The Contemporary Meaning of the Bill of Rights: Second Amendment

This is the second post in a series about the meaning of the Bill of Rights. The first post (about the First Amendment) gives more background.

The meaning of the Bill of Rights has evolved and shifted with time, not always for the better. What follows is my version of a workable Second Amendment. The constitutional text is in italics. My version is in bold. It is preceded by a long explanatory note.

The explanatory note and revised amendment are lengthy for two reasons: the original Second Amendment was unduly vague; there are many aspects of the right to bear arms that must be addressed clearly if the essential liberty right is to be upheld.

Amendment II

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

EXPLANATORY NOTE FOR CONTEMPORARY VERSION:

The paramount purpose served by the right to bear arms is the “security of a free State,” which is to say, the security of the people. If the people are denied the right to bear arms, they are denied the right to ensure their own security when the state fails in its duty to ensure that security, or when the state oppresses the people.

With respect to oppression, the American Revolution succeeded against an oppressive regime, despite the support of less than half of the populace. The revolution probably would have failed but for two facts: gun ownership was commonplace in that time, and British troops did not enjoy a marked advantage in the quality of their weapons.

Unlike the state of affairs at the time of the American Revolution, the weaponry and other resources that are now in the hands of the police and armed forces of the United States are vastly superior to any that might be acquired by liberty-loving Americans. Police and armed forces, despite the good that they often do for the people, are — in the end — like the British soldiers who fought the revolutionaries: servants of the state, beholden to it for their compensation, and fearful of its power and reach. It follows that the police and armed forces of the United States are more likely to serve the state — even when it is oppressive — than to serve liberty. This unspoken menace, coupled with tyranny by a “democratic” majority, has enabled the enforcement of the oppressions that began in earnest with the New Deal.

It follows that the arming of private citizens against the forces of oppression is futile. It is probably dangerous as well, because of the threat posed to public safety by large collections of weapons, many of which would inevitably fall into the hands of criminals and terrorists. The most likely outcome of any attempt to topple America’s entrenched, oppressive regime by force is utter defeat and the killing of many innocents.

But, despite its power, the state cannot defend citizens from criminals everywhere and at all times. A disarmed or ill-armed citizenry is an enticement to criminal activity.. Accordingly, citizens ought to enjoy the right to arm themselves for the purpose of self-defense.The purpose of this narrower but enforceable right is to enable the people to enjoy whatever liberty has been left to them, circumscribed or full.

TEXT OF CONTEMPORARY VERSION:

1. Every person has an absolute right to defend his property, himself, or others around him when he reasonably judges that any or all of them are in imminent danger of being stolen or harmed. Retreat and surrender are options, but are not required.

2. Active means of defense may include physical exertions, maneuvers, or blows, without limitation; objects at hand, without limitation; commercially available defensive devices (mechanical, electrical, or chemical) that are designed to disable temporarily; and firearms. For this purpose, a firearm may be a handgun, shotgun, or rifle, without limitation as to its caliber or bore, the number of rounds that can be loaded into it, or its rate of fire. The particular means of defense are at the defender’s discretion. Harm to another person or persons shall be presumed necessary or unavoidable, unless there is probable cause to suspect otherwise.

3. The sale, transportation, and possession of defensive devices and firearms shall be regulated only as provided in this clause:

a. No one under the age of eighteen may purchase a defensive device or firearm. No one who has been hospitalized or confined because of mental illness nor anyone who has been convicted of a felony may purchase or possess a firearm or defensive device.

b. The Congress of the United States may by law regulate the possession of defensive devices and firearms on the property of the government of the United States, including its installations and facilities on foreign soil. The Congress may also by law regulate the possession of defensive devices and firearms on and within modes of interstate transportation that are used by the general public, including terminal facilities directly involved in interstate transportation. No such regulation shall have the effect of hindering the lawful sale or transportation of defensive devices or firearms.

c. The Congress and the States may by law provide for keeping records of the transportation of defensive devices firerarms on modes of interstate and intrastate transportation, but such record-keeping shall not unreasonably interfere with the movement of defensive devices or firearms.

d. The States may by law regulate the possession of defensive devices and firearms on State property (including the property of political subdivisions), and on or within 100 yards of the grounds and buildings of public or private hospitals and public or private educational institutions, but without interfering with instruction in the use, maintenance, and safe-keeping of defensive devices and firearms. The States may also by law regulate the possession of defensive devices and firearms on and within modes of intrastate transportation that are used by the general public, including terminal facilities directly involved in intrastate transportation. No such regulation shall have the effect of hindering the lawful sale or transportation of defensive devices or firearms.

e. Permits shall not be required for the purchase of defensive devices or firearms of the kind contemplated in this amendment. But vendors shall ascertain promptly the eligibility of purchasers in accordance with Clause 3.a.

f. Except as provided in Clauses 3.b and 3.d, no law or regulation of the United States, any State, or any political subdivision of a State shall have the effect of preventing the lawful possessor of a firearm from keeping it on private property, carrying it in a privately owned vehicle, or carrying a handgun on his person. Nor, except as provided in Clauses 3.b and 3.d, shall any law or regulation of the United States, any State, or any political subdivision of a State have the effect of preventing the lawful possessor of a firearm from keeping the firearm loaded and ready to fire when it is on his private private property, in a privately owned vehicle, or on the possessor’s person.

“An Economist’s Special Pleading: Affirmative Action for the Ugly,” A Footnote

My post of August 30, 2011, “An Economist’s Special Pleading: Affirmative Action for the Ugly,” opens with this:

It’s hard to tell whether economist Dan Hamermesh is pulling our collective leg, or if he’s serious. In either event, here’s a portion of his proposal to instigate affirmative action for the uglies among us (“Ugly? You May Have a Case,” The New York Times, August 27, 2011).

Hamermesh has garnered some publicity for his cause through an appearance on Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show (clip available here). Hamermesh joins with good humor in the lampooning of his thesis — and his less-than-matinee-idol looks — but he might have done so for the publicity. Whatever the case, enjoy the video clip, read my post of August 30, read Hamermesh’s NYT article, and decide for yourself.

The Contemporary Meaning of the Bill of Rights: First Amendment

UPDATED 11/18/11 and 11/30/11

Although there was, in the early days of the Republic, some misunderstanding about the applicability of the Bill of Rights — whether it bound only the central government or the States as well — that misunderstanding was resolved, finally, by Chief Justice John Marshall, in Barron v. Mayor & City Council of Baltimore (1833). Marshall held that the Bill of Rights applied only to the central government. Marshall’s holding should have been undone by the “privileges and immunities” clause of the Fourteenth Amendment (1868), which was meant to enforce the first eight amendments of the Bill of Rights against the States. (The final two amendments of the Bill of Rights directly address the States and do not require “incorporation.”) That the Supreme Court has nevertheless seen fit to incorporate the Bill of Rights piecemeal and incompletely is a case of judicial error or misfeasance, as you wish.

In any event, the meaning of the Bill of Rights has evolved and shifted with time, not always for the better. What follows, in this and subsequent posts, is my take on the original meaning of the Bill of Rights, stated in modern language and addressed to contemporary issues. The constitutional text is in italics. My version is in bold. [11/18/11: An addition to the first paragraph of my version is in bold italics.] [11/30/11: A second addition to the first paragraph of my version is in underlined bold italics.]

Amendment I

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

No government of or in the United States may establish an official religion or, by any act, favor a particular religion, sect, or cult. The expression of religious views by a member, officer, employee, or agent of a governmental body, acting as such, is not an establishment of religion. Nor is the verbal or tangible observance of a religious holiday by such persons an establishment of religion, as long as no one is compelled to join the observance. Except to enforce the preceding provisions, no governmental body of or in the United States may interfere with the peaceful observance of religion or with the peaceful expression of religious views, in verbal or tangible form. Nor may any governmental body of or in the United States compel any person or private entity to perform an act that is contrary to the person’s religious beliefs or the beliefs espoused by the private entity, either directly or by threatening or causing the loss or diminution of a person’s employment or a private entity’s patronage, revenues, profits, or existence. Further, no governmental body may compel a minor to attend or participate in a lesson or activity that conflicts with the religious beliefs of the minor and/or his parent(s) or guardian(s); nor shall a minor or his parent(s) or guardian(s) be penalized in any way for a refusal to participate in any such lesson or activity.

“Speech” is the transmission of ideas. The curtailment of “speech” is an affront to liberty and can hinder the people’s betterment. Subversive “speech” that foments or abets treason, insurrection, rebellion, or crime should be dealt with under one of those headings.

Profanity and obscenity are not “speech,” and therefore do not merit protection; ideas can be conveyed without the use of profanity and obscenity. The people, through their State and local governments, may legislate against profanity and obscenity, and the interstate transmission of profanity and obscenity shall be regulated by the laws of the jurisdictions whose citizens are recipients of a transmission, by any medium. The role of the central government in such matters shall be restricted to the judicial determination of the reasonableness of any restriction on the transmission of profanity and obscenity.

“Speech” may not be barred, regulated, or penalized merely because it might be or is deemed objectionable by other persons or category of persons. This provision applies not only to governments of and in the United States but also to institutions of learning that operate under the aegis of such governments.

The emissions of the press, in whatever medium, are merely an aspect of “speech.” The press enjoys no special rights of “speech” over and above those enjoyed by the people at large.

Prior restraint of “speech,” regardless of its source, is potentially dangerous to liberty and should not be undertaken lightly. But — given due process of law — such restraint may be exercised by a government of or in the United States for the purpose of preventing a particular act of treason, insurrection, or rebellion, or a crime that would take place absent the restraint.

No government of or in the United States may bar, disrupt, or dissolve any peaceful assembly on private property, as long as the owner of the property assents to the assembly. If the owner does not assent, the government with jurisdiction shall enforce the owner’s property rights. An assembly on public property is deemed not peaceful if causes or contributes to a breakdown of public order, or if it prevents the use of that property for its intended purposes. In any event, no government shall allow an assembly on public property to continue for more than 24 hours if it requires the government to incur expenses over and above a normal amount, unless financial responsible parties assure the reimbursement of such expenses. A government shall bar, disrupt, or dissolve any assembly within its jurisdiction if it is not peaceful or if there is a reasonable expectation that reimbursement, if required, will not be made.

* * *

The final paragraph might seem unduly restrictive, but in this age of instant communication and intellectual “flash mobs,” public demonstrations are not much more than ego-trips that impose costs and inconveniences on hard-working taxpayers.

To be continued…

Scientism, Evolution, and the Meaning of Life

Scientism is “the uncritical application of scientific or quasi-scientific methods to inappropriate fields of study or investigation.” When scientists proclaim truths outside the realm of their expertise, they are guilty of practicing scientism. Two notable scientistic scientists, of whom I have written several times (e.g., here and here), are Richard Dawkins and Peter Singer. It is unsurprising that Dawkins and Singer are practitioners of scientism. Both are strident atheists, and a strident atheists, as I have said, “merely practice a ‘religion’ of their own. They have neither logic nor science nor evidence on their side — and eons of belief against them.”

Dawkins, Singer, and many other scientistic atheists share an especially “religious” view of evolution. In brief, they seem to believe that evolution rules out God. Evolution rules out nothing. Evolution may be true in outline but it does not bear close inspection. On that point, I turn to the late David Stove, a noted Australian philosopher and atheist. This is from his essay, “So You Think You Are a Darwinian?“:

Of course most educated people now are Darwinians, in the sense that they believe our species to have originated, not in a creative act of the Divine Will, but by evolution from other animals. But believing that proposition is not enough to make someone a Darwinian. It had been believed, as may be learnt from any history of biology, by very many people long before Darwinism, or Darwin, was born.

What is needed to make someone an adherent of a certain school of thought is belief in all or most of the propositions which are peculiar to that school, and are believed either by all of its adherents, or at least by the more thoroughgoing ones. In any large school of thought, there is always a minority who adhere more exclusively than most to the characteristic beliefs of the school: they are the ‘purists’ or ‘ultras’ of that school. What is needed and sufficient, then, to make a person a Darwinian, is belief in all or most of the propositions which are peculiar to Darwinians, and believed either by all of them, or at least by ultra-Darwinians.

I give below ten propositions which are all Darwinian beliefs in the sense just specified. Each of them is obviously false: either a direct falsity about our species or, where the proposition is a general one, obviously false in the case of our species, at least. Some of the ten propositions are quotations; all the others are paraphrases. The quotations are all from authors who are so well-known, at least in Darwinian circles, as spokesmen for Darwinism or ultra-Darwinism, that their names alone will be sufficient evidence that the proposition is a Darwinian one. Where the proposition is a paraphrase, I give quotations or other information which will, I think, suffice to establish its Darwinian credentials.

My ten propositions are nearly in reverse historical order. Thus, I start from the present day, and from the inferno-scene – like something by Hieronymus Bosch – which the ‘selfish gene’ theory makes of all life. Then I go back a bit to some of the falsities which, beginning in the 1960s, were contributed to Darwinism by the theory of ‘inclusive fitness’. And finally I get back to some of the falsities, more pedestrian though no less obvious, of the Darwinism of the 19th or early-20th century.

1. The truth is, ‘the total prostitution of all animal life, including Man and all his airs and graces, to the blind purposiveness of these minute virus-like substances’, genes.

This is a thumbnail-sketch, and an accurate one, of the contents of The Selfish Gene (1976) by Richard Dawkins….

2 ‘…it is, after all, to [a mother’s] advantage that her child should be adopted’ by another woman….

This quotation is from Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene, p. 110.

Obviously false though this proposition is, from the point of view of Darwinism it is well-founded

3. All communication is ‘manipulation of signal-receiver by signal-sender.’

This profound communication, though it might easily have come from any used-car salesman reflecting on life, was actually sent by Dawkins, (in The Extended Phenotype, (1982), p. 57), to the readers whom he was at that point engaged in manipulating….

9. The more privileged people are the more prolific: if one class in a society is less exposed than another to the misery due to food-shortage, disease, and war, then the members of the more fortunate class will have (on the average) more children than the members of the other class.

That this proposition is false, or rather, is the exact reverse of the truth, is not just obvious. It is notorious, and even proverbial….

10. If variations which are useful to their possessors in the struggle for life ‘do occur, can we doubt (remembering that many more individuals are born than can possibly survive), that individuals having any advantage, however slight, over others, would have the best chance of surviving and of procreating their kind? On the other hand, we may feel sure that any variation in the least degree injurious would be rigidly destroyed.’

This is from The Origin of Species, pp. 80-81. Exactly the same words occur in all the editions….

Since this passage expresses the essential idea of natural selection, no further evidence is needed to show that proposition 10 is a Darwinian one. But is it true? In particular, may we really feel sure that every attribute in the least degree injurious to its possessors would be rigidly destroyed by natural selection?

On the contrary, the proposition is (saving Darwin’s reverence) ridiculous. Any educated person can easily think of a hundred characteristics, commonly occurring in our species, which are not only ‘in the least degree’ injurious to their possessors, but seriously or even extremely injurious to them, which have not been ‘rigidly destroyed’, and concerning which there is not the smallest evidence that they are in the process of being destroyed. Here are ten such characteristics, without even going past the first letter of the alphabet. Abortion; adoption; fondness for alcohol; altruism; anal intercourse; respect for ancestors; susceptibility to aneurism; the love of animals; the importance attached to art; asceticism, whether sexual, dietary, or whatever.

Each of these characteristics tends, more or less strongly, to shorten our lives, or to lessen the number of children we have, or both. All of them are of extreme antiquity. Some of them are probably older than our species itself. Adoption, for example is practised by some species of chimpanzees: another adult female taking over the care of a baby whose mother has died. Why has not this ancient and gross ‘biological error’ been rigidly destroyed?…

The cream of the jest, concerning proposition 10, is that Darwinians themselves do not really believe it. Ask a Darwinian whether he actually believes that the fondness for alcoholic drinks is being destroyed now, or that abortion is, or adoption – and watch his face. Well, of course he does not believe it! Why would he? There is not a particle of evidence in its favour, and there is a great mountain of evidence against it. Absolutely the only thing it has in its favour is that Darwinism says it must be so. But (as Descartes said in another connection) ‘this reasoning cannot be presented to infidels, who might consider that it proceeded in a circle’.

What becomes, then, of the terrifying giant named Natural Selection, which can never sleep, can never fail to detect an attribute which is, even in the least degree, injurious to its possessors in the struggle for life, and can never fail to punish such an attribute with rigid destruction? Why, just that, like so much else in Darwinism, it is an obvious fairytale, at least as far as our species is concerned.

A science cannot be wrong in so many important ways and yet be taken seriously as a God-substitute.

Frederick Turner has this to say in “Darwin and Design: The Evolution of a Flawed Debate“:

Does the theory of evolution make God unnecessary to the very existence of the world?…

The polemical evolutionists are right about the truth of evolution. But the rightness of their cause has been deeply compromised by their own version of the creationists’ sin. The evolutionists’ sin, as I see it, is even greater, because it is three sins rolled into one….

The third sin is … dishonesty. In many cases it is clear that the beautiful and hard-won theory of evolution, now proved beyond reasonable doubt, is being cynically used by some — who do not much care about it as such — to support an ulterior purpose: a program of atheist indoctrination, and an assault on the moral and spiritual goals of religion. A truth used for unworthy purposes is quite as bad as a lie used for ends believed to be worthy. If religion can be undermined in the hearts and minds of the people, then the only authority left will be the state, and, not coincidentally, the state’s well-paid academic, legal, therapeutic and caring professions. If creationists cannot be trusted to give a fair hearing to evidence and logic because of their prior commitment to religious doctrine, some evolutionary partisans cannot be trusted because they would use a general social acceptance of the truth of evolution as a way to set in place a system of helpless moral license in the population and an intellectual elite to take care of them.

And that is my issue, not only with the likes of Dawkins and Singer but also with any so-called scientist who believes that evolution — or, more broadly, scientific knowledge — somehow justifies atheism.

Science is only about the knowable, and much of life’s meaning lies where science cannot reach. Maverick Philosopher puts it this way in “Why Science Will Never Put Religion Out of Business“:

We suffer from a lack of existential meaning, a meaning that we cannot supply from our own resources since any subjective acts of meaning-positing are themselves (objectively) meaningless….

…[T]he salvation religion promises is not to be understood in some crass physical sense the way the typical superficial and benighted atheist-materialist would take it but as salvation from meaninglessness, anomie, spiritual desolation, Unheimlichkeit, existential insecurity, Angst, ignorance and delusion, false value-prioritizations, moral corruption irremediable by any human effort, failure to live up to ideals, the vanity and transience of our lives, meaningless sufferings and cravings and attachments, the ultimate pointlessness of all efforts at moral and intellectual improvement in the face of death . . . .

…[I]t is self-evident that there are no technological solutions to moral evil, moral ignorance, and the apparent absurdity of life. Is a longer life a morally better life? Can mere longevity confer meaning?The notion that present or future science can solve the problems that religion addresses is utterly chimerical.

The Libertarian-Conservative Fusion Is Alive and Well

The evidentiary trail begins with Daniel B. Klein‘s “I Was Wrong, and So Are You” (Atlantic Magazine, December 2011). The article’s teaser proclaims: “A libertarian economist retracts a swipe at the left—after discovering that our political leanings leave us more biased than we think.” Perhaps.

In any event, here is some of what Klein has to say in the Atlantic piece:

Back in June 2010, I published a Wall Street Journal op-ed arguing that the American left was unenlightened, by and large, as to economic matters. Responding to a set of survey questions that tested people’s real-world understanding of basic economic principles, self-identified progressives and liberals did much worse than conservatives and libertarians, I reported. To sharpen the ax, The Journal titled the piece “Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader?”—the implication being that people on the left were not….

The Wall Street Journal piece was based on an article that Zeljka Buturovic and I had published in Econ Journal Watch, a journal that I edit….

But one year later, in May 2011, Buturovic and I published a new scholarly article reporting on a new survey. It turned out that I needed to retract the conclusions I’d trumpeted in The Wall Street Journal. The new results invalidated our original result: under the right circumstances, conservatives and libertarians were as likely as anyone on the left to give wrong answers to economic questions….

Writing up these results was, for me, a gloomy task—I expected critics to gloat and point fingers. In May, we published another paper in Econ Journal Watch, saying in the title that the new results “Vitiate Prior Evidence of the Left Being Worse.” More than 30 percent of my libertarian compatriots (and more than 40 percent of conservatives), for instance, disagreed with the statement “A dollar means more to a poor person than it does to a rich person”—c’mon, people!—versus just 4 percent among progressives. Seventy-eight percent of libertarians believed gun-control laws fail to reduce people’s access to guns. Overall, on the nine new items, the respondents on the left did much better than the conservatives and libertarians. Some of the new questions challenge (or falsely reassure) conservative and not libertarian positions, and vice versa. Consistently, the more a statement challenged a group’s position, the worse the group did.

The articles to which Klein refers are “Economic Enlightenment in Relation to College-going, Ideology, and Other Variables: A Zogby Survey of Americans” and “Economic Enlightenment Revisited: New Results Again Find Little Relationship Between Education and Economic Enlightenment but Vitiate Prior Evidence of the Left Being Worse.” (Those links lead to abstracts and links to the full text of each article, in .pdf format.) Both papers explain how answers were scored and how respondents identified their political leanings. The choices offered were progressive, liberal, moderate, conservative, very conservative, and libertarian.

The questions asked are listed below (in italics), with the “unenlightened” (or “incorrect”) answers in parentheses. My comments (in bold) are followed by the correct answers, from an enlightened libertarian perspective.

1. Restrictions on housing development make housing less affordable. (Unenlightened: Disagree)

Disagreement suggests a refusal to acknowledge reality and/or a preference for arrogantly imposing one’s aesthetic views on others. The enlightened answer is “agree.”

2. Mandatory licensing of professional services increases the prices of those services. (Unenlightened: Disagree)

Disagreement suggests a refusal to acknowledge reality and/or a strong streak of paternalistic arrogance. The enlightened answer is “agree.”

3. Overall, the standard of living is better today than it was 30 years ago. (Unenlightened: Disagree)

Disagreement suggests a refusal to acknowledge reality or indoctrination in the standard leftist view that most people are doing worse than they used to, which (in the left-wing view) justifies redistribution of income. The enlightened answer is “agree.”

4. Rent-control laws lead to housing shortages. (Unenlightened: Disagree)

Disagreement suggests a refusal to acknowledge reality and/or a value judgment that lower rents are preferable to more and better housing. The enlightened answer is “agree.”

5. A company that has the largest market share is a monopoly. (Unenlightened: Agree)

Agreement suggests a presumption that “largest market share” means dominance of a market, and is grounds for government action. The enlightened answer is “disagree.”

6. Third-world workers working overseas for American companies are being exploited. (Unenlightened: Agree)

Agreement suggests a value judgement that third-world workers would be better off doing whatever it is they did before the arrival of American companies, even though they probably choose to work for American companies because it makes them better off. Agreement is driven by the knee-jerk left-wing disposition to favor “victims.” The unenlightened answer is “agree.”

7. Free trade leads to unemployment. (Unenlightened: Agree)

Free trade can lead to unemployment in certain industries and areas, at least temporarily, but not in the long run (unless welfare programs discourage job-seeking and relocation). And free trade benefits American consumers. Agreement indicates an unwillingness to concede that change is always in the air, and that the effects of international trade are no different in kind than the effects of changes in patterns of domestic trade. Agreement is driven by the knee-jerk left-wing disposition to favor “victims.” The enlightened answer is “disagree.”

8. Minimum wage laws raise unemployment. (Unenlightened: Disagree)

Disagreement suggests a refusal to acknowledge reality and/or a value judgment that higher wages for some offsets the loss of employment by others. (This is a typically arrogant left-wing view of the world, in keeping with left-wing positions on most of the preceding questions.) The unenlightened answer is “disagree.”

9. A dollar means more to a poor person than it does to a rich person. (Unenlightened: Disagree)

This, the first of the “new” questions is truly ambiguous and requires a judgment that no one is entitled to make. Does a dollar “mean more” in relative or absolute terms? And how can anyone know what a dollar “means” to someone else? As it happens, the marginal utility of a dollar need not decline. An additional dollar represents an opportunity to buy something new and different or add to one’s store of wealth. In the latter case, more is preferable to less over a very large range of additional dollars. The enlightened answer is “disagree.”

10. Making abortion illegal would increase the number of black-market abortions. (Unenlightened: Disagree)

This is almost certainly a true statement. Those who disagree with it make two implicit judgments: (1) Abortion is a moral abomination because it ends an innocent life and (2) the net effect of making abortion illegal would be to reduce the number of abortions. Disagreement is therefore rational. Disagreement signals a superior moral stance; the enlightened answer is “disagree.”

11. Legalizing drugs would give more wealth and power to street gangs and organized crime. (Unenlightened: Agree)

I must quote myself:

The legalization of drugs will make them affordable only by those persons who can afford to pay the inevitably inflated prices that will result from government licensing of vendors, restrictions on the number and location of vendors, and restrictions on the amount of drugs an individual may purchase in a given period. (Regulation and paternalism go hand in hand.)….

…[G]overnment restrictions would open the door to a black market, operated by the usual suspects. In the meantime, drug-users would continue to expose themselves to the same inhibition-loosing effects, and many of them would still resort to crime to underwrite their drug intake.

Legalization is a paper panacea. Agreement with the proposition indicates a healthy grasp of reality. The enlightened answer (with respect to the real issue) is “agree.”

12. Drug prohibition fails to reduce people’s access to drugs. (Unenlightened: Agree)

Those who agree with this statement probably make two implicit judgments: (1) Drug use has untoward social consequences (e.g., impoverishment of families and crime) and (2) the net effect of making it illegal would be to reduce the incidence of those consequences. Opposition to drug use is therefore rational. The unenlightened answer (with respect to the real issue) is “disagree.”

13. Gun-control laws fail to reduce people’s access to guns. (Unenlightened: Agree)

This is almost certainly a false statement. But those who agree with it are making the rational judgment that gun-control laws of the strict (confiscatory) kind favored by the left will do little or nothing to disarm criminals, while leaving law-abiding citizens without guns. The enlightened answer (with respect to the real issue) is “agree.”

14. By participating in the marketplace in the United States, immigrants reduce the economic well-being of American citizens. (Unenlightened: Agree)

“Immigrants” these days are mainly illegal ones. Leftists don’t care about that because anything that sticks it to “the man” is good, in their adolescent-rebellion worldview. Nor do they care much about the cost of subsidizing the housing, health-care, and education of illegal immigrants — and those costs probably nullify the gains from lower labor costs that accrue to well-to-do leftists who employ nannies, yard men, and other types of unskilled labor. The enlightened answer is “agree.”

15. When a country goes to war its citizens experience an improvement in economic well-being. (Unenlightened: Agree)

Agreement with this statement reflects the myth that World War II rescued America from the Great Depression. It did, but not because the war brought with it full employment of labor; the war also brought widespread rationing, so that resources could be diverted to the war effort. The war ended the Great Depression indirectly, in two, related ways. There was a “saving glut,” which generated demand for products and services once the war had ended. And businesses were ready and willing to respond to that demand because the war and FDR’s death brought a (temporary) end to the anti-business, anti-growth policies of the New Deal. The enlightened answer is “disagree” because wars consume resources and usually don’t have the after-effects of WWII.

16. When two people complete a voluntary transaction, they both necessarily come away better off. (Unenlightened: Agree)

Both parties to a voluntary transaction believe that it will make them better off, and they will be right in most cases. The “correct” answer (“disagree”) hinges on “necessarily” and plays into the leftist view of voluntary transactions between individuals and businesses, where businesses are seen (by leftists) as exploiters. “Agree” is the correct answer with respect to the expectations and motives that drive voluntary exchange; “disagree” is favored by those who wish to discredit voluntary exchange and replace it with paternalistic regulation. The enlightened answer is “agree.”

17. When two people complete a voluntary transaction, it is necessarily the case that everyone else is unaffected by their transaction (Unenlightened: Agree)

Here, again, we find the qualifier “necessarily.” As with question 16, it serves to deflect attention from the normal course of events to the outliers that (in the minds of leftists) justify government action. For if anyone is affected (or even offended) in the slightest by a voluntary transaction, the “externality” thus created is grounds from some kind of government action, in the left-wing view of the world. The importance and negative effects of externalities are vastly overrated. The enlightened answer is “agree.”

My interpretations are deliberately provocative. But my point is that, the 17-question survey can be seen as a libertarian Rorschach test. An enlightened libertarian would see through the questions, as stated, to the deeper issues and give what I call enlightened answers.

I used the enlightened answers to compare the positions of self-described leftists, conservatives, and libertarians with each other and with the positions that an enlightened libertarian would take. The next two paragraphs describe my method.

In tables 1 and 2 of “Economic Enlightenment Revisited,” Buturovic and Klein (B & V) give, for each question, the percentage of respondents offering answers that are “incorrect” (in their view), overall and by ideological category. I used the values given in tables 1 and 2 to obtain weighted percentages of “incorrect” answers for “leftist” participants, that is, persons who self-identified as progressive and liberal. Similarly, I obtained weighted percentages of “incorrect” for “conservative” participants, that is, persons who self-identified as conservative and very conservative. I took the percentages for self-identified libertarians straight from the tables.

I then had to account for the fact that an enlightened libertarian would have answered eight questions (9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 16, and 17) “incorrectly,” according to B & V. For example, 30.5 percent of self-described libertarians answered question 9 “incorrectly.” But B & V’s “incorrect” answer is, in fact, the correct one from the standpoint of an enlightened libertarian; therefore, 100 – 30.5 = 69.5 percent of libertarians answered question 9 incorrectly. I made similar adjustments for all eight of the wrongly graded questions, and did so for leftists and conservatives as well as libertarians.

Without further ado, here is a question-by-question comparison of the three ideological categories with respect to the answers that an enlightened libertarian would give:

This leads to two observations:

1. Persons responding to the survey who self-describe as leftists did better than self-described conservatives and libertarians on only two questions: 12 and 15. To put it another way, libertarians and conservatives generally come closer than leftists to enlightened libertarian positions.

2. More significantly, it is obvious that self-described libertarians and conservatives are closely aligned on 14 of the 17 questions. Further, that would be true even if I were to accept B & V’s version of the “correct” answers.

Klein’s retraction is misguided. Many of the answers that he considers correct are, in fact, consistent with the wrong-headed views of extreme libertarians — a vocal but unrepresentative minority of libertarians.

The survey results evidently reflect the views of sensible libertarians, who understand that true libertarianism is found in traditionalist conservatism. The closeness of their positions to those of conservatives is heartening evidence of a de facto libertarian-conservative fusion.

Preemptive War and Iran

My post, “Preemptive War,” is mainly a general argument for preemption, where American’s vital interests are at stake. But it was prompted by ” the imminent acquisition by Iran of material with which to produce nuclear weapons.”

The authors of “Why Obama Should Take Out Iran’s Nuclear Program” (Foreign Affairs, November 9, 2011) see the wisdom of preemption:

The November 8 International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) report casts further doubt on Iran’s continual claims that its nuclear program is intended solely for peaceful use….

…[T]he Obama administration has downplayed the findings of the new IAEA report, suggesting that a change in U.S. policy is unlikely. Yet this view underestimates the challenges that the United States would confront once Iran acquired nuclear weapons.

For example, the Obama administration should not discount the possibility of an Israeli-Iranian nuclear conflict….

Beyond regional nuclear war, Tehran’s acquisition of these weapons could be a catalyst for additional proliferation throughout the Middle East and beyond….

…Iran’s rivals for regional dominance, such as Turkey, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia, might seek their own nuclear devices to counterbalance Tehran. The road to acquiring nuclear weapons is generally a long and difficult one, but these nations might have shortcuts. Riyadh, for example, could exploit its close ties to Islamabad — which has a history of illicit proliferation and a rapidly expanding nuclear arsenal — to become a nuclear power almost overnight….

The closer Iran gets to acquiring nuclear weapons, the fewer options will be available to stop its progress. At the same time, Iran’s incentives to back down will only decrease as it approaches the nuclear threshold. Given these trends, the United States faces the difficult decision of using military force soon to prevent Iran from going nuclear, or living with a nuclear Iran and the regional fallout.

But the Obama administration — more accurately, Barack Obama — seems committed to a perverse foreign policy in the Middle East. This is from “Panetta Assures Iran It Has Little to Worry About” (Commentary, November 11, 2011):

If the leaders of the Iranian regime were worried about Jeffrey Goldberg’s prediction that Barack Obama would confound the world and launch a U.S. military strike designed to save Israel from nuclear destruction, they can now calm down. Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta made it crystal clear at a Pentagon news conference yesterday he has no intention of supporting an American attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities….

…But by publicly throwing cold water on the idea the United States is ready and able to militarily squash Iran’s nuclear ambitions, Panetta has sent a dangerous signal to Tehran that the Pentagon intends to veto any use of force against them. Combined with Russia’s pledge to block any further sanctions on Iran, the statement should leave the Khameini/Ahmadinejad regime feeling entirely secure as they push ahead to the moment when they can announce their first successful nuclear test.

This — combined with Obama’s dubious support of Israel, his unseemly withdrawal from Iraq, and his reluctant and easily reversed decision to “surge” in Afghanistan — confirms Obama’s position as the Jimmy Carter of the 21st century. Where is the next Ronald Reagan when we need him?

The “loss” of the Middle East and its relatively cheap oil would be a disaster for America’s economy. Further, it would leave an opening for an ambitious and increasingly powerful China.

Does Obama care about such things? Evidently not. He is too busy trying to remake the U.S. in the image of Europe: defenseless, bankrupt, and hostage to enviro-nuts.

Analysis for Government Decision-Making: Demi-Science, Hemi-Demi-Science, and Sophistry

Taking a “hard science” like classical mechanics as an epitome of science and, say, mechanical engineering, as a rigorous application of it, one travels a goodly conceptual distance before arriving at operations research (OR). Philip M. Morse and George E. Kimball, pioneers of OR in World War II, put it this way:

[S]uccessful application of operations research usually results in improvements by factors of 3 or 10 or more…. In our first study of any operation we are looking for these large factors of possible improvement…. They can be discovered if the [variables] are given only one significant figure,…any greater accuracy simply adds unessential detail.

One might term this type of thinking “hemibel thinking.” A bel is defined as a unit in a logarithmic scale corresponding to a factor of 10. Consequently a hemibel corresponds to a factor of the square root of 10, or approximately 3. (Philip M. Morse and George E. Kimball, Methods of Operations Research, originally published as Operations Evaluation Group Report 54, 1946, p. 38)

This is science-speak for the following proposition: Where there is much variability in the particular circumstances of combat, there is much uncertainty about the contributions of various factors (human, mechanical, and meteorological) the the outcome of combat. It is therefore difficult to assign precise numerical values to the various factors.

OR, even in wartime, is therefore, and at best, a demi-science. From there, we descend to cost-effectiveness analysis and its constituent branches: techniques for designing and estimating the costs of systems that do not yet exist and the effectiveness of such systems in combat. These methods, taken separately and together, are (to coin a term) hemi-demi-scientific — a fact that the application of “rigorous” mathematical and statistical techniques cannot alter.

There is no need to elaborate on the wild inaccuracy of estimates about the costs and physical performance of government-owned and operated systems, whether they are intended for military or civilian use. The gross errors of estimation have been amply documented in the public press for decades.

What is less well known is the difficulty of predicting the performance of systems — especially combat systems — years before they are commanded, operated, and maintained by human beings, under conditions that are likely to be far different than those envisioned when the systems were first proposed. A paper that I wrote thirty years ago gives my view of the great uncertainty that surrounds estimates of the effectiveness of systems that have yet to be developed, or built, or used in combat:

Aside from a natural urge for certainty, faith in quantitative models of warfare springs from the experience of World War II, when they seemed to lead to more effective tactics and equipment. But the foundation of this success was not the quantitative methods themselves. Rather, it was the fact that the methods were applied in wartime. Morse and Kimball put it well:

Operations research done separately from an administrator in charge of operations becomes an empty exercise. To be valuable it must be toughened by the repeated impact of hard operational facts and pressing day-by-day demands, and its scale of values must be repeatedly tested in the acid of use. Otherwise it may be philosophy, but it is hardly science. [Methods of Operations Research, p. 10]

Contrast this attitude with the attempts of analysts … to evaluate weapons, forces, and strategies with abstract models of combat. However elegant and internally consistent the models, they have remained as untested and untestable as the postulates of theology.

There is, of course, no valid test to apply to a warfare model. In peacetime, there is no enemy; in wartime, the enemy’s actions cannot be controlled. Morse and Kimball, accordingly, urge “hemibel thinking”:

Having obtained the constants of the operations under study… we compare the value of the constants obtained in actual operations with the optimum theoretical value, if this can be computed. If the actual value is within a hemibel (…a factor of 3) of the theoretical value, then it is extremely unlikely that any improvement in the details of the operation will result in significant improvement. [When] there is a wide gap between the actual and theoretical results … a hint as to the possible means of improvement can usually be obtained by a crude sorting of the operational data to see whether changes in personnel, equipment, or tactics produce a significant change in the constants. [Ibid., p. 38]

….

Much as we would like to fold the many different parameters of a weapon, a force, or a strategy into a single number, we can not. An analyst’s notion of which variables matter and how they interact is no substitute for data. Such data as exist, of course, represent observations of discrete events — usually peacetime events. It remains for the analyst to calibrate the observations, but without a benchmark to go by. Calibration by past battles is a method of reconstruction –of cutting one of several coats to fit a single form — but not a method of validation. Lacking pertinent data, an analyst is likely to resort to models of great complexity. Thus, if useful estimates of detection probabilities are unavailable, the detection process is modeled; if estimates of the outcomes of dogfights are unavailable, aerial combat is reduced to minutiae. Spurious accuracy replaces obvious inaccuracy; untestable hypotheses and unchecked calibrations multiply apace. Yet the analyst claims relative if not absolute accuracy, certifying that he has identified, measured, and properly linked, a priori, the parameters that differentiate weapons, forces, and strategies….

Should we really attach little significance to differences of less than a hemibel? Consider a five-parameter model, involving the conditional probabilities of detecting, shooting at, hitting, and killing an opponent — and surviving, in the first place, to do any of these things. Such a model might easily yield a cumulative error of a hemibel, given a twenty-five percent error in each parameter. My intuition is that one would be lucky if relative errors in the probabilities assigned to alternative weapons and forces were as low as twenty-five percent.

The further that one travels from an empirical question, such as the likely effectiveness of an extant weapon system under specific, quantifiable conditions, the more likely one is to encounter the kind of sophistry known as policy analysis. It is in this kind of analysis that one — more often than not — encounters in the context of broad policy issues (e.g., government policy toward health care, energy, or defense spending). Such analysis is constructed so that it favors the prejudices of the analyst or his client, or support the client’s political case for a certain policy.

Policy analysis often seems credible, especially on first hearing or reading it. But, on inspection, it is usually found to have at least two of these characteristics:

It stipulates or quickly arrives at a preferred policy, then marshals facts, calculations, and opinions that are selected because they support the preferred policy.

If it offers and assesses alternative policies, they are not placed on an equal footing with the preferred policy. They are, for example, assessed against criteria that favor the preferred policy, while other criteria (which might be important ones) are ignored or given short shrift.

It is wrapped in breathless prose, dripping with words and phrases like “aggressive action,”grave consequences,” and “sense of urgency.”

No discipline or quantitative method is rigorous enough to redeem policy analysis, but two disciplines are especially suited to it: political “science” and macroeconomics. Both are couched in the language of real science, but both lend themselves perfectly to the old adage: garbage in, garbage out.

Do I mean to suggest that broad policy issues should not be addressed as analytically as possible? Not at all. What I mean to suggest is that because such issues cannot be illuminated with scientific rigor, they are especially fertile ground for sophists with preconceived positions.

In that respect, the model of cost-effectiveness analysis, with all of its limitations, is to be emulated. Put simply, it is to state a clear objective in a way that does not drive the answer; reveal the assumptions underlying the analysis; state the relevant variables (factors influencing the attainment of the objective); disclose fully the data, the sources of data, and analytic methods; and explore openly and candidly the effects of variations in key assumptions and critical variables.

A Declaration and Defense of My Prejudices about Governance

I am a pro-defense, conservative libertarian.

By conservative libertarian, I mean that I am a libertarian who understands that liberty depends on the preservation of the traditional institutions of civil society (e.g., marriage, religion, voluntary charity) because it is those institutions that make possible mutual trust, respect, and forbearance. And it is those things that enable a people to coexist peacefully and cooperatively, to their mutual benefit. It is those things — not the statutes, ordinances, codes, and regulations that may be overlaid on them — which constitute the rule of law. Without the rule of law, liberty and the enjoyment of its fruits is impossible.

The alternatives to a robust civil society are chaos, from which warlordism springs, and the police state. Police and courts are a necessary evil, because bad things happen, even where civil society is strong. But, as civil society is weakened by the intrusions of government, police and courts become more necessary because dependence on police and courts to maintain the rule of law further weakens civil society, which leads to the need for even more intrusion by police and courts, and so on, toward the dark night of oppression.

In any event, I part company with those libertarians who believe that private agencies can and should perform the functions of police forces and courts. Private agencies, each acting on behalf of their clients, will sooner or later clash, warlord-style. Or the vacuum of statelessness will be filled by those who seek power for its own sake and for the riches it can bring them. Better an accountable state than an unaccountable warlord.

The same is true when it comes to defense against foreign powers — whether they are states or terrorist groups. Yes, some very wealthy Americans might pool their resources and provide defense, from which everyone might benefit. But the might of a defense force can easily be turned inward and aimed at particular individuals and groups who are out of favor with the proprietors of the defense force.

An accountable, state-run defense force, on the other hand, should be used to defend Americans and their legitimate overseas interests, and to do that decisively. Either get in and win, or stay out. But always remember that staying out — or delaying action — enables an actual or potential enemy to gather strength.

Enough of that. How did I become a libertarian, of the kind that I am?

My disillusionment with the predictably “liberal” worldview that I acquired as an undergraduate came in stages, beginning in the late 1960s. The urban riots that had begun earlier in the decade and reached a zenith in 1968 were evidence of the futility of solving the “black problem” by throwing tax dollars at it. What was needed instead of welfare was robust economic growth and jobs — especially for black males. The intellectual clincher came for me in the mid-1970s, when — as a defense analyst — I grasped the limitations of warfare models.

What is the connection between the limitations of warfare models and the proper role of government? A mathematical model of a fairly well-defined phenomenon — combat involving certain types of weapons — is unlikely to yield an accurate prediction of the outcome of combat. Therefore, it is even more unlikely that emotionally justified government programs — designed mainly to benefit this and that interest group — will perform as predicted. Or, even if they deliver something like the expected benefits, they will also have unanticipated, negative side effects.

The evidence against social and economic engineering is staggering. See, for example, the 144 issues of Regulation that have been published since the magazine’s inception in 1977. Or consider just four salient examples of the social and economic engineering that have had untoward results:

1. Social Security. On the surface, this seems to have helped millions of old persons live more comfortably. It has in fact led people to save less for their retirement, causing them to be more dependent on Social Security and reducing the nation’s rate of saving, with adverse consequences for growth-inducing capital investment. Add to that the inevitable political consequences of a popular program that brings in revenue — the expansion of benefits as a vote-getting measure and the expenditure of “contributions” on other government programs — and you have an explanation for a large chunk of the burgeoning federal deficit.

2. Health care. The creation and expansion of Medicare and Medicaid, coupled with employer-supported health insurance (a result of tax policy), have led to the over-consumption of health-care services with little effect on health. (There is an authoritative, scientific RAND study to support that contention.) It is therefore largely because of government actions that drugs and medical services have become so expensive in the U.S. Another contributor to the apparently high cost of health-care in the U.S. has been the invention and improvement of life- and health-saving drugs, procedures, and equipment. Such things do not come cheaply. But put them all together and you have what the proponents of government intervention like to call a “broken” system. That it is “broken” largely because of government intervention does not faze the proponents of still more intervention.

3. Welfare. Daniel Patrick Moynihan explained well the contributions of government welfare programs to what he called “he cycle of poverty and disadvantage” among urban blacks. For his pains, he was labeled a “racist” and accused of “blaming the victim.” The evidence of subsequent history is on Moynihan’s side.

4. Deficit spending. This canon of Keynesian orthodoxy has led to bouts of wasteful spending and a larger federal debt, both of which cause the displacement of private outlays on consumption goods (including health care) and job-producing, growth-enhancing capital investments. Deficit spending is stoutly defended by believers in big government, even though (a) it did not cure the Great Depression (conventional wisdom to the contrary), (b) its sudden withdrawal at the end of World War II did not cause a new depression (despite “authoritative” predictions to the contrary), and its recurrence in the form of “stimulus” did not alleviate the Great Recession. There are many reasons that deficit spending does not work as advertised, but its defenders will hear none of them because they are persons of faith in big government, not facts and reason.

Were it not for these and other government interventions, Americans — even the poorest ones — would be much better off than than they are, because they would strive to do better for themselves and because they would earn much more from their striving. In addition, there would be significantly more voluntary charity for those many fewer persons who really need it. That is a real “social safety net.”

Despite the foregoing, social and economic engineering by government persists for five reasons:

Ignorance — which includes the kind of blind faith in the power of government to do “the right thing,” as discussed above.

Smugness — the self-satisfaction that comes from having supported or voted for a certain cause as a token of one’s “enlightenment,” “open-mindedness,” or “compassion.”

Power-seeking — as politicians cater to and shape the preferences of certain voting blocs, for the sake of gaining and holding office and the power that goes with it.

Rent-seeking — the effort to gain an economic or social advantage at the expense of others, an advantage that is mainly illusory because one group’s gains must be paid for, politically, by supporting the efforts of other groups to acquire gains.

Appeals to “fairness,” “social justice,” “equality,” and other such high-flown concepts are good indicators of ignorance, smugness, power-seeking, and rent-seeking.

Am I right about the essential bankruptcy of social and economic engineering by government? All I can say is that I came to my views as a result of observation and reflection. I did not inherit them from my parents (who were inarticulate in such matters), nor did I absorb them from my professors (who, if anything led me in the opposite direction). I believe in the rightness of my views — of course. But whether I am right or wrong is not for me to say. What I could say has been said well by an economist named Russell Roberts that I will quote him:

I am willing to admit that I have trouble thinking of a natural experiment that would get me to change my worldview. It would take a lot of natural experiments in lots of different settings before I became convinced, for example, that government can spend our way out of a recession or that bailouts are a good way to deal with systemic risk. I have a worldview. I’m an ideologue. I have a philosophy of what makes the world a better place. I stand by that philosophy because I think its principles if implemented more widely would actually make the world a better place. It would take a lot of evidence to dissuade me from my views on economic freedom and the proper role of government. Those principles color the way I see the world. I think that’s true for almost all of us. What distinguishes is honesty about what we believe and why.

Now you have a good idea — if you didn’t already — of what I believe and why I believe it.

* * *

Related and supporting posts: Too many to list. Go here and browse.

Preemptive War

What should be done about the imminent acquisition by Iran of material with which to produce nuclear weapons? This is a question that the president of the United States and Congress must face because Iran’s possession of nuclear weapons will threaten vital U.S. interests in the Middle East, namely, access to about one-third of the world’s present output of oil. That alone — even if Iran would not strike U.S. allies in Europe or the U.S. itself — should cause the president and congressional leaders to entertain the possibility of a preemptive strike on the Iranian facilities that could produce material for nuclear weapons.

This is not a new subject, and my aim here is not to assess the chances of a successful strike or the political fallout from a strike, successful or not. I want to explore different aspects of preemption — aspects that, so far, have drawn relatively little attention — namely, its morality, the conditions under which it should occur, and its constitutionality.

A MORAL CASE FOR PREEMPTIVE WAR

Here is my argument, in brief:

1. Any sovereign nation (A) has the right to act preemptively against any other sovereign nation (B) to prevent B from harming the ability of A‘s citizens to enjoy liberty and its fruits. In fact, if A could afford to do so, and if it would serve the interests of A‘s citizens, A might act preemptively against B to prevent B from harming C‘s citizens because of the resulting harm to A‘s citizens.

2. If A‘s preemptive act results in A‘s violating its treaty obligations, A simply has put its reason for being above an obligation that was supposed to serve its reason for being, but which patently does not. A nation dedicated to liberty is obliged, first and foremost, to take the course of action that best serves its citizens’ liberty and their enjoyment of it.

You should note that harm (or prospective harm) is not just bodily harm. There is more to liberty than the preservation of life and limb. What are life and limb without the ability to own property and pursue happiness? Theft is a denial of liberty, no matter where the theft occurs, that is, whether it takes place in the U.S. or overseas? If it is not theft to disrupt America’s economy by force or threat of force, and to make Americans poorer by denying them (among others) access to oil pumped from the ground in Middle Eastern countries, then what is it?

The only other thing it can be called — with good reason — is an act of aggression against the liberty of Americans. If there is good reason to believe that the aggression will occur, if not prevented, then it is the duty of the American government to act preemptively to prevent the aggression and thus the harm that would flow from it.

Given the preceding, I cannot exempt any nation or foreign entity as a legitimate target of preemption. Nor can I rule out any form of action against Americans’ interests as a legitimate cause of preemption. Harm is harm; the question is how best to respond to the certain prospect of harm.

Now, if you remain opposed to preemption, you should ask yourself whether you are willing to acquiesce in the aims of a foreign entity. For, to believe that the United States should not act against aggression — except where the evidence of impending aggression is weak or doubtful — is tantamount to acquiescing in the aggression. I can see it no other way.

But, as outlined below, a decision to preempt should not be taken easily.

PREEMPTION IN PRACTICE

Criteria for Preemption

The case for preemption must be met by answering six questions:

1. What is the object of preemption?

2. Who can be the target of preemption?

3. When is preemption the appropriate course of action?

4. Must preemption be limited to a “proportional” response?

5. Do treaty obligations trump preemption?

6. Is preemption unconstitutional?

What Is the Object of Preemption?

The object of preemption must be to prevent a foreign state or entity from acquiring or deploying the means of attacking Americans’ liberty interests, as discussed above, where the foreign entity’s behavior clearly indicates that an attack is almost certain to follow from said acquisition or deployment.

Who Can Be a Target of Preemption?

Does that formulation mean, for example, that the United States should act preemptively if good intelligence indicates that (a) the Saudi regime is about to drastically curtail oil production, (b) a terrorist organization has co-opted the Saudi regime, or (c) the terrorist organization is about to launch a massive attack on Saudi oil facilities?

The first scenario might lead to preemption, if certain other conditions are met, as discussed below.

The second and third scenarios would almost certainly warrant preemption because of the potential harm to the well-being of Americans. It is one thing if Americans lose jobs and income through the normal fluctuations of the business cycle. It is another thing, entirely, if Americans are likely to lose jobs and income because of what would amount to an act of aggression by a foreign enemy. If we would not stand for the sabotage of oil refineries on American soil, why would we contemplate the sabotage of overseas facilities that provide oil which is refined in the United States?

Americans are not “entitled” to oil. But they are entitled to ply trade with willing partners who provide oil. The principle applies to any product or service. The question is not whether the United States might legitimately conduct preemptive operations in defense of free trade, but under what circumstances such operations are warranted.

When Is Preemption the Appropriate Course of Action?

Given the foregoing, preemption is appropriate when several conditions are met. First, it must be clear that the target of preemption is an enemy of the United States. A foreign state or entity can be an enemy without having any immediate or specific plans to attack Americans or their interests. Thus a foreign state or entity can become an enemy by

undertaking to harm Americans’ interests through unilateral actions (e.g., shutting off a major supply of oil)

threatening or attacking allies of the United States upon whom we depend for trade (e.g., Iraq in 1990)

threatening or attacking nations whose defeat might jeopardize the security of the United States (e.g., Hitler’s declaration of war on Great Britain in 1939)

threatening or attacking overseas areas of strategic importance to the United States (e.g., the oil fields of the Middle East or South America, the Suez or Panama Canal)

developing, or planning to develop, the wherewithal to acquire weapons that could enable an attack the United States, harm Americans’ interests, attack our allies, or attack strategically important nations or strategic areas

otherwise engaging in a persistent course of provocative opposition toward the United States, which opposition might consist of pronounced ideological enmity (as in the cases of Cuba and North Korea, for example), supporting efforts by third parties to harm the United States (as was the case with Saddam, doubters to the contrary), or engaging in efforts to harm the United States through economic or diplomatic machinations (as did the USSR during the Cold War).

Such conditions are necessary but not sufficient for preemption. Sufficient conditions are:

the failure of diplomatic efforts, which may include the United Nations but need not depend on the UN’s course of action (see the later discussion of treaty obligations)

the failure of economic sanctions and military threats

the likelihood that preemption would not cause a breakdown of diplomatic, military, or economic relations with foreign states, where such relations are important to the well-being of Americans

the prospect of a successful preemption, where the costs (in life, limb, and money) are judged to be less than the costs of failing to act

an open debate resulting in an authorization by Congress, where events do not require swift and even clandestine actions, which should be taken in accordance with the War Powers Resolution of 1973.

Must Preemption Be Limited to a “Proportional” Response?

Preemption should be limited to the military means necessary to accomplish the object of preemption, no more and no less. No more because excessive force can harm the standing of the United States with its allies others upon whom it might depend for moral and military support in future contingencies. No less because failure or perceived failure (as in Vietnam, Lebanon, Somalia, and Gulf War I) can embolden enemies and potential enemies to act against Americans’ interests.

Do Treaty Obligations or the Constitution Trump Preemption? (Iraq as a Case Study)

Opponents of the war in Iraq argued, among other things, that the war was illegal because the United States was not acting under a resolution of the United Nations that specifically authorized the war. That argument hinged on a reading of certain provisions of the U.S. Constitution and the UN Charter. First, there is Article VI, Clause 2, of the Constitution, which says:

This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding.

Then there are these provisions of the UN Charter:

All Members shall settle their international disputes by peaceful means in such a manner that international peace and security, and justice, are not endangered. (Article 2, Clause 3)

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

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

All of which has been read to say this: Treaty obligations are legally binding on the United States. Our treaty obligations under the UN Charter therefore required us to proceed to war only in the case of self defense, and then only until the UN had decided what to do about the situation.

On the other hand, there is Article II, Section 1, of the UN Charter, which states that the UN “is based on the principle of the sovereign equality of all its Members.” From that principle comes the authorization for the invasion of Iraq (Public Law 107-243, 16 October 2002):

SEC. 3. AUTHORIZATION FOR USE OF UNITED STATES ARMED FORCES.

(a) AUTHORIZATION. –The President is authorized to use the Armed Forces of the United States as he determines to be necessary and appropriate in order to —

(1) defend the national security of the United States against the continuing threat posed by Iraq; and

(2) enforce all relevant United Nations Security Council resolutions regarding Iraq.

(b) PRESIDENTIAL DETERMINATION. — In connection with the exercise of the authority granted in subsection (a) to use force the President shall, prior to such exercise or as soon thereafter as may be feasible, but no later than 48 hours after exercising such authority, make available to the Speaker of the House of Representatives and the President pro tempore of the Senate his determination that —

(1) reliance by the United States on further diplomatic or other peaceful means alone either (A) will not adequately protect the national security of the United States against the continuing threat posed by Iraq or (B) is not likely to lead to enforcement of all relevant United Nations Security Council resolutions regarding Iraq. . . .

The Security Council resolutions referred to are those that had been passed in the years preceding the invasion of Iraq. It is clear that PL 107-243 contemplated military action without a further, authorizing UN resolution.

Absent PL 107-243 the invasion of Iraq might be found illegitimate under the doctrine enunciated by Chief Justice Marshall in The Nereide (13 U.S. [9 Cranch] 388, 422, 3 L. Ed. 769 [1815]), that in the absence of a congressional enactment, United States courts are “bound by the law of nations, which is a part of the law of the land.” But there was a congressional enactment in the case of Gulf War II. Therefore, under the Constitution, the issue of the legitimacy of the invasion of Iraq or any other preemptive act authorized by Congress becomes a political question.

A legal challenge of the legitimacy of the PL 107-243 (Doe v. Bush) was rebuffed, first by the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts in a summary judgment, then by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit after hearing arguments from both parties. It was evident by the date of the appellate court’s opinion (March 13, 2003) that President Bush was on a course to invade Iraq without a specific authorizing resolution by the UN Security Council (the pre-invasion air bombardment began on March 20, 2003). The appellate court nevertheless ducked the issue of the war’s legitimacy under the UN Charter, claiming that that issue was not yet “ripe” for adjudication. The concluding language of the court’s opinion suggests, however, that the judicial branch is unlikely to rule on the legitimacy of military action unless such action is the subject of a dispute between the legislative and executive branches:

In this zone of shared congressional and presidential responsibility [for war-making], courts should intervene only when the dispute is clearly framed…. Nor is there clear evidence of congressional abandonment of the authority to declare war to the President. To the contrary, Congress has been deeply involved in significant debate, activity, and authorization connected to our relations with Iraq for over a decade…. Finally, the text of the October Resolution itself spells out justifications for a war and frames itself as an “authorization” of such a war.

It is true that “courts possess power to review either legislative or executive action that transgresses identifiable textual limits” on constitutional power…. But courts are rightly hesitant to second-guess the form or means by which the coequal political branches choose to exercise their textually committed constitutional powers…. As the circumstances presented here do not warrant judicial intervention, the appropriate recourse for those who oppose war with Iraq lies with the political branches.

Similar formulations can be found in Dellums v. Bush, 752 F. Supp. (D.C. Cir. 1990), and Goldwater v. Carter, 444 U.S. 996 (1979).

More about the Constitutionality of Preemption

I begin with Mr. Justice Black, writing for the U.S. Supreme Court in Reid v. Covert (1957):

Article VI, the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution, declares:

“This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land;… .”

There is nothing in this language which intimates that treaties and laws enacted pursuant to them do not have to comply with the provisions of the Constitution. Nor is there anything in the debates which accompanied the drafting and ratification of the Constitution which even suggests such a result….

There is nothing new or unique about what we say here. This Court has regularly and uniformly recognized the supremacy of the Constitution over a treaty. For example, in Geofroy v. Riggs, 133 U.S. 258, 267 , it declared:

“The treaty power, as expressed in the Constitution, is in terms unlimited except by those restraints which are found in that instrument against the action of the government or of its departments, and those arising from the nature of the government itself and of that of the States. It would not be contended that it extends so far as to authorize what the Constitution forbids, or a change in the character of the [354 U.S. 1, 18] government or in that of one of the States, or a cession of any portion of the territory of the latter, without its consent.”

In sum, a treaty (such as the UN Charter) may neither violate nor change the meaning of the Constitution. The UN, in other words, may not in any way usurp the authority of Congress (or the president) to decide when and in what circumstances the U.S. goes to war.

As long as Congress and the president have agreed a course of action, as in the case of the preemptive invasion of Iraq, U.S. courts are unlikely to rule that a preemptive military operation is illegitimate under the Constitution. Whether such an operation is illegitimate in the minds of its opponents or in the councils of the United Nations should be irrelevant to those who care about the liberty of Americans.

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

SUMMARY

Preemptive war is morally justified if it serves to protect the interests of Americans. But preemptive war is not to be undertaken without careful consideration of its necessity, costs, and consequences. Any specific act of preemption must pass a five-fold test:

1. The object must be to protect Americans’ liberty interests, broadly understood, by preventing a foreign state or entity from acquiring the means by which to attack Americans’ those interests, or to prevent the state or entity from deploying those means if it already has acquired them.

2. The sovereignty and legitimacy of the target of preemption are irrelevant, ultimately, though such considerations should influence our willingness to strive for a diplomatic and/or economic solution.

3. Preemption should be a last resort, following our good-faith efforts toward finding a diplomatic and/or economic solution, and only then after an open debate in which the likely costs and benefits of preemption are weighed.

4. Preemptive military operations should not be undertaken unless there is a good certainty of success. Failure could prove to be more costly, in the long, run than inaction.

5. A preemptive operation must be carried out in accordance with the War Powers Resolution of 1973. But treaty obligations cannot trump America’s sovereign right to wage war for the protection of Americans’ liberty interests.

Politics, Sophistry, and the Academy

By “politics” I mean the business of acquiring and applying governmental power, which involves — among other things — persuading the electorate, either directly or through advertising and the utterances of political allies and friendly “opinion elites” among journalists and academicians.

“Sophistry” is more complex. Its meaning has evolved, as described at Wikipedia:

The Greek word sophos, or sophia, has had the meaning “wise” or “wisdom” since the time of the poet Homer and originally was used to describe anyone with expertise in a specific domain of knowledge or craft. For example, a charioteer, a sculptor or a warrior could be described as sophoi in their occupations. Gradually, however, the word also came to denote general wisdom and especially wisdom about human affairs (in, for example, politics, ethics, or household management)….

In the second half of the 5th century BC, particularly at Athens, “sophist” came to denote a class of mostly itinerant intellectuals who taught courses in various subjects, speculated about the nature of language and culture and employed rhetoric to achieve their purposes, generally to persuade or convince others: “Sophists did, however, have one important thing in common: whatever else they did or did not claim to know, they characteristically had a great understanding of what words would entertain or impress or persuade an audience.”…

Plato is largely responsible for the modern view of the “sophist” as a greedy instructor who uses rhetorical sleight-of-hand and ambiguities of language in order to deceive, or to support fallacious reasoning. In this view, the sophist is not concerned with truth and justice, but instead seeks power.

Here, I am concerned with sophistry in its modern, political sense: the cynical use of language in the pursuit and application of power. In a word, propaganda. Josef Pieper (1903-97), a German Catholic philosopher, has much to say about this in Abuse of Language, Abuse of Power (for which I thank my son). There, Pieper notes that propaganda

can be found wherever a powerful organization, and ideological clique, a special interest, or a pressure group uses the word as their “weapon”…. (p. 32)

A bit later, Pieper says that “the abuse of political power is fundamentally connected with the sophistic abuse of the word” (p. 32). But this is nothing new under sun, and should come as no surprise to anyone who has even a superficial knowledge of modern history and understanding of politics.

Less evident, I believe, is the tragically corrosive confluence of politics and sophistry in the academy. To push the metaphor, what was a trickle in the middle of the twentieth century has grown to a wide, roaring river of academic dishonesty in the service of political ends.

About the corruption of the academy, Pieper writes:

[T]he term academic expresses something that remained unchanged throughout the centuries, something that can be identified quite accurately. It seems that in the midst of society there is expressly reserved an area of truth, a sheltered space for the autonomous study of reality, where it is possible, without restrictions,to examine, investigate, discuss, and express what is true about any thing — a space, then, explicitly protected against all potential special interests and invading influences, where hidden agendas have no place, be they collective or private, political, economic, or ideological. At this time in history we have been made aware amply, and forcefully as well, what consequences ensue when a society does or does not provide such a “refuge”. Clearly, this is indeed a matter of freedom — not the whole of freedom, to be sure, yet an essential and indispensable dimension of freedom. Limitations and restrictions imposed from the outside are intolerable enough; it is even more depressing for the human spirit when it is made impossible to express and share, that is, to declare publicly, what according to one’s best knowledge and clear conscience is the truth about things….

Such a space of freedom needs not only a guarantee from the outside, from the political power that thus imposes limits on itself. Such a space of freedom also depends on the requirement that freedom be constituted — and defended — within its own domain. By “defended” we mean here not against any threat from the outside but against dangers arising — disturbingly! — within the scholarly domain itself…. (pp. 37-8)

Pieper’s depiction of the academy may seem, at first glance, to be unrealistically romantic. But Pieper is merely setting forth an ideal toward which the academy should strive. If the academy would renew its dedication to the ideal, it would banish and bar the sophists who lurk within and seek to infiltrate it.

Where are the sophists most likely to be found in the academy? In such pseudo-disciplines as “women’s studies,” “black studies,” and the like, of course. But also throughout the liberal arts, humanities, and social sciences, where artistic forms, economics, history, literature, and sociology serve (to name a few) serve as vehicles for those who would destroy the foundations of Western civilization in the name of “liberation,” “equality,” and “social justice.” Even the sciences are not immune, as evidenced by almost-obligatory belief in anthropogenic global warming, and the need to subscribe to that belief or be ostracized. More generally, there is the selection bias that works against the hiring and promotion of those who come from schools that have a reputation for dissenting from left-wing academic orthodoxy, or who have themselves overtly dissented from the orthodoxy. Especially damning is the fact of dissent based on hard evidence and impeccable logic — especially damning because it is especially threatening to the orthodoxy.

The last word goes to Pieper:

“Academic” must mean “antisophistic” if it is to mean anything at all. This implies also opposition to anything that could destroy or distort the nature of the word as communication and its unbiased openness to reality. In this respect we are well able to pronounce the general principle and at the same time to to be very specific: opposition is required, for instance, against every partisan simplification, every ideological agitation, eery blind emotionality; against seduction through well-turned yet empty slogans, against autocratic terminology with no room for dialogue, against personal insult as an element of style … , against the language of evasive appeasement and false assurance …, and not least against the jargon of the revolution, against categorical conformism, and categorical nonconformism…. (pp. 38-9)

The Real Multiplier

Superseded by this page.

The Cuban Missile Crisis, Revisited

Stephen Hayward, writing at Powerline in “Reckoning with JFK,” says:

JFK’s supposed “cool handling” of the missile crisis is probably the greatest enduring myth of JFK’s presidency. Yes, it was good that we avoided World War III, but aside from that just about every common judgment about the missile crisis is wrong. It was both a political and military defeatfor the United States, but the great Kennedy spin machine managed from the first moments to convey the exact opposite impression. And the whole matter arose precisely because the Soviet Union perceived JFK’s weakness.

This fact was not generally recognized because key concessions from Kennedy were kept secret from the American people and even from most of Kennedy’s top advisers at the time. Kennedy secretly agreed to withdraw American missiles from Greece and Turkey, something he had publicly stated he would not do when the Soviets demanded it. (When this concession leaked out years later, it was said the missiles were “obsolete” and unimportant, though the Soviets did not share this view.) The biggest public concession was Kennedy’s pledge that the U.S. would cease attempting to overthrow the Castro regime in Cuba.

Hayward’s assessment squares with my own, which I have given in various posts:

The botched [Bay of Pigs] invasion pushed Castro closer to the USSR, which led to the Cuban missile crisis.

JFK’s inner circle was unwilling to believe that Soviet missile facilities were enroute to Cuba, and therefore unable to act before the facilities were installed. JFK’s subsequent unwillingness to attack the missile facilities made it plain to Kruschev that the the Berlin Wall (erected in 1961) would not fall and that the U.S. would not risk armed confrontation with the USSR (conventional or nuclear) for the sake of the peoples behind the Iron Curtain. Thus the costly and tension-ridden Cold War persisted for almost another three decades. (“Whose Incompetence Do You Trust?“)

*   *   *

I should add that Kennedy’s willingness to withdraw missiles from Turkey — a key element of the settlement with the USSR — played into Nikita Krushchev‘s hands, further emboldening the Soviet regime. (“Presidential Legacies“)

*   *   *

JFK succeeded Eisenhower before the [Bay of Pigs] invasion took place, in April 1961. JFK approved changes in the invasion plan that resulted in the failure of the invasion. The most important change was to discontinue air support for the invading forces. The exiles were defeated, and Castro has remained firmly in control of Cuba.

The failed invasion caused Castro to turn to the USSR for military and economic assistance. In exchange for that assistance, Castro agreed to allow the USSR to install medium-range ballistic missiles in Cuba. That led to the so-called Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. Many historians give Kennedy credit for resolving the crisis and avoiding a nuclear war with the USSR. The Russians withdrew their missiles from Cuba, but JFK had to agree to withdraw American missiles from bases in Turkey. (“The Modern Presidency: A Tour of American History since 1900“)

*   *   *

The Cold War had some “hot” moments and points of high drama. Perhaps the most notable of them was the so-called Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, which was not the great victory proclaimed by the Kennedy administration and its political and academic sycophants… That the U.S. won the Cold War because the USSR’s essential bankruptcy was exposed by Ronald Reagan’s defense buildup is a fact that only left-wingers and dupes will deny. They continue to betray their doomed love of communism by praising the hapless Mikhail Gorbachev for doing the only thing he could do in the face of U.S. superiority: surrender and sunder the Soviet empire. America’s Cold War victory owes nothing to LBJ (who wasted blood and treasure in Vietnam), Richard Nixon (who would have sold his mother for 30 pieces of silver), or Jimmy Carter (whose love for anti-American regimes and rebels knows no bounds). (“Rating America’s Wars“)

I could not resist including the part after the ellipses in the quotation from “Rating America’s Wars.” Since the end of Eisenhower’s presidency on January 20, 1961, the United States has had only two presidents worthy of the title “commander-in-chief”: Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush.

Related posts: Go to “Favorite Posts” and click on “XIV. War and Peace.”

The Spoiled Children of Capitalism

I am struck by the convergence of two posts that I read recently. The first is by Tim of Angle (he says it’s his real name), the proprietor of Dyspepsia Generation (a blog deserving of a vast readership). This is from Tim’s “The Spoiled Children of Capitalism“:

The rot set after World War II. The Taylorist techniques of industrial production put in place to win the war generated, after it was won, an explosion of prosperity that provided every literate American the opportunity for a good-paying job and entry into the middle class. Young couples who had grown up during the Depression, suddenly flush (compared to their parents), were determined that their kids would never know the similar hardships.

As a result, the Baby Boomers turned into a bunch of spoiled slackers, no longer turned out to earn a living at 16, no longer satisfied with just a high school education, and ready to sell their votes to a political class who had access to a cornucopia of tax dollars and no doubt at all about how they wanted to spend it. And, sadly, they passed their principles, if one may use the term so loosely, down the generations to the point where young people today are scarcely worth using for fertilizer.

In 1919, or 1929, or especially 1939, the adolescents of 1969 would have had neither the leisure nor the money to create the Woodstock Nation. But mommy and daddy shelled out because they didn’t want their little darlings to be caught short, and consequently their little darlings became the worthless whiners who voted for people like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama [and who were people like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama: ED.], with results as you see them. Now that history is catching up to them, a third generation of losers can think of nothing better to do than camp out on Wall Street in hopes that the Cargo will suddenly begin to arrive again.

Good luck with that.

I have long shared Tim’s assessment of the Boomer generation. Among the corroborating data are my sister and my wife’s sister and brother — Boomers all.

It is less clear that all Boomers passed along their generally deplorable traits. Contradictory data include my sister’s three children, my wife’s sister’s child, and one of my wife’s brother’s children. As members of Generation X — a Reactive generation, in Strauss and Howe’s theory of generations — they “tend to be pragmatic and perceptive, savvy but amoral, more focused on money than on art.” (The other of my wife’s brother’s children is of Generation Y, discussed next.)

Gen X’s successors are found in Generation Y. It is they who seem to dominate the ranks of “Occupiers,” and they are, in the main, children of Boomers. But Gen Yers are of a different character than their older siblings. To the extent that they are late children of Boomers, it is likely that they resemble Boomers in having been spoiled. And it shows in the “Occupy” movement, the underlying theme of which is that the world owes them — the “Occupiers” — a living.

So, despite my quibbles about Gen X, I subscribe to Tim’s view that the rot set in after World War II. That rot, in the form of slackerism, is more prevalent now than it ever was. It is not for nothing that Gen Y is also known as the Boomerang Generation.

Which brings me to Bryan Caplan’s post, “Poverty, Conscientiousness, and Broken Families.” Caplan — who is all wet when it comes to pacifism and libertarianism — usually makes sense when he describes the world as it is rather than as he would like it to be. He writes:

[W]hen leftist social scientists actually talk to and observe the poor, they confirm the stereotypes of the harshest Victorian. Poverty isn’t about money; it’s a state of mind. That state of mind is low conscientiousness.

Case in point: Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas‘ Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood Before Marriage. The authors spent years interviewing poor single moms. Edin actually moved into their neighborhood to get closer to her subjects. One big conclusion:

Most social scientists who study poor families assume financial troubles are the cause of these breakups [between cohabitating parents]… Lack of money is certainly a contributing cause, as we will see, but rarely the only factor. It is usually the young father’s criminal behavior, the spells of incarceration that so often follow, a pattern of intimate violence, his chronic infidelity, and an inability to leave drugs and alcohol alone that cause relationships to falter and die.

Furthermore:

Conflicts over money do not usually erupt simply because the man cannot find a job or because he doesn’t earn as much as someone with better skills or education. Money usually becomes an issue because he seems unwilling to keep at a job for any length of time, usually because of issues related to respect. Some of the jobs he can get don’t pay enough to give him the self-respect he feels he needs, and others require him to get along with unpleasant customers and coworkers, and to maintain a submissive attitude toward the boss.

These passages focus on low male conscientiousness, but the rest of the book shows it’s a two-way street. And even when Edin and Kefalas are talking about men, low female conscientiousness is implicit. After all, conscientious women wouldn’t associate with habitually unemployed men in the first place – not to mention alcoholics, addicts, or criminals.

Low conscientiousness was the bane of those Boomers who, in the 1960s and 1970s, chose to “drop out” and “do drugs.” It will be the bane of the Gen Yers who do the same thing. But, as usual, “society” will be expected to pick up the tab, with food stamps, subsidized housing, drug rehab programs, Medicaid, and so on.

Before the onset of the welfare state in the 1930s, there were two ways to survive: work hard or accept whatever charity came your way. And there was only one way for most persons to thrive: work hard. That all changed after World War II, when power-lusting politicians sold an all-too-willing-to-believe electorate a false and dangerous bill of goods, namely, that government is the source of prosperity. It is not, and never has been.

Whether that truth will become apparent before America goes the way of Greece is anyone’s guess. I am pessimistic because conscientiousness — which seemed to be on the rise with Gen X — is once again on the decline.

Driving and Politics (1)

Among the many reasons for my hatred of flying is that I am usually seated behind someone who fails to heed the notice to return his or her seat-back to the upright position. This is a mild annoyance, compared with the severe annoyances and outright dangers that go with driving in Austin. Austiners (a moniker that I prefer to the pretentiousness of “Austinites”) exhibit a variety of egregious driving habits, the number of which exceeds the number of Willie (The Actor) Sutton‘s convictions for bank robbery.

Without further ado, I give you driving in Austin:

First on the list, because I see it so often in my neck of Austin, is (1) driving in the middle of unstriped, residential streets, even as another vehicle approaches. This practice might be excused as a precautionary because (2) Austiners often exit parked cars by opening doors and stepping out, heedless of traffic. But middle-of-the-road driving occurs spontaneously and is of a piece with the following self-centered habits.

(3) Waiting until the last split-second to turn onto a street. This practice — which prevails along Florida’s Gulf Coast because of the age of the population there — is indulged in by drivers of all ages in Austin. It is closely related to (4) the habit of ignoring stop signs, not just by failing to stop at them but also (and quite typically) failing to look before not stopping. Ditto — and more dangerously — (5) red lights.

Not quite as dangerous, but mightily annoying, is the Austin habit of (6) turning abruptly without giving a signal. And when the turn is to the right, it often is accompanied by (7) a loop to the left, which thoroughly confuses the driver of the following vehicle and can cause him to veer into danger.

Loopy driving reaches new heights when an Austiner (8) changes lanes or crosses lanes of traffic without looking. A signal, rarely given, occurs after the driver has made his or her move, and it means “I’m changing/crossing lanes because it’s my God-given right to do so whenever I feel like it, and it’s up to other drivers to avoid hitting my vehicle.”

The imperial prerogative — I drive where I please — also manifests itself in the form of (9) crossing the center line while taking a curve. That this is done by drivers of all types of vehicle, from itsy-bitsy cars to hulking SUVs, indicates that the problem is sloppy driving habits, not unresponsive steering mechanisms. Other, closely related practices are (10) taking a corner by cutting across the oncoming lane of traffic and (11) zipping through a parking lot as if no child, other pedestrian, or vehicle might suddenly appear in the driving lane.

At the other end of the spectrum, but just as indicative of thoughtlessness is the practice of (12) yielding the right of way when it’s yours. This perverse courtesy only confuses the driver who doesn’t have the right of way and causes traffic to back up (needlessly) behind the yielding driver.

Then there is (13) the seeming inability of most Austiners to park approximately in the middle of a head-in parking space and parallel to the stripes that delineate it. The ranks of the parking-challenged seem to be filled with yuppie women in small BMWs, Infinitis, and Lexi; older women in almost any kind of vehicle; and (worst of all) drivers of SUVs –(14) of which “green” Austin has far more than its share on its antiquated street grid. It should go without saying that most of Austin’s SUV drivers are (15) obnoxious, tail-gating jerks when they are on the road.

Contributing to the preceding practices — and compounding the dangers of the many dangerous ones — is (16) the evidently inalienable right of an Austiner to talk on a cell phone while driving, everywhere and (it seems) always. Yuppie women in SUVs are the worst offenders, and the most dangerous of the lot because of their self-absorption and the number of tons they wield with consummate lack of skill. Austin, it should also go without saying, has more than its share of yuppie women.

None of the above is unique to Austin. But inconsiderate and dangerous driving habits seem much more prevalent in Austin than in other places where I have driven — even including the D.C. area, where I spent 37 years.

My theory is that the prevalence of bad-driving behavior in Austin — where “liberalism” is hard-left and dominant — reflects the essentially anti-social character of “liberalism.” Despite the lip-service that “liberals” give to such things as compassion, community, and society, they worship the state and use its power to do their will — without thought or care for the lives and livelihoods thus twisted and damaged.

Privacy Is Not Sacred

This is yet another post that begins with a quotation from Maverick Philosopher. In this instance, I am drawn to a passage in MP‘s “A Response to Asher Levy on Abortion“:

Asher thinks that laws against abortion “intrude into private life.” He doesn’t seem to understand that some such intrusions are legitimate. If he abuses or kills his own children he will have to answer to the state, and rightly so. That is a legitimate intrusion into his private family life. Conservatives, and some libertarians, maintain that there is no difference that makes a moral difference between killing born and unborn children. If one of the legitimate functions of the state is to protect life, and it is, then that includes all human life.

In the matter of the so-called privacy right, I turn first to the late Justice Hugo L. Black, a man renowned for his defense of individual rights. This is from his dissent in Griswold v. Connecticut:

The Court talks about a constitutional “right of privacy” as though there is some constitutional provision or provisions forbidding any law ever to be passed which might abridge the “privacy” of individuals. But there is not. There are, of course, guarantees in certain specific constitutional provisions which are designed in part to protect privacy at certain times and places with respect to certain activities. Such, for example, is the Fourth Amendment’s guarantee against “unreasonable searches and seizures.” But I think it belittles that Amendment to talk about it as though it protects nothing but “privacy.” To treat it that way is to give it a niggardly interpretation, not the kind of liberal reading I think any Bill of Rights provision should be given. The average man would very likely not have his feelings soothed any more by having his property seized openly than by having it seized privately and by stealth. He simply wants his property left alone.

To put it more bluntly, as I do in “Privacy: Variations on the Theme of Liberty,”

if privacy were an absolute right, it would be possible to get away with murder in one’s home simply by committing murder there. In fact, if there are any absolute rights, privacy certainly isn’t one of them.

Further to the point (from “Law, Liberty, and Abortion“):

It is … unsurprising that the majority in Roe v. Wade could not decide whether the general privacy right is located in the Ninth Amendment or the Fourteenth Amendment. Neither amendment, of course, is the locus of a general privacy right because none is conferred by the Constitution, nor could the Constitution ever confer such a right, for it would interfere with such truly compelling state interests as the pursuit of justice. The majority simply chose to ignore that unspeakable consequence by conjuring a general right to privacy for the limited purpose of ratifying abortion.

The spuriousness of the majority’s conclusion is evident in its flinching from the logical end of its reasoning: abortion anywhere at anytime. Instead, the majority delivered this:

The privacy right involved, therefore, cannot be said to be absolute. . . . We, therefore, conclude that the right of personal privacy includes the abortion decision, but that this right is not unqualified and must be considered against important state interests in regulation.

That is, the majority simply drew an arbitrary line between life and death — but in the wrong place. It is as if the majority understood, but wished not to acknowledged, the full implications of a general right to privacy. Such a general right could be deployed by unprincipled judges to decriminalize a variety of heinous acts.

What about the morality of abortion? Once again, I am uncannily in agreement with MP. This is from one of my early posts, “I’ve Changed My Mind“:

I can no longer condone the legality of abortion. For one thing, legal abortion is a step on the path to legal euthanasia. But legal abortion stands by itself as a crime against humanity….

Once life begins it is sophistry to say that abortion doesn’t amount to the taking of an innocent life. It is also sophistry to argue that abortion is “acceptable” until such-and-such a stage of fetal development. There is no clear dividing line between the onset of life and the onset of human-ness. They are indivisible.

The state shouldn’t be in the business of authorizing the deaths of innocent humans. The state should be in the business of protecting the lives of innocent humans — from conception to grave.

When I wrote that, more than seven years ago, I considered myself a libertarian. Subsequent reflection about libertarianism and its shortcomings led me to reject mainstream libertarianism because it is inimical to liberty, for reasons I spell out in many of the posts linked below. My rejection began with the issue of abortion, and it spread.

I am, in fact, a conservative, though I prefer the more accurate designation of Burkean libertarian. Thoroughgoing libertarianism is impossible in a world of flesh-and-blood social beings whose relationships are not merely calculated and transactional — or cold-blooded, like abortion.

Religion on the Left

Maverick Philosopher makes an astute point:

[T]he present question is not whether God exists or not, but whether belief in Man makes any sense and can substitute for belief in God. I say it doesn’t and can’t, that it is a sorry substitute if not outright delusional. We need help that we cannot provide for ourselves, either individually or collectively. The failure to grasp this is of the essence of the delusional Left, which, refusing the tutelage of tradition and experience, and having thrown overboard every moral standard, is ever ready to spill oceans of blood in pursuit of their utopian fantasies.

There may be no source of the help we need. Then the conclusion to draw is that we should get by as best we can until Night falls, rather than making things worse by drinking the Left’s utopian Kool-Aid.

The main ingredient of utopian Kool-Aid (its water, if you will) is a belief in the perfectibility of man and the ability of man to achieve perfection on this earth. It is that belief which enables leftists to inveigh against every inevitable imperfection of human striving as a failure that must be — and can be — corrected through state action. The state is the left’s religion-substitute, and a most dangerous one because obeisance to the state leads to the suppression of individuals in the name of the common good — as seen from the left — and the destruction of the human spirit that enable earthly progress, imperfect as it may be.

Where one finds ostensibly religious persons on the left, one does not find a belief in voluntary acts of goodness toward others. What one finds is exemplified in A Circle of Protection, which proclaims:

As Christians, we believe the moral measure of the debate is how the most poor and vulnerable people fare. We look at every budget proposal from the bottom up—how it treats those Jesus called “the least of these” (Matthew 25:45). They do not have powerful lobbies, but they have the most compelling claim on our consciences and common resources. The Christian community has an obligation to help them be heard, to join with others to insist that programs that serve the most vulnerable in our nation and around the world are protected. We know from our experience serving hungry and homeless people that these programs meet basic human needs and protect the lives and dignity of the most vulnerable. We believe that God is calling us to pray, fast, give alms, and to speak out for justice.

As Christian leaders, we are committed to fiscal responsibility and shared sacrifice. We are also committed to resist budget cuts that undermine the lives, dignity, and rights of poor and vulnerable people. Therefore, we join with others to form a Circle of Protection around programs that meet the essential needs of hungry and poor people at home and abroad.

Hiding one’s leftism behind the robe of Jesus is a cynical act:

[T]he “Circle of Protection” … tried to browbeat conservative lawmakers into pumping taxpayer dollars at full force into welfare and wealth redistribution programs.

They claimed to be doing this for the “poor.” The coalition’s slogan, “What would Jesus cut?”, equates federal spending levels with degree of morality….

Such political activism is its own reward—there’s unlikely to be much of a reward in Heaven for being “compassionate” with other people’s money. Jesus noted that the Pharisees, who excelled at imposing layers of human standards to the Lord’s, practiced their “righteousness . . . [merely] in order to be seen” by other people. The “circle” follows the same practice….

The bottom line for America is how to put our public sector on fiscally sustainable ground—for the good of all Americans. The welfare state, the disproportionate expropriation of private income and wealth transfer schemes embodied in public programs all make for unsustainable spending patterns.

Moreover, the government is robbing middle- and upper-income Peter to pay Paul—despite the fact Paul has what would amounts to middle-class or upper-income existence in most of the world.

The so-called “Circle of Protection” and the unfair, immoral policies it stands for represent one circle that should be broken.

“Charity” at the point of the state’s gun is not charity, it is theft. There is a Commandment about that, as I recall.

Leftists-cum-religionists commit at least one other sin — or most of them do, I am sure. That is the sin of hypocrisy:

Essentially its malice is identical with that of lying; in both cases there is discordance between what a man has in his mind and the simultaneous manifestation of himself…. St. Thomas Aquinas teaches that we must carefully differentiate its two elements: the want of goodness, and the pretence of having it. If a person be so minded as definitely to intend both things, it is of course obvious that he is guilty of grievous sin, for that is only another way of saying that a man lacks the indispensable righteousness which makes him pleasing in the sight of God.

The portrait of hypocrisy is drawn with appalling vividness by Christ in His denunciation of the Pharisees in Matthew 23:23-24: “Woe to you scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites; because you tithe mint, and anise, and cummin, and have left the weightier things of the law; judgment, and mercy, and faith. These things you ought to have done, and not to leave those undone. Blind guides, who strain out a gnat, and swallow a camel.”

There are those Pharisees again. Their modern brethren are well-fed, well-clothed, well-housed leftists who proclaim their “compassion” for the “less fortunate” and use the state’s power to enforce that “compassion,” but do not share their homes with the less-fortunate or even give as generously to charity as the conservatives whose supposed lack of “compassion” they deride.

What does left-religionists’ penchant for coercion and hypocrisy have to do with atheism? A lot.

The invocation of religion as a justification for state action, for the sake of the “poor and vulnerable,” is a mockery of charity:

a divinely infused habit, inclining the human will to cherish God for his own sake above all things, and man for the sake of God.

I submit that one cannot be a Christian, in more than name, while favoring coercive “charity.” The person who does that is putting himself in the position of judging the relative worthiness of individuals, which is a kind of blasphemy. Further, the belief that one is doing good by counseling coercion is a manifestation of the vice of presumption.

I will go further and say that the leftists of my acquaintance who profess to be religious are no less mean-spirited than the leftists of my acquaintance who reject religion. Mean-spiritedness is not excused simply because it is aimed at the well-to-do. Yes, Jesus said this to the rich man: “If you will be perfect, go sell what you have, and give to the poor, and you shall have treasure in heaven: and come, follow me.” But Jesus was counseling the rich man, not directing anyone to take the rich man’s possessions and give them to the poor.

My conclusion — to which many readers will no doubt object — is that leftist-religionists are religiously shallow at best and insincerely religious at worst. Remove their veneer of religiosity and you have a utopian leftist, committed to perfection on this earth. In other words, you have an lefitist-atheist in all but name — a person who worships at the altar of the state.

Taxes: Theft or Duty?

As goofy as Ron Paul is about defense and foreign policy, he is mostly right about domestic policy, namely that there should be little of it — especially at the national level. This is from his exchange with David Gregory on Meet the Press (October 23, 2011):

MR. GREGORY: Let me, let me ask you about the role of government. You’ve said about taxation, in a way that doesn’t minces words, the following: “Taxation is immoral,” you told the Libertarian Party News. Would you scrap the tax code altogether?

REP. PAUL: That would be a pretty good idea, a pretty good start. I, I can qualify it if I’m allowed. Taxation is theft when you take money from one group to give it to, to another, when you, when you transfer the wealth. Now, taxation could be accomplished with user fees and, you know, highway fees and gasoline taxes and import taxes. But the income tax is based on the assumption that the government owns you, owns all of your income and provides the conditions on which they allow you to keep a certain percentage. That, to me, is immoral, and the founders didn’t like it. That’s why the Constitution had to be amended in 1913.

Not eloquent, but fairly near the mark.

Government has essentially one legitimate function, which is to protect citizens from predators, foreign and domestic. That covers national defense and domestic justice (including the enforcement of contracts and prosecution of fraud). Those functions could be provided by private agencies, but — because of the danger of warlordism — they are best provided by government and funded from a true flat tax.

A proper division of labor would place defense in the hands of the national government and justice in the hands of State and local governments. This would eliminate the ability of the national government to criminalize conduct for the sake of imposing its will on everyone. For the same reason, the provision of justice should be devolved to the lowest possible level within each State.

I see no need for State and local governments to do more than provide justice, though the government of a very small community — say, not more than 150 persons — might legitimately do more if authorized by the community, following rules explicitly and regularly adopted by consensus. Expanding the scale of government action beyond the jurisdiction of a small community courts runaway statism and precludes the provision of services (utilities, highways, etc.) by private actors, which are subject to discipline by market forces.

With that background, I turn to the October 20, 2011, issue of The New Republic and “Don’t Mess with Taxes: A moral defense.” Excerpts of the editorial (in italics) are accompanied by my comments (in brackets and boldface):

Elizabeth Warren, the Harvard law professor now running for U.S. Senate, is getting a lot of attention for the video of a speech she made recently. It wasn’t just because she was taking on Republican talking points more forcefully than most Democrats do these days. It was also because she was defending an idea almost nobody in American politics dares to champion anymore, at least explicitly: She was defending the idea of taxes. [Elizabeth Warren is all wet.]

In recent decades, Republican politicians and key allies, most notably anti-tax crusader Grover Norquist, have succeeded in demonizing taxes, as if the very concept of a tax itself were immoral. [Not quite. See above.]

But there is nothing wrong with asking [asking?] people to pay taxes. On the contrary, there is something very right about it. Nobody [nobody?] questions whether society [the state] can require people to serve on a jury or, in times of war, to enlist in the military. [So soon is Vietnam forgotten, along with its main legal legacy: all-volunteer armed forces.] So why do we question whether society [the state] can require people to pay for the government whose services, and protection, they enjoy? [Most of us do not “enjoy” government services, other than defense and justice, and even those that we do “enjoy” would be provided more efficiently by private firms.]

The moral case for taxation rests on two separate, but related, principles. The first is distributional. History teaches us that capitalism is an excellent economic system for generating wealth. But history also teaches us that capitalism will create losers as well as winners, often because of forces beyond any individual’s control. Whether it’s accident or illness, mismatched skills or misallocated resources, large numbers of people will inevitably find themselves in financial difficulty—without a job, without savings, and without enough money to pay for the basic necessities of life. It can be crippling for them and crippling for their children, so that poverty, like affluence, becomes its own sort of inheritance. [And that’s another thing better left to the private sector: charity. Charity-by-government is an inefficient way of taking from the few to give to the many — but it yields votes, as in “tax and tax, and spend and spend, and elect and elect.”]

A civilized society recognizes this problem and vows to mitigate it. [A state, driven by power-lust, is not a society, and cannot claim to be civilized.] If capitalism does not offer everybody at least some realistic hope of upward mobility, it cannot survive. [But it does offer that hope, and it will survive unless the minions of the state have their way.] Here in the United States, a part of our solution has been to enact government programs that offer the needy minimal allotments of sustenance (food stamps) and shelter (housing choice vouchers), that provide the less affluent with cash (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families) and college tuition (Pell Grants), and that guarantee all citizens pensions (Social Security) and health insurance (Medicare, Medicaid, and the Affordable Care Act). These programs cost money. And the money has to come from somewhere. [These programs are self-defeating because they (1) create dependency, (2) reduce the incentive to better oneself, (3) reduce the incentive to save for one’s future needs, and (4) drain resources from growth-producing investments that create jobs and higher incomes, and allow people to save for future needs.]

The second reason we need taxes isn’t about the least fortunate; it’s about public goods. You’ll frequently hear conservatives argue that taking money from people, particularly successful people, is unfair because they, not the government, earned that money. But that’s not quite right, for reasons Warren explained very well in her monologue. Behind every successful individual is a set of public investments that past generations made. Could Bill Gates have made his fortune without government-financed education and technology? Could Sam Walton’s stores have spread across the country without government-sponsored roads on which goods and customers travel? “You built a factory and it turned into something terrific, or a great idea?” Warren said. “God bless. Keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.” [“Public goods” are a crock. Elizabeth Warren is all wet.]

[O]n the morality of asking [asking?] people to pay taxes, there should be no debate at all. Taxes are an act of citizenship [coercion]. We should all be proud to pay them. [Speak for yourself, kemosabe.]

Other than that, I found the punctuation and spelling to be impeccable.

As for the question posed in the title of this post: theft, all theft, because even essential protective services are not funded equitably.

The War on Terror, As It Should Have Been Fought

The war on terror encompasses more than military action, but military action is a necessary part of it. However, as with the Vietnam War, the military response to the attacks of September 11, 2001, have been half-hearted and therefore inconclusive. What should have been done? The answers are given in two recent essays at the Claremont Review of Books.

In “The Lost Decade” (October 20, 2011), Angelo M. Codevilla writes:

America’s ruling class lost the “War on Terror.” During the decade that began on September 11, 2001, the U.S. government’s combat operations have resulted in some 6,000 Americans killed and 30,000 crippled, caused hundreds of thousands of foreign casualties, and spent—depending on various estimates of direct and indirect costs—somewhere between 2 and 3 trillion dollars. But nothing our rulers did post-9/11 eliminated the threat from terrorists or made the world significantly less dangerous. Rather, ever-bigger government imposed unprecedented restrictions on the American people and became the arbiter of prosperity for its cronies, as well as the manager of permanent austerity for the rest. Although in 2001 many referred to the United States as “the world’s only superpower,” ten years later the near-universal perception of America is that of a nation declining, perhaps irreversibly. This decade convinced a majority of Americans that the future would be worse than the past and that there is nothing to be done about it. This is the “new normal.” How did this happen?…

America’s current ruling class, the people who lost the War on Terror, monopolizes the upper reaches of American public life, the ranks of those who make foreign and domestic policy, including the leadership of the Republican and Democratic parties. It is more or less homogeneous socially and intellectually. In foreign affairs, the change from the Bush to the Obama Administrations was barely noticeable. In domestic matters, the differences are more quantitative than qualitative. Dissent from the ruling class is rife among the American people, but occurs mostly on the sidelines of our politics. If there is to be a reversal of the ongoing defeats, both foreign and domestic, that have discredited contemporary America’s bipartisan mainstream, heretofore marginal people will have to generate it, applying ideas and practices recalled from America’s successful past.

The world of 2011 is even less congenial to America and Americans than it was on September 10, 2001. The U.S. government is not responsible for all the ways in which the world was menacing then and is menacing now, of course. Regardless of what America did, China’s challenge to the post-1945 Peace of the Pacific was going to become more serious. Vladimir Putin’s neo-Soviet Russia was not and could not be anything but a major bother. Western Europe would be living off civilizational capital it had lost the will to replenish, irrespective of any American deeds or entreaties. The Muslim world would be choking on the dysfunctions inherent in its government and cultures.

But U.S. policy has made things worse because the liberal internationalists, realists, and neoconservatives who make up America’s foreign policy Establishment have all assumed that Americans should undertake the impossible task of changing such basic facts, rather than confining themselves to the difficult but vital work of guarding U.S. interests against them. For the Establishment, 9/11 meant opportunities to press for doing more of what they had always tried to do….

After 9/11 President George W. Bush told the American people to go shopping and behave normally. In short: forget that you will never again be free to live as before. Think about money. This advice followed naturally from the government’s decision to persist in its ways instead of lifting terrorism’s burden from America. What might have happened if, instead, Bush had told Americans that the terror threat would not last forever, because their government would now undertake some expensive military operations that would soon allow normal life to resume? To support those operations the government would have had to cut back other spending and perhaps raise some taxes. No doubt, in fall 2001 the American people would have accepted these sacrifices. But they would have demanded results. Since the administration was not about to try that, it sought to satisfy the American people with the pretend-safety of “homeland security,” with images of U.S. troops in combat, and perhaps above all with domestic prosperity fueled by record-low interest rates and massive deficit-spending.

This pretend-prosperity aimed not only to anesthetize criticism of endless war, but also to feed both political parties’ many constituencies—the ruling class’s standard procedure. Both parties joined in expanding federal guarantees for sub-prime mortgages, subsidies for education, alternative fuels, and countless activities dear to well-connected players. Both parties congratulated themselves for establishing new entitlements for prescription drugs and for medical care for children. When the “great recession” began in 2007 Democrats blamed Republicans’ excessive spending on “the wars,” while Republicans blamed it on Democrats’ excessive spending on everything else. Both are correct, and both are responsible….

What should have been done? Mark Helprin gives the prescription, in “The Central Proposition” (same source, September 13, 2011):

True shock and awe following upon September 11, when the world was with us, could have pitched the Middle East (and beyond, including the Islamists) into something resembling its torpor under European domination or its shock after the Arab-Iraeli War of 1967. That is to say, pacified for a time, with attacks on the West subsiding. And if the West could have resisted the arrogance of the victor and been magnanimous, who knows for how long such a period would have been extended? Instead, we exhibit the generosity of the soon-to-be defeated, otherwise known as concession and surrender.

Comporting with the idea that if you’re going to have a war it’s a good idea to win it, and with the Powell Doctrine, General Eric Shinseki’s recommendations, the lessons of military history, the American way of war, and simple common sense, an effective response to September 11 would have required an effort of greater scale than that of the Gulf War—i.e., all in. With a full and fully prepared “punch through,” we could have reached Baghdad in three days, and instead of staying there for a decade or more put compliant officials or generals in power (which is more or less what we’re doing now) and wheeled left to Damascus, smashing the Syrian army against the Israeli anvil and putting another compliant regime in place before returning to the complex of modern military bases at the northern borders of Saudi Arabia. There, our backs to the sea, which we control, and our troops hermetically sealed by the desert and safe from insurgency, we could have occupied the center of gravity in the heart of the Middle East, able to sprint with overwhelming force within a few days to either Baghdad, Damascus, or Riyadh.

Having suffered very few casualties, our forces would have been rested, well-trained, ready for deployment in other parts of the world, and able to dictate to (variously and where applicable) the Syrians, Iraqis, and Saudis that they eradicate their terrorists, stay within their borders, abandon weapons of mass destruction, break alliances with Iran and Hezbollah, keep the oil price down, and generally behave themselves. These regimes live for power, do anything for survival, and have secret police who can flush out terrorists with ruthless efficiency. Such strategy, had we adopted it, would have been demanding and imperious, yes, but not as demanding and imperious as ten years of war across much of the Middle East. Our own economy and alliances need not have been disrupted, our polity not so severely divided, and far fewer people would have suffered.

What happened between World War II and September 11, 2001, to change the American way of war from tenacity to pusillanimity? A lot of what happened has to do with the ascendancy of leftism, which too many conservatives seem bent on accommodating for fear of seeming mean-spirited and (in the case of too many conservative politicians) for the sake of gaining office.

Beyond that, and more importantly, there is the decline of willpower. On that point, I turn to Andrew Klavan:

A book called Willpower has been making a splash lately and will, I’m told, appear on the New York Times bestseller list next week. I have not read the book yet, but while in New York last week at the behest of the Manhattan Institute, I attended an MI-sponsored presentation by the book’s authors, psychology researcher Roy F. Baumeister and science writer John Tierney.

Willpower surpasses even intelligence as a predictor of success in life. And Baumeister has performed a number of experiments that convinced him that willpower is something like a muscle: it can be strengthened, conserved, and fatigued. Like a muscle, it also needs to be fueled. Baumeister’s assertion that glucose in the blood is essential to willpower has featured in the headlines about the book.

But in the question period after the presentation, I asked Baumeister how else, aside from eating well, could willpower be strengthened. His response was this: Exercise strengthens willpower just as it strengthens muscles. Even a meaningless exercise of will — training yourself to use your left hand for a task instead of your right, for instance — can make the will stronger over time. He added — I quote from memory: “When I was a boy, I used to be baffled by the idea of profanity. I used to wonder why there should be all these words that everyone knew but nobody used. But now I understand: that strengthens willpower.”

Well, right. In other words, behaving well, behaving responsibly, learning the norms of politeness and refusing to abandon them without good reason tend to make you a more self-controlled, successful, and finally better person.

This is precisely the wisdom my generation threw away. Their promiscuity, adolescent foul-mouthedness, bad manners, and disregard for tradition — all of which they claimed were a new kind of freedom — were in fact the precursors to the very oldest kind of slavery: slavery to one’s own impulses and desires…. (“‘Willpower’ and the Suckiest Generation” (Klavan on the Culture, September 26, 2011)

In so many words, a lack of staying power. If one goes through life expecting to be rewarded at every turn for having done nothing, one acquires a habit of mind that precludes doing what is necessary to remain alive and free.

Drone warfare is not wrong (as leftists and extreme libertarian would have it) because it uses technology to kill our enemies. But drone warfare is symptom of the moral torpor that has overtaken most Americans, especially our so-called leaders. It is an (illusory) easy way out of a situation that defies an easy solution and demands the application of vastly more military might than our so-called leaders have been willing to muster.

“Occupy Wall Street” and Religion

Religion and Occupy Wall Street make strange pew-mates. This is from an AP story, “Religion claims its place in Occupy Wall Street“:

Clergy emphasize they are participants in the aggressively leaderless movement, not people trying to co-opt it. Plus, in a movement that purports to represent the “99 percent” in society, the prominent religious groups are overwhelmingly liberal….

Religious imagery and events have been common since the protests began. In New York, clergy carried an Old Testament-style golden calf in the shape of the Wall Street bull to decry the false idol of greed….

A Chicago group, Interfaith Worker Justice, has published an interfaith prayer service guide for occupation protests nationwide.

Clergy who support the protests say they are a natural fit with many faiths, because they share traditional concerns about economic injustice….

Let’s stop there and talk about “economic injustice.” What does that mean?

A true economic injustice occurs when a party to an economic contract (written or implied) reneges. An employer who doesn’t pay a worker the agreed wage or for the full number of hours worked commits an economic injustice. A supplier who delivers less than a full lot of goods, but bills the full lot, commits an economic injustice. Well, you get the idea: Economic injustice is theft, pure and simple.

But it is not theft to refuse to pay a person what he has not earned. To the contrary, it is theft to demand unearned payment. It is armed robbery when the state — with its monopoly of force — takes from those who earn and gives to those who do not.

Armed robbery is exactly what passes for “economic justice” among the OWS crowd, though they prefer to call it “fairness” and “caring.” Accordingly, there is no legitimate religious basis for OWS-style “economic justice,” despite the attempt of some religious (and irreligious) leftists to claim that Christianity requires redistribution.

At this point, I defer to Father Robert A. Sirico, a Roman Catholic priest and president of the Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty. This is taken from from a speech that he delivered at Hillsdale College on October 27, 2006:

In chapter 21 of St. Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus proposes a moral dilemma in the form of a parable: A man asks his two sons to go to work for him in his vineyard. The first son declines, but later ends up going. The second son tells his father he will go, but never does. “Who,” Jesus asks, “did the will of his father?” Although I am loath to argue that Jesus’s point in this parable was an economic one, we may nonetheless derive from it a moral lesson with which to evaluate economic systems in terms of achieving the common good.

Modern history presents us with two divergent models of economic arrangement: socialism and capitalism. One of these appears preoccupied with the common good and social betterment, the other with profits and production. But let us keep the parable in mind as we take a brief tour of economic history….

In our own time, we think of socialists as opposing capitalist excess, disparaging the mass availability of goods and services, and seeking to restrict the freedom to produce and enjoy wealth. Consider, for instance, the wrath that modern socialists feel towards fast food, large discount stores, and specialty financial services for the poor. They accuse the mass consumer market of institutionalizing false needs, commodifying the commons, glorifying the banal, homogenizing culture—all at the expense of the environment and of equality of condition, the highest socialist goal. Improving the standard of living in society is far down the list of modern socialist priorities.

But to repeat, it was not always so. Early socialists believed that socialism would bring about an advance of civilization and an increase in wealth. Babeuf, for example, predicted that socialism would “[have] us eat four good meals a day, [dress] us most elegantly, and also [provide] those of us who are fathers of families with charming houses worth a thousand louis each.” In short, socialism would distribute prosperity across the entire population….

The core of the old socialist hope was a mass prosperity that would free all people from the burden of laboring for others and place them in a position to pursue higher ends, such as art and philosophy, in a conflict-free society. But there was a practical problem: The Marxist prediction of a revolution that would bring about this good society rested on the assumption that the condition of the working classes would grow ever worse under capitalism. But by the early twentieth century it was clear that this assumption was completely wrong. Indeed, the reverse was occurring: As wealth grew through capitalist means, the standard of living of all was improving.

Historians now realize that even in the early years of the Industrial Revolution, workers were becoming better off. Prices were falling, incomes rising, health and sanitation improving, diets becoming more varied, and working conditions constantly improving. The new wealth generated by capitalism dramatically lengthened life spans and decreased child mortality rates. The new jobs being created in industry paid more than most people could make in agriculture. Housing conditions improved. The new heroes of society came from the middle class as business owners and industrialists displaced the nobility and gentry in the cultural hierarchy….

In the midst of all this change, many people seemed only to observe an increase in the number of the poor. In a paradoxical way, this too was a sign of social progress, since so many of these unfortunate people might have been dead in past ages. But the deaths of the past were unseen and forgotten, whereas current poverty was omnipresent. Meanwhile, as economic development expanded in the nineteenth century, there was a dramatic growth of a middle class that now had access to consumer goods once available only to kings—not to mention plenty of new goods being created by the engine of capitalism.

These economic advances continued throughout the period of the rise of socialist ideology. The poor didn’t get poorer because the rich were getting richer (a familiar socialist refrain even today) as the socialists had predicted. Instead, the underlying reality was that capitalism had created the first societies in history in which living standards were rising in all sectors of society. In a sense, free market capitalism was coming closest to realizing what Marx himself had imagined: “the all round development of individuals” in which “the productive forces will also have increased” and “the springs of social wealth will flow more freely.”

There was one Marxist in England who seemed to understand what was happening. Eduard Bernstein, who lived from 1850 to 1932, is hardly known today. His writings are not studied, except by specialists. But he was the leading Marxist after Marx and Engels. Engels considered him their successor, and even asked him to finish editing Marx’s fourth volume of Capital.

In the 1890s, Bernstein began to observe the positive effects of capitalism on living standards. “What characterizes the modern mode of production above all,” he wrote, “is the great increase in the productive power of labour. The result is a no less increase of production—the production of masses of commodities.” This empirical fact struck at the very heart of the Marxist case. Bernstein also observed that the numbers of businesses and of people who were well-off were rising along with incomes. As he put it, “The increase of social wealth is not accompanied by a diminishing number of capitalist magnates, but by an increasing number of capitalists of all degrees.” In fact, in the 50 years after the publication of the Communist Manifesto, incomes in England and Germany doubled—precisely the opposite of what Marx had predicted….

The basis of Marxist doctrine had been the idea that society under capitalism consisted of two classes—one small and rich, the other vast and increasingly impoverished. The reality, however, was that the numbers of the rich were growing more rapidly than those of the poor, while the vast majority was falling into a category that socialism didn’t anticipate: the middle class. Doctrinaire Marxists were of course furious with Bernstein for noticing these developments….

If one becomes aware that the older moral argument for socialism is wrong—that capitalism is actually benefiting people and serving the common good—why would one hold on to the ideology rather than abandon it? Clearly, it is difficult to abandon a lifelong ideology, especially if one considers the only available alternative to be tainted with evil. Thus socialism was, for Bernstein’s generation of socialists and for many that followed, simply an entrenched dogma. It was possible for them to argue the finer points, but not to abandon it.

However understandable this might be, it is not praiseworthy. To hold on to a doctrine that is demonstrably false is to abandon all pretense of objectivity….

There have long been cases where grotesque examples of the failure of socialism exist alongside glowing examples of capitalist success, and yet many people will use every excuse to avoid attributing the differences to their economic systems. Even a superficial comparison of North and South Korea, East and West Germany before the Berlin Wall fell, Hong Kong and mainland China before reforms, or Cuba and other countries of Latin America, demonstrates that free economies are superior at promoting the common good. And yet the truth has not sunk in….

Although the free enterprise system obviously does not incorporate the old socialists’ idea of a commonality of goods, it does seem to achieve the common good as they conceived it. What then can we say of those who today remain attached to socialism as a political goal? We can say that they do not know or have not understood the economic history of the last 300 years. Or perhaps we can say that they are more attached to socialism as an ideology than they are to the professed goals of its founders. I’m particularly struck by the neo-socialist concern for the well-being of plants, animals, lakes and rivers, rain forests and deserts—particularly when the concern for the environment appears far more intense than the concern for the human family.

When we speak of the common good, we need also to be clear-minded about the political and juridical institutions that are most likely to bring it about. These happen to be the very institutions that socialists have worked so hard to discredit. Let me list them: private property in the means of production; stable money to serve as a means of exchange; the freedom of enterprise that allows people to start businesses; the free association of workers that permits people to choose where they would like to work and under what conditions; the enforcement of contracts that provides institutional support for the idea that people should keep their promises; and a vibrant trade within and among nations to permit the fullest possible flowering of the division of labor. These institutions must be supported by a cultural infrastructure that respects private property, regards the human person as possessing an inherent dignity, and confers its first loyalty to transcendent authority over civil authority. This is the basis of freedom, without which the common good is unreachable….

To summarize: We are all entitled to call ourselves socialist, if by the term we mean that we are devoted to the early socialist goal of the well-being of all members of society. Reason and experience make clear that the means to achieve this is not through central planning by the state, but through political and economic freedom. Thomas Aquinas had an axiom: bonum est diffusivum sui. “The good pours itself out.” The good of freedom has indeed poured itself out to the benefit of humanity.

In conclusion, I ask you, “Who did the will of the Father?”

Who indeed? It was not (and is not) the spoiled children of capitalism who now “occupy” various venues or sympathize with those who do. These aspiring lotus-eaters claim to be for “economic justice,” but their true agenda is armed robbery.

Obamacare: Neither Necessary Nor Proper

This is from my post “The Unconstitutionality of the Individual Mandate“:

The Constitution simply gives Congress the power to regulate interstate commerce. And not all activities comprised in “health care” occur in transactions that are properly considered interstate commerce. In fact, significant portions of it (e.g., the manufacture of products used in health care, the use of those products by health-care providers, and the personal services rendered by health-care providers) clearly occur outside the activities properly understood as interstate commerce: the sale and transmission of goods (tangible and intangible) across State lines.

With regard to the second question, it follows that the mandate cannot be “necessary and proper” if Congress lacks the authority to regulate “the massive interstate market in health care,” in the first place….

…If the power of Congress to regulate “health care” cannot be found in its power to regulate interstate commerce, where can it be found? Nowhere in the Constitution. And if such a power cannot be found in the Constitution, then there can be no “necessary and proper” law that requires individuals to buy health insurance….

The defenders of Obamacare and the individual mandate would argue that it is “necessary and proper” to regulate activities (commercial or not) that are tangentially related to the portion of “health care” that is comprised in interstate commerce. That is so, in their view, because otherwise the effort to regulate the portion comprised in interstate commerce would fail to have the desired effect. In other words, they would regulate everything that can be labeled “health care,” and everything beyond that which threatens to undermine the intended regulatory outcome.

In so many words, the defenders of Obamacare and the individual mandate, like many others before them, want Congress to have the power to regulate anything and everything that they want Congress to regulate….

James Madison held the same view:

…[T]he Constitution did not give Congress the power to establish an incorporated bank. Hamilton, [Madison] said, was urging the legislators to charter the bank based on the power that Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution gives them “to make all laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers”—specific, limited powers that the section had just enumerated. But notice what “ductile” language Hamilton must use “to cover the stretch of power contained in the bill.” As the bill puts it, the bank “might be conceived to be conducive to the successful conducting of the finances; or might be conceived to tend to give facility to the obtaining of loans,” Madison quoted, adding emphasis oozing with incredulous contempt. So to begin with, the bank wasn’t even “necessary,” as the “necessary and proper” clause required; “at most it could be but convenient.”

Worse, Madison suggested, Hamilton’s reliance on a doctrine of implied powers instead of explicit ones courted disaster. “The doctrine of implication is always a tender one,” he warned. “Mark the reasoning” behind the bill: “To borrow money is made the end and the accumulation of capitals, implied as the means. The accumulation of capitals is then the end, and a bank implied as the means.” By such a chain of implication, we end up with “a charter of incorporation, a monopoly, capital punishments, &c.,” until finally we take in “every object of legislation, every object within the whole compass of political economy.” In that case, Madison cautioned, the “essential characteristic of the government, as composed of limited and enumerated powers, would be destroyed,” and Congress would bear “the guilt of usurpation.” We should not, he later wrote, “by arbitrary interpretations and insidious precedents . . . pervert the limited government of the Union, into a government of unlimited discretion, contrary to the will and subversive of the authority of the people.” (Myron Magnet, “The Great Little Madison,” City Journal, Spring 2011)

As for the Necessary and Proper Clause:

…[M]ost federal regulations today are justified by the Necessary and Proper Clause. They are said to be within Congress’s Interstate Commerce Power— but within not the core Commerce Clause (“The Congress shall have Power . . . To regulate Commerce . . . among the several States”). Rather, they are said to be supported by the accompanying authority to “make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution” the power to regulate commerce.

Now, here’s the irony of the situation: Far from granting “broad authority” to Congress, the truth is that Necessary and Proper Clause grants no power at all. It is placed at the end of Article I, Section 8 as an explanation—that is, a “recital.” A recital is a passage in a legal document that has no substantive legal effect, but serves to inform the reader of assumptions or facts behind the document. Another example of a recital in the Constitution is the Preamble.

In recent years, several constitutional scholars have investigated the true meaning of the Clause, and have worked to correct the record. The process began with an article written by Professor Gary L. Lawson and Patricia B. Granger: The Proper Scope of Federal Power: A Jurisdictional Interpretation of the Sweeping Clause, 43 Duke L. J. 267 (1994). It focused on the meaning of “proper.” A decade later, I delved into the historical record. I found that wording of this kind was extremely common in eighteenth-century documents granting power from one person to another. I also found the courts had issued cases interpreting this language, and that the Founders had adopted the courts’ interpretation. See articles here and here.

Finally, Professors Lawson and I teamed up with two other noted scholars, Geoff Miller, and Guy Seidman, and wrote a book on the subject. (We all have differing political views, by the way.) The book is called The Origins of the Necessary and Proper Clause, and it was published last year by Cambridge University Press.

Here’s what we found:

* The Clause is a mere recital. It informs the reader how to interpret congressional authority. It does not grant any power.

* The term “necessary” tells the reader that congressional authority is interpreted according to the intent behind the document, rather than very strictly (as the Articles of Confederation required).

* The Clause does this by telling the reader that the legal “doctrine of incidental powers” applies to the Constitution. This means that Congress can regulate certain activities outside the strict reading of its powers, but ONLY IF this ancillary regulation is (1) subordinate to an express power, and (2) a customary or necessary way of carrying out the express power. For example, in regulating commerce, Congress can require accurate labels on goods to be shipped in interstate commerce. But Congress cannot regulate the entire manufacturing process.

* The word “proper” means that a law must comply with Congress’s fiduciary (public trust) responsibilities. A law is not “proper”—and is therefore unconstitutional— if it invidiously discriminates among people, violates individual rights, is utterly irrational, or exceeds congressional authority.

* Contrary to prevailing legal mythology, Chief Justice Marshall’s famous case of McCulloch v. Maryland (1819) did not stretch the Clause, but applied it properly and with due regard for its limitations.

Recently, Dave Kopel, the Independence Institute Research Director, filed an amicus curiae brief in the most important anti-Obamacare lawsuit. He did so on behalf of Professors Lawson, Seidman, and me. The goal? To correct the record and inform the courts what the Necessary and Proper Clause REALLY means. (Rob Natelson, “The Constitution: Does the Necessary and Proper Clause Grant “Broad Authority” to Congress? Actually, None at All,” posted May 18, 2011, at The Cauldron: By Caldara, the blog of the president of the Independence Institute)

Which brings us full circle to the opening quotation.

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