Category: Thinkers: Famous and Infamous

A Politically Incorrect Democrat

UPDATE: Read this relevant post at The American Thinker, and this one at RedState.org.

Larry Summers, late of the Clinton administration, will relinquish the presidency of Harvard in the face of a pending (and second) vote of no-confidence by his faculty. Why?

Mr Summers’s brusque manner and characteristically aggressive form of questioning had turned some on the faculty against him. Resentment built into a furore last year when the president – a Harvard-trained economist – gave a speech suggesting that “issues of intrinsic aptitude” might be responsible for the dearth of women in science and engineering positions at top universities.

His comments angered some faculty members, culminating in a vote of no confidence in his leadership last March, which was passed by a 218-185 margin….

Harvey Mansfield, a professor of government at Harvard, said he thought the attacks on Mr Summers had their root in political differences. “My worry is that the feminist left and its sympathisers will take over Harvard, and I fear that the university will fall under the influence of a minority,” he said.

Tsk. Tsk. Musn’t have any “aggressive” questioning of faculty, eh? (That would be a breach of current academic etiquette. The faculty is god-like and not to be challenged in its superior knowledge of how things should be.) Mustn’t say politically incorrect things, eh? (That would be another breach of current academic etiquette, in which certain subjects are beyond debate — beyond “academic freedom” — lest certain parties take offense.)

Presumably, Prof. Mansfield has tenure, and a very thick skin.

European Hypocrisy

A statement and question from Alex Tabarrok at Marginal Revolution:

David Irving, the British historian, was sentenced in Austria today to three years in jail for denying the holocaust in two speeches he gave in 1989. I have little sympathy for Irving but support the right to free speech. How can we in the West take a principled stand against radical Muslims who riot and kill to protest depictions of Muhammad when we jail those who attack our sacred beliefs?

“We” in America are not responsible for the actions of our European “allies.” It is evident (not only from the Irving case) that most of Europe (especially “Old Europe”) wants to defend life, but not liberty and property.

Nock-ing Collectivism

I am re-reading Albert Jay Nock’s Our Enemy, the State (1935). Here’s one of the many passages I’ll be posting:

The superficial distinctions of Fascism, Bolshevism, Hitlerism, are the concerns of journalists and publicists; the serious student sees in them only the one root-idea of a complete conversion of social power into State power. . . .

This process — the conversion of social power into State power — has not been carried as far here as it has elsewhere; as it has in Russia, Italy, or Germany, for example. Two things, however, are to be observed. First, that it has gone a long way, at a rate of progress that has of late been greatly accelerated. What has chiefly differentiated its progress here from its progress in other countries is its unspectacular character. . . .

The second thing to be observed is that certain formulas, certain arrangements of words stand as an obstacle to our perceiving how far the conversion of social power into State power has actually gone. . . . We may imagine, for example, the shock to popular sentiment that would ensue Mr. Roosevelt’s declaring publicly that “the State embraces everything, and nothing has value outside the State. The State creates right.” Yet the American politician, as long as he does not formulate that doctrine in set terms, may go further with it in a practical way than Mussolini has gone. Suppose Mr. Roosevelt should defend his regime by publicly reasserting Hegel’s dictum that “the State alone possesses rights, because it is the strongest.” One can hardly imagine that our public would get that down without a great deal of retching. Yet how far, really, is that doctrine alien to our public’s actual acquiescences? Surely not far. (Hallberg Publishing Corporation edition, 1983, pp. 30-2)

Not far at all. And the acquiescences have multiplied mightily since 1935.

Ann Coulter Beats MasterCard

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

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

The Fatal Naïveté of Anarcho-Libertarianism

The anarcho-libertarians at the Ludwig von Mises Institute are at it again. They’re flogging “The Production of Security,” by Gustave de Molinari (1819-1912). The idea, as usual, is to sell the notion that police services and even national defense can be provided through competitive, private firms. Toward the beginning of the essay Molinari asserts that

if everyone had, in one word, an instinctive horror of any act harmful to another person, it is certain that security would exist naturally on earth, and that no artificial institution would be necessary to establish it. Unfortunately this is not the way things are. The sense of justice seems to be the perquisite of only a few eminent and exceptional temperaments. Among the inferior races, it exists only in a rudimentary state. Hence the innumerable criminal attempts, ever since the beginning of the world, since the days of Cain and Abel, against the lives and property of individuals.

Well, there seem to be enough of “the inferior races” (of all races) to guarantee that “criminal attempts” will continue, without abatement, unless the potential victims of those attempts establish institutions for the purpose of deterring and punishing crime. Molinari, of course, believes that private institutions can do the job. Toward the end of the essay he says that

[u]nder the rule of free competition, war between the producers of security entirely loses its justification. Why would they make war? To conquer consumers? But the consumers would not allow themselves to be conquered. They would be careful not to allow themselves to be protected by men who would unscrupulously attack the persons and property of their rivals. If some audacious conqueror tried to become dictator, they would immediately call to their aid all the free consumers menaced by this aggression, and they would treat him as he deserved. Just as war is the natural consequence of monopoly, peace us the natural consequence of liberty.

Under a regime of liberty, the natural organization of the security industry would not be different from that of other industries. In small districts a single entrepreneur could suffice. This entrepreneur might leave his business to his son, or sell it to another entrepreneur. In larger districts, one company by itself would bring together enough resources adequately to carry on this important and difficult business. If it were well managed, this company could easily last, and security would last with it. In the security industry, just as in most of the other branches of production, the latter mode of organization will probably replace the former, in the end.

The “customers would not allow themselves to be conquered”? Tell that to those who pay gangsters for “protection” and to the residents of gang-ridden areas. Molinari conveniently forgets that the ranks of “competitors” are open to “the inferior races,” who in their viciousness will and do “unscrupulously attack the persons and property of their rivals.” If not everyone is honorable, as Molinari admits, why would we expect private providers of security be honorable? Why would they not extort their customers while fighting each other? The result is bound to be something worse than life under an accountable state monopoly (such as we have in the U.S.) — something fraught with violence and fear. Think of The Roaring Twenties without the glossy coat of Hollywood glamour.

Molinari and his anarcho-libertarian descendants exhibit the Anne Frank syndrome. About three weeks before Frank and her family were betrayed and arrested, she wrote this:

It’’s a wonder I haven’’t abandoned all my ideals, they seem so absurd and impractical. Yet I cling to them because I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart.

Molinari and his ilk do not express the jejune belief that all “people are truly good at heart,” yet they persist in the belief that the security can be achieved in the absence of an accountable state. That is, like Anne Frank, they assume — contrary to all evidence — that “people are truly good at heart.” But competition, by itself, does not and cannot prevent criminal acts. Competition, to be beneficial, must be conducted within the framework of a rule of law. That rule of law must be enforced by a state which is accountable to its citizens for the preservation of their liberty.

The present rule of law in the United States is far from perfect, but it is far more perfect than the alternative dreamt of by anarcho-libertarians.

Related posts:

Defense, Anarcho-Capitalist Style
But Wouldn’t Warlords Take Over?
My View of Warlordism, Seconded

Joel Stein’s "Logic"

For those few of you who haven’t read Joel Stein’s op-ed piece (“Warriors and Wusses“) in the L.A. Times — the one that begins “I don’t support our troops” — here’s the “logic” of the piece:

  • The U.S. has imperialistic ambitions (except when it doesn’t).
  • People who after 9/11 enlisted in the Army had noble motives (defense of the country) — but they really knew that they were signing up to advance the (sometimes) imperialistic ambitions of the U.S.
  • Those soldiers who knew that they were signing up to advance the (sometimes) imperialistic ambitions of the U.S. were “tricked” into signing up for the war in Iraq. (Okay, Stein, which is it?)
  • The war in Iraq is “immoral” (just because Stein asserts that it is).
  • Bush is to blame for the “immoral war” in Iraq (no mention of Congress, which authorized the war and still supports it).
  • But the soldiers who serve in Iraq really are to blame for the “immoral war” there because they refuse to lay down their arms. Why do they refuse? Because (according to Stein) they really enlisted either (a) to advance their country’s imperialistic ambitions or (b) because they were “tricked” into enlisting (by Bush, presumably) and persist in fighting even though (I’m reading between the lines here) they must by now be aware that they were “tricked.” Got that? (Stein never deigns to mention the possibility that the soldiers who serve in Iraq are executing a legal war in accordance with their contractual obligations, which they entered into because they chose to risk their lives in the defense of their country.)
  • Therefore — even though Stein is willing to concede that the U.S. should honor its contractual obligations to those “immoral” soldiers (e.g., health care and pensions) — it should not honor them with a parade because to do so would make traffic worse than it is already.
  • In sum, the price of “immorality” is to be denied a parade, but only because the resulting traffic jam would inconvenience Stein. Wow!

What a piece of work is Stein. Not a logical bone in his head or a patriotic bone in his body. He belongs with these people.

Obtuse Nonsense

Mark A.R. Kleiman (The Reality-Based Community) closes a post with this observation:

All judges judge by their personal beliefs. Whose beliefs would you expect them to judge by?

Kleiman misses the point entirely. Judges should judge from their “beliefs” about the law: what it requires, like it or not. Too many judges, however, judge from what they would like the law to require. There is a vast difference between those two positions, but Kleiman is too obtuse to grasp it or too argumentative to admit it. Kleiman’s relativistic standard allows him to excuse seven decades of Leftist opinions that have made a mockery of the Constitution and denuded it of liberty. Just what one would expect from a “reality-based” blogger.

Fie on Steve Bainbridge, who recommends Kleiman’s post.

Brian Leiter, Exposed

Brian Leiter — whose lunacies I have exposed here, here, and here — is now the subject of a blog titled, appropriately, Brian Leiter, Academic Thug. The blogger is Keith Burgess-Jackson, himself a philosopher (as Leiter claims to be) and an attorney (which Leiter is). Burgess-Jackson’s first post (12/25/05) sets out the purpose of the blog:

Brian Leiter has been abusing people with impunity for far too long. It’s time someone stood up to him. This blog is devoted to exposing his abusiveness. . . . If you have been abused by Leiter (as I have) and wish to become a member of this blog, please contact me through my blog AnalPhilosopher. I will allow you to blog anonymously, especially if you are untenured.

Nothing of a defamatory nature will be posted on this blog. That is to say, everything posted will be true. Nor is it an attack blog. It is a blog devoted to publicizing the awful truth about a very bad man—a man who uses his power as a tenured professor (and as a prominent ranker of law and philosophy programs) to humiliate, intimidate, degrade, and punish those with whom he disagrees. If you know of instances in which Leiter has abused (or tried to harm) someone, please bring them to my attention. Anonymity is assured. I will investigate the matter and, if appropriate, post links. . . .

The purpose of this blog, therefore, is to hold Leiter responsible for his abominable behavior. It is to give him his due. That is the essence of justice.

Thug now consists of 23 posts — all worth reading. I’ve added Thug to my daily reading routine.

(Thanks to Maverick Philosopher for the pointer.)

A Dissonant Vision

I noted, way back on June 8, 2004, Thomas Sowell’s A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles. There, at the end of chapter 2, Sowell explains that

[t]he dichotomy between constrained and unconstrained visions is based on whether or not inherent limitations of man are among the key elements included in each vision….These different ways of conceiving man and the world lead not merely to different conclusions but to sharply divergent, often diametrically opposed, conclusions on issues ranging from justice to war.

Thus, in chapter 5, Sowell writes:

The enormous importance of evolved systemic interactions in the constrained vision does not make it a vision of collective choice, for the end results are not chosen at all — the prices, output, employment, and interest rates emerging from competition under laissez-faire economics being the classic example. Judges adhering closely to the written law — avoiding the choosing of results per se — would be the analogue in law. Laissez-faire economics and “black letter” law are essentially frameworks, with the locus of substantive discretion being innumerable individuals.

By contrast,

those in the tradition of the unconstrained vision almost invariably assume that some intellectual and moral pioneers advance far beyond their contemporaries, and in one way or another lead them toward ever-higher levels of understanding and practice. These intellectual and moral pioneers become the surrogate decision-makers, pending the eventual progress of mankind to the point where all can make moral decisions.

That observation helps to explain why persons who hew to the unconstrained vision — liberals, that is — also have become apocalyptic in their outlook: the environmentwill kill us, our food is poisonous, defense is a military-industrial plot, we’re running out of oil, we can’t defeat terrorism, etc., etc., etc. I will make the connection below but, first, let’s hear from Joe Kaplinsky, who reviews a book full of such apocalyptic tripe — James Howard Kunstler’s, The Long Emergency: Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century (bolded emphasis added by me):

As recently as a decade ago it was unusual to encounter books predicting the imminent collapse of civilisation and probable extinction of the human race. . . . Today such works are common. The core elements of the litany are predictable: climate change, disease, terrorism, and an-out-of-control world economy. Other elements such as killer asteroids, nanotechnology or chemical pollution can be added according to taste.

James Howard Kunstler’s The Long Emergency: Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century clearly fits the genre. While not neglecting any of the usual suspects, Kunstler builds his litany around the increasingly fashionable panic over oil depletion. The Long Emergency has received a warm welcome, featuring on the front covers of both the leftish British publication the New Statesman and Pat Buchanan’s old-right American Conservative.

The picture of the future put forward in The Long Emergency is truly grim. The best-case scenario is a mass die-off followed by a forced move back to the land, complete with associated feudal relations. As the title implies, this is to be an ongoing state rather than a crisis to be overcome . . . .

The successes of science and the Enlightenment present a conundrum for green pessimists. How to explain away the failed predictions of collapse from Malthus on, through to Paul Ehrlich and the Club of Rome in the 1970s?

. . . Conceding that Malthus may have got his facts wrong here, Kunstler wants to rehabilitate Malthus’ larger point: a focus on mechanisms of social restraint as a counterpoint against the claims of Enlightenment optimists such as Godwin and Condorcet. . . .

Kunstler also puts forward a second explanation for the successful economic growth of the twentieth century: oil. ‘Malthus was certainly correct, but cheap oil has skewed the equation over the past hundred years’, he says. He claims that oil, and fossil fuels more broadly, have been responsible for the gains of the twentieth century, from agriculture to medicine to transport.

Furthermore, Kunstler claims that this was a one-shot deal. Having used up our oil he thinks we are about to descend back into Malthusianism – for which we are worse prepared, because we have invested so much economically and psychologically in a modern world that is unsustainable. Our past progress, he thinks, is only setting ourselves up for a fall. He calls suburbia and the motorcar the ‘greatest misallocation of resources in history’.

The deeper theme of The Long Emergency is not oil so much as human powerlessness. The projection of all the products of human resourcefulness on to fossil fuels is only one example of this. Another example is disease. . . .

Kunstler’s discussion of emerging diseases is headed ‘Nature Bites Back’. Such a notion endows Nature with intentions, interests, and intrinsic moral value. Yet without pausing to defend such implausible assumptions, Kunstler ploughs straight on: in ‘response to unprecedented habitat destruction by humans and invasion of the wilderness, the Earth itself seems to be sending forth new and much more lethal diseases, as though it has a kind of protective immune system with antibody-like agents aimed with remarkable precision at the source of the problem: Homo Sapiens.’

Human beings are pushed to one side, as puppets or parasites, while nature is endowed with superhuman powers. It is this process which transforms any of the difficulties we face from problems to be solved into warnings of apocalypse to come.

The most striking example of the sense of powerlessness is as it applies to Kunstler himself. He has long argued against suburbia and the car, in favour of a ‘New Urbanism’. In places it is perhaps possible to read The Long Emergency as a revenge fantasy. Embittered at his inability to convince others that they should change their ways, Kunstler takes refuge under the wing of Nature’s avenging angel. He can be ignored (he attributes this to a psychological flaw in his detractors); the inhuman laws of nature cannot. . . .

The global economy, or perhaps even any economy based on monetary exchange, is apparently an ‘hallucination’. Only a low-energy, local economy in which we are in touch with the land, claims Kunstler, can avoid the destructive effects of entropy. . . .

. . . But entropy doesn’t have any mystical qualities. It is a thermodynamic variable like any other. There is no more reason to connect a breakdown of civilisation with an increase in entropy than with, say, an increase in atmospheric pressure or the Earth’s magnetic field. Kunstler’s discussion of this topic is plain and simple pseudoscience.

His underlying argument about human powerlessness also cannot stand. In abolishing old problems, progress brings new problems. How could it not? The new problems can sometimes appear larger than the old, existing on a global scale. But this just arises from human society operating on a global scale, which carries with it the benefits of global cooperation, trade and travel. History shows that exchanging older problems for newer, sometimes greater, ones has been a good bargain.

The capacity to solve problems expands faster than the problems themselves. It is harder to defend a modern city – with skyscrapers, highways, and energy infrastructure – against a flood or an earthquake. But alongside the technologies that enabled us to build modern cities we have created solutions that make them resilient to natural disasters. That is why life is better in the more developed parts of the world.

While it is always possible that we will stumble at the next hurdle, science confirms that we have a good chance of flourishing in the future, too. The core of The Long Emergency is the anxiety that problems will outweigh solutions. It is summed up by Kunstler’s complaint that by following the path of progress humanity is continually setting itself an exam. Alienated from progress he has no answers himself and fears we are relying on a few techno-geeks to come up with a fix. He is haunted by the question, what if we fail?

This question assumes overwhelming significance for Kunstler because he seems to believe we must fail. A more reasoned approach balances it against two other questions. What if we succeed? Everything worthwhile in human culture and civilisation has come from such successes. What if we do not try?

The emphasis on social restraints — to a Leftist of Kunstler’s ilk — means social engineering writ large. He wants a society that operates according to his strictures. But society refuses to cooperate, and so he conjures historically and scientifically invalid explanations for the behavior of man and nature. By doing so he is able to convince himself and his fellow travelers that the socialist vision is the correct one. He and his ilk cannot satisfy their power-lust in the real world, so they retaliate by imagining a theoretical world of doom. It is as if they walk around under a thought balloon which reads “Take that!”

Well Said

From Occam’s Carbuncle, a Canadian blog:

Wilfrid Laurier[*] once said that the 20th century would belong to Canada. As it turned out, the times were driven by all things American, both good and bad. I don’t propose that we should try to take on another whole century as our very own. Rather, I think that what Canada should aim for is simply to become freest nation on earth. Let liberty be our great project. The field is open. . . . We can make personal liberty, autonomy and responsibility the building blocks of our society, our true values. I think they are the strongest and least discussed values of the majority of Canadians. Of course, if you ask ten people what liberty means, you’ll get ten different answers. Let’s argue about it. Debating the meaning of liberty can’t possibly be a waste of time. Making liberty the cornerstone of a country strikes me as a great enterprise.

As “Occam” rightly points out, “America has often been described as the leader of the free world. I don’t think they’ve done much to earn that title in the last few years, with their explosive growth of government at all levels.” This has happened, in large part, because the GOP — which rose to power on the promise of smaller government — has lost its bearings. OpinionJournal puts it this way:

The real House GOP problem isn’t about lobbyists so much as it is the atrophying of its principles. As their years in power have stretched on, House Republicans have become more passionate about retaining power than in using that power to change or limit the federal government. Gathering votes for serious policy is difficult and tends to divide a majority. Re-election unites them, however, so the leadership has gradually settled for raising money on K Street and satisfying Beltway interest groups to sustain their incumbency.

This strategy has maintained a narrow majority, but at the cost of doing anything substantial. The last year in particular was an historic lost opportunity. House Republicans were also the main culprit in watering down Medicare reform, while Ohio’s Mike Oxley has run the Financial Services Committee more or less as liberal Barney Frank would. Beyond welfare reform and tax cuts (and perhaps health-savings accounts), the GOP has achieved little in the last decade that will outlast the next Democratic majority.

We Americans may have much to learn from the debate in Canada. We should be paying attention to it.
__________
* From Wikipedia:

The Right Honourable Sir Wilfrid Laurier, PC, KC, GCMG, BCL, DCL, LLD, LittD (November 20, 1841 – February 17, 1919) was the seventh Prime Minister of Canada from July 11, 1896, to October 7, 1911. . . .

Laurier led Canada during a period of rapid growth, industrialization, and immigration. His long career straddles a period of major political and economic change. As Prime Minister he was instrumental in ushering Canada into the 20th century and in gaining greater autonomy from Britain for his country.

Lew-nacy

Apropos “Neo-Nazi Conned?“: LewRockwell.com has a department called “The Peace Archive,” which features writings by many obscure loonies and such eminent ones as Pat Buchanan, Bobby (Klansman) Byrd, and Cindy Sheehan. Strange bedfellows, indeed, for a staunch anti-statist. Lew, your desperation is showing.

Ethics and the Socialist Agenda

UPDATE BELOW, 12/29/05

From a story in the L.A. Times (get an ID and password from bugmenot.com):

“This letter is for yourself alone,” [reads a letter written by Upton Sinclair to his attorney on Sept. 29, 1929]. “Stick it away in your safe, and some time in the far distant future the world may know the real truth about the matter. I am here trying to make plain my own part in the story.”

The story was “Boston,” Sinclair’s 1920s novelized condemnation of the trial and execution of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, Italian immigrants accused of killing two men in the robbery of a Massachusetts shoe factory.

Prosecutors characterized the anarchists as ruthless killers who had used the money to bankroll antigovernment bombings and deserved to die. Sinclair thought the pair were innocent and being railroaded because of their political views.

Soon Sinclair would learn something that filled him with doubt. During his research for “Boston,” Sinclair met with Fred Moore, the men’s attorney, in a Denver motel room. Moore “sent me into a panic,” Sinclair wrote in the typed letter that Hegness found at the auction a decade ago.

“Alone in a hotel room with Fred, I begged him to tell me the full truth,” Sinclair wrote. ” … He then told me that the men were guilty, and he told me in every detail how he had framed a set of alibis for them.” . . .

Upton Beall Sinclair was a giant of the nation’s Progressive Era, a crusading writer and socialist who championed the downtrodden and persecuted. President Theodore Roosevelt, who pushed through the nation’s first food-purity laws in response to “The Jungle,” coined the name for Sinclair’s craft: muckraker. . . .

“I faced the most difficult ethical problem of my life at that point,” [Sinclair] wrote to his attorney. “I had come to Boston with the announcement that I was going to write the truth about the case.”

Other letters tucked away in the Indiana archive illuminate why one of America’s most strident truth tellers kept his reservations to himself. . . .

He also worried that revealing what he had been told would cost him readers. “It is much better copy as a naïve defense of Sacco and Vanzetti because this is what all my foreign readers expect, and they are 90% of my public,” he wrote to Minor.

It surpriseth me not. Sinclair was a role model for today’s Left-leaning media. What other lies did Sinclair tell in order to advance the “progressive” (i.e., socialist) cause?

UPDATE: This is from a post by Eugene Volokh at The Volokh Conspiracy:

The ACLU’s founding director and likely most influential official, Roger Baldwin, had long been an admitted supporter of communism as an economic system, and on balance an apologist for the Soviet Union. Though he criticized the Soviets at times, he had also praised the USSR as on balance a haven for liberty. His true break with the Soviets (which ultimately brought him around to pretty vociferous anti-Communism) came not with Stalin’s ascent, not with the Ukrainian famine, not with the Terror and the show trials — he defended the Soviets even after that — but only in 1939, with the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact.

On top of that, Baldwin was on the record as having said that his commitment to civil liberties for supposed reactionaries was sheerly instrumental, just a tool for advancing the cause of communism. His struggle for free speech, he said, was just incidental to the class struggle, a useful tactic for furthering communist goals. When the working class took over, the resulting regime should be supported by any means necessary, including dictatorship. Dictatorship and suppression of civil liberties would be necessary to get to a socialist society, so such suppression is justified. That was the position of the founding director of the ACLU.

Peter Singer’s Agenda

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

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


Princeton’s Peter Singer (Photo: The Age)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More related posts:

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

The O’Reilly Factoid

This (via Don Boudreaux) only reaffirms my contempt for Bill O’Reilly.

A One-Issue Blogger

Mark Shea (via Steve Dillard at Southern Appeal) notices that the

key to everything [Andrew] Sullivan writes is the defense of his sex life. His attacks on Bush suddenly began after Bush said no to gay marriage. And, of course, his increasingly shrill loathing of Benedict springs from the same source.

I noted the same phenomenon on September 9, 2004, in the heat of the Bush-Kerry race:

Andrew Sullivan, renowned homosexual blogger, who was once a staunch supporter of Bush and the war in Iraq has turned his back on his old loves. Sullivan now openly embraces Kerry (no pun intended), puts down Bush at every opportunity, and second-guesses the war in Iraq.

Like many other bloggers, I long sensed that Sullivan eventually would change his colors because he has been monomaniacal about the recognition of homosexual marriage. He kept harping on it in post after post, day after day, week after week. It got so boring that I took Sullivan’s blog off my blogroll and quit reading it.

Now, Kerry isn’t much better than Bush on gay marriage — from Sullivan’s perspective — but Kerry doesn’t make a big issue of opposing it the way Bush does. Maybe that’s because Kerry doesn’t know where he stands on gay marriage. Why should he? He doesn’t seem to know where he stands on anything. No, I take that back: Kerry believes in serial monogamy with rich women; the evidence is irrefutable.

But I digress. Back to Andrew Sullivan. He seems to have put his sexual orientation above all else. He’s really a one-issue voter. Sure, he has rationalized his change of mind, but his change of mind can be traced, I think, to his preoccupation with gay marriage as a political litmus test.

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

Roger Scruton at Right Reason

Max Goss of Right Reason interviews the noted English conservative Roger Scruton. I first became aware of Scruton almost twenty years ago when I bought and read avidly his wickedly incisive collection of essays entitled Untimely Tracts. He made his “name” with The Meaning of Conservatism, a book that I have placed on my must-read list.

At any rate, I strongly recommend that you read Goss’s interview of Scruton, of which Part I appears today. There’s so much that’s quotable, but I’ll restrain myself and quote only this trenchant paragraph:

It is part of the blindness of the left-wing worldview that it cannot perceive authority but only power. People who think of conservatism as oppressive and dictatorial have some deviant example in mind, such as fascism, or Tsarist autocracy. I would offer in the place of such examples the ordinary life of European and American communities as described by 19th century novelists. In those communities all kinds of people had authority — teachers, pastors, judges, heads of local societies, and so on. But only some of them had power, and almost none of them were either able or willing to oppress their fellows.

Joe Stiglitz, Ig-Nobelist

Economist Joseph Stiglitz (a.k.a. Paul Krugman plus Nobel prize) recently reviewed Benjamin Friedman’s The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth. Stiglitz delivers many outrageous ideas, not the least outrageous of which is this:

Inequality did seem to fall in the United States after the Great Depression, but in the last 30 years it has increased enormously.

Inequality seems to go with economic growth — as Stiglitz admits. But he prefers equality and lower incomes for all to inequality and higher incomes for all. He has no regard for those whose talents and entrepreneurship fuel growth and help to make everyone better off. That’s probably why he’s an academic.

Then there is this:

The question should be, are there policies that can promote what might be called moral growth — growth that is sustainable, that increases living standards not just today but for future generations as well, and that leads to a more tolerant, open society? Also, what can be done to ensure that the benefits of growth are shared equitably, creating a society with more social justice and solidarity rather than one with deep rifts and cleavages of the kind that became so apparent in New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina?

This is absurd talk coming from a so-called economist. He must have learned his economics at the knee of Karl Marx. Aside from enforcing laws against force and fraud, government should simply get out of the way. Markets thrive without government intervention. Markets are the essence of cooperation. Markets are inherently “tolerant” and “open” because the pursuit of self-interest (profit) requires service to the interests of others. Markets ensure equitable sharing of the benefits of growth by incentivizing and rewarding contributions to growth. A society of free markets and limited government would not have fostered the conditions that led to New Orleans’s poverty and rank dependence on incompetent government.

But Stiglitz continues undaunted by the ghost of Adam Smith:

As the income distribution becomes increasingly skewed, with an increasing share of the wealth and income in the hands of those at the top, the median falls further and further below the mean. That is why, even as per capita GDP has been increasing in the United States, U.S. median household income has actually been falling.

Left-wingers like to talk about the “skewed” distribution of income, but they don’t like to talk about the fact that there is considerable mobility across that distribution. As I wrote here, for example,

at the end of the 20th century, only about 15 percent of the households (3 million of 21 million) then in the bottom quintile had been there for a generation.

(See also this post and this one.) Moreover, Stiglitz views household income selectively. Instead of looking at the long-term trend, which clearly is upward, he focuses on recent, recession-related data. Here is the big picture:


Source: Census Bureau. See Figure 5, at this link.

Stiglitz, of course, likes to invoke the usual Left-wing bugbears, as if the bottom line (rising real income) were irrelevant. Thus he alludes to the poverty rate, which in fact is in long-term decline; job security, a nebulous scare-term that somehow cancels out rising real income and the 20-year decline in the unemployment rate, which is now well below the average for 1948-2004; the percentage of persons without health insurance, which has risen somewhat since 1987, probably due to immigration and government mandates that have raised the cost of health insurance; and so on.

Now Stiglitz mounts a direct assault on Adam Smith:

In a market economy with imperfect and asymmetric information and incomplete markets — which is to say, every market economy — the reason that Adam Smith’s invisible hand is invisible is that it does not exist. Economies are not efficient on their own. This recognition inevitably leads to the conclusion that there is a potentially significant role for government.

Of course nothing is perfect, except in the mind of a delusional economist or engineer. The price of perfection is too high: perfection is inefficient and stagnant. But Stiglitz doesn’t want to talk about that; he wants to talk about how the visible, heavy hand of government can do to us what we refuse to do to ourselves. He doesn’t want to talk about the very high cost of government intervention in markets, which I have documented here. That high cost includes the direct cost of government — which, including welfare programs, now amounts to 40-50 percent of GDP — and the incentive-dampening costs of taxation and regulation — which, over the past 100 years, have slashed GDP to about 60 percent of its potential level.

Finally, Stiglitz offers this bit of “evidence” for the superior wisdom of government:

There is, for instance, a greater role for government in promoting science and technology than Friedman seems to suggest. A report by the Council of Economic Advisers (conducted when I was its chair) found that the returns on public investment in science and technology were far higher than for private investment in these areas and than for conventional investment in plant and equipment.

I wonder how it was that Stiglitz, as chairman of the Council, was able to sponsor a report that came to such pro-government conclusions? (Just asking.) Actually, Stiglitz misrepresents the findings of the study to which he refers. The study (as cited here) actually found

the private rate of return of R&D to be between 10 and 40 percent, while the social rate of return ranged from about 20 to 140 percent.

(An analysis with similar results can be found here. The following critique applies to all such studies.)

What we have here are apples and cucumbers. The private rate of return to R&D is the additional profit that results from additional investments in R&D. The social rate of return to R&D is the gain in consumption (GDP) that results from additional government investments in R&D. Thus, according to Stiglitz’s study, if a corporation invests a dollar in R&D, it can expect that dollar to return a profit of between 10 and 40 cents a year, whereas a dollar of government R&D enables an future increase in consumption (additional GDP) of between 20 cents and $1.40 per year. However, a corporation’s profit is net of something, namely its sales. If a corporate investment of $1 is to yield a profit of 10 to 40 cents a year, it must generate additional sales (additional GDP) of considerably more than 10 to 40 cents a year.

To convert the apple of private R&D to the cucumber of government R&D we must convert after-tax profits to the equivalent amount of GDP required to generate those profits. Drawing on National Income and Product Accounts Table 1.15 (Price, Costs, and Profit Per Unit of Real Gross Value Added of Nonfinancial Domestic Corporate Business) for 1929-2004, I find the mean and median after-tax profit of nonfinancial corporations to be have been 7.7 percent of value-added for that period.* Thus, over the long haul, every dollar of profit represents about $13 in additional GDP. Applying that ratio, we get a valid comparison of the returns to private and government R&D:

  • The private rate of return to R&D, in terms of additional GDP, is between 130 and 520 percent.
  • The so-called social rate of return (i.e. return to government R&D, in terms of additional GDP) ranged from about 20 to 140 percent.

The true private rate of return to R&D is about 4 to 6 times that of the government rate of return. What else would one expect, knowing that the private sector responds to the signals sent by consumers while government just makes it up as it goes along?

I hereby nominate Joe Stiglitz for the Perpetual Ig-Nobel Prize in Left-Wing Economics.
__________
* The profit rate for 1999-2003 dropped below the long-term mean and median. That wouldn’t bother Stiglitz, of course. He seems to believe that government, not business, is mainly responsible for economic growth, and that corporate poverty is somehow good for people, when just the opposite is true.

Making an Exception

Maverick Philosopher notes this this post of mine about Brian Leiter:

. . . I agree with [the author of Liberty Corner] that Leiter’s ‘easy’ questions are not at all easy. But I am puzzled by what [he] says about the ‘hard’ questions:

Leiter’s “hard” questions are nothing more than the kind of intellectual pornography that stimulates professional academics and pseudo-intellectuals to engage in endless, meaningless bouts of mutual, mental masturbation.

What say you, MP commenters? Am I an intellectual pornographer? A pseudo-intellectual? Our debates are some of them endless, but are they meaningless? Social, political and economic debates are also endless; are they meaningless for that reason? Is it all just a circle-jerk of the mind?

Brian Leiter once called me a “noxious mediocrity.” Better that than an intellectual pornographer.

A perusal of Maverick’s blog reveals that he is anything but an intellectual pornographer or pseudo-intellectual. I withdraw my general condemnation of philosophical inquiry, except as it applies to noxious weasels of Leiter’s ilk.

Killing Conservatism in Order to Save It

EconoPundit quotes a Times column by David Brooks (not worth $50 a year to read online). A choice morsel:

Let’s start by remembering where conservatism was before Bush came on the scene. In the late 1990’s, after the failure of the government shutdown, conservatism was adrift and bereft of ideas.

Voters preferred Democratic ideas on issue after issue by 20-point margins.

Which was it David? Were conservatives bereft of ideas or did voters prefer Democrats’ “ideas.” Well, as Capital Freedom observes, ” Free handouts get more votes than free markets.” Democrats didn’t (and don’t) trade in ideas, they trade in bribery. The Bush-led GOP has simply followed suit.

The real problem in the late 1990s wasn’t that conservatives lacked ideas, but that those ideas didn’t happen to garner enough votes to defeat Bill Clinton and deliver overwhelming Republican control of Congress. But instead of regrouping around the functionally sound and widely accepted ideas of the “Contract with America,” the GOP largely abandoned its conservative principles and sold its soul for a few more votes, thus joining Democrats in the bribery game.

Brooks, who is either deluded or stupid, nevertheless quotes Bush’s defense of big government:

“Government should help people improve their lives, not run their lives,” Bush said. This is not the Government-Is-the-Problem philosophy of the mid-’90s, but the philosophy of a governing majority party in a country where people look to government to play a positive but not overbearing role in their lives.

In other words, the GOP should bribe voters, but somehow restrain its bribery so that it’s not quite as egregious as the kind of bribery practiced by Democrats. That simply won’t work. The bribed (i.e., voters) won’t let government off the hook unless and until they understand how bribery works against their own interests. The only way to get government out of our lives (or to push it toward the exit) is to oppose it in the first place, and to explain why voters should join in that opposition.

But Brooks applauds Bush’s sophistry, even though it is indistinguishable (in essence) from the Left’s excuses for big government: Government just needs to “fix things” because markets don’t always get it right. People just can’t be trusted to take care of themselves. Brooks fails to see (or wishes not to say) that Bush has simply adopted the Democrats’ old game plan: Tax, spend, regulate, elect, tax, spend, regulate, elect, ad infinitum.

Well, Brooks’s column proves one thing, with finality: He’s a so-called conservative who is devoid of valid ideas, valid logic, and intellectual honesty. Brooks would kill true conservatism in the name of saving it. What’s worse, he’d believe that he had saved it.

Tom DeLay and James Madison

No, I do not mean to put DeLay on a par with Madison. Not by a very long shot. But I needed a catchy title. This is about DeLay’s current legal troubles, and why DeLay’s real “crime” isn’t what a Texas prosecutor claims it is.

Sure, Tom DeLay is a tough political cookie. Sure, he plays hardball, like everyone else in Washington — and elsewhere — who seeks to control the levers of power. Sure, in his zeal to wield power he might have broken some Texas law about political contributions (from CNN):

The indictment [handed down today] accused DeLay of a conspiracy to “knowingly make a political contribution” in violation of Texas law outlawing corporate contributions. It alleged that DeLay’s Texans for a Republican Majority political action committee accepted $155,000 from companies, including Sears Roebuck, and placed the money in an account.

The PAC then wrote a $190,000 check to an arm of the Republican National Committee and provided the committee a document with the names of Texas State House candidates and the amounts they were supposed to receive in donations.

Yes, a law is a law, and if DeLay broke it, he should be punished for breaking it. But campaign-finance laws are inherently repressive of free speech, so part of me wants DeLay to get off. And I’m hoping that McCain-Feingold and all of its ilk at the State level will be eviscerated in the 2005-6 term of the U.S. Supreme Court. The Court has granted certiorari in Vermont Republican State Committee v. Sorrell, described by SCOTUSblog as a “challenge[] to expenditure limits imposed by Vermont campaign finance laws.” (For more, go here.)

But I will not be sorry if the campaign-finance scandal ends DeLay’s political career. I have no sympathy for a senior Republican (or any other politican) who can say what DeLay said about funding disaster relief. This from The Washington Times:

House Majority Leader Tom DeLay said yesterday that Republicans have done so well in cutting spending that he declared an “ongoing victory,” and said there is simply no fat left to cut in the federal budget.
Mr. DeLay was defending Republicans’ choice to borrow money and add to this year’s expected $331 billion deficit to pay for Hurricane Katrina relief. Some Republicans have said Congress should make cuts in other areas, but Mr. DeLay said that doesn’t seem possible.
“My answer to those that want to offset the spending is sure, bring me the offsets, I’ll be glad to do it. But nobody has been able to come up with any yet,” the Texas Republican told reporters at his weekly briefing.
Asked if that meant the government was running at peak efficiency, Mr. DeLay said, “Yes, after 11 years of Republican majority we’ve pared it down pretty good.”

Balderdash! Hogwash! Bilge!

It’s time for Republicans to get back to basics: spending cuts to match tax cuts, then more tax cuts and more spending cuts, for as long as it takes to get Congress back to its enumerated powers under Article I, Section 8, of the Constitution of the United States.

And don’t be fooled by the “general welfare clause” in the first sentence of Section 8. Here’s why:

In his last act before leaving [the presidency], Madison vetoed a bill for “internal improvements,” including roads, bridges, and canals:

“Having considered the bill…I am constrained by the insuperable difficulty I feel in reconciling this bill with the Constitution of the United States…The legislative powers vested in Congress are specified…in the…Constitution, and it does not appear that the power proposed to be exercised by the bill is among the enumerated powers…” [1]

Madison rejected the view of Congress that the General Welfare Clause justified the bill, stating:

“Such a view of the Constitution would have the effect of giving to Congress a general power of legislation instead of the defined and limited one hitherto understood to belong to them, the terms ‘common defense and general welfare’ embracing every object and act within the purview of a legislative trust.”

(Source: Wikipedia)

Related posts:

The Erosion of the Constitutional Contract (03/23/04)
Unintended Irony from a Few Framers (06/05/04)
An Agenda for the Supreme Court (06/29/05)
What Is the “Living Constitution”? (08/23/05)