Author: Loquitur Veritatem

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A Pseudo-libertarian Whiner, Cornered

The Corner‘s Ramesh Ponnuru zaps a pseudo-libertarian:

John Perry Barlow was being interviewed, with much of the discussion concerning his turn away from the Republicans. He said: “…in the past I found it most effective to be inside the Republican Party acting as a libertarian. But I’ve switched. One of the things going on in my mind when I wrote that note [announcing the decision to embrace political activism over lifestyle libertarianism] was that I’d just been busted for having a really trivial amount of marijuana in a checked bag under a PATRIOT Act search. I was arrested, hauled off in irons, an ugly experience. At San Francisco airport, for, like, three joints’ worth of dope. Before the plane took off, Delta employees came on and said, Mr. Barlow, you have to step off the plane, and bring your personal effects. Then San Francisco cops arrested me. I spent the day in Redwood City in jail. It was a chilling experience. It’s happening, and happening a lot. The Transportation Security Administration is now routinely searching checked bags. They are not just looking for explosives….”

The Transportation Security Administration is doing more intensive bag searches than we used to have, and when they find illegal substances they are not ignoring them. You can wish that marijuana were legal, or that the TSA were prohibited from enforcing the law in this way. But what any of this has to do with Patriot is beyond me.

Exactly! I speed a bit, but I’m not about to become a Democrat if I’m pulled over for speeding. Get over it, Mr. Barlow.

"The Party of the Little People"?

Conjure with this:

Today’s Democratic Party is the party of America’s poorest people and of its very richest. (Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, George Soros and Donald Trump are all for Kerry. So is almost all of Hollywood and most of Wall Street. Kerry will probably win at least eight of the 12 richest zip codes in America. The four per cent of voters who described themselves to pollsters in 2000 as “upper class” decisively favoured Al Gore over George W Bush.)

The writer is David Frum, a former special assistant to President Bush, but I have no reason to doubt his facts. They’re consistent with the vast sums that are pouring into the treasuries of pro-Kerry Section 527 organizations.

Why are the super-rich more likely to be Democrats than Republicans? Here are some possibilities:

1. Super-rich Democrats suffer from a certain degree of guilt about their wealth, especially those of the super-rich who became wealthy because they happened to have a marketable talent, such as singing or acting, or a remarkable streak of good fortune in notoriously volatile professions, such as investing. Thus, out of guilt, they feel compelled to side with the party that professes to favor the less-fortunate. (They might not call it guilt, but it sure smells like guilt.)

2. They rightly resent the attitude of some Republicans who are super-rich or who aspire to that status, namely, that government can be used to tilt economic outcomes in their direction.

3. The super-rich are little affected by taxes and therefore don’t see why others should care so much about them. They can’t understand, for example, why mere millionaires should resent the estate tax, when they, the super-rich, can so easily get around it with trusts and other devices. Similarly, they’re so wealthy (already) that they don’t care about progressive income tax rates, which they know how to avoid to the extent that they wish to do so.

4. They’re good at what made them wealthy, but that doesn’t mean they are especially well educated or insightful about the causes of poverty and corruption (in both cases, too much government, not too little). To the extent that they’re good at business, they have a wrong-headed belief that government can “run” the economy in the way that a business is run.

5. Then there is knee-jerk opposition to war — peace is good, war is bad — which is fashionable, and easy for shallow minds to embrace. Shallow-minded or not, the super-rich have acquired a taste for consorting with pseudo-sophisticated “opinion makers” and left-wing “intellectuals”.

A super-rich person may be a Democrat for any combination of these reasons, or others I haven’t listed. Whatever the case, the Democrat Party is no longer “the party of the little people” — if it ever was. That term is not only condescending, it’s just plain wrong.

He’s Right, Don’t Listen to Him

Sometimes — well, perhaps most of the time — “conservative” columnists, like left-wing actors and singers, ought to just shut up. Now comes David Brooks of The New York Times (free registration required) to opine that

we need an ambitious national service program to demystify the military for the next generation of Americans. It also seems clear, looking at our history, that combat heroism is not an essential qualification for a wartime leader. It’s much more important to have the political courage that Lincoln had and Kennedy celebrated. But don’t listen to me. I never served.

I never served, either, but I know a dumb idea when I read it.

Brooks started with the observation that, in the campaign of 2000, veterans in South Carolina seemed less awed by John McCain than did non-veterans in New Hampshire. Being a “creative” writer, Brooks couldn’t simply stop with the obvious truth: South Carolinians, being more conservative than New Hampshirites were therefore more likely to favor Bush over McCain. Instead, he extrapolated and embellished his four-year old observation into the notion that “national service” ought to be required. To put it baldly, which Brooks can’t bring himself to do, he wants to restore the draft.

There are many good arguments against the draft, which this succinct essay summarizes. My favorite argument against the draft, however, is one that I coined some years ago: A nation that must draft its defenders probably isn’t worth defending.

The Tricks Time Plays on Us

Remember when Barry Goldwater was reviled as a right-wing extremist? Of course, he still is in many quarters, but his ideas have much more currency today than they did in 1964, when he lost the presidential election, in a landslide, to FDR’s spiritual and moral heir, LBJ. Here are some passages from Goldwater’s acceptance speech at the 1964 Republican National Convention:

[T]he tide has been running against freedom. Our people have followed false prophets. We must, and we shall, return to proven ways — not because they are old, but because they are true….

[W]e are a Nation becalmed. We have lost the brisk pace of diversity and the genius of individual creativity. We are plodding along at a pace set by centralized planning, red tape, rules without responsibility, and regimentation without recourse.

Rather than useful jobs in our country, our people have been offered bureaucratic “make work”; rather than moral leadership, they have been given bread and circuses….

Now those who seek absolute power, even though they seek it to do what they regard as good, are simply demanding the right to enforce their own version of heaven on earth….

It is our cause to dispel the foggy thinking which avoids hard decisions in the delusion that a world of conflict will somehow mysteriously resolve itself into a world of harmony, if we just don’t rock the boat or irritate the forces of aggression — and this is hogwash….

[O]nly the strong can remain free, that only the strong can keep the peace….
Now, we here in America can keep the peace only if we remain vigilant and only if we remain strong. Only if we keep our eyes open and keep our guard up can we prevent war. And I want to make this abundantly clear: I don’t intend to let peace or freedom be torn from our grasp because of lack of strength or lack of will — and that I promise you, Americans….

Now I know this freedom is not the fruit of every soil. I know that our own freedom was achieved through centuries, by unremitting efforts of brave and wise men. And I know that the road to freedom is a long and a challenging road. And I know also that some men may walk away from it, that some men resist challenge, accepting the false security of governmental paternalism….

We see in private property and in economy based upon and fostering private property, the one way to make government a durable ally of the whole man, rather than his determined enemy. We see in the sanctity of private property the only durable foundation for constitutional government in a free society. And — And beyond that, we see, in cherished diversity of ways, diversity of thoughts, of motives and accomplishments. We don’t seek to lead anyone’s life for him. We only seek — only seek to secure his rights, guarantee him opportunity — guarantee him opportunity to strive, with government performing only those needed and constitutionally sanctioned tasks which cannot otherwise be performed….

A hard-nosed, libertarian Republican. If only….

Advice about Battling Political Correctness

American Rhetoric has had 4.9 million visitors since August 1, 2001. I just learned about it. It has text and, sometimes, audio and video of speeches ranging from Lincoln at Gettysburg to Russell Crowe as General Deridius in The Gladiator. As I browsed the site, I came across the a Charlton Heston speech on “Winning the Cultural War” (Harvard University Law School, February 1999). As a conservative libertarian, I find it meritorious. Here are some snippets:

…Dedicating the memorial at Gettysburg, Abraham Lincoln said of America, “We are now engaged in a great Civil War, testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure.”

Those words are true again. I believe that we are again engaged in a great civil war, a cultural war that’s about to hijack your birthright to think and say what lives in your heart….

For example, I marched for civil rights with Dr. King in 1963 — long before Hollywood found it acceptable, I may say. But when I told an audience last year that white pride is just as valid as black pride or red pride or anyone else’s pride, they called me a racist.

I’ve worked with brilliantly talented homosexuals all my life — throughout my whole career. But when I told an audience that gay rights should extend no further than your rights or my rights, I was called a homophobe.

I served in World War II against the Axis powers. But during a speech, when I drew an analogy between singling out the innocent Jews and singling out innocent gun owners, I was called an anti-Semite.

Everyone I know knows I would never raise a closed fist against my country. But when I asked an audience to oppose this cultural persecution I’m talking about, I was compared to Timothy McVeigh….

You are the best and the brightest. You, here in this fertile cradle of American academia, here in the castle of learning on the Charles River, you are the cream. But I submit that you, and your counterparts across the land, are the most socially conformed and politically silenced generation since Concord Bridge. And as long as you validate that and abide it, you are — by your grandfathers’ standards — cowards….

If you talk about race, it does not make you a racist. If you see distinctions between the genders, it does not make you sexist. If you think critically about a denomination, it does not make you anti-religion. If you accept but don’t celebrate homosexuality, it does not make you a homophobe.

Don’t let America’s universities continue to serve as incubators for this rampant epidemic of new McCarthyism. That’s what it is: New McCarthyism. But, what can you do? How can anyone prevail against such pervasive social subjugation?

Well, the answer’s been here all along. I learned it 36 years ago, on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C., standing with Dr. Martin Luther King and two hundred thousand people.

You simply disobey. Peaceably, yes. Respectfully, of course. Nonviolently, absolutely. But when told how to think or what to say or how to behave, we don’t. We disobey social protocol that stifles and stigmatizes personal freedom….

I’m asking you to disavow cultural correctness with massive disobedience of rogue authority, social directives, and onerous laws that weaken personal freedom.

But be careful. It hurts. Disobedience demands that you put yourself at risk. Dr. King stood on lots of balconies. You must be willing to be humiliated — to endure the modern-day equivalent of the police dogs at Montgomery and the water Cannons at Selma. You must be willing to experience discomfort….

When a mugger sues his elderly victim for defending herself, jam the switchboard of the district attorney’s office. When your university is pressured — your university — is pressured to lower standards until 80% of the students graduate with honors, choke the halls of the Board of Regents. When an 8-year-old boy pecks a girl’s cheek on the playground and then gets hauled into court for sexual harassment, march on that school and block its doorways. When someone you elected is seduced by political power and betrays you — petition them, oust them, banish them….

So that this nation may long endure, I urge you to follow in the hallowed footsteps of the great disobediences of history that freed exiles, founded religions, defeated tyrants, and yes, in the hands of an aroused rabble in arms and a few great men, by God’s grace, built this country….

An Aside about Libertarianism and War

Gene Healy has myopia when it comes to libertarianism and war. In his post on “Barnett on War and Liberty” he sees the trees — the high cost of securing the rights of Iraqis — and not the forest — the strategic advantage of defeating an antagonistic regime and securing a stronger foothold in the Middle East, where Americans have vital interests. Here’s some of what Healy has to say:

Does it violate libertarian principle for the U.S. government to wrest scores of billions of dollars from the American taxpayer (possibly as much as $3,000 per American family in the case of Iraq,) in order to address rights violations committed half a world away against people not under its protection?

I’d say it does. I have a right to come to the defense of others. I do not have the right to steal Randy Barnett’s car in order to do so….

[Barnett] might say the argument above applies just as well to taxation for the defense of Americans — it says the U.S. government can’t come to the defense of Californians if it has to tax Kansans to do it. After all, none of us signed any kind of “social contract” or consented to a Constitution that pledges us to the “common defence” of Americans. But if even that limited justification of the state-as-common-defense-pact is problematic, how do you justify the state-as-world-liberator? Where does it get the authority to carry out these missions, however benevolent they might be?

In any event, I think it’s odd to proceed as if the only rights in question are the rights of those who are to be liberated.

I think it’s odd to ignore the broader question of how Americans might benefit from such ventures as the war in Iraq. To put it in Healy’s terms, you can defend California on the Pacific Coast or you go sail across the Pacific and defend California on the enemy’s coast. That’s what we did in World War II. In my view, that’s just what we’re doing now, in the Middle East.

I Used to Be Too Smart to Understand This

When I arrived in college (eons ago) I soon discovered that learning is more than memorization, which had served me well through the 12th grade. I therefore began to denigrate memorization. It took me years to understand that it’s just as important as the skeptical and logical traits that I began to cultivate as a college student. Now, from
City Journal, comes this:

In Defense of Memorization

Michael Knox Beran

If there’s one thing progressive educators don’t like it’s rote learning. As a result, we now have several generations of Americans who’ve never memorized much of anything. Even highly educated people in their thirties and forties are often unable to recite half a dozen lines of classic poetry or prose.

Yet it wasn’t so long ago that kids in public schools from Boston to San Francisco committed poems like Shelley’s “To a Skylark” and Tennyson’s “Ulysses” to memory. They declaimed passages from Shakespeare and Wordsworth, the Psalms and the Declaration of Independence. Even in the earliest grades they got by heart snippets of “The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere” or “Abou Ben Adhem.” By 1970, however, this tradition was largely dead.

Should we care? Aren’t exercises in memorizing and reciting poetry and passages of prose an archaic curiosity, without educative value?

That too-common view is sadly wrong. Kids need both the poetry and the memorization. As educators have known for centuries, these exercises deliver unique cognitive benefits, benefits that are of special importance for kids who come from homes where books are scarce and the level of literacy low. In addition, such exercises etch the ideals of their civilization on children’s minds and hearts….

What the child discovers, in other words, is not only aesthetically pleasing, but important to cognitive development. Classic verse teaches children an enormous amount about order, measure, proportion, correspondence, balance, symmetry, agreement, temporal relation (tense), and contingent possibility (mood). Mastering these concepts involves the most fundamental kind of learning, for these are the basic categories of thought and the framework in which we organize sensory experience….

No less important, memorizing poetry turns on kids’ language capability. It not only teaches them to articulate English words; it heightens their feel for the intricacies and complexities of the English language—an indispensable attainment if they are to go on to speak, write, and read English with ease. Susan Wise Bauer, author of The Well-Educated Mind: A Guide to the Classical Education You Never Had, argues that memorization “builds into children’s minds an ability to use complex English syntax.” The student “who memorizes poetry will internalize” the “rhythmic, beautiful patterns” of the English language. These patterns then become “part of the student’s ‘language store,’ those wells that we all use every day in writing and speaking.” Without memorization, the student’s “language store,” Bauer says, will be limited: memorization stocks “the language store with a whole new set of language patterns.”

It also stocks those bins with a generous supply of the English language’s rich accumulation of words. Research suggests that the size of a child’s vocabulary plays an important part in determining the quality of his language-comprehension skills. “The greater and wider the vocabulary,” says education historian [Diane] Ravitch, “the greater one’s comprehension of increasingly difficult material.” Bauer points out that if “a student reads a word in a novel, she might or might not remember it for later use. But when she commits it to memory in proper context (as the memorization of lines of poetry requires), she is much more likely to have it at her ‘mental fingertips’ for use in her own speaking and writing.”

All these benefits are especially important for inner-city kids. Bill Cosby recently pointed to the tragedy of the black kids he sees “standing on the corner” who “can’t speak English.” “I can’t even talk the way these people talk,” Cosby said: “ ‘Why you ain’t. Where you is.’ ” To kids who have never known anything but demotic English, literary English is bound to seem an alien, all but incomprehensible dialect. Kids who haven’t been exposed to the King’s English in primary school or at home will have a hard time, if they get to college, with works like Pride and Prejudice and Moby Dick. In too many cases, they will give up entirely, unable to enter the community of literate citizens—and as a result will live in a world of constricted opportunity….

Today’s public-school educators, of course, aren’t allowed to teach the true ideals of our civilization. (MLK is okay, but GW and TJ were just slave-owning honkies.) Perhaps those so-called educators would be willing to allow their students to memorize comic books. That might be better than nothing.

This Isn’t Free-Market Capitalism in Action

From today’s NYT online (free registration required):

Bill Would Raise Franchise Value of Sports Teams

By DUFF WILSON

Owners of professional sports teams stand to gain tens of millions of dollars in the values of their franchises because of a single sentence buried deep in a sprawling piece of export-tax legislation now before Congress.

The benefit to sports franchises is contained in a small part of an enormous bill introduced originally to settle a trade dispute with the European Union. But the legislation has since become laden with add-ons for interests ranging from tobacco farmers to Oldsmobile dealers….

Another good argument for replacing the income tax with a national sales tax.

The Veil of Ignorance in Ohio (and Elsewhere)

I was reminded of the veil of ignorance when I read in The New Republic online that Kerry may have a shot at winning Ohio because, according to Democrat pollster Stanley Greenberg, “Bush’s support among …”Country Folk” has weakened”:

The Country Folk are the most anti-corporate in the Republican base (33 percent warm and 35 percent cool thermometer readings). By 57 to 41 percent, they reject the assertion that Bush’s economic policies are proving successful, affirming instead that the middle class is not sharing in the income and employment gains. They are particularly upset with rising health care costs and the fact that people are financially squeezed. Over half agree (60 percent) that Bush is neglecting domestic problems.

The ignorance, of course, lies in the “folk wisdom” that corporations are bad, that a president is responsible for economic performance in the short run, that government is responsible for health care and the cost of health care, and that a president is responsible for economic performance in the short run. (See, “folk wisdom” makes me so crazy that I start repeating myself.)

“Folk wisdom” isn’t restricted to Ohio, of course. It’s widespread. Ohio’s “Country Folk” have no monopoly on economic ignorance.

Blatant economic ignorance reminds me of John Rawls’s legendary veil of ignorance, which according to Wikipedia,

is a method of determining the morality of a certain issue (e.g., slavery) based upon the following principle: imagine that societal roles were completely re-fashioned and redistributed, and that from behind your veil of ignorance you do not know what role you will be reassigned. Only then can you truly consider the morality of an issue. For example, whites in the pre-Civil War south did indeed condone slavery, but they most likely would not have done so had there been a re-fashioning of society because of which they would not know if they would be the ones enslaved. It is a philosophical idea related of method of two people dividing a cake: one cuts, the other chooses first (see pie method).

The “wisdom” of Ohio’s Country Folk and their ilk — rural, suburban, and urban — illustrates a deep flaw in Rawls’s formula for so-called social justice. The veil of ignorance, aside from being a useless thought experiment, works only if you believe that people can simply make up rules about such things as how an economy should work and what outcomes it should produce.

Free-market capitalism is the best economic system because — when it’s left alone — it produces more income and wealth than any alternative system. And it’s good for everyone, not just those “filthy capitalists” and their corporations. Yes, the rich get richer, but so do the poorer — except for those whose incentives are blunted by the lure of welfare benefits.

Free-market capitalism was invented neither by a bunch of economic ignoramuses operating behind the veil of ignorance nor by Adam Smith. It evolved over centuries of trial and error. Smith merely tried to understand it and explain why it works so well.

Karl Marx and his intellectual heirs retreated behind the veil of ignorance and brought forth Communism, Socialism, the New Deal, the Fair Deal, the Great Society, and other impoverishing schemes — all in the name of social justice. The veil of ignorance is aptly named.

The Physics of John Kerry

Jay Tea at Wizbang calls it the “Kerry Uncertainty Principle”:

Werner Heisenberg was a quantum physicist of the early and mid 20th Century. He’s probably best well known for his Uncertainty Principle, which states that one can know the exact position of a particle or its exact speed, but not both simultaneously. Heisenberg pointed out that the mere fact of observing such particles changes them, and renders prior observations moot.

Were Heisenberg alive today, and were he more interested in politics than subatomic particles, he would have made the same discovery by observing John Kerry’s positions on issues. It seems the more one examines where the Democratic nominee stands on an issue, the less you actually know.

My comment:

I think Kerry’s mind exhibits the qualities of Schrodinger’s cat; his state of mind is an unpredictable, random event. Wikipedia explains the concept:

A cat [Kerry’s mind] is placed in a sealed box [his head]. Attached to the box is an apparatus containing a radioactive nucleus and a canister of poison gas [his thought processes]. There…is a 50% chance of the nucleus decaying in one hour. If the nucleus decays, it will emit a particle that triggers the apparatus, which opens the canister and kills the cat…However, when the box is opened [Kerry speaks] the experimenter sees only a “…dead cat” or a “…living cat [whatever happens to come into Kerry’s mind at the moment].”

Note to Colorado Democrats…Not So Fast

Colorado Democrats think they’ve found a way to tip 4 of the State’s 9 electoral votes to Kerry, even if Bush wins the popular vote in Colorado. How? They’ve floated a ballot initiative that would split the State’s electoral votes in proportion to the popular vote. The formula would, in most cases, result in a 5-4 split in favor of the candidate with the most popular votes in Colorado. The initiative has garnered enough signatures to be placed on the November ballot.

Fortunately, there are two obstacles to the passage of this scheme. First, it must be approved by a majority of Colorado’s voters, which is unlikely because most (if not all) Bush voters will reject it, and some Kerry voters will reject it on the off-chance that Kerry will win Colorado’s popular vote. Second, even if it’s approved by a majority of Colorado’s voters it will be challenged as unconstitutional (that’s the U.S. Constitution I’m talking about). As it says in Article II, Section 1, paragraph 2 of the U.S. Constitution:

Each State shall appoint, in such manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors…[emphasis added].

It seems to me that a ballot initiative, in this case, would amount to an unconstitutional usurpation of legislative power.

(Here’s the story. Thanks to Ed Driscoll.com for the tip.)

Who’s the Smarter, More Articulate Candidate for President?

Hint: It’s not John Kerry. From an interview by Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday (thanks to Althouse):

WALLACE: …you also said that you won’t play politics with the Constitution. Implication: this President has played politics…

KERRY: Correct.

WALLACE: … with the Constitution. Isn’t that what John Edwards calls the negative politics of the past?

KERRY: No, those are comparisons of choices about the values that we bring to politics. You know, you hear a lot of talk about values in America. I think that the choices that you make in your policies reflect your values, and the things that you try to champion. John and I want health care for all Americans. That’s a value. John and I believe that you shouldn’t talk about no child left behind and then not fund the education system so that no child is left behind. That’s a value. Under our plan, we’re going to fund education, we’re going to respect educators, teachers, we’re going to bring our schools up in a positive and affirmative way. They’re choosing to do one thing, and we have an affirmative choice. Obviously, we have to talk about the comparative choices. That’s not name-calling. That’s not petty and small. We have a big idea of health care for all Americans. We have a big idea for young people to afford to be able to go to college, where tuitions are going up. We have a big idea for restoring America’s reputation in the world and fighting a more effective war on terror. To compare how we will fight the war on terror is the center of this campaign and that’s what Americans want to know.

What on earth does any of that have to do with the Consitution? And what on earth does it mean? Perhaps Kerry is really the “Manchurian Candidate”, instructed by his brainwashers to lull all of us to sleep with psychobabble.

Name Calling

I just posted a comment at another blog that’s worth posting here (with some edits):

Name calling on the web just gets in the way of rational discourse. It’s “e-mail bravado”: People say things in dashed-off e-mails, posts, and comments that they wouldn’t say in face-to-face conversation. And being civil, face-to-face, isn’t just a matter of avoiding a fistfight. It’s a matter of seeing the face in front of you and thinking something like this: “Here’s another human being; he or she is worthy of my respect until he or she proves otherwise,” or “I was taught good manners as a child and I’ve found that good manners are generally met with civility and a respectful hearing.”

Now, satire isn’t name-calling unless it devolves into likening your ideological opponents to people like Hitler, Stalin, or bin Laden. I don’t often engage in satire, but I reserve the right to do so, without becoming offensive.

Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is

The polls suggest a “convention bounce” for Kerry. The betting odds at Iowa Electronic Markets say that Bush regained his lead when the Demo convention began. I’d bet on the betting odds.

In the "So What?" Department

The New Republic reveals a nefarious plot :

PAKISTAN FOR BUSH.
July Surprise?
by John B. Judis, Spencer Ackerman & Massoud Ansari

Post date 07.29.04 | Issue date 07.19.04

[Editor’s Note: This afternoon, Pakistan’s interior minister, Faisal Saleh Hayyat, announced that Pakistani forces had captured Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, a Tanzanian Al Qaeda operative wanted in connection with the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. The timing of this announcement should be of particular interest to readers of The New Republic. Earlier this month, John B. Judis, Spencer Ackerman, and Massoud Ansari broke the story of how the Bush administration was pressuring Pakistani officials to apprehend high-value targets (HVTs) in time for the November elections–and in particular, to coincide with the Democratic National Convention. Although the capture took place in central Pakistan “a few days back,” the announcement came just hours before John Kerry will give his acceptance speech in Boston.]

Why not now? It’s better than next year.

Sayonara to Government Land-Grabbing?

I hope this starts a new trend (from the Detroit Free Press, via Michelle Malkin):

Poletown seizures are ruled unlawful

State Supreme Court restricts government rights to take land



July 31, 2004

BY JOHN GALLAGHER

FREE PRESS BUSINESS WRITER

Reversing more than two decades of land-use law, the Michigan Supreme Court late Friday overturned its own landmark 1981 Poletown decision and sharply restricted governments such as Detroit and Wayne County from seizing private land to give to other private users.

The unanimous decision is a decisive victory for property owners who object to the government seizing their land, only to give it to another private owner to build stadiums, theaters, factories, housing subdivisions and other economic development projects the government deems worthwhile.

Detroit and other municipalities have used the Poletown standard for years to justify land seizures as a way to revitalize.

In the decision, the court rejected Wayne County’s attempt to seize private land south of Metro Airport for its proposed Pinnacle Aeropark high-technology park. The Pinnacle project, announced in 1999, is geared to making Wayne County a hub of international high-tech development linked to the airport….

Here’s the best part:

Justice Robert Young, who wrote the lead opinion, called the 1981 case allowing Detroit’s Poletown neighborhood to be cleared for a GM plant a “radical departure from fundamental constitutional principles.”

“We overrule Poletown,” Young wrote, “in order to vindicate our constitution, protect the people’s property rights and preserve the legitimacy of the judicial branch as the expositor, not creator, of fundamental law.”

It’s exhilarating to read such utterances from a State supreme court.

The Berger Affair, Again

NewsMax.com reported yesterday that the National Archives denies a report that Sandy Berger is in the clear. Blogospheric lefties have been touting a report to the contrary by the Wall Street Journal. Here’s the NewsMax.com story:

“In spite of what the Wall Street Journal said, the National Archives really isn’t commenting on this case because it’s under investigation,” Susan Cooper, chief spokeswoman for the Archives, told NewsMax.com.

The Journal reported in Friday editions:

“Officials looking into the removal of classified documents from the National Archives by former Clinton National Security Advisor Samuel Berger say no original materials are missing and nothing Mr. Berger reviewed was withheld from the commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks. … The conclusion by Archives officials and others would seem to lay to rest the issue of whether any information was permanently destroyed or withheld from the commission.”

The Journal report was picked up by ABC Radio network news, which further misreported the story by saying that the Justice Department had cleared Sandy Berger of all charges.

But Ms. Cooper disputed the claim that she or any other Archives official had said any such thing.

“We really have had nothing to say and will continue to have nothing to say about the particulars of the [Berger] case,” Cooper told NewsMax. “I gather that there’s somebody else in the food chain that has been talking about the case but it’s not at the Archives.”

In keeping with her no-comment policy, the Archives chief spokeswoman declined to confirm an earlier Washington Post report that Berger had destroyed four of the six copies of the Millennium Plot After Action Review stored in Archives files.

Cooper also declined to say whether draft copies of the document with original notes in the margins were among the papers Berger’s lawyer Lanny Breuer said his client had “discarded.”

Seems fair and balanced to me.

I’ve posted twice before about l’affaire Berger, here and here. In the first post I drew on 30 years’ experience in dealing with classified information to question the veracity of Berger’s claim that he “inadvertently” removed classified notes and documents from the National Archives. The second post was just for fun, comprising quips of the sort you might hear on late-night TV.

I won’t guess at what Berger really did or why he did it. That’s for the FBI and, possibly, the courts to resolve. Whatever Berger did at the National Archives may or may not be an indictable offense. Otherwise, it doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of life. Here’s why: Suppose that Berger was trying to cover up his failure, while he was Clinton’s national security adviser, to authorize strikes on Osama bin Laden. How would reconstructing Berger’s failure be of help in preventing future terrorist attacks? Hindsight in such matters is unlikely to produce useful foresight. It isn’t enough to know that bin Laden is in your crosshairs, you must be willing to pull the trigger. Berger, apparently, wasn’t willing to pull the trigger. Would a future Berger be willing to pull the trigger? There’s no way of knowing, no way of ensuring that it would happen.

A Perfect Strategy for Bush

Don’t say anything. Let Kerry do all the talking. The Iowa Electronic Markets price on a Bush victory has been rising since Kerry’s acceptance speech and his dumb-ass statement about trying bin Laden in U.S. courts.

Here’s Why I’m Afraid of Kerry

UPDATED, with a P.S.

From AP via Yahoo! News:

Kerry Favors Bin Laden Trial in U.S.

By RON FOURNIER and NEDRA PICKLER, Associated Press Writers

NEWBURGH, N.Y. – John Kerry said Friday he would put Osama bin Laden on trial in U.S. courts rather than an international tribunal to ensure the “fastest, surest route” to a murder conviction if the terrorist mastermind is captured while he is president.

“I want him tried for murder in New York City, and in Virginia and in Pennsylvania,” where planes hijacked by al-Qaida operatives crashed Sept. 11, 2001, Kerry said in his first interview as the Democratic presidential nominee.

The Saudi-bred terrorist is suspected of plotting attacks that have shed blood across the globe, not just in the United States. Kerry suggested he would place the highest priority on avenging American deaths.

Osama bin Laden isn’t a criminal — he’s our enemy. He isn’t “suspected of plotting attacks that have shed blood” — he’s known to have plotted those attacks. Kerry’s limp-wristed handling of bin Laden would only make bin Laden’s partisans guffaw. It would confirm their conception of America as irresolute and spineless. It would make us more, not less, vulnerable to terrorism.

We must not let that happen. If bin Laden is taken alive he should be marched to a place where CNN has cameras, then wrapped in plastique, doused with jet fuel, and torched.

P.S. If you wonder why I feel so intensely about bin Laden and company, please read this.

Libertarianism and Pre-emptive War: Part I

Randy Barnett at The Volokh Conspiracy has two new posts on the subject of libertarianism and war, here and here. Barnett’s posts, the posts he links to, and the comments on some of those posts have highlighted the need for a clear definition of libertarianism. In particular, we need a definition of libertarianism as it applies to the defense of America. I will offer that definition here, then (in a later post) I will offer a doctrine of pre-emptive war that is consistent with my view of libertarianism.

According to Wikipedia,

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

That’s consistent with this passage from the Libertarian Party’s introductory statement:

The Libertarian way is a logically consistent approach to politics based on the moral principle of self-ownership. Each individual has the right to control his or her own body, action, speech, and property. Government’s only role is to help individuals defend themselves from force and fraud.

Note that Wikipedia‘s definition and the Libertarian Party’s statement both acknowledge a role for government. It can’t be said often enough: Liberty is not anarchy. The state is legitimate, though not everything the state does is legitimate.

That statement may not seem to say much about libertarianism, but it does when libertarianism is contrasted with its alternatives. There are four main points on the political compass:

• Anarchy is the stateless solution, in which individuals, families, clans, and bands may or may not cooperate to defend their lives and property from others. Of course, anarchy inevitably gives way to a state, a rather powerful and oppressive one at that, because under anarchy “might makes right.”

• Libertarianism admits a minimal, neutral state to protect life and property, and therefore the liberty to enjoy them.

• Communitarianism uses the power of the state to regulate private institutions for the sake of “desirable” outcomes in such realms as income distribution, health, safety, education, and the environment

• Statism consists of outright state control of most institutions, including religion (which may be banned or allowed in only one form). Statism may be reached either as an extension of communitarianism or via anarchy or near-anarchy, as in Soviet Russia, the Third Reich, and Communist China.

In sum, those who say that the state is inherently unjust — be they anarchists, anarcho-capitalists, and anarcho-libertarians — are not libertarians, they are simply anarchists by various names. All of them must accept the logical consequences of their ideology: They have no right to life, liberty, or property; they must prey upon others or be preyed upon. Luckily for most of them, their proclaimed belief in anarchy is a cloistered virtue, cosseted in the United States by a state that is far more benevolent than the one that would arise from anarchy.

Libertarians, having a firmer grasp of reality, understand that living under anarchy, in what amounts to a constant state of warfare, diminishes liberty — the ability to enjoy life and property — for all but the strongest or most ruthless. They understand, further, that there is less to enjoy under anarchy, communitarianism, and statism because those ideologies are inimical to free markets and property rights. Libertarians therefore willingly accept a neutral state for defense from force and fraud. Libertarians understand that the presence of such a state actually makes life better for everyone but predators.

Libertarians can and do argue about how the state should go about protecting individuals from force and fraud, but one cannot be a libertarian and argue that the state is inherently an unjust institution. That untenable position is reserved for anarchists and crypto-anarchists. As “Decnavda” says in a comment on a post by John Quiggin at Crooked Timber:

I think this is entirely a means vs. ends problem, in two senses:

1. Libertarians (NOT anarcho-capitalists) believe in strong police enforcement of property rights, but their belief in these property rights places many restrictions on HOW the police can engage in this strong enforcement. The same would apply to war. You can believe that a war against a dictator is justified…but also believe in major restrictions on how that war is fought. Thus, a privately owned power plant may be an illegitimate target, while actual military bases would undoubtedly be legitimate. It may be that a libertarian legitimate war is IMPOSSIBLE to fight on PRACTICAL grounds.

2. There are two types of libertarianism: “pure” deontological libertarianism and consequentialist libertarianism[*]….A consequentialist libertarian could easily conclude…that a war against a dictator, although inevitably resulting in the deaths of innocents, will advance the overall cause of freedom.

Indeed…it seems to me that the problem discussed here is not with libertarianism, but with deontology. Not only could a consequentialist libertarian easily support a war against a dictator, but ANY deontologist would have to oppose any modern war except to repel invasion. Is there ANY deontological moral code that would authorize the intentional killing of innocent workers at power plants?

There are, of course, consequentialist libertarians who argue that we only make the world more dangerous (for ourselves as well as others) by going to war in the absence of imminent danger to the homeland. But that’s an argument about how and when to go to war, not about whether to go to war or whether pre-emptive war is always unjustified.

The deontological view — what Randy Barnett would call “defenseism” — is more troublesome. Deontological libertarians (“defenseists”) seem to say that we should never attack until we are under attack, and then we must be very careful about what and whom we attack. Such a view, aside from being suicidal in practice, implies that the innocents and private property of the United States are somehow less worthy of protection than the innocents and private property of other lands.

That leads me to these thoughts, which I ask “defenseists” and reluctant consequentialists to consider.

You, the innocent, are targets simply because you’re Americans. Your main enemy — Osama bin Laden and his ilk — don’t care about the lives and property of innocents. Your main enemy doesn’t care what you think about George Bush, the invasion of Iraq, or pre-emptive war. Your main enemy doesn’t care whether you’re anarchists, crypto-anarchists, libertarians, communitarians, or even neo-fascists. You don’t have to choose sides, your main enemy has already done it for you.

The only ideology your main enemy values is Islamism, and he would impose an Islamic state upon you if he could. But he will settle for killing and terrorizing you so that you retreat from the Middle East. He will then control it and you will become poorer and ever more vulnerable to his threats of death and destruction. Now ask yourself whether you are willing to acquiesce in your enemy’s aims before you acquiesce in actions that might — unavoidably — result in the killing of foreign innocents and the destruction of their property.

That’s all for now. This post positions me to lay out a doctrine of pre-emptive war that is consistent with libertarianism, properly understood. I’ll do that in a future post.

———-

[* Editor’s note: Borrowing from Wikipedia, a deontological libertarian believes that the use of force is always wrong, except in self-defense; a consequentialist maintains “that the rightness or wrongness of an action depends on the consequences of the act and hence on the circumstances in which it is performed.”]