from Joe. Stay tuned.

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