Author: Loquitur Veritatem

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All That Jazz

An otherwise sensible blogger (whom I’ll not name) adores Miles Davis. He (the blogger) says, “If you listen to nothing else by Miles Davis, buy and listen to Relaxin’. I absolutely guarantee you will not hate it, and you are very likely to love it.”

Well, I just refreshed my memory by listening to a few cuts, courtesy of Amazon.com. I hate it; it’s pablum for the ears. It reminds me of the background music for “Peanuts” films. Maybe it is the background music for “Peanuts” films.

Wherever jazz went after the late 1930s, it wasn’t a good place. Davis’s stuff is good compared with the meandering, discordant offerings of “artists” whose names my memory has suppressed. But that’s like saying a bowlful of sugar is better for you than a bowlful of arsenic. It is, but why eat it when the pantry is stocked with the pre-war offerings of Sidney Bechet, Bix Beiderbecke, Benny Goodman, Fletcher Henderson, Jelly Roll Morton, King Oliver, Jimmie Lunceford, and Fats Waller, among many others of their era.

I just love it when I get a chance to expound on the degradation of classic musical forms. Someday I’ll write about the hideousness of “serious” music after 1900.

Getting It Perfect

Have you ever noticed that Americans are perfectionists? It’s true.

It all began with the U.S. Constitution. (For the benefit of the ahistorical reader, the Constitution was drafted in 1787 and ratified in 1788.) The preamble to the Constitution says it was “ordained and established” (a ringing phrase, that) “in order to form a more perfect union” — among other things. It’s been all downhill since then.

The Federalists (pro-Constitution) and anti-Federalists (anti-Constitution) continued to squabble for a decade or so after ratification of the Constitution. The anti-Federalists believed the union to be perfect enough under the Articles of Confederation. But those blasted perfectionist Federalists won the debate. So here we are.

The Federalists were such perfectionists that they left room in the Constitution for amending it. After all, a “more perfect union” can’t be attained in a day. Thus, in our striving toward perfection — Consitution-wise, that is — we have now amended it 27 times. We even adopted an amendment (XVIII, the Prohibition amendment, 1919) and only 14 years later amended it out of existence (XXI, the Repeal amendment, 1933).

But we can be very patient when it comes to perfecting the Constitution through amendments. Amendment XXVII (the most recent amendment) was submitted to the States on September 25, 1789, as part of the proposed Bill of Rights. It wasn’t ratified until May 7, 1992. Not to worry, though, Amendment XXVII isn’t about rights, it merely prevents a sitting Congress from raising its own pay:

No law, varying the compensation for the services of the Senators and Representatives, shall take effect, until an election of Representatives shall have intervened.

So now the only group of public servants that can vote itself a pay raise must wait out an election before a raise takes effect. Big deal. Most members of Congress get re-elected, anyway.

Where was I? Oh, yes, perfectionism. Well, after the Constitution was ratified, the next big squabble was about states’ rights. Some politicians from the North preferred to secede rather than remain in a union that permitted slavery. Some politicians from the South said the slavery issue was just a Northern excuse to bully the South; the South, they said, should secede from the union. The union, it seems, just wasn’t perfect enough for either the North or the South. Well, the South won that squabble by seceding first, which so ticked off the North that it dragged the South back into the union, kickin’ and hollerin’. The North had decided that the only perfect union was a whole union, rednecks and all.

The union didn’t get noticeably more perfect with the South back in the fold. Things just went squabbling along through the Spanish-American War and World War I. There was a lot more prosperity in the Roaring ’20s, but that was spoiled by Prohibition. It wasn’t hard to find a drink, but you never knew when your local speakeasy might be raided by Elliot Ness or when you might get caught in a shoot-out between rival bootleggers.

The Great Depression put an end to the Roaring ’20s, and that sent perfection for a real loop. But Franklin D. Roosevelt got the idea that he could help us out of the Depression by creating a bunch of alphabet-soup agencies, including the CCC, the PWA, the FSA, and the WPA. I guess he got his idea from his older cousin, Teddy, who created his own alphabet-soup agencies back in the early 1900s.

Well, Franklin really got the ball rolling, and every president since him has added a bunch of alphabet-soup agencies to the executive branch. And when a president has been unable to think of new alphabet-soup agencies, Congress has stepped in and helped him out. (Don’t need to say “him or her” yet.) It seems that our politicians think we’ll attain perfection when there are enough agencies to use every possible combination of three letters from the alphabet. (That’s only 17,576 agencies; we must be getting close to perfection by now.)

During the Great Depression some people began to think that criminals (especially juvenile delinquents) weren’t naturally bad. Nope, their criminality was “society’s fault” (not enough jobs), and juvenile delinquents could be rehabilitated — made more perfect, if you will — through “understanding”, which would make model citizens of potential killers. That idea was put on hold during World War II because we needed those former juvenile delinquents and their younger brothers to kill Krauts and Japs. (Oops, spell-checker doesn’t like “Japs”; “Nips” is okay, though.)

The idea of rehabilitating JDs through “understanding” took hold after the war. In fact, the idea spread beyond the ranks of juvenile delinquents to encompass every tot and pre-adolescent in the land. Corporal punishment became a no-no. Giving into Johnny and Jill’s every whim became a yes-yes. Guess what? What: Johnny and Jill grew up to be voters. Politicians quickly learned not to say “no” to Johnny and Jill’s demands for — whatever — otherwise Johnny and Jill would throw a fit (and throw a politician out of office). So, politicians just got in the habit of approving things Johnny and Jill asked for. In fact, they even got in the habit of approving things Johnny and Jill might ask for. (Better safe than out of office.) A perfect union, after all, is one that grants our every wish — isn’t it? We’re not there yet, but we’re trying like hell.

Sometimes you can’t attain perfection through legislation. Then you go to court. Remember a few years ago when an Alabama jury awarded millions (millions!) of dollars to the purchaser of a new BMW who discovered that its paint job was not pristine? (Maybe it’s true that most Alabamans can’t count.) Or how about the small machine-tool company that was sued by a workman who lost three fingers while using (or misusing) the company’s product, even though the machine had been rebuilt at least once and had changed hands four times. (Somebody’s gotta pay for my stupidity.) Then there was the infamous case in which a jury found in favor of a woman who had burned herself with hot coffee (what did she expect?) dispensed by a fast-food chain.

The upshot of our litigiousness? The politicians elected by Johnny and Jill — ever in the pursuit of more perfection — have mandated warning labels for everything. THIS SAW IS SHARP. THIS COFFEE IS HOT. DON’T PUT THIS PLASTIC BAG OVER YOUR HEAD, STUPID. DON’T STICK YOUR HAND DOWN THIS GARBAGE DISPOSAL, YOU MORON. THIS TOY GUN WON’T KILL AN ARMED INTRUDER (HA, HA, HA, YOU GUN NUT!).

You may have noticed a trend in my tale: Politicians quit trying some years ago to perfect the union; their aim is to perfect US. That’s why they keep raising cigarette taxes. Everyone knows that smoking is a slovenly redneck habit (movie stars excepted, of course).

Own a gun? Are you nuts? You might be too stupid to handle it properly. What are the police for, after all? Oh, I have a tax-supported security detail and you don’t? Well, the members of my security detail needs their guns, of course.

We mustn’t hate other people, mustn’t we? If you do hate a person, and then you kill that person, you’re going to pay extra for it. Why, instead of trying to rehabilitate you we’re going to fry your butt. That’ll teach you.

Ah, perfection at last.

A Week in the Making…Now Showing on Your Computer Screen…"The 325 Greatest Movies of All Time"…

I have replaced this entry with a more careful analysis: here.

Social Injustice

From Economic Theories of Social Justice: Risk, Value, and Externality, by Anthony de Jasay:

Stripped of rhetoric, an act of social justice (a) deliberately increases the relative share…of the worse-off in total income, and (b) in achieving (a) it redresses part or all of an injustice….This implies that some people being worse off than others is an injustice and that it must be redressed. However, redress can only be effected at the expense of the better-off; but it is not evident that they have committed the injustice in the first place. Consequently, nor is it clear why the better-off should be under an obligation to redress it….

There is the view, acknowledged by de Jasay, that the better-off are better off merely because of luck. But as he points out:

Since Nature never stops throwing good luck at some and bad luck at others, no sooner are [social] injustices redressed than some people are again better off than others. An economy of voluntary exchanges is inherently inegalitarian….Striving for social justice, then, turns out to be a ceaseless combat against luck, a striving for the unattainable, sterilized economy that has built-in mechanisms…for offsetting the misdeeds of Nature.

Getting It Wrong: Civil Libertarians and the War on Terror (A Case Study)

Michael Ignatieff opens his essay, “Lesser Evils” (New York Times Magazine, May 2, 2004), by asking “Could we actually lose the war on terror?” But, to Ignatieff, defeat in the war on terror isn’t

the detonation of a radiological or dirty bomb, perhaps, or a low-yield nuclear device or a chemical strike in a subway. Any of these events could cause death, devastation and panic on a scale that would make 9/11 seem like a pale prelude.

In Ignatieff’s view, which seems to be au courant among civil libertarians, defeat looks like this:

A succession of large-scale attacks would pull at the already-fragile tissue of trust that binds us to our leadership and destroy the trust we have in one another. Once the zones of devastation were cordoned off and the bodies buried, we might find ourselves, in short order, living in a national-security state on continuous alert, with sealed borders, constant identity checks and permanent detention camps for dissidents and aliens. Our constitutional rights might disappear from our courts, while torture might reappear in our interrogation cells. The worst of it is that government would not have to impose tyranny on a cowed populace. We would demand it for our own protection. And if the institutions of our democracy were unable to protect us from our enemies, we might go even further, taking the law into our own hands. We have a history of lynching in this country, and by the time fear and paranoia settled deep in our bones, we might repeat the worst episodes from our past, killing our former neighbors, our onetime friends.

That is what defeat in a war on terror looks like. We would survive, but we would no longer recognize ourselves. We would endure, but we would lose our identity as free peoples.

What a nifty rhetorical trick. Ignatieff paints the darkest possible picture of official and unofficial reaction to a hypothetical succession of large-scale terrorist attacks. He then characterizes that reaction as a defeat — as if sustaining a string of major terrorist attacks weren’t a defeat.

Ignatieff shortly buttresses his rhetorical trick by invoking the evil John Ashcroft: “Other conservatives, like Attorney General John Ashcroft, simply refuse to believe that any step taken to defend the United States can be called an evil at all.” Oh, really? Did I miss Mr. Ashcroft’s call for the summary execution of all Muslims resident in the United States? Well, it’s Ignatieff, not Ashcroft, who says:

To defeat evil, we may have to traffic in evils: indefinite detention of suspects, coercive interrogations, targeted assassinations, even pre-emptive war. These are evils because each strays from national and international law and because they kill people or deprive them of freedom without due process. They can be justified only because they prevent the greater evil. The question is not whether we should be trafficking in lesser evils but whether we can keep lesser evils under the control of free institutions. If we can’t, any victories we gain in the war on terror will be Pyrrhic ones.

Okay, maybe we’re getting somewhere. Maybe Mr. Ignatieff will tell us how we might prevent the hypothetical string of terrorist attacks that will turn us into a ravening pack of jackals, led by John Ashcroft.

Sorry, false start. Back to Civil Liberties 101:

Civil liberties are not a set of pesky side constraints, pettifogging legalisms tying democracy’s hands behind its back. Ask what the American way of life is, and soon we are talking about trial by jury, a free press, habeas corpus and democratic institutions. Soon we are talking about that freedom and that confident sense of an entitlement to happiness that the Europeans find so strange in this country. Civil liberties are what America is.

Well not quite all. There is life itself. There is freedom from fear. But Ignatieff just rolls on:

Civil liberties may define us, but we have a bad record of jettisoning them when we get scared….Indeed, by comparison with the Red Scare or later shameful episodes like Roosevelt’s detention of Japanese during World War II, there have been no mass detention camps in the United States since Sept. 11 and no imprisonments for dissent. Not yet anyway.

“In spite of John Ashcroft,” he might as well have said. But let’s keep reading:

Even so, after 9/11 we were frightened, and Congress and the government weren’t always thinking straight. After the attack, it may have made sense to detain more than 700 aliens on one immigration pretext or another until we could figure out whether there were other sleeper cells at work. But it made a lot less sense to hold them for months (80 days on average) and to deny them lawyers and public due process before we tossed most of them out of the country.

How does he know how long we should have held the detainees, unless he’s privy to what we learned about and from them while they were detained? Well, it doesn’t matter, because he’s just looking for an excuse to introduce this non sequitur: “It was shameful, as a Justice Department report found, that many Arab and Muslim detainees were abused and harassed in confinement.” Yes, it was shameful, but that doesn’t negate the wisdom of detention — just as the shameful acts toward detainees in Iraq don’t negate the wisdom of our efforts there.

Might Ignatieff, finally, talk about efforts to prevent further terrorist attacks in the U.S? Well, sort of:

…Obviously it’s a good idea to keep recipes for ricin off government-financed research Web sites, and it’s not a good idea to have target detail on critical infrastructure available for download. But adversarial review, as intended by the founding fathers, can’t work if ordinary citizens are denied the information they need.

And what information is that — the names and addresses of persons under investigation, of persons being held for questioning as material witnesses? Why don’t we just post that information on the White House’s web site for the terrorists who remain at large, and cut out the middle man?

Ignatieff just goes on — and on — about the things President Bush has done wrong: designating “American citizens as ‘enemy combatants'”; imprisoning “foreign combatants at Guantanamo beyond the reach of American courts”; creating “military tribunals “to try foreign combatants” but keeping those tribunals “free from review by federal courts and free of the due process safeguards that apply in U.S. military courts-martial.”

Nor does he neglect the things President Bush might do wrong: targeted assassination (okay if there are rules for it, but it probably wouldn’t do much good); torture (okay as long there are strict rules about it and detainees can’t be held without access to counsel and judicial process).

Then there’s the ever-looming “out-of-control presidency”: “A war on terror, declared against a global enemy, with no clear end in sight, raises the prospect of an out-of-control presidency.” Well, the war on terror was declared almost three years ago and the presidency still seems under control to me.

Oh, here’s the out-of-control bit, it’s the war in Iraq:

Pre-emptive war can be justified only when the danger that must be pre-empted is imminent, when peaceful means of averting the danger have been tried and have failed and when democratic institutions ratify the decision to do so. If these are the minimum tests pre-emptive war has to meet, the Iraq war failed to meet all three.

Who says that the danger must be imminent? It’s stupid to wait until danger is imminent if you can do something about it before it becomes imminent. (Or should we have waited until Hitler had launched an amphibious invasion of New York before going to war against Nazi Germany?) Peaceful means of averting the danger were tried — but the United Nations failed, after exhaustive diplomacy on our part, to confront the danger that it had already recognized. The Congress of the United States — surely a far more democratic institution than the United Nations — ratified the war in Iraq. Tests passed.

Oh well, at last we come to the predictably fatuous peroration:

The chief ethical challenge of a war on terror is relatively simple — to discharge duties to those who have violated their duties to us. Even terrorists, unfortunately, have human rights. [Oh, really? Where is that written? Why “unfortunately” if they really have human rights?] We have to respect these because we are fighting a war whose essential prize is preserving the identity of democratic society and preventing it from becoming what terrorists believe it to be. [That’s not a problem, as I’ll explain below. The problem is preventing terrorists from killing us.] Terrorists seek to provoke us into stripping off the mask of law in order to reveal the black heart of coercion that they believe lurks behind our promises of freedom. [When was this revealed to Ignatieff, and by whom?] We have to show ourselves and the populations whose loyalties we seek that the rule of law is not a mask or an illusion. It is our true nature. [We also have to show ourselves and others that we have the will to defeat terror, which means killing or capturing terrorists before they kill us. That, too, is part of our nature, and a part that we must accept and others must respect.]

Let’s now talk seriously about waging war and why we can do bad things in wartime without permanently revoking our commitment to freedom. I’ll take a real example from a real war, namely the internment of Japanese and Japanese-Americans during World War II. Before I do, though, I feel that I must say this once more: The objective of war is to defeat the enemy, whether the enemy is a nation-state (as were the Third Reich and the Japanese Empire) or an elusive band of terrorists.

Now, here is how Wikipedia describes the internment:

[T]he exclusion and subsequent removal of approximately 112,000 to 120,000 Japanese and Japanese Americans, officially described as “persons of Japanese ancestry”, 62% of whom were United States citizens, from the west coast of the United States during World War II to hastily constructed housing facilities called War Relocation Camps in remote portions of the nation’s interior. The government of the United States officially apologized for this action in the 1980s and has paid reparations to survivors.

The last sentence summarizes how most American citizens had come to feel about the internment years after it had ended. But here’s what a 6-3 majority of the U.S. Supreme Court had to say about it in 1944, in the case of Korematsu v. United States, with Justice Black writing for the Court:

It is said that we are dealing here with the case of imprisonment of a citizen in a concentration camp solely because of his ancestry, without evidence or inquiry concerning his loyalty and good disposition towards the United States. Our task would be simple, our duty clear, were this a case involving the imprisonment of a loyal citizen in a concentration camp because of racial prejudice. Regardless of the true nature of the assembly and relocation centers — and we deem it unjustifiable to call them concentration camps with all the ugly connotations that term implies — we are dealing specifically with nothing but an exclusion order. To cast this case into outlines of racial prejudice, without reference to the real military dangers which were presented, merely confuses the issue. Korematsu was not excluded from the Military Area because of hostility to him or his race. He was excluded because we are at war with the Japanese Empire, because the properly constituted military authorities feared an invasion of our West Coast and felt constrained to take proper security measures, because they decided that the military urgency of the situation demanded that all citizens of Japanese ancestry be segregated from the West Coast temporarily, and finally, because Congress, reposing its confidence in this time of war in our military leaders — as inevitably it must — determined that they should have the power to do just this. There was evidence of disloyalty on the part of some, the military authorities considered that the need for action was great, and time was short. We cannot — by availing ourselves of the calm perspective of hindsight — now say that at that time these actions were unjustified.

Justice Frankfurter’s concurring opinion says, in part:

The provisions of the Constitution which confer on the Congress and the President powers to enable this country to wage war are as much part of the Constitution as provisions looking to a nation at peace. And 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.

That we later came to regret the relocation of some 112,000 to 120,000 souls is merely evidence that the vicissitudes of wartime will not deflect us from our essential commitment to civil liberties. In the aftermath of World War II — and despite the excesses committed by our side in the quest for victory (and surely there were many excesses that have never been revealed) — our government has put an end to legal segregation (which is the most that government can do), guaranteed suffrage for blacks, and opened the door of opportunity for minority groups, women, the handicapped, and homosexuals.

Nevertheless, in wartime you have to do what you have to do, and sometimes it ain’t pretty. As Justice Frankfurter also said in Korematsu v. United States:

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 dialectic subtleties not reasonably to be attributed to the hard-headed Framers, of whom a majority had had actual participation in war.

And so those war-hardened Framers moved on to give us the Constitution and Bill of Rights. And so we will move on to the preservation and expansion of civil liberties in the United States. But, first, we must try — sometimes in unpalatable ways — to capture and kill terrorists before they kill us.

Confirmation

As if to confirm a point I made in my previous post, Timothy Sandefur of Freespace has just posted this:


The greatest increase in freedom comes through technological advancement. Sunday morning I woke up in Las Vegas, Nevada, a miserable, godforsaken desert, with practically no natural resources that are not rocks. I nevertheless awoke in calm air-conditioned comfort, ate a large buffet breakfast which included salmon, chicken, shrimp, and various other things not native to Nevada. I then got on an airplane and flew home, got in a car, came home, and blogged about my trip. On the way I listened to the music of Stevie Ray Vaughan, on a compact disk —- music created on an electric guitar. Almost nothing that I did -— almost nothing that I dealt with, from my cheap, faux leather shoes to the instantaneous news I got on the radio at the top of the hour, was available to people in 1904. My freedom is therefore infinitely greater.

But of course, today I’m subject to zoning laws, income taxes, licensing restrictions, minimum wages, medicine regulation, and a limitless number of curtailments to my freedom which did not exist in 1904.

Sandefur, like most people, mistakes the fruits of prosperity for freedom. If it weren’t for the “limitless number of curtailments to…freedom” that Sandefur acknowledges, more people would enjoy more of the fruits of prosperity. Because so many people mistake prosperity for freedom they fail to notice — or to care about — the state’s encroachments on freedom.

The Roots of Statism in the United States

Government — measured by its real cost — has never been larger. The regulatory state thrives and its hidden costs grow apace. Future generations are faced with huge tax bills for compulsory charity in the form of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. Why, why, why?

First, we have become locked into a cycle of dependency on government, which began in earnest in the 1930s. The government way of life has acquired powerful and vocal constituencies, which few politicians dare to offend.

Second, we think we can afford gargantuan government. Thanks in large part to three eras of rapid technological progress (in the early 1800s, the late 1800s, and the late 1900s), real per capita GDP has grown more than 30-fold since 1789. Thus most Americans don’t know (or don’t care) how much better off they would be if, for example, Social Security were privatized or the mountain of economic regulations were reduced to a molehill.

Third, the onset of the Cold War — followed closely by the Korean War and then by the apparent threat of nuclear war — led us to a state of permanent and costly mobilization. Our reluctance to demobilize — and our willingness to use armed force in some parts of the world — stems, in part, from increasing dependence on foreign trade as a source of our growing affluence.

Fourth, with greater affluence we have become worldlier and less wedded to traditional sources of moral authority, namely, family and church. The family has dwindled in size, split with greater frequency, and drifted apart geographically. The church — with the notable exception of counter-cultural fundamentalism — has become more secular and less prone to the teaching of behavioral absolutes. Family and church have been displaced, in large part, by an increasingly paternalistic government, one that compels charity through taxation, one that enforces “right” behavior (e.g., bestowing special treatment on “disadvantaged” classes of people, banning smoking in most public and many private places, dictating the design of our automobiles in the name of safety and environmentalism), and one that fosters the redress of grievances through legislatures and courts rather than directly or the good offices of friends, family, and clergy.

Like teen-age cultists, we have renounced our faith in voluntary (and relatively costless) institutions. We have become addicted, instead, to the adoration of the state, which compels our obeisance and demands a high price for the privilege.

Toward Domestic Tranquility

Let’s agree that 10 years from now the United States will be divided geographically into two separate nations — U.S. Red and U.S. Blue. The boundaries will be established by the electoral votes cast in the 2004 election (States voting for Bush will be U.S. Red and States voting for Kerry will be U.S. Blue).

If you want to live in U.S. Red (or Blue) and you currently live in a Blue (Red) State, you’ll have 10 years in which to migrate. All the transition details (new constitutions, terms of trade, defense treaties, etc.) can be worked out. Let’s go for it.

Trade Deficit Hysteria

Trade deficit hysteria is a psychological illness closely related to budget deficit hysteria (see Wednesday, April 21, 2004). Why do people (e.g., CNN’s Lou Dobbs) get all excited when the value of U.S. imports exceeds the value of U.S. exports? They think we’re shipping “our” money overseas.

Wrong. When the value of U.S. imports exceeds the value of U.S. exports, it means that we’re able to buy more things than we could in the absence of foreign trade.

But where does “our” money (the deficit) go? Well, our deficit is a surplus to foreigners. Guess what they do with their surplus. They invest it in U.S. Treasury bonds, the U.S. stock market, and U.S. real estate. That’s more good news for Americans.

So, if you’re suffering from trade deficit hysteria, calm down and quit watching CNN.

Oh, Sure

The killing of Nick Berg was revenge for the abuse of Iraqi prisoners. Just as the next terrorist attack in the U.S. will be revenge for our invasion of Iraq.

See, the perpetrators of 9/11 would never kill anyone without provocation. Don’t you get it?

Curing Debt Hysteria in One Easy Lesson

Are you hysterical about the so-called national debt? If you are, you probably keep repeating one or both of these statements:

• We can’t keep piling up debt like this, we’ll go bankrupt.

• We’re making future generations pay for our profligate spending.

Let’s get it straight. The so-called national debt is in fact the debt of the federal government, issued in the form of U.S. Treasury securities. It has nothing to do with your credit card balances, your auto loan, or your mortgage.

The federal government can keep piling up debt, it can’t go bankrupt, and the “future generations” argument is phony. Federal indebtedness does cause real problems, which I’ll come to after I’ve cured your hysteria.

The federal debt isn’t owed to a Simon Legree who’s just waiting for the chance to throw all of us out into the cold if we can’t make the mortgage payment. About 40% of the federal debt is held by agencies of the federal government (notably the Federal Reserve and the Social Security Trust Fund). The rest is held by private investors, including some foreigners (who hold about 20% of the total debt). They can’t demand immediate payment of the debt owed them; they must wait until their holdings mature (in three months to 30 years). And they know they’ll be repaid — that’s why they’re willing to hold U.S. Treasury securities at much lower rates of interest than they could earn on, say, corporate bonds.

Because individuals and institutions are quite willing to lend money to the federal government, it can keep piling up debt indefinitely. In fact the federal government has been able to increase its debt almost continuously since opening for business. From January 1, 1791, to April, 19, 2004, the federal debt rose at an average annual rate of 5.5%. During that period, the debt reached a low of $33,733.05 on January 1, 1835. From then until April 19, 2004, the debt rose at an average annual rate of 11.3%. That’s a much greater rate of increase than we’ve experienced recently or expect to experience in the next several years.

What about those future generations? Well, future generations not only “inherit” the debt, they also inherit an offsetting asset. If you lend the government $10,000 by buying a 10-year Treasury note, and you keep rolling the note over (that is, buying a new 10-year note when the old one matures), the note eventually will pass to your heirs.

Future generations of taxpayers also inherit an obligation to pay interest on the federal debt. But those same future generations receive the interest that is being paid.

Now, let’s find the real problems. The debt exists because the government has borrowed money to cover spending that is in excess of tax receipts. The excess in any given year is called a deficit. The federal debt is the sum of all deficits, less the occasional surplus.

Borrowing isn’t a real problem per se. Rubinomics to the contrary, there’s no strong evidence that government borrowing, in itself, has much effect on interest rates. The main risk is that additional borrowing will be financed by the Federal Reserve, which is tantamount to printing money. That can spur inflationary expectations, which do drive interest rates. The Fed, however, has become rather adept at defusing inflationary expectations through its manipulation of short-term interest rates.

Taxation is a real problem, but it’s a problem whether or not there’s a federal debt. Taxation compels some people to give money to other people. Even though a well designed tax policy might result have beneficial macroeconomic effects (e.g., a lower unemployment rate), the individuals who are net payers of taxes are decidedly worse off — and the harm done to them is not undone by making other individuals better off. Your misery and my happiness do not cancel each other.

This brings me to the real problems with the debt: It represents the diversion of resources from the private sector — from you and me, folks. And it can stifle economic growth by causing inflation.

The debt exists because the government spends money; that is, it purchases goods and services (e.g., missiles, military pay, civil service pensions, leases, computers, and office supplies) and it transfers income from some people to other people (via Social Security, Medicare, and other welfare programs). Government spending, like taxation, is a form of compulsion. It takes resources that could be used for private purposes and puts them to work for “public” purposes — some of which (like national defense) are necessary, some of which seem necessary but are not (e.g., Social Security and Medicare), and most of which are designed to perpetuate the federal bureaucracy and pander to interest groups with lots of votes.

If the federal debt grows year after year because the federal government’s spending keeps growing faster than its tax receipts, prices will tend to rise unless there is a lot of excess capacity in the economy. If the economy is perking along at relatively full employment, however, a growing debt will lead to inflation. Inflation will cause higher interest rates, which will do several bad things: further increase the debt (that is, add to inflationary pressure) by forcing the government make even higher interest payments, stifle investments that improve businesses’ productivity (e.g., better computing systems and software), and dampen interest-sensitive consumer markets (e.g., real estate and autos).

The root cause of these real problems is federal spending. The federal debt is just a symptom.

Now that your hysteria is cured, implore your members of Congress to treat the cause, not the symptom. Ask them to cut spending, then cut taxes some more, then cut some more spending, and so on until we reach nirvana.

Speaking of Health Care and Free Lunches

Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution points out that “Americans pay more [per capita] but get better health care in return. We die sooner because we eat too much and exercise too little, among other facts.” As he says, “National health insurance is unlikely to save on medical costs, unless it cuts back on treatment drastically.”

You get what you pay for and you are what you eat.

By Their Supreme Court Appointments Ye Shall Know Them

Nixon: Rehnquist (later appointed Chief Justice by Reagan) — Belongs in the second tier, all by himself. His instincts are statist rather than libertarian, but he tries to adhere to the original meaning of the Constitution.

Ford: Stevens — What do you expect from Ford? A Republican in name only who interprets the Constitution the way a blind umpire interprets the strike zone.

Carter: He made no appointments, luckily for the nation.

Reagan: O’Connor, Scalia, Kennedy — O’Connor and Kennedy make up the third tier; they vacillate between libertarianism and statism. Scalia’s originalism usually overcomes his instinctive statism; he’s in the top tier with Thomas.

Bush I: Souter, Thomas — Typically conflicted Bush I appointments; from another John Paul Stevens to the best appointment since the 1920s.

Clinton: Ginsburg, Breyer — Clinton failed to nationalize health care, but stuck us with these two crypto-socialists.

Do You Remember?

I often drop by <a href="

http://www.deadoraliveinfo.com/dead.nsf/pages-nf/main”>Dead or Alive? just for fun. A favorite feature of mine is “People Alive over 85” — famous and once-famous names from the not-so-distant past. A surprising number of erstwhile celebrities are still with us at 90+. Here are some of them. How many of them do you remember?

George Kennan 100, Max Schmeling 98, Dale Messick 98, Fay Wray 96, John Mills 96, Eddie Albert 95, Estée Lauder 95, Al Lopez 95, Henri Cartier-Bresson 95, Michael DeBakey 95, John Kenneth Galbraith 95, George Beverly Shea 95, Ernest Gallo 95, Peter Rodino, Jr. 94, Luise Rainer 94, Constance Cummings 93, Artie Shaw 93, Gloria Stuart 93, Kitty Carlisle 93, John Wooden 93, Joseph Barbera 93, Mitch Miller 92, Jane Wyatt 92, Byron Nelson 92, Karl Malden 92, Archibald Cox 91, Art Linkletter 91, Julia Child 91, Lady Bird Johnson 91, Frankie Laine 91, Oleg Cassini 91, Risë Stevens 90, Robert Mondavi 90, Ralph Edwards 90, Geraldine Fitzgerald 90, Tony Martin 90, Jane Wyman 90, Kevin McCarthy 90, Sammy Baugh 90, William Westmoreland 90, Frances Langford 90

Time Out for Humor: The Ghost of Impeachments Past Presents "The Trials of William Jefferson Whatsit"

This is a farce in three acts. The first act takes place in the presidential study near the Oval Office — also known as the nookie nook. Act two is set in the presidential boudoir, where the air is definitely chilly. Act three takes place beyond the great divide, that is, when Willie Whatsit meets the Chief Justice of us all.

Act I: In the Nookie Nook

Willie Whatsit: Wow, Veronica, that was great!

Monica Crapinsky: It’s Monica, you schmuck. Get it right. That’s only the fourteenth time I’ve given you a back rub, lard butt.

WW: Well, as leader of the free world, commander-in-chief of the armed forces, and first fund-raiser I’ve got too much on my mind to remember a detail like your first name.

MC: You’d better remember it, buster, because I’ve just been subpoenaed to testify against you in a wrongful discharge suit.

WW: But I haven’t fired anyone since I cleaned out the travel office to make room for the meetings of Hillary’s coven.

MC: Oh, I meant to say “paternity suit.” Paternity, wrongful discharge, same thing. Get it?

WW: Yuk-yuk-yuk. You’re as funny as Orrin Hatch eating a sour pickle. Anyway, if I’m the sue-ee, who’s the sue-er?

MC: You have to ask?

WW: Of course I have to ask. It could be almost anyone, couldn’t it?

Act II: In the Deep Freeze

WW enters the presidential boudoir to find Hillary Ramrod — his liberated, emancipated, and constipated spouse — writing his State of the Union speech.

HR: I heard a rumor that you’ve been cavorting with an intern in your private study.

WW: Who told you that? Come on, I need to know so I can figure out how to wiggle out of this one.

HR: Since you’re not going to be able to wiggle out of this one, I’ll tell you. It was our favorite flack, Sid “The Snake” Loveinbloom.

WW: You can’t believe anything Sid tells you. He’s got the hots for you and he’d say anything to tear me down.

HR: Well, you of all people know that he can have all the “hots” he wants, but it won’t get him anywhere with me. I’ve sworn off sex since I discovered witchcraft. Double, double, toil and trouble, send money to Washington, on the double.

WW: I’m glad you have such a laid-back — I mean relaxed — attitude. I was afraid you’d heard about the paternity suit.

HR: What paternity suit?

WW: What do you mean “What paternity suit?” How do you expect me to keep track of them? Do you think I do all that fund-raising to help elect a bunch of yokels to Congress?

Scream of rage from HR. Blackout. Loud thwack (simulated by striking Arkansas watermelon with baseball bat).

Act III: Beyond the Blue Horizon

The Great Chief Justice in the Sky: How do you come to be here, Mr. Whatsit?

WW: That’s a trick question if I ever heard one. It depends on what you mean by “come.” Where am I, anyway?

CJ: You’re in the land of the final judgment — beyond civil suits, criminal prosecutions, and impeachment trials.

WW: I always thought you had a flowing white beard and wore a blinding white robe. Why are you wearing that silly black robe with gold stripes on the sleeves?

CJ: Shut up. I ask the questions here. And the robe’s not silly, Justice Sandy made it for me. Do you have anything to say for yourself before I pass sentence on you?

WW: I didn’t do it.

CJ: “It” what?

WW: It depends on what you mean by “it.”

CJ: Enough with the clever wordplay, already. Do you take me for some dumb Senator?

WW: You’re about the right age.

CJ: Before I get any older, I’m sentencing you, William Jefferson Whatsit, to eternal community service, in the “other place.”

WW: Is that the best you can do? The “other place” can’t be any hotter than an Arkansas summer, and I’ll be glad to service the community. There must be some hot babes down there.

CJ: Just for that, I’m changing the sentence. Earphones will be permanently affixed to your ears and you will be forced to listen to right-wing talk radio twenty-four hours a day for all eternity.

WW grins broadly.

CJ: How can that sentence cause you to smile?

WW: It could have been worse. You could have sentenced me to listen to Hillary.

CJ: Mmmm….

Lights dim. Drone of HR reading from It Takes A Village Idiot to Know One swells in volume.

The Inevitability of the Communitarian State, or, What’s a Libertarian to Do?

What kind of state? Bear with me. To get there (inevitably) we have to reject some useless terminology.

It’s obvious that “left” and “right” inadequately capture the subtleties in political ideology. (Calling Stalin and Mao leftists while putting Hitler and Pinochet on the right is as descriptive as parsing shades of white.) “Liberal” and “conservative” are somewhat more meaningful labels, but libertarians always object (rightly) to being lumped with conservatives, who object (rightly) to being lumped with neo-fascists.

The left-right, liberal-conservative taxonomies of the political spectrum fail because they are linear and lacking in subtlety. My alternative is a somewhat more subtle taxonomy with these four major points arrayed on a circular continuum:

• Anarchy — “might makes right” without an effective state to referee the fight

• Libertarianism — the minimal state for the protection of life, property, and liberty

• Communitiarianism — the regulation of private institutions to produce “desirable” outcomes in such realms as income distribution, health, safety, education, and the environment

• Statism — outright state control of most institutions, reached either as an extension of communitarianism or via post-statist anarchy or near-anarchy, as in Stalin’s Russia, Hitler’s Germany, and Mao’s China.

Think of anarchy, libertarianism, communitarianism, and statism as the North, East, South, and West of a compass. The needle swings mostly from anarchy to statism to communitarianism, and occasionally from communitarianism toward libertarianism, but never very far in that direction.

The tide of communitarianism rose inexorably to engulf the federal government in the aftermath of the Great Depression and World War II. The tide continues to rise, threatening to engulf us in statism. Libertarians, like the sorcerer’s apprentice, have been trying futilely to turn the tide with a broom.

Consider the ambitious Free State Project,

a plan in which 20,000 or more liberty-oriented people will move to New Hampshire, where they may work within the political system to reduce the size and scope of government. The success of the Free State Project would likely entail reductions in burdensome taxation and regulation, reforms in state and local law, an end to federal mandates, and a restoration of constitutional federalism, demonstrating the benefits of liberty to the rest of the nation and the world.

The movement has attracted fewer than 6,000 adherents since it began almost three years ago.

The communitarian state is simply too seductive. It co-opts its citizens through progressive corruption: higher spending to curry favor with voting blocs, higher taxes to fund higher spending and to perpetuate the mechanisms of the state, still higher spending, and so on. Each voting bloc insists on sustaining its benefits — and increasing them at every opportunity — for one of two reasons. Many voters actually believe that largesse of the communitarian state is free to them, and some of them are right. Other voters know better, but they grab what they can get because others will grab it if they don’t.

Communitarianism leads inevitably to statism because the appetite for largesse is insatiable. The resultant statism may be relatively benign, like the statism of pre-Thatcher Britain or today’s France and Germany, but it is statism nevertheless.

The good news is that statism is an easier target for reform than communitarianism. The high price of statism becomes obvious to more voters as more facets of economic and personal behavior are controlled by the state. In other words, statism’s inherent weakness is that it creates more enemies than communitarianism.

That weakness becomes libertarians’ opportunity. Persistent, reasoned eloquence in the cause of liberty may, at last, slow the rise of statism and hasten its rollback. And who knows, perhaps libertarianism will gain adherents as the rollback gains momentum.

If we reach for the stars we may at least rise above the Earth.

Tito Schipa

No, that’s not a sparkling wine from the former Yugoslavia, it’s the name of one of Italy’s greatest tenors. Schipa is almost unknown today (unless you’re an afficianado of operatic singing), but in his prime…

Listen to track 9, recorded when Schipa was 37 years old and probably at or near his best. Listen to his agile, ringing voice, with its overtones of sweetness. Listen — and weep with joy.

Today’s Notable Birthday, and Related Thoughts

Today’s honors go to Charles Spencer (Charlie) Chaplin, born on this date in 1889, died Christmas Day, 1977, at the age of 88. I cannot reject his accomplishments on film however much I detest his pretensions to socialism. The man was a comic genius.

Similarly, I still enjoy the old recordings of Joan Baez, Pete Seeger, and Peter, Paul, and Mary despite their screwy political beliefs, just as I admire the acting skills of such dedicated lefties as Sean Penn, Susan Sarandon, and Tim Robbins.

Art transcends politics, as long as the artists only sing and act — and stay off their soapboxes.

Fear of the Free Market — Part III

If it’s unnecessary to regulate health care — as I’ve argued in Part I (April 8) and Part II (April 11) of this series — can we take the next step and denationalize it? Can we forgo other forms of nationalization (particularly Social Security) and the regulation of other industries (e.g., telecommunications, banking, and securities)?

The prospect of deregulating health care; giving up Medicare, Medicaid, or Social Security; and leaving consumers generally “at the mercy of the market” may seem unthinkable. So let us think about it.

Regulation and nationalization (an extreme form of regulation) restrict competition and therefore reduce the supply and quality of regulated products and services. Many have argued, rather persuasively, that individuals would be far better off with the privatization of Social Security. (See, for example, my posts of March 5.) Moreover, there is ample evidence that proper deregulation leads to higher quality and lower prices. Phone service, for example, is not only cheaper (in real terms) but indisputably better, given the range of options available to consumers. Air travel, to take another example, is also cheaper (in real terms) and certainly better for the great majority of travelers who prefer more legroom to the so-called meals that airlines used to serve in coach class.

Why, despite sound arguments and concrete evidence, do most Americans tend to resist denationalization and deregulation? Their resistance arises from two things: risk aversion (both personal and paternalistic) and economic illiteracy.

Risk aversion is revealed in questions like these: Will I choose the right doctor? Will he choose the right medicine? Will that over-the-counter drug poison me? Will I save enough for retirement? What about my parents, my children, my friends, and the elderly poor? The answers are:

• Licensing of doctors doesn’t ensure your doctor’s competence or help you choose the right doctor.

• The FDA’s approval of drugs doesn’t ensure that your doctor will choose the right drug for you or a drug that’s safe for you.

• That over-the-counter drug is unlikely to poison you, especially if the one you choose has been on the market for at least a few years.

• Your parents, children, and all the rest (even you) would have plenty of money for retirement living (including private medical insurance) if the government didn’t collect taxes for Social Security, Medicare, and other welfare programs. The elderly poor would be taken care of by greater charitable donations (afforded by lower taxes) and relatively small, strictly means-tested, welfare programs.

I could go on and on about other components of our over-regulated economy, but I think you get the idea. There is little risk of coming to harm in a free-market economy, where individuals learn to look out for themselves, especially if they are backed by strict enforcement of tough laws against deception and fraud. Conversely, the rewards of a free-market economy are great: more competition, higher quality, lower prices, greater output, higher employment, and higher incomes (from which to fund minimal welfare programs for those who are truly dependent on society because no one else can meet their needs).

Economic illiteracy blinds people to the benefits that flow from a truly free-market economy. The illiterates (that’s most of us) therefore become easy prey for the real beneficiaries of nationalization and regulation, what Bruce Yandle aptly calls “Bootleggers and Baptists”:

• The “bootleggers” are market incumbents (as represented by the American Medical Association and the American Bar Association, for example) who benefit from the suppression of competition (as bootleggers did during Prohibition).

• The “Baptists” are self-appointed guardians of our health and well-being (the sum of all our risk-averse fears, you might say).

Economics can be as abstruse as the physics of special relativity. But it rests on two things that are easily remembered:

• Incentives matter.

• There’s no such thing as a free lunch.

Nationalization and regulation suppress incentives and therefore weaken the economy. The benefits of nationalization and regulation come at a high cost, but we tend to focus on our own benefits (the “free lunch”) and forget the cost (the taxes we pay for benefits that go to others).

Great Voices of the Past

If you like great operatic voices, the site for you is Prima Voce Catalog: Listing of Real Audio Tracks. There you can listen to recordings made in the first four decades of the 20th century by the greatest singers of that era. There are many familiar names — Caruso, McCormack, Galli-Curci, Tibbett, Gigli, Bjoerling, and Ponselle, among others — and many unfamiliar names with voices just as great. Hours of enjoyment, free.

And here’s some free trivia about a few of the names you’ll see listed. Alma Gluck was the mother of Efram Zimbalist Jr. Geraldine Farrar’s father, Sid Farrar, was a first baseman for the Philadelphia Quakers of the National League from 1883 until 1890. Leo Slezak appeared in at least 45 German films; his son Walter began acting in German films, then became a familiar character actor in Hollywood films, appearing in at least 44 of them from 1942 until 1972. Ezio Pinza became famous late in his career for his leading role in the stage production of “South Pacific” (think “Some Enchanted Evening).

For alluring names to go with alluring voices, you can’t beat Pol Plançon, Conchita Supervia, Toti dal Monte, Claudia Muzio, Lucrezia Bori, Riccardo Stracciari, Luisa Tetrazzinni, Titta Ruffo, Giacomo Lauri-Volpi, Adelina Patti, and Apollo Granforte.