Conjectures and Refutations

Incoherence

2012-01-08T09:37:00.000-08:00

What will it take to get our politicians to sit down and talk seriously about solutions to our country’s problems? The primary season never brings out the best in candidates, but even allowing for that, the political class seems far more interested in scoring points like a bunch of seventh-graders trading punches than in arriving at intelligent policy decisions.

The first casualty is any kind of coherence. Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich were for an insurance mandate before they were against it. Barack Obama was against it before he was for it. Democrats oppose corporate welfare except when it benefits businesses they like; Republicans oppose corporate welfare except... wait a second, I’m repeating myself.

If you take a look at actual core beliefs, in so far as they exist and can be discerned, there ought to be the makings of a bipartisan consensus on some of these issues. Liberals have always been unenthusiastic about the drug war; now a Republican candidate is actually stating a principled opposition to it. What will it take to get people from both parties together to come up with a sane policy on drugs?

The federal tax code ought to drive liberals crazy with its countless giveaways to insiders; it ought to drive conservatives crazy for its Byzantine distortion of markets. What will it take to get people to venture across the aisle and talk about serious, radical tax reform? I realize that all our politicians are on the take to some degree or other; that’s how you get elected. But a bipartisan committee that got serious about tax reform would give everybody cover; you could deep-six the whole rotten system and plead the tyranny of the majority to the offended donors.

There are real and profound philosophical differences between the parties and their constituent factions, and the tug-of-war over basic approaches will always be with us. But many of our problems could be ameliorated significantly by simply meeting on the common ground which already plainly exists. And the parties are too busy demonizing their opponents to sit down for some common-sense damage control.

Maybe the election will clear the air. Or maybe they’ll figure out who’s been putting psychotropic drugs in the D.C. water supply. But something has to change. Politicians ought to be held to high standards of argument and high standards of seriousness. Instead we get ad hominem attacks, irrelevancies and non-sequiturs and endless foolish promises that nobody, least of all those issuing them, expects to be kept.

What’s stopping them from doing better? We are. We the voters haven’t yet made clear to our representatives that we expect them to do better. It’s not just voting; it’s taking ten minutes to send an e-mail or make a phone call. It doesn’t have to be a partisan move; whatever your political stance, there’s almost certainly something you agree on with your neighbors. Let’s start with tax reform: call your representative and your senators and let them know that you think the federal tax code is a festering disgrace and you expect the mess to be cleaned up. A simpler, cleaner tax code will allow less scope for mischief by either side, and we’ll all gain.

Democracy takes work. This means you.

Sam Reaves
www.samreaves.com

Resolved

2012-01-01T20:40:00.000-08:00

New Year's Resolution Number One: revive the blog. When I started it, I swore I would never post just to be posting something; I would only write when I had something worthwhile to say. I still think that’s a healthy attitude, but unfortunately it reacts too easily with laziness to produce long blank stretches. So my resolution now is: exert yourself a little, find something worthwhile to say a little more often.

Just to ease into things, here’s a wild swipe at the topic that will dominate 2012:

I only have ten months to decide whom to vote for. I’d love to vote for one of the two major candidates in the fall, but it may be too much to ask, yet again. If pressed, I describe myself as a pragmatic, non-ideological libertarian. This means, roughly, that I think a light touch with taxes and regulation and minimal interference in our private conduct, with appropriate qualifications, is the way to go. And I think that most Americans are instinctively more or less libertarian, even if they don’t call it that. I could be wrong about that, but whatever the case, I don’t think I’m the only one who feels dismayed at the spectacle presented by our two major parties.

Neither of the major parties represents people like me. The Republicans are bellicose and nativist and the Democrats believe that problems are solved by creating entitlements. I usually vote Libertarian, but I’ve given up on the Libertarians making a surge into the mainstream. So offer me something, fellas. My expectations are low. I know I will never get a perfect candidate. Voting is usually about damage control.

I have a feeling that an adequate candidate is more likely to emerge from the Republican Party, just because I’m not sure there’s anybody among the Democrats who really has a clear idea of the limits to government. The only constraints that Democrats recognize are budgetary, and they can always fiddle those. What you need is philosophical constraints on government. Without those, there’s no way to keep government from metastasizing.

Republicans claim to have those philosophical constraints, but too many of them also think that the government ought to subsidize their businesses, protect them from competition and keep them from going under when the market turns thumbs down on them. They think the market ought to be free except in their case. And then there are the Republicans who want to send all the immigrants home and put even more people in jail for using drugs. There is also a hair-raising anti-intellectual strain among Republicans. I don’t think that a rough-hewn country manner disqualifies anyone from high office, but I don’t think it qualifies anyone in and of itself, either.

So which major party represents me? The problem is that there are a lot more than two political camps in any country, but we seem to have decided that two parties awkwardly jamming diverse camps into one big tent best provides stability. And the distribution of camps that has evolved has led to two huge messy coalitions, neither of which fully represents any substantial portion of the electorate.

I’d love to see it all get shaken up somehow. But I doubt it’s going to happen before November. So there I’ll be, outside the booth, wishing I could vote for somebody who had a chance to win.

Sam Reaves
www.samreaves.com

Collective punishment

2011-09-25T10:41:00.000-07:00

Film director Michael Moore has called for a boycott of the state of Georgia following the execution there of a man many claimed was innocent. With his usual temperate rhetorical style, Moore pledged to donate a portion of his royalties from his current book to “help defeat the racists and killers who run that state.”

The execution of Troy Davis ought to make the most ardent death-penalty booster stop and think for a second; I don’t know of anybody who claims that the criminal justice system is infallible, so maybe it’s not a good idea to insist on irreversible measures to enforce its outcomes. But I’m not going to pile on; plenty of commentators are all over the death penalty.

Instead I’m trying to think through what it is about indignant calls for boycotts that bothers me so much. It’s not just Moore’s politics; I don’t share them but I’m generally in favor of muckrakers and gadflies because, whatever their politics, they occasionally turn up things that need to be brought to our attention.

It’s the blunt instrument that bothers me, Moore’s dismissal of “the murderous state of Georgia” and his apparent belief that hurting economic activity in that state will make matters better for the people who live there.

It brings to mind the disinvestment and boycott campaign against Israel, which has led a number of universities, churches and government bodies in Europe and the U.S. to withdraw investment from companies linked to Israel, cut academic links and even take measures that have a whiff of the bonfire about them, as when a municipal council in Scotland prohibited its libraries from acquiring books published in Israel.

You don’t have to support capital punishment and cheer Israeli bombing runs on Gaza to be bothered by these campaigns. It’s ironic that they are usually run by people who call themselves “liberals”, because I can’t think of too many things more illiberal than prohibiting academic exchange, banning the circulation of books, and trying to throw poor people out of work. (Who does Moore think will suffer first from a successful boycott of Georgia?)

A call for blanket sanctions is a call for collective punishment, and that’s what makes it wrong. Collective punishment ought to have been discredited by its extensive use by the Nazis, Soviets and other models of political virtue. (When the partisans hit your patrol, you wipe out the nearest village. That’ll teach ’em.) Unfortunately the Michael Moores of the world missed that lesson. When a small group of decision makers in a bureaucracy makes the wrong call, hit the whole state. If you disapprove of a nation’s policies (or its very existence), try to build a ghetto wall around it.

Collective thinking is a hallmark of totalitarianism, and too many on the political left still fall prey to the totalitarian temptation. (I’ll get to the right’s pathologies some other time). Collective thinking is easy, reflexive and emotionally satisfying. And it’s stupid.

When the U.N. imposed harsh and far-reaching sanctions on Iraq in the wake of the first Gulf War, leading to economic and infrastructure collapse and widespread destitution, liberals were properly outraged. Sanctions have gotten smarter since then; now they selectively target elites from outlaw regimes in attempt to hit them where it hurts while sparing the populace at large.

Michael Moore and the anti-Israel zealots need to get smart, too. There are identifiable people who made the decisions in the Troy Davis case. Work to get them removed from office and take it easy on the many Georgians who joined the campaign to save Troy Davis. There is a vibrant peace movement in Israel; try reaching out to it instead of demonizing an entire population.

Collective punishment is the reflex of small-minded zealots, an attempt to over-simplify the world. Don’t let them tempt you into helping them.

Sam Reaves
www.samreaves.com

Plug 'em

2011-06-17T07:53:00.000-07:00

In the tussle between Tom Coburn and Grover Norquist, I think you have to come down on Coburn’s side. The Oklahoma senator says closing tax loopholes is a step on the road to fiscal sanity; the viscerally anti-tax Norquist says closing a loophole is a tax increase and he’s against it on principle.

Both men are conservatives; the question is a current bone of contention within the Republican party. Let’s take a look at the principles. Norquist is consistent in his opposition to big government and the taxes that fuel it. He favors the starve-the-beast approach, in which you cut off revenue and force the government to downsize.

Fine, except it doesn’t work that way. The spending machine keeps running and you just get deeper into debt. You have to expend political capital on attacking the roots of the spending culture. That’s where the real debates and the tough, principled choices have to be made, in defining the legitimate functions of government and eliminating the illegitimate ones. Cutting taxes and calling it a day isn’t enough: that’s the lazy man’s way of trying to limit government.

No doubt Norquist also favors attacking the spending. But he’d win more converts if he didn’t appear to be defending even the most egregious tax breaks. Politics is all about compromise, and closing loopholes is something that appeals to both sides of the aisle. It’s a fiscal fix that is politically relatively easy, and that’s nothing to sneeze at in a fiscal emergency. The short-term boost to revenue will help stem the momentum of the deficit, and once everyone’s paying what they owe and the true tax burden is apparent, we can set to work bringing our high corporate tax rates down to appropriate levels as the fiscal crisis eases. Close the loopholes and lower the rates is a formula that will fly, politically. Coburn’s right on this issue.

Thoroughgoing reform of the tax system is good sound policy just for its own sake: our federal tax system is a resource-wasting, enterprise-killing, demoralizing disgrace, a fetid sump of corruption. Radical tax simplification ought to be an urgent issue for both parties; if it’s not, we need to ask our representatives why not.

Sam Reaves
www.samreaves.com

Badgering the Governor

2011-02-20T09:47:00.000-08:00

The rhetoric is getting heated in Wisconsin as the Tea Party groups are starting to show up to shout back at the protesters who have been besieging the state capitol in Madison. At issue is governor Scott Walker’s bill curtailing public-sector unions’ collective bargaining rights and requiring higher pension contributions. Meanwhile, the state’s Democratic senators are in hiding, refusing to report for work and thus provide a quorum enabling a vote they know they will lose.

I’m not going to get into a discussion of the issue itself; if you’re interested you can check out the opposing arguments, among other places, on the Huffington Post and the National Review. What I'm concerned about today is the rule of law issue; if you've read many of my posts, you know that's an important one for me.

Civilized nations with functioning democracies find ways to solve political conflicts without violence. This is what makes them different, and better, than places like Zimbabwe and Russia. These solutions rest on the idea that everybody has to follow the rules; nobody is above the law. An important corollary is that rules have to be established by public discussion and majority vote. If new rules need to be made or old ones changed, a process that is itself rule-governed exists to do that. And as long as that process exists, people have to respect the rules. When this idea is deeply rooted, societies can make even major adjustments in distributions of money and power without violence.

So the rule of law is important. And whatever you think about what rights Wisconsin public-sector unions should have, you have to be dismayed that an angry crowd, along with the mass desertion of minority party legislators, has succeeded in shutting down the Wisconsin state legislature. That's not the rule of law in operation. That's some other kind of rule.

If you sympathize with the unions, fair enough. But ask yourself this: if a crowd of Tea Partiers had invaded a state capitol, and Republican legislators had fled the state, preventing the passage of, say, a health care law, what would your attitude be?

I know what I'd say: if you don't have the votes in the legislature, tough luck. You have to wait till the next election and hope you gain the seats you need. Taking to the hills to prevent a vote is not democracy. Shouting down the speaker from the gallery is not democracy.

Opinion on the left seems to be that the cause of the beleaguered unions is a moral rather than a political issue, and thus the spanner in the democratic works is justified. But this is an issue of what to do with taxpayers' money. These are public sector unions, and it is legitimate for the state government to set the rules governing the disbursement of public money, including the rules governing collective bargaining. And just for the record, under Walker's bill the unions will retain collective bargaining rights for wages, losing them for benefits and working conditions.

Another objection to Walker's initiative is that the bill is being "ramrodded" through the legislature without consultation. But there was no debate on the bill because there were no Democratic senators there to debate it—they had all fled the state. Now, the outcome of the debate may have been a foregone conclusion because of the numbers. But are we to conclude that it is always unfair to introduce legislation when you have the numbers to pass it?

If Governor Walker violated procedural rules in any way by introducing this legislation, then he should be censured and the violation corrected. But I haven't come across any allegations in that regard. That's not what he's being accused of. What he's being accused of is introducing legislation that a whole lot of people don't like, with assurance of getting it passed. And that's not a crime or a procedural violation. It's pulling the levers of political power. People do that in a democracy all the time.

The uproar in Madison isn't going to die down any time soon. I fervently hope it's not going to escalate to serious disorder. But if it does, it will be the Democrats and their supporters who opened Pandora's box.

The protesters should go home, and the Democratic senators should come home. They should report for duty, make a principled stand in debate, cast their losing votes, and act like the loyal opposition until the next election.

That's how it's done in a democracy. We shouldn't have to be explaining this to people in Wisconsin, a state with an honorable democratic tradition.

Sam Reaves
www.samreaves.com

Riots in the Arab Street

2011-01-30T09:30:00.000-08:00

It started in Tunisia and caught everyone by surprise: pushed beyond endurance by corrupt and incompetent government, people took to the streets and ousted a long-entrenched dictator. The collapse of the Ben Ali regime in Tunisia seems to have given people in other countries ideas: protests erupted in Yemen, Jordan and now, momentously, Egypt. Revolution is in the air and there is talk of a 1989-style collapse of dictatorship and springtime of democracy. What are the prospects?

It’s too early to tell, but there’s hope for the type of genuine popular upheaval that leads to real change. Democracy emerging from domestic aspirations and efforts rather than foreign military invasion would be an enormous positive development for Arab societies long subject to authoritarian rule. It’s something the U.S. should welcome, despite the risks of less compliant regimes emerging in the short run. In the long run our interests lie with the extension of genuine popular rule.

Egypt is a much bigger story than Tunisia, a much bigger country and much more strategically important. Regime change in Egypt means hair-raising instability in the short run. The Mubarak regime presides over a cold peace with Israel that is unpopular with the Egyptian people, cooperating with Israel to manage Gaza. A genuinely popular regime in Egypt will complicate or most likely freeze what is left of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process (not that it’s exactly thriving now). The peace may get colder, but it doesn’t have to slide toward war. Early international engagement with a legitimate popular government will be crucial.

But a genuinely popular regime in Egypt is not a lock. The army will be the deciding factor, and I don't pretend to know how they are going to tip. There are probably many factions. A best case scenario is probably something like what's happening in Tunisia now, with continued street protests keeping pressure on the new government to get rid of all the holdovers from the old regime, liberalization of civic life and stumbling progress toward elections. A worst case scenario is civil war. We know how that goes from Iraq. The realist in me says Egypt will probably get some form of military dictatorship with some progressive elements and cosmetics insisted on by the West.

Could we see a hostile Islamist regime emerge? Anything is possible, but the protests in Iran after the fraudulent elections of 2009 show that people don’t like authoritarian Islamic regimes any more than they like authoritarian West-endorsed ones. There are no guarantees, but backing popular demands for civil and political freedoms can’t steer us too far wrong.

I don't think there's much the U.S. can do to influence things. Strong support for any faction will label it irredeemably as an American puppet. We need to issue lots of forceful but vague proclamations about supporting democracy and human rights while pulling what strings we can behind the scenes to prevent worst case outcomes. Baradei is probably not a bad horse to back in Egypt. But we can't do it too openly.

The U.S. takes a lot of criticism for backing evil regimes, but it's hard to say what a better policy would be. We turned on an evil regime in Iraq and precipitated a bloodbath. The Saudi regime is medieval and oppressive, less democratic than our declared enemy Iran. So what do we do? Turn on it? Cut off military aid, maybe, but then the Saudis are a firm ally against Iranian expansionism, which is a real threat with Iraq tipping to the Shiites. The Saudis are like the Mafia guys that keep the Italian neighborhoods safe: you know they're thugs but you like being able to go out at night. A revolution in Iran would help, but then there's not much we can do to promote that. Obama was criticized by the right for not supporting the protests in 2009 more forcefully, but then again, what was he supposed to do? Overt American support would taint any party accepting it, particularly in Iran. There's no magic bullet, no easy way to manage all this.

The country that scares me most is Pakistan, which has working, deliverable nukes and deep penetration of the security forces by jihadists, along with increasing intimidation of moderate voices like the governor who was assassinated by one of his own bodyguards this month for speaking out against the draconian and arbitrary blasphemy law. My three-AM cold sweat thought is that Pakistan is Somalia circa 1990, times fifty. In the cold light of day I hope that there’s still a chance of the Pakistani political center coalescing around a figure untainted by corruption and willing to face down the extremists.

The best thing to do is to try to pick out the most genuinely liberal (in the broadest, least political sense of the word) elements in each country and find ways to promote their survival and development. Survival first, of course. The worst case doesn't have to happen. There are enough people in all these countries who are opposed to extremism and just want a functioning state with a modicum of accountability that it should be possible to identify and support a critical mass that could serve as a basis for a workable, coherent polity with continuing liberalization and a shot at eventual democracy.

The external forms of electoral democracy on the western model are not what we should be prioritizing. Real democracy can exist only on the basis of a wide range of things that need to be nurtured first: basic security, the rule of law, a functioning free press, a judicial system with some integrity, etc. Those are the things we need to be promoting, however we can, while reserving the black arts for defensive purposes, i.e. keeping the worst elements out of power. Where the worst elements are already in power, that's where deterrence comes in. Qaddafi gave up his WMD after we went into Iraq. It's a tragedy that Iraqis had to pay the price, but draw your own conclusions. When the State Department fails, it's nice to have the Marines.

Perilous times, but we know whom to root for: the men and women out in the streets in Tunis and Cairo, facing down the riot police and telling the dictators it’s time to let Arab and Muslim populations enjoy the freedoms we take for granted in the West.

Sam Reaves
www.samreaves.com

Nihilists and Provocateurs

2010-11-30T08:53:00.000-08:00

A couple of thoughts in the wake of the morning paper:

Tricky Leaks

The U.S. Department of State is scrambling to contain the damage from the release by Julian Assange’s WikiLeaks website of thousands of intercepted government e-mails. Somebody found the key to the cupboard and turned everything over to Assange, the no-holds-barred whistleblower who has made it his mission in life to make public what the U.S. government wants to keep private. This has not made him popular in government circles but has raised him to hero status among critics of U.S. policy.

Assange’s activities raise a number of questions. I tend to be in sympathy with whistleblowers, who, ideally at least, courageously risk retaliation to reveal wrongdoing on the part of institutions with the power to suppress information about their activities. This can be a genuine public service as well as being genuinely heroic.

But the violation of secrecy ought to be in the service of some identifiable principle. If the U.S. military is covering up crimes committed by its personnel, we ought to know about it. But it’s hard to discern the principle behind Assange’s latest information spill. It appears to be a completely undiscriminating pillaging of routine diplomatic correspondence. And routine diplomatic correspondence is bound to contain a few things that the diplomats would rather not became public. Is this evidence of wrongdoing? Not necessarily.

Confidentiality is a perfectly reasonable expectation for any organization in conducting even routine business. Frank discussion of problems and conflicts is not possible if every remark has to be vetted in consideration of its being overheard. Is Assange attacking the very concept of confidentiality? If so, by what principle? You have to wonder if he considers his own dealings confidential. It would be interesting to hear him explain his criteria for exposure.

In the short run Assange is doing a lot of damage by complicating any number of diplomatic relationships. In the long run, he’s only going to assure that diplomacy and other government activities become more devious and impervious to scrutiny. If he were casting light on a genuine scandal instead of routine diplomatic frankness, that might be justifiable. But there’s a whiff of nihilism to Julian Assange’s latest grandstand play. I think at this point he’s doing it just because he can.

FBI Heroics

The FBI’s announcement that they had foiled a plot by a Somali-American youth to detonate a bomb in the midst of a holiday crowd in Portland would be more impressive if they had not helped set up the attack themselves. This comes on the heels of a similar plot in Chicago, in which agents identified a Lebanese man with jihadist sympathies and helped him plan an attack on revelers in bars near Wrigley Field before arresting him as he was about to strike. In both cases, it’s reasonable to ask whether the crimes would ever have been committed without help from FBI agents.

FBI agents seem to be good at this; the so-called Miami Seven jihadist cell busted in 2006 was also extensively jollied along by a federal informant. In all these cases, people with dubious sympathies were identified and then actively encouraged and materially aided to progress toward real violence by federal agents, who then busted them and held press conferences to celebrate a victory in the War on Terror.

I’m not a lawyer, so I’m not sure whether this constitutes entrapment. But I’m fairly sure it means these guys are low-hanging fruit. Now, if a kid is willing to press a button to blow up a crowd of holiday makers, then that kid should probably be off the street. But if it’s not clear whether he would ever have gotten that far without active encouragement from the FBI, then I think it’s time to take a hard look at the FBI approach.

I’d feel a lot better about the FBI if they were going a bit higher up the tree. There is always going to be a pool of disaffected losers who are manipulable and ripe for exploitation. Wouldn’t it make more sense to watch for real attempts to manipulate them than to provide the manipulation yourself so you can score an easy arrest and hold a press conference?

Sam Reaves
www.samreaves.com

Orphans

2010-10-31T16:04:00.000-07:00

It’s election time again, and once again people like me are looking at the choices and heaving great sighs.

Who do I mean by people like me? I’ll try to explain without flattering myself too much. One one hand I mean people who are repelled by the stunning levels of invective, distortion and pandering to ignorance that characterize our political campaigns. Attack ads dominate the airwaves, and they are not designed to make viewers pause in thoughtful reflection on the issues. The Democratic approach is to insist that Republicans are all heartless corporate shills that want only to increase their takings while reducing the lower classes to penury; meanwhile the Republicans are feverishly trying to convince the electorate that a Bolshevik coup is just around the corner, masterminded by the secret Muslim in the White House.

Campaign managers will tell you that of course they realize things are more complicated than that, but that they have to go for the lowest common denominator because that’s how elections are won and lost: most people are too unsophisticated or too lazy to give the issues the consideration they deserve.

What does it tell us about our society that political campaigns are pitched to the most ignorant members of the electorate? To me it suggests that among the many failings of our school systems is a complete failure to teach elementary logical analysis and economic literacy.

That’s an issue for another rant on another day. The other aspect of my dismay at our political circus is the fact that the poles around which our two major parties have coalesced leave me without a good choice.

I’ve been voting Libertarian for years. Yes, I’m aware of all the baggage—the creepy lunatic fringe, the easily caricatured minimalism, as captured in the New Yorker cartoon depicting a homeowner cheerfully waving away the fire department as his home burns behind him, saying “No thanks, I’m a Libertarian.”

Believe me, I’d love to vote for a nice mainstream party. The problem is that each of our major parties has put half of its money on the wrong horse. The Democrats embody some honorable strains in our political epic, like the struggle for civil rights and principled opposition to dubious wars. (And they hold themselves in correspondingly high regard.) However, the Democrats let FDR lead them down the path toward statism, producing outcomes that are a little less high-minded, like punitive taxation, clumsy interventions in the market economy and metastasizing bureaucracies. The Democrats are the party of the nanny state, the regulatory nightmare and the rush to legislate, heedless of unintended consequences. In addition, their civil rights heritage has calcified into an unreflective, adversarial approach to the complex problems of African-American disadvantage.

The Republicans, meanwhile, claim to be the party of small government and yet somehow under the second Bush managed to vaporize the budget surplus and create huge new entitlements and onerous federal mandates like No Child Left Behind. If failure to live up to their principles was their only problem, they might be redeemable, but unfortunately not all of their apparent principles inspire confidence. The Republicans are too often prone to a belligerent patriotism, a tendency to try to trump a reasonable argument by waving the flag. Patriotism is a fine thing (and properly a non-partisan one), but not when used as a substitute for thought. The Republicans are more likely to see a military solution for complex geo-strategic problems and, of course, they are obdurate boosters of the futile and corrupting Drug War.

So each of the major parties has it half right; the Democrats know that we all have to live together and that warfare is a tool best used as a last resort; the Republicans know that the free market is the best provider of material goods and that individual responsibility is the only basis for a healthy society. Unfortunately, they also each have it half wrong. The Democrats think a few keen policy wonks, if we just give them enough power, can legislate our problems away, while the Republicans think that a few strong men, if we just give them enough power, can lock up all our problems or leave them a smoking ruin.

So I vote Libertarian. People tell me that’s a cop-out, that I’m wasting my vote and abdicating my responsibility to choose the better of the only two realistic alternatives. I don’t agree; I think you always vote your principles. It sends a message even if you know your guy has no chance to win. Another option often suggested is for people of my views to pick a party and jump in and try and change it; move the major party of your choice closer to your principles.

That would mean getting the Democrats to find a clue about market economics or getting the Republicans to jettison xenophobia and gunboat diplomacy; don’t hold your breath. I think the best hope is to keep trying to persuade Americans that there’s a political party that is already mostly there where they want to be. I think most Americans are natural libertarians; we want the government to protect us against force and fraud but we don’t think it owes us a living; we are personally tolerant and appreciate our live-and-let-live culture; we respect our military but want it used carefully, and we know there’s no future in trying to seal the borders.

And neither of the two big parties represents us; we’re orphans. So take a look at the Libertarian option next Tuesday; the more votes the Libertarians get the more mainstream they will become, shedding the lunatic fringe, raising standards and assuming responsibilities. And maybe some day there will be a major party that is in tune with our natural, small-L libertarian instincts.

Sam Reaves
www.samreaves.com

The Ecology of Money

2010-09-29T20:33:00.000-07:00

I’ve just finished reading Niall Ferguson’s The Ascent of Money, accurately subtitled A Financial History of the World. The book was completed just as the financial crisis was heating up in 2007, and the author has added an Afterword to the paperback edition to bring things up to date through early 2009 or so.

Ferguson is a British historian with impeccable academic credentials who is also an accomplished popularizer who can make sense out of complex topics for the layman, usually with a slightly new angle. (His The War of the World interpreted the twentieth century with its wars as essentially the losing struggle of the West to maintain its long-term primacy.)

In this book he takes on the history of money and how it has shaped civilization, or perhaps even provided the foundation for civilization. His pithy definition of money (“the crystallized relationship between debtor and creditor”) makes as much sense as any I’ve heard, and he provides two insights that for me are the core of the book.

The first is that financial markets are inseparable from human progress. Not just money, i.e. gold or wampum or any other medium of exchange, but further, markets for buying and selling debt in all its forms and derivatives, are what have made possible economic progress-- meaning the material goods and services that make our lives more comfortable than the cavemen’s. We couldn’t have done it without the bankers.

Bankers are not very popular now, for obvious reasons, so it’s refreshing to be reminded that we need them. Attempts to punish or abolish financial markets generally end in tears. Finance is the “brain of the economy”, in the words of one of Ferguson’s sources, “...a coordinating mechanism that allocates capital... to its most productive uses.” There is an obvious need for a certain amount of regulation, but beyond the enforcement of contracts and punishment of fraud and so forth, we monkey with financial markets at our peril.

Which is not to say that finance always gets it right, witness the current crisis. In his excellent Afterword, which is worth the price of the book all by itself, Ferguson discusses the reasons why financial systems are prone to regular crises. (Capsule summary: people aren’t as rational as classical economic theory assumes. Surprised?) But this brings us to Ferguson’s second key point, the evolutionary nature of economic activity.

An analogy has often been made between an economy and an ecology. Both are highly complex systems with billions of actors producing imperfectly predictable aggregate outcomes, full of feedback loops and selection pressures, prone to unintended consequences when tampered with.

Sadly, a great many people refuse to accept this analogy; the political left swarms with people who are able to acknowledge the above with perfect clear-sightedness as regards an ecology, while stubbornly insisting than an economy requires only a sufficiently competent and ruthless bureaucracy to be shaped to their preferences. A Mugabe or a Chavez can wreck an economy in a hurry, just as unwise farming practices created the Dust Bowl.

Ferguson is smarter than that, and he extends the analogy to discuss the evolutionary nature of an economy. While acknowledging that the analogy is not perfect, not least because because mutations are the result of human decisions (entrepreneurial innovation and regulators’ attempts to provide ‘intelligent design’), he points out that “Financial history is essentially the result of institutional mutation and natural selection.” Firms arise and go extinct; the ones that survive pass on their “genes” (effective business practices), speciation occurs, producing new financial institutions, and so forth.

Just as the natural world has had its epoch-ending asteroid strikes, Ferguson points out previous “major discontinuities” which brought on “mass extinctions”, like the Great Depression. He suggests that the current crisis may be another one, and that the financial landscape that will emerge will be unpredictably different.

This is not an argument for radical laissez-faire: the book is full of accounts of the folly of financiers and the regulatory failures that enabled them. But the fabulous complexity and unpredictability of an economy, like that of an ecology, mean that regulation is always reactive. We’re always playing catch-up, and we need to approach the task with caution: attempts to bully and harass markets into being docile servants of the state are more likely to wound or even kill them than to tame them.

It is the messiness of human life that makes financial markets messy. As Ferguson says, “financial markets are like the mirror of mankind,” and “it is not the fault of the mirror if it reflects our blemishes as clearly as our beauty.”

Sam Reaves
www.samreaves.com

The Softball Test

2010-08-08T10:23:00.000-07:00

Here’s a little test to clarify your political thinking. Where you stand on this trivial question is likely to reflect the assumptions that shape your views on politics and social policy.

I play in a long-running pickup softball game every week. Every Saturday afternoon, anything from one to two dozen guys show up at the park, toss and swat the ball around a little to warm up, and then choose sides for a couple of games of easy-going slow-pitch softball. Everyone who shows up plays; nobody is turned away.

Sometimes we come up a little short on players and can only muster two teams of six or seven each. Then we either close off a field or have the batting team supply the catcher or first baseman; there’s always a way to get a game going. But when we have a good turnout we have the opposite problem: each team might have more players than can fit on the field at one time when we’re on defense. So we apply the following rule: if you make an out in your time at bat, you might have to catch (pretty much a do-nothing position in slow-pitch) or sit out the next inning on defense. If there’s only one extra player, the third out catches; if there are two, second out catches and third out sits, and so on.

We’ve been doing it this way for years, without complaints. It puts a lot of pressure on you if you come to bat with two outs, believe me. Nobody wants to sit out the next inning. But it’s a simple and effective rule, and nobody’s ever questioned its fairness.

Until recently. Then one day when we had a lot of players and consequently three guys sitting out every inning on defense, somebody came up with the notion that it would be fairer to sit out in rotation, that is, keep track of who sat out last inning and have three different guys sit out next time. People shrugged and said sure, and we tried it.

Well, of course then somebody had to find a piece of paper and a pencil and write down the lineup and consult the list every time we went out to the field to figure out who had to sit that inning. There was a certain amount of confusion and a little grumbling. Our age-old rule was simpler, if harsher when you’re having a bad day with the bat. (There have been days when I barely had to pick up a glove.)

We haven’t tried the rotation system again. Without any explicit discussion, after that one experiment we just went back to doing it the time-tested way. Is it fair? Most of us seem to think so. It’s a meritocracy. You hit, you earn the chance to go out to the field. You fail, you sit. And it’s a lot simpler: there’s no paperwork involved.

Extend this to society at large. There are two competing notions of fairness in political thought: some people think fairness is insuring that everyone plays by the same rules and letting the chips fall where they may, and some people think fairness is insuring the same outcome for everybody. The debate over the “disparate impact” of policies on different groups is a long-running one.

Life is a lot more complicated than a softball game, of course, but our little experiment illuminates two different attitudes. People who favor equal outcomes mistrust meritocracy and support the establishment of bureaucracies to make sure everything comes out the same for everyone. Other people think that if everyone is playing by the same rules, and cheaters are punished, there’s no reason to see unequal outcomes as injustice.

Where do you stand? Do go with the simple time-tested rule, and sit out the inning without complaint when your screaming liner goes right into the shortstop’s glove? Or do you insist that that’s not fair and that you sat out the last inning, and it’s your turn to go to the field?

And does this carry over to your political stance? For me it does; I favor the simple, effective rule even when it keeps me nailed to the bench, and in politics I favor meritocratic arrangements and mistrust complicated bureaucratic fixes. A book I recommend to everyone is Richard Epstein’s Simple Rules for a Complex World. In it Epstein discusses how six simple, time-tested legal principles (autonomy, first possession, voluntary exchange, protection from aggression, limited privilege in cases of need and taking with compensation for public benefit) do a better job of governing society than a lot of complicated ad hoc legislation administered by clumsy bureaucracies.

But you don’t have to read Epstein’s book: just ask yourself which approach keeps the softball game moving smoothly, as well as providing the best incentives for concentrating during your at-bats. And see if that doesn’t tell you something about the way we are governed.

Sam Reaves
www.samreaves.com

Two Questions

2010-07-24T09:02:00.000-07:00

The minimum wage is one of those issues that some people can’t talk about without a flare of righteous indignation. Try announcing at a dinner party that you are opposed to the government’s mandating a minimum wage and watch how jaws drop and a freeze settles over the room. “You’re not one of those people, are you?” a friend said to me the last time the topic came up, a look of appalled disdain settling on her face as if I’d just told her I favored pedophilia or eating puppies.

This is an issue that separates people who believe in economics from people who don’t. Or maybe just people who are patient enough to work through economic arguments from people who aren’t. Most people, it seems, aren’t, to judge from the treatment you get if you try to make the case against the minimum wage.

The case is, of course, that imposing a minimum wage costs jobs at the low end of the scale. To an employer, some jobs are only worth doing if they can be done cheaply; the workers you pay the least tend to be doing the jobs that are least vital. If you suddenly have to pay them more, you’re likely to decide that you don’t really need that outbuilding painted; it can wait till next year or maybe forever. Or you’ll hire one or two fewer migrants to get the crop in and go back to having your wife and kids pitch in. In either case, the guys you let go are probably not high-demand workers; the people who lose jobs due to the minimum wage are among the most vulnerable people in the work force.

There’s plenty of evidence for this. A study from Ball State University (available for download here) concludes that minimum wage increases in 2008 and 2009 cost 550,000 part time jobs and points out that "teenage workers, especially minority teenagers, bear the bulk of minimum wage job losses."

In other words, the minimum wage is most likely to hurt black teenagers. This, of course, is not what you want to hear if you're a Democratic politician who's made a career out of promising to help minorities. Maybe that's why Democrats work so hard to demonize opponents of the minimum wage: they know it doesn't stand up to scrutiny. It is a rare politician that attempts to defend the minimum wage on its merits.

Now, you can argue that the trade-offs involved are worth it, that it's better to increase the rewards of work and maintain more people on the dole. You can even come right out and say that no job at all is better than a poorly paid job. I don't buy that, but at least it's an argument and not an ad hominem attack.

But you can’t simply deny that people lose jobs when the minimum wage rises above the market rate for low-skilled labor. The economic logic and the real world evidence say they do.

There are two questions to ask anyone who favors the minimum wage. The first is, why does every minimum wage law include a lengthy list of exceptions? You can see a list of those exempt from the federal minimum wage here. The list includes, among others, "employees of certain seasonal amusement or recreational establishments" and "casual babysitters and persons employed as companions to the elderly or infirm". The loopholes, of course are an acknowledgment on lawmakers’ part that the minimum wage kills jobs at the low end of the scale. The legislators know that some jobs will simply disappear if employers are forced to pay workers more than they’re worth. They can't admit that, but they know it. So they carve out exceptions, and they never talk about them much above an embarrassed mumble.

The second question to ask is: Why does anyone make more than the minimum wage? If we need a law to force employers to pay us a certain minimum amount, why does anyone make even a penny more than this amount? Most of us, in fact, make more than the minimum wage. How is this theoretically possible, if stingy employers have to be forced by government action to pay their employees what they're worth?

The answer, of course, is that they don't. Employers always try to pay workers what they’re worth. Sometimes their calculations are wrong, as when they pay over-the-hill sluggers millions to bat .220, but they always try. The uncomfortable truth is that some workers are worth a whole lot, and some aren’t. If you want higher wages, the best thing to do is to make yourself more valuable to your employer, by increasing your skill level (get that degree!), upping your productivity (spend less time on Facebook!) or marrying the boss’s daughter (sadly, an option available only to a few).

Unfortunately, another thing you can do is pressure your legislators to force your employer to pay you more. That will raise wages for some people, but you’d better be careful about what you ask for: if you’re near the bottom of the scale, you might find that your employer now deems you not worth the new higher wage.

Now, until you have considered the above two questions, do me a favor and save the attitude. We can have a civil discussion about trade-offs and the best way to provide jobs for marginal workers and so forth and so on, but you can’t hit me with that look of appalled disdain. You can’t write me off as a heartless right-wing ideologue. You have to acknowledge that in the real world, economic policy has economic consequences, and you can’t choose simply to ignore consequences that you don’t like.

We have minimum wage laws because most people are unwilling to think through the economic consequences, and politicians like easy legislative fixes, even if they're illusory. Politics trumps good economic policy every time, and the prevalence of minimum wage laws is exhibit number one. This is an issue that should be argued dispassionately on its merits, but human nature is such that people will gasp in horror and label you a capitalist pig instead of confronting the evidence and the arguments. Don’t let them get away with it.

Sam Reaves
www.samreaves.com

It’s Over

2010-05-21T21:59:00.000-07:00

The argument is over. The movement to prohibit private ownership of firearms has officially conceded defeat. The concession was made on Thursday by Chicago mayor Richard Daley, who responded to a press conference question about the effectiveness of Chicago’s gun ban by threatening to shove a rifle up the reporter’s fundament.

I’m not making this up. Daley held a press conference to discuss the city’s options should the Supreme Court overturn the ban on private gun ownership that has been in place in Chicago since 1982. In response to the irksome question Daley picked up a confiscated rifle from a display table and said, “It’s been very effective. If I put this up your butt, you’ll find out how effective it is. I’ll put a round up your, you know...” The Chicago Tribune’s John Kass discusses the whole sorry episode in his column today.

There are many interesting things about this performance by a famously irascible mayor. But the really striking thing is the absence of any attempt to defend the gun ban by the least semblance of argument. Perhaps that’s because all but the most fossilized opponents of gun rights are realizing that prohibition really is a bad idea.

The argument is simple, and to simple minds like Mayor Daley’s, irrefutable: if the overwhelming majority of murders are committed with firearms, then all we have to do is prohibit firearms and the murder rate will plummet.

Except that banned objects remain stubbornly physical: they do not simply vanish into thin air. The criminals certainly aren’t going to turn in their guns; they don’t pay any attention to laws anyway. And there are millions of guns out there in the hands of non-criminals. If you really want to take them out of circulation, you are going to have to implement police measures so intrusive that even the ACLU might be made slightly uncomfortable, despite their notable vacillation on the Second Amendment, the only one they won’t go to the wall for.

Let’s say we get every bit as serious about taking guns out of circulation as we are about, say, drugs. We’ve had more than thirty years of the Drug War, complete with raided homes, asset confiscation and periodic police corruption scandals, and you can still get heroin, cocaine and meth in every city and county in the U.S. Can anyone possibly still believe we could get all the guns off the street? If we get as serious about guns as we are about drugs, the only thing that will happen is that the gun dealers will get richer and gun gangs will kill each other over turf the way drug gangs do now. (And meanwhile the woman whose gun gets confiscated won’t be able to shoot her psychotic ex-boyfriend when he comes after her with a butcher knife.)

You can’t eliminate something that people think they need and that can be easily concealed without draconian police state measures. You just can’t. If you’re honest, you’ll admit that. Ask Americans if they want to live in a police state, and they will tell you no. But in the same breath, too many of them will call for the government to get rid of things they don’t like, like guns or drugs or illegal immigrants. They don’t think through the consequences. And they only get outraged about the police state measures that affect people they like. How many of the people now sanctimoniously canceling their Arizona vacations have called for the government to confiscate their neighbors’ guns?

But now that Mayor Daley has tacitly admitted that there are no coherent arguments for banning private gun ownership, maybe we can start discussing measures that might really reduce gun violence. At the press conference Daley said that if the ban falls the city will consider implementing registration and training for firearms owners. Now that’s more like it. This is the conversation we should have been having all along. You stand a much better chance of reducing the social harm caused by dangerous objects and behaviors if they are legal, so that you can require training and impose reasonable registration requirements.

But the NRA Neanderthals oppose registration, you say? Of course they do. If Mayor Daley wanted to confiscate your car, you’d be reluctant to tell the city where your car was parked. Political resistance to registration will fade when people are certain that the Daleys of the world have given up trying to take their guns.

And that should happen soon, because anybody listening to Mayor Daley on Thursday saw that the argument is over. The gun nuts have won.

Sam Reaves
www.samreaves.com

Arizona cracks down

2010-05-09T11:14:00.000-07:00

Arizona’s passage of a law making illegal immigration status a state crime (as opposed to a federal one) and requiring police to check the immigration status of arrestees has set off a storm of protest, with demonstrations and calls to boycott the state and make it a pariah.

I’ve written about immigration before, and broadly speaking I’m in favor of it: in a world where capital can move freely around the globe in search of better investment opportunities, it seems only fair to let workers take their labor where they can get the best return on it. And accusations that immigrants take jobs from natives are overblown; they wouldn’t come if there were no demand for their labor.

However, mass immigration raises two legitimate concerns besides the economic issue: assimilation and the rule of law. These are what give rise to a lot of the opposition to illegal immigration, and worries about them can't be reduced to mere xenophobia.

In the United States, fears about lack of assimilation are somewhat exaggerated; American culture is powerfully assimilative and assimilation tends to happen of its own accord within a generation or two. The concern here should be merely to avoid measures that can retard assimilation, such as bilingual education programs (however well-intentioned ) that fail to help students make the transition to education in English.

For me the serious issue is the rule of law. The idea that the law is greater than any person, no matter how powerful, is the rock on which the open society rests. There is no greater check on autocracy and governmental misconduct than widespread respect for the laws that govern a society.

But this respect is not a given. It rests on two bases: democratic accountability and consistent enforcement. Our laws must be subject to revision in response to an informed electorate, and they must mean something once they are written.

In this light the Arizona law is a reaction to the pervasive sense that our government has simply not bothered to enforce the laws governing immigration. When large numbers of people residing in this country are not legally entitled to do so, and yet are able to live and work here with impunity, you can be forgiven for thinking that the government doesn’t care about the law.

So I don’t think the Arizona law is mere xenophobia. I think it’s a protest against perceived government indifference to widespread flouting of the law. That makes people angry. And calling them Nazis and trying to make Arizona out to be a new apartheid-era South Africa is only going to make them angrier. The hysterical tone of some of the opposition to the law does not aid clarity of thinking.

However. Understandable as it may be, the Arizona law is not the way to resolve the issues surrounding illegal immigration. It’s not that the government doesn’t care about our immigration laws; it’s that strict enforcement of them would be so expensive and intrusive that the population wouldn’t stand for it. I think we’re about to see this in action in Arizona. So maybe it’s time to take a hard look at the whole legal framework governing immigration.

I’ve argued before that the rule of law is weakened whenever laws are made for which the costs of enforcement outweigh the benefits gained. In such cases enforcement tends to be intermittent and arbitrary, and people lose respect both for the people who make our laws and for those who are expected to enforce them. In those cases, it’s time to reconsider the laws.

While difficulty of enforcement alone is no reason to ditch a law, difficulty of enforcement added to dubious benefits indicates a law that we might be better off without. If immigration has economic benefits, which I think it does, then treating it as a threat is a mistake. Of course, as with everything else, there are management issues and security issues, but those can be dealt with while accepting that immigration to the United States should be open to anyone who wishes to come here and contribute to our society.

So I favor comprehensive immigration reform. Not a blanket amnesty, which would be unfair to those who have tried to follow the rules, but the institution of a process for regularization, a path to legality. It should involve some costs and some commitments on the part of the applicants, but it should offer the benefit of legal residence at the end of it.

It is simply impossible to seal the borders and expel all the people who are currently here illegally; it just isn’t going to happen. And it’s foolish to pretend that it is. The dynamics of the world economy have simply overtaken an obsolete legal regime, and it’s time to update it.

So make the illegals jump through some hoops; make them come out of the bushes and pay a fine and take an oath or whatever; but give them a chance to become legal. In the long run, that’s the best way to affirm the rule of law and assure assimilation. And then we won’t need laws like the one Arizona just passed.

Sam Reaves
www.samreaves.com

Building boom

2010-03-16T08:52:00.000-07:00

The latest crisis in the Mideast peace process centers on Israel’s announcement of further construction in East Jerusalem just as U.S. Vice-president Joseph Biden was arriving to try to nudge everyone a little closer to the table. Israeli construction in areas that the Arabs consider subject to negotiation has become a major obstacle to getting the talks restarted, and the timing of the announcement looked like a provocation on the part of the Israelis. The U.S. fumed, the Israelis claimed the timing was an accident, and the Palestinians were unsurprised.

This brouhaha has followed a familiar script: Israel keeps building on land that the Palestinians think ought to be returned to them as part of a peace settlement, the U.S. makes token complaints, and the Palestinians refuse to talk as long as the construction crews are working. The problem seems intractable because the U.S. doesn’t want to bring too much pressure on Israel and the Palestinians understandably don’t want to seem to accept continued erosion of their territory by expanding Israeli settlements. So noise levels rise but so do the apartment blocks in Ariel and Neve Yaakov.

The whole thing rests on an unspoken assumption: that if a building is constructed by an Israeli crew, it must be occupied until the end of time by Israelis. Nobody ever says this, of course, but that seems to be the assumption, at least publicly. We read of “Jewish housing” and “Arab housing” as if Israelis and Palestinians were different species with radically different habitats, as if a faucet or an electrical outlet will only work for people of a particular ethnicity.

I have a suggestion for breaking the logjam: President Obama, or perhaps Secretary of State Clinton, should make a simple but very public announcement: “The United States does not take it as given that construction currently occupied by Israeli citizens must remain so, or that construction currently occupied by Palestinian citizens must remain so.”

The implication of this, of course, is that a peace agreement may entail border adjustments and population movement. You might think that this should go without saying, but apparently not. The assumption on both sides is that once the Israelis move in, they are never going to move out. It’s easy to see why the Israelis would wish to promote this view, but it’s harder to see why the Palestinians would accept it. If I were Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, I would say something like, “Let them build all those nice apartment blocks. The amenities will be much appreciated by the Palestinian families who move in when the land is ceded to us by a peace agreement.”

That would be taking a big chance of course, as long as the U.S. is complicit in promoting the view that a building constructed by Israelis can only ever house Israelis. I think this unspoken idea is possibly the greatest obstacle to progress in peace negotiations. If we want to support the peace process, we need to de-link it from the construction issue. And all it would take would be a simple announcement.

Announce that the U.S. considers eventual occupation of any Israeli construction in disputed areas to be subject to negotiation along with everything else, and watch how Israeli zeal for building in Arab areas would diminish. Watch how Palestinian reluctance to come to the table would evaporate. To make the announcement would be tantamount to saying that the U.S. is serious about promoting a genuine peace process.

Just a thought...

Sam Reaves
www.samreaves.com

Musing over the morning paper

2010-02-25T09:04:00.000-08:00

In lieu of a single topic compelling enough for a post, a couple of random thoughts:

Health Care: I’ve been intending to write more about the health care debate, but haven’t been able to find a concise enough way to get at what’s wrong with the Obama approach. Now Steven Chapman has gotten at one important aspect of it, in his column in today’s Chicago Tribune. Democrats would always rather regulate than get the incentives right, which would be cheaper and administratively simpler.

It’s easy to demonize the Republicans for stubbornly opposing the Obama bill, and it’s legitimate to ask why they didn’t come up with meaningful reform when they were in power for most of the last decade. But as annoying as the Republicans may be, the awkward fact remains that on this score they’re right: the two-thousand page monster health care bill the Democrats want to pass is bad legislation. Congress should start over, scaling back Democratic aspirations for radical restructuring, and go for achievable, significant reform based on a few key ideas, like de-linking health insurance from employment and allowing interstate insurance shopping. There is a whole range of achievable proposals for health care reform out there at places like the Cato Institute and the Heritage Foundation, putting the lie to the accusation that conservatives have no ideas and merely want to obstruct progress.

But don’t hold your breath. We’ll likely get some version of the monster, costs will continue to spiral, and we’ll have to have the debate all over again in a few years.

Terrorism: In light of my post of last November 21 and some comments on it, I’ve continued to think about the best way to treat terrorism suspects. The question is whether captured terrorists should be treated as criminal suspects, with the whole range of procedural protections afforded them, or as enemy combatants, with more leeway for interrogation and the possibility of detention without trial.

I have tended to side with the position they should be treated as criminals, since that is what I believe people planning mass murder are; my thinking has been that to call them enemy combatants is to confer on them a legitimacy they do not deserve.

But there’s a paradox here: we grant far greater protection to the rights of criminal suspects than we do to enemy combatants engaged in legitimate warfare. If we’re at war and I can get the jump on you, you’re toast, and rights don’t even enter into the debate. Warfare involves a total suspension of rights, starting with the right to life. This is a good reason for thinking twice about going to war, but once you’re in, it’s the only way to fight one.

So critics of the Obama administration may be right to insist that criminal law procedures are simply too cumbersome and inflexible to effectively confront the ruthlessness shown by our jihadist enemies. They certainly consider this a war, even if some of us would prefer not to. However distasteful we may find Guantánamo, we may need it, the way we needed prison camps for Germans and Japanese captured in World War Two.

But it’s still an apparent refutation of our stated commitment to the rule of law and a debating point for our enemies to hold captives without trial for years on end. The Germans and Japanese were repatriated at the end of hostilities. How will we know when the hostilities have ended in the War on Terror?

I don’t know. I don’t think there’s an easy answer. And it should be pointed out that this is one of the evillest aspects of terrorism—it undermines confidence in legitimacy and provokes ruthlessness in response. But we still have to take on the tough questions. We may need Guantánamo, but we also need to decide what the limits are, where the line of demarcation is between warfare and criminality, and we need to make the case plainly both to our allies and our enemies.

International law recognizes the concept of criminality within warfare, and it may be on this basis that we can justify our handling of terror suspects. We can call them war criminals. But our commitment to international law has been questioned on the basis of our reluctance to support the International Criminal Court at the Hague. Can we insist on our right to pursue terrorists as we see fit while at the same time insisting that we are exempt from international standards governing the use of force?

Sam Reaves
www.samreaves.com

Football curmudgeon

2010-02-07T14:56:00.000-08:00

It’s Super Bowl Sunday, and in an hour or so I’ll be sitting down with a few friends to watch the big game. If I can find any trace of it, that is, among all the hype and hoopla and commercial frenzy and overproduced halftime extravaganzas and general cultural trash that has almost smothered the actual playing of the game itself. It’s going to be an ordeal, as usual.

I love football. I was imprinted on the game early in life; I grew up just across the railroad tracks from the football practice field at the college where my father taught, and some of my earliest memories are of going with my big brother to watch the players bang into each other. That was a spectacle to capture a four-year old boy’s heart forever. My desire to grow up and be a football player vanished only after I failed to grow up enough, topping out at about 135 pounds as an undersized bench-warming high school halfback.

But I kept watching-- my father, who had gone to the University of Oklahoma in the Bud Wilkinson era, was a fan, and watching football on TV with him was a bonding experience for my brothers and me. I vividly remember watching the Chicago Bears beat the New York Giants for the NFL championship in 1963, with my father’s friend Bill Wade at the helm for the Bears. I was hooked early, and I’ve been watching football for fifty years.

And in those fifty years it has gotten harder and harder to watch the game on television. A recent study by the Wall Street Journal confirmed what I’ve suspected for years—there isn’t a whole lot of football in a football telecast. Of the three-plus hours it takes to show an NFL game on TV, about eleven minutes consist of actual football. Yup, that’s right. Sit down to watch an NFL game, and two hours and fifty minutes of your time will be spent watching something other than football.

Part of it is the nature of the game itself, of course; you run a play, huddle, run another play, and so on. The action isn’t continuous. And that’s fine—there’s time between plays to savor, scheme, anticipate. That’s part of the game. But that aspect of the game unfortunately lends itself to the insertion of commercial announcements, as the marketing geniuses realized early on. And brother, is that a slippery slope.

The NFL sold its soul to the networks decades ago, and the networks have been piling on the commercial time ever since. They have made the NFL game unwatchable. They lost me for good when they started going back to a commercial after every kickoff. Touchdown, extra point, endless commercials, ten seconds for the kickoff and what’s this? Right back for more endless commercials. Go to a televised football game in person these days, and you will be struck with how often the game is halted for no apparent reason while everyone stands around doing nothing for three minutes. Those are the TV timeouts, and they ruin the flow and continuity of the game, absolutely ruin it.

The misery was compounded when they brought in video review of officials’ decisions. Now the game often grinds to a halt for five or more minutes, often at the most crucial juncture, while the ref sticks his head under a hood and watches the play from a dozen angles so he can come back out and make the wrong call anyway. Meanwhile, we are treated to more commercials.

I can’t watch commercials any more. I just refuse. I started muting the TV for the commercials about twenty years ago, and then after a while it was too much trouble to turn the sound back up, and I just kept the thing muted. Now I usually keep one eye on the game while catching up on my reading. If you’re thinking that means I’m paying less attention to the game than I used to, less than a real hard-core X’s and O’s geek would, you’re right. My passion for the game has waned a bit.

Because, you see, there are other aspects of the game that distress me. I’m old enough to remember when there was such a thing as sportsmanship. You respected your opponent, you didn’t brag or taunt, and you let the ref call the game. Now, football players act like prima donnas at La Scala on opening night, prancing and dancing and putting on airs not just after touchdowns but after every first down, every tackle, every routine completion of an assignment.

They need to watch some footage of the old-time players. When Jim Brown scored a touchdown, he handed the ball to the official and trotted back to the bench like a workman completing a competent job. When Dick Butkus made a routine tackle he didn’t act as if he’d defeated fascism or ended world hunger. In the old days players acted like grown-up men doing their jobs. But that’s gone, and we’re poorer for it.

So I’ll watch the Super Bowl; my friends will probably want to watch it with the sound up because the commercials, in an ironic triumph of money over meaning, have become as big as the game, and I’ll do my best to follow the drama of the game despite the excruciating, drama-killing nature of the TV coverage. I’ll root for the underdog Saints and I will probably get at least a little excitement out of the experience in addition to the indigestion.

But I’m going to leave the room at halftime to avoid all the schlock and go for a quiet walk, doing my best to remember when a football game was what you got when you sat down to watch a football game.

Last fall I went to a high school football game for the first time in about forty years. I went because my daughter was in the marching band, but I found myself unexpectedly captivated by the game. I stood in a cold rain and saw players who weren’t getting paid a cent, most of whom will never play beyond the high school level, playing their hearts out on a miserable October night, playing the game the way it’s supposed to be played, with no dancing, no taunting or chest-beating. The game was fluid, intense and dramatic. It was the best time I’d had watching football in years. Best of all, there were no commercials.

If you love football, try this: next fall, go see a high school game or an NCAA Division III game, a game the TV networks don’t care about. If you love the game, you’ll like what you see.

Sam Reaves
www.samreaves.com

Book 'em

2009-11-21T16:31:00.000-08:00

President Barack Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder have come out in favor of show trials with pre-ordained verdicts for the men accused of planning the September 11 terror attacks.

At least that’s what it sounded like when Holder assured the Senate Judiciary Committee last Wednesday that he had told federal prosecutors that “failure is not an option” in the proposed trials, and Obama spoke as if the outcome were a fait accompli, saying that doubters would be reassured “when [Khalid Sheikh Muhammad] is convicted and when the death penalty is applied to him.”

In other words, we wouldn’t be holding a trial if we weren’t sure what the verdict is going to be. What kind of justice is that? Inherent in the idea of putting someone on trial is the possibility, even if remote, that the defendant may be acquitted.

Now, a variety of arguments can be made against bringing the September 11 plotters to trial, including the tainted nature of the evidence and the need to protect intelligence sources, but what Holder and Obama seem to be saying is this: the possibility of their acquittal is simply politically unacceptable. And that’s a scary thing to hear from the people at the top of our judicial system.

The question of what to do with the prisoners taken in the fight against jihadism is tying the U.S. government in knots and forcing us to think about justice and the sometimes fuzzy line between war and crime. Driving the debate is the Obama administration’s desire to close the U.S. prison at Guantánamo, Cuba, which means figuring out what to do with the people we’ve been holding there for years without trial.

How can a country based on the rule of law justify holding prisoners indefinitely without trial? Well, you have to define them as enemy combatants, which means you can hold them the way we did enemy POW’s in World War Two. None of them got a trial, and nobody said they should have. They just got caught in the course of fighting for the other side, and we had to do something with them. Similarly, we scooped up a lot of people in Afghanistan in the fighting that followed our invasion there, and we didn’t have any crimes to charge them with; they were just on the other side. We couldn’t let them go or they would have gone back into the hills and gone on fighting us, so we took them to Guantánamo.

So far, so good. But in World War Two there was a definable end to hostilities. When Germany and Japan surrendered, we returned their prisoners. When will the War on Terror be over? Nobody knows. Nobody even knows what the criteria are. With asymmetrical warfare and long-running insurgencies we’re in uncharted legal territory. So we have people sitting in Guantánamo who have never been charged with a crime but whom we don’t want to let go.

We’re not sure how to distinguish between the truly dangerous ones and the ones who just didn't like foreigners marching up the valley, and we don’t know what to do with the latter. But after eight years, it’s getting harder and harder to defend continued detention without trial. A country that proclaims its respect for the rule of law cannot simply go on holding prisoners forever without any possibility of appeal or resolution. And Obama’s determination to resolve the situation has opened up a Pandora’s Box of thorny legal questions.

Some say that military tribunals are more appropriate than our criminal court system for dealing with terror suspects. Others say that these tribunals don’t offer adequate legal safeguards. Of course, that’s precisely the point. If you can’t face the idea of the defendant going free, you’re not going to accept legal safeguards.

To achieve justice in the treatment of the prisoners at Guantánamo, we have to make some distinctions. We have to decide if there is any element of legitimate warfare at all on the jihadist side, and if so, we have to come up with criteria for the eventual release of those prisoners who were engaged in legitimate warfare. If not, they’re all criminals. And if they’re criminals, we have to be willing to prosecute, with all that that implies.

Of course there are, in theory, laws of war, and people can be prosecuted for contravening them. That’s why we put the Nazis on trial at Nuremberg and hanged Tojo. But if we try the September 11 plotters as war criminals in military tribunals, isn’t that tantamount to conceding some element of legitimacy to their campaign against the United States? We didn’t try Tojo for making war, but for commiting crimes in the course of that war. Is global jihad a legitimate military enterprise, with the September 11 attacks an aberrant departure from it?

Not in my book. But it could be argued that resisting the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan was legitimate warfare rather than terrorism, and if so, then some of the people at Guantánamo are prisoners of war in the classic sense. In that case, maybe the best course of action with regard to them is to send them back to Afghanistan and put them in Bagram prison with the other people captured in the current campaign there. We need to recognize that not everybody in Guantánamo has the same status and start sorting the guys who were just defending their turf from the ones who were devising ways of killing large numbers of American or European civilians.

For them, I don’t see any alternative to prosecution. Criminal prosecution of Khalid Sheikh Muhammad says to the world that we deny the legitimacy of attacks specifically targeting civilians. That’s not war, that’s murder. And if you’re going to bring criminal charges, that means you have to have due process, including the risk of acquittal. You’d better make damn sure you have a good case, but in the long run the legitimacy of our system will only be undermined by rigging the trials or refusing to provide them. And in the long run, American men and women are not going to go on fighting and dying in faraway countries for a system of dubious legitimacy.

So I think Obama and Holder have to stand up in front of the American people and say, “These are the people who planned the greatest mass murder in American history, and we are going to prosecute them, and if a fair trial leads to acquittal, then that’s just one of the risks of having a working judicial system. And if they are convicted we are going to put them in prison here on American soil, because they committed their crimes against Americans, and if that makes us the target of further attacks we will defend against those as we have defended against others in the past. And those are the risks of having an open society.”

That would take guts. We’ll see if Obama and Holder have them.

Sam Reaves
www.samreaves.com

Dial 911 for health care?

2009-11-08T10:09:00.000-08:00

The House of Representatives has passed its version of a health care reform bill, and it’s starting to look as if before too long we’ll get some kind of legislation that will transform the U.S. health care system.

I wish I had more confidence in the ability of the Congress to produce good policy, but I don’t. Given the way the legislative process operates, we are guaranteed to come up with something that, while it may increase the number of people insured, will almost certainly make the system more cumbersome and expensive. That may be better than the status quo, but then again it might not be.

The legislation will be cumbersome and expensive for two reasons: the Democrats’ preference for bureaucratic micro-management over sensible calibration of incentives, and the way legislation is produced, in which horse-trading and marker-calling play a larger role than sober policy analysis. Whatever comes out of Congress, it’s going to be ugly.

Will it solve the problem? That depends on what problem you’re talking about. We’ll probably wind up with more people covered by insurance. But I see nothing in the summaries I’ve read (not even our Congressional leaders have read the whole 2,000-page monstrosity) that will reduce the burdensome administrative costs of the system, which are the main reason we spend 16% of GDP on health care. We’ll continue to have a complex, jury-rigged mixed health-care system, and it will only get more expensive.

Maybe in a few years, when the staggering costs begin to focus minds, we’ll be ready for a new attempt at reform. Let’s hope at that point we’ll also be ready for some fresh thinking and a new approach.

The best discussion I’ve seen recently of the health care crisis was in
David Goldhill’s article on health care in the September issue of the Atlantic, together with readers’ reactions and Goldhill’s responses to them published in the November issue. Goldhill’s article analyzes the underlying reasons for the health care crisis, and suggests meaningful reforms.

The crux of his argument is that when patients do not directly bear the costs of medical care (because even routine care is covered by insurance), moral hazard is created, providers are insensitive to patient (i.e. consumer) concerns, and cost containment becomes impossible. Goldhill compares the current situation in health care to “paying for gas with our auto-insurance policy, or for our electric bills with our homeowners insurance” and details the distortions that follow from that. I don’t know of a better analysis of the real problems with the current system, which the currently debated legislation in Congress would do nothing to fix.

Of course, not everybody buys Goldhill’s argument. Among those who wrote responses to his article was Mike Mahoney of Sandpoint, Idaho, who said, “Throughout history, when societies have found that a service was needed for the common good, that service was created, and people chose to tax themselves to provide it. Armies, fire departments, water systems, police departments—all were created and paid for as the need arose. It makes no more sense to expect only those who can afford health care to have it than it would to make sure you have a valid credit card before dialing the fire department.”

That’s a pretty good statement of the case for state-provided health care. And proponents of a system like Britain’s National Health Service are right in saying that such a system would be administratively much simpler, reducing the amount of resources wasted on paperwork. Of course, there are other problems with government-provided health care, such as waiting lists and constant budget pressures. Any system has to ration care somehow, and in a single-provider or single-payer system it’s politicians and bureaucrats who decide how much gets spent on health care. And that brings a whole new set of problems.

But Mahoney’s letter got me to thinking: why do we accept without question government provision of police and fire services, while the thought of government-provided health care sends half the electorate into a Don’t Tread On Me frenzy?

Maybe it’s because the term health care covers a highly disparate variety of things, some of which are more suited to government provision than others. The reason why it makes no sense to make sure you have a valid credit card before dialing the fire department is because when your house is on fire, it’s an emergency: you need help right now, and your ability to pay is, or ought to be, irrelevant. The same goes for police protection and any other emergency service. We have recognized in our society that in an emergency it’s appropriate to help now and ask questions later.

Maybe it’s appropriate to make the same distinction in health care as we grope toward the right balance of public and private financing. Some medical needs are emergencies: you get hit by a bus, shot by a gang-banger or ambushed by your failing heart, and it’s inhuman to pester you with questions about payment as you bleed out on the gurney. Maybe in this realm government-provided (or paid-for) medical care makes sense, and Mahoney is right in saying that we ought to join other advanced nations in just providing it, no questions asked.

But other medical needs are more predictable and more subject to things under your control, such as diet and lifestyle, and are probably not best handled by third-party payment, for the reasons Goldhill discusses. Maybe you ought to pay for routine checkups the way you pay for an oil change on your car or maintenance on your furnace. Maybe even antibiotics for your fever ought to come out of your pocket, (or your privately financed insurance policy) the way body work after the fender bender does. Maybe the proper approach for most health care needs is to budget and save and carry private insurance for unexpected expenses. And for people who can’t afford that, there can always be a government-provided safety net.

In short, maybe there’s not a single best answer for all our health care problems, and a government role is appropriate for some medical needs and not for others. It’s worth considering as we wait for the latest spasm of tinkering from Congress to complicate the system, because the next round of reform is going to require some outside-the-box thinking.

Sam Reaves
www.samreaves.com

Don't just stand there...

2009-10-08T19:04:00.000-07:00

Attorney General Eric Holder and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan were in Chicago yesterday, doing what politicians do best: making earnest promises to solve a problem they can’t do anything about.

The visit was prompted by something that wasn’t really unusual except that it happened to be caught on video and seen around the world: a Chicago teenager being killed by other Chicago teenagers.

That happens all the time. Last school year, thirty-six students in the Chicago school system were murdered; this year so far three have been killed. The overwhelming majority were African-American or Hispanic, and were killed by kids just like them. This has been going on for years, of course, but the toll has finally gotten so high that it has caught a level of attention that makes politicians uncomfortable.

So President Obama dispatched two cabinet members to make promises. To prove they were serious, they brought cash: they promised a grant of half a million bucks to the local school system to be used to combat violence.

This is pure theater, of course; nobody really thinks half a million bucks or some new Federal laws or a spate of committees and initiatives will stop poor kids from killing each other. But Obama has to do it, because most people’s first response in any social crisis is to scream for the government to not just stand there but do something.

Most people are reluctant to say out loud what they must know at some level: the government can’t solve this problem. It’s a social and cultural problem, and only social and cultural change can ameliorate it. This may come as a shock, but the government is mostly irrelevant to problems like this.

There are many elements involved in a crisis like endemic child homicide, and of course poverty plays a role, as does easy access to firearms. (As if embarrassed that the victim in this latest case was beaten to death, an op-ed writer in the Chicago Tribune hastened today to remind us that most of these killings use guns.) But if poverty was the main cause of this, Calcutta and Cairo would have astronomical homicide rates, and they don’t. And if firearms were the main cause, farm kids in Iowa would be capping each other as much as kids on the South Side of Chicago, and they’re not.

What it’s hard to come out and say is that poor black and Hispanic kids in American cities kill each other because too many of them are not being raised with the scruples, inhibitions and self-imposed restraints that keep people from resorting to violence as a first reflex.

Where do those restraints come from? They come from parents. And the great unmentionable factor in the moral collapse of the urban poor is the disintegration of the two-parent family. Around seventy percent of black children are now born out of wedlock, as are an increasing percentage of Hispanic children, now around forty-five. Most of them are being raised by their mothers, more or less alone. While fathers are present in the lives of many of these children to some degree, in most cases they are not there on a day-to-day basis.

I don’t want to single out the mothers: let’s call this the Absent Father problem. But let’s stop pretending it’s not a problem. The correlation between single parenthood and all manner of social, educational and economic disadvantages is well established. Now, correlation is not causation, but correlation is certainly information. And when you look at the demands children make on two parents, let alone one, it’s easy to see how a poor woman trying to make a living while raising children is going to struggle to be successful at either. Don’t take my word for it; ask them.

There are many reasons why a woman might wind up raising a child on her own: widowhood, divorce and abandonment are the classics. But increasingly, women are explicitly choosing to have children outside of a stable relationship. Some of them do a heroic job of it and raise happy, successful children. (It helps to be a well-off middle-class single mother with lots of family support and professional child care.) I don't want to demonize single mothers. But when that choice becomes the default option, you have to ask if that’s a good thing for the community.

It will be pointed out that out-of-wedlock birth rates are going up in a lot of countries, including prosperous European ones, without a corresponding spike in the types of problems poor black kids in the U.S. have. But we need to consider that a phenomenon like family disintegration hits vulnerable, economically weak communities harder than it hits stable, prosperous ones. If your community’s hold on economic success is precarious to begin with, adverse social phenomena pose a greater threat to it.

Of course there are lots of two-parent households that neglect, abuse and otherwise harm their children. And I’m sure you can give me any number of examples of successful single parents. I can give you some. But at some point you have to pay attention to the sociological evidence and admit that for a fragile community, single parenthood might not be the best model.

It’s easy to say that the government should just make it easier for that struggling single mother to make a living, but we’ve been down that road before: Bill Clinton even got a lot of liberals on board for welfare reform when it became evident that subsidizing single motherhood tended to produce more of it, with all the attendant problems. At some point we’ve got to revive the stable two-parent home. It has to become the norm again.

Eric Holder can’t fix this. Barack Obama can’t fix it. Only the people in the community can fix it. How can we get people to start valuing marriage, or at least permanent in-home fathering, once again? The conservatives have an answer: re-stigmatize single motherhood. Sometimes they’re quite explicit about that, as in Ross Douthat’s New York Times op-ed. Predictably, he took a lot of flak for that piece. (One measured response ended with a simple “F*** you.”) But that’s what moral codes have always done: they’ve tried to make people ashamed of behavior that hurts the community.

If that seems harsh and mean-spirited to you, then it’s up to you to come up with a better way. Be as positive as you want. But you have to find a way to make girls determined to delay child bearing until they are in a stable and economically viable situation, and, more importantly, you have to get boys to invest in codes of conduct that exalt restraint and responsibility.

This is one the government can't fix. It’s up to you.

Sam Reaves
www.samreaves.com

Why Bill James is Like Karl Popper

2009-10-01T19:51:00.000-07:00

I’ve been a Bill James fan since some time in the early eighties. Actually I’m a fan of two guys named Bill James, but this is not about the British crime writer. I’ll write about him some other time. This is about the American baseball analyst, or as he prefers to call himself, “sabermetrician”. (The term is derived from an organization devoted to statistical analysis of baseball, the SABR or Society for American Baseball Research.) I’ve been an admirer of James ever since I first ran across his Baseball Abstract twenty-five years or so ago.

If you’re not especially interested in baseball, you might think Bill James is beneath your notice, but then my wife is not especially interested in baseball, and she thinks what James does is very interesting. That’s because she works in data analysis; she’s interested in what collected numerical data can tell us about the world. And anyone who has an interest in that topic can admire James’s work.

As anyone even slightly familiar with baseball knows, numbers have always been a big part of baseball: what’s he hitting, what’s his won-lost record, how many runs has he driven in? What Bill James did, starting back in the seventies, was to think seriously about what baseball numbers really mean with regard to winning and losing ball games. He brought a trained statistician’s mind to the endeavor, along with a predilection to think outside the box, to look at what was actually happening instead of what the conventional wisdom said must be happening.

This coincided with the computerization of statistical data, which greatly facilitated the compilation and analysis of the numbers. SABR promoted the careful gathering of data by armies of amateur statisticians, and it all went into the computer, providing a vastly expanded pool of baseball data.

From looking at the data Bill James decided that a lot of what we were told about baseball was wrong. In particular, our evaluations of players and teams were faulty because we were looking at the wrong things. Batting average was not really the best measure of what a hitter was contributing to the offense; a pitcher’s won-lost record was practically useless in evaluating his actual effectiveness, a team’s home ball park distorted its overall statistics, misleading observers as to its true strengths and weaknesses.

James asked the question: what individual actions on a baseball field actually contribute to a team’s winning or losing games? His answers led him to buck conventional wisdom, claiming for example that bunting and stealing bases were high-risk strategies that often hurt the team because they squandered outs, which he called a team’s most precious commodity. He claimed that walks were an underrated offensive weapon and that on-base percentage and slugging percentage were better indicators of offensive performance than batting average.

James’s insights were not accepted by everyone. Michael Lewis’s 2003 book Moneyball tells how Oakland A’s general manager Billy Beane struggled against conventional wisdom and baseball old-timers in applying James’s insights to his running of the team. But Beane made believers of a lot of people by using those insights to build a small-market, low-payroll team into a perennial contender by acquiring players who were undervalued by other teams but had the skills James insisted were crucial to baseball success.

It took a couple of decades, but Bill James changed the way people understand baseball. Today newspaper sports sections publish players’ OPS (on-base percentage plus slugging percentage) alongside their batting averages, and other James-originated concepts like range factor are routinely used in evaluating players. And James himself has now been hired as a consultant by the Boston Red Sox (who have won two World Series since adopting a Jamesian approach to player evalution), a supreme concession of respect.

So what does Bill James have to do with Karl Popper, or anything serious, for that matter? Listen to James in his essay “Intro to Sabermetrics” in The Bill James Gold Mine 2009: “[The entire difference between sabermetrics and traditional sportswriting] is merely the habit of beginning with a question, rather than beginning with an answer... The person who begins with the question itself naturally focuses not on what he does know, but on what he does not know.”

Now listen to Karl Popper: “...we do not start from observations but always from problems—either from practical problems or from a theory which has run into difficulties.”

James goes on: “Forced to confront his ignorance, [the researcher] is forced to find ways to figure out the information that he is missing... Through this process, he winds up contributing things that were not known before... We are never certain... We are just doing the best we can. Our methods are always flawed, and our answers are usually tentative and muddled... But the difference between knowledge and BS is that knowledge moves forward, whereas BS moves in circles... We wind up with methods that get better over time.”

Sound familiar? Here’s how Popper put it: “Scientific theories, if they are not falsified, for ever remain hypotheses or conjectures... The growth of knowledge proceeds from old problems to new problems, by means of conjectures and refutations.”

I don’t know if Bill James has ever read Karl Popper, but he’s a textbook example of the Popperian thinker at work, and his success in increasing our understanding of baseball is testimony to the power of Popper’s supremely rational approach to the accumulation of knowledge. He's only a baseball writer, but Bill James has a lot to teach any number of supposedly serious social scientists.

So give Bill James the Karl Popper Award for the Advancement of Knowledge, and take one last Bill James quote to heart: “... there will never be a shortage of ignorance... The things that we do not know are inexhaustible.”

Which echoes, of course, my favorite Karl Popper quote: “Our knowledge can only be finite, while our ignorance must necessarily be infinite.”

Sam Reaves
www.samreaves.com

Capturing the low ground

2009-09-09T18:42:00.000-07:00

In my last post I defended Whole Foods CEO John Mackey from the less temperate responses to his Wall Street Journal editorial on health care and suggested that a call to boycott is not exactly a constructive contribution to the health care debate.

Of course, there are intemperate reactions on both sides of the political divide. Over on the right there are people who are carrying out their own campaign to stifle rational debate by resorting to invective, distortion and intimidation.

First there’s the fellow who showed up at the health care rally with the gun on his hip and the sign quoting Jefferson’s remark about the tree of liberty and the blood of patriots. This made a lot of people’s hair stand on end, and for good reason.

It’s not the gun per se I have a problem with; in New Hampshire he wasn’t violating any law. It’s the implication that a federal role in health care poses a threat to our liberty so urgent and so draconian as to justify violent revolution that makes me wonder what this gentleman has been ingesting besides that good mountain spring water. Taken together with the gun, I think we have to say that this disqualifies this particular citizen from a seat at the roundtable. Intimidation has no role in the discussion of public policy problems.

Then there are all the Obama-Hitler comparisons popping up in various venues, from the fringes of rally crowds to Rush Limbaugh’s radio show. If there’s one thing guaranteed to transform a debate instantly from a rational discussion to a shouting match, it’s an implication of fascism. As tokens, Hitler and his Nazis remain the polemical equivalent of tossing a match into a pool of gasoline.

Liberals, of course have been blithely comparing conservatives to Nazis for a long time, so perhaps a backlash was inevitable. The comparison of Democrats to Nazis is currently fashionable in some conservative circles partly because of a book by Jonah Goldberg called Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning, which reminds readers of the ‘Socialist’ part of National Socialism and points out similar elements in the history of the American left. But the point of Goldberg’s book is to attack careless use of the term ‘fascist’ by the left, and Goldberg himself says, in the current issue of the National Review, “...I don’t think it is remotely right or fair to call Obama a crypto-Nazi.”

Doing so may be merely hysterical, or it may be a dishonest attempt to preempt debate. That was true when the left was comparing Bush to Hitler, and it’s true now. It’s an attempt to make people’s minds snap shut instead of remaining open for the long slog of evaluating evidence and arguments. It’s an attempt to avoid doing your homework on the issues.

I don’t know who’s ahead in the dishonesty sweepstakes; at this point there are lots of people on both the left and the right who would rather caricature and demonize their opponents than tackle the hard work of calm, rational analysis and persuasion. So when people start trading accusations about whether the right or the left is more dishonest, I lose interest.

I’ll listen to anyone who is genuinely interested in the truth. But if you’re more interested in scoring points than in advancing the debate, don’t pester me. I’m too busy doing my homework.

Sam Reaves
www.samreaves.com

Is Health Care a Right?

2009-08-16T15:17:00.000-07:00

John Mackey, founder of the upscale Whole Foods supermarket chain, has raised howls of protest by saying, in a guest editorial in the Wall Street Journal, that “a careful reading of both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution will not reveal any intrinsic right to health care, food or shelter... because there isn't any.”

Outraged, an array of left-leaning pundits and organizations is calling for a boycott of Whole Foods. Mackey has become a hate figure for daring to publish a reasoned, temperate opinion on the health care debate that challenges a basic assumption of the left.

It should be noted that a call to boycott is not an argument. It is an attempt to punish dissent. If the left wants to advance the health care debate, it should attempt to refute Mackey’s argument, not simply demonize him. Sadly, a quick scan of responses to Mackey’s article shows a heavy preponderance of invective over argument.

The unexamined assumption that people have a right to health care needs to be debated because so many people share it so unquestioningly. And if you start with that as an assumption, much of the opposition to government-provided health care will seem malicious and obtuse. This is a systemic problem: the left, working on assumptions the right does not share, proposes something; the right, not bothering to elucidate the difference in assumptions, opposes it and is accused of mean-spiritedness and other moral failings. This lack of philosophical curiosity poisons the debate.

I’ve said before that calling health care a right is problematic; maybe it’s time to discuss it a little further. Saying that health care (or decent housing, or any other goods or services) is a fundamental right is problematic because it is tantamount to declaring that you have a claim on somebody else’s labor or time or possessions. The amount of philosophical justification accompanying this declaration is usually approximately zero.

The best discussion of the philosophical grounding of rights that I know of is a book called Persons, Rights and the Moral Community by Loren Lomasky. In this book Lomasky tries to get at the heart of what rights are and why they are generally held to be “untrumpable”—that is, how they are different from mere preferences, which can be thwarted without the perception that a violation has occurred.

The entire argument is beyond the scope of a blog post, but Lomasky does take on the question of positive versus negative rights. Negative rights are those which boil down to saying that you have the right not to be messed with. Positive rights are those which express a claim to something concrete—goods or services. Classical liberalism, roughly speaking the philosophical tradition of our Founding Fathers, held negative rights to be very important but did not recognize positive rights. (Take a look at the Bill of Rights for examples of negative rights.) The line of thinking that goes from Marx through European social democracy to modern American liberalism tends to stress positive rights (while being a touch more selective about negative rights).

Lomasky points out that the fact that something is needed does not imply that one has a right to it. Our list of potential needs includes things which cannot be provided by others, like intelligence. There is no logical correspondence between needs and rights.

Any attempt to define a list of things crucial enough to be regarded as positive rights is necessarily arbitrary. (Just a house? Why not a car, if you live far from where the jobs are?) Philosophical clarity gets lost pretty quickly.

But more importantly, need on your part does not imply a duty of sacrifice on mine—if I have two good corneas and you have none, does your pressing need create a right to one of my (or anyone else’s) corneas? It may be praiseworthy of me to provide you with a good by my sacrifice, but that does not make it your right.

Asserting a right to housing asserts a claim on the labor of carpenters, masons, etc. What gives rise to this claim? A right, remember, is something that cannot be trumped. When a right to a good is legitimately asserted, it must provided. Do those whose labor provides the good deserve compensation? If so, how are they to be compensated? Questions of payment are inescapable, and a positive right is economically indistinguishable from any other good.

Health care goods and services obey the laws of economics even if you don’t think they should. Ask the British National Health Service. An asserted right proves to be inextricable from the grubby reality of overworked doctors and long waiting lists. When doctors in a public health service go on strike, are they violating the rights of the patients who are not served? Philosophical clarity gets lost here, too.

And philosophical clarity is at a premium. As Lomasky points out, an escalation in claims of rights makes public problems more intractable, since when perceived rights come into conflict, a judgment against one party leaves the loser with a sense of grievance. It is an advantage to have a clear criterion for rights and make sure that our legal system guarantees them.

As Lomasky says, an important aspect of the classical liberal position on rights is its modesty: since the costs to others of conceding these negative rights is lower, they are less likely to opt out of the system. A regime of rights will not be respected if it is too costly.

So I think John Mackey is right. Now, none of this means that we should not place a high priority on the provision of health care, education and any number of other socially useful goods to all members of the population. That’s just good government. Urgency in providing desirable social goods ought to be way up there on our scale of public policy values.

But calling real-world goods “rights” complicates their provision by obscuring the very real costs of providing them. Call a good or a service a right, and you still have to figure out how to pay for it. It doesn’t appear out of thin air.

If you’re outraged by this position, so be it. But the burden of proof is on you to show how you’re going to pay for all the good things you think we are entitled to. John Mackey presented a list of reasonable proposals for doing that in his widely vilified op-ed. Before you join the boycott, you might just want to run an eye over them.

Sam Reaves
www.samreaves.com

Dangerous Ideas, Part 2

2009-05-31T14:21:00.000-07:00

Continuing to delve into What is Your Dangerous Idea?, edited by John Brockman (see my last post), I’ve been finding more things that challenge my thinking, which is of course what we should all be doing all the time but don’t—it’s a lot more comfortable to read only things we know in advance we’re going to agree with.

With my libertarian inclinations, I had to take a look at Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s piece entitled "The Free Market". Coming just after Matt Ridley’s "Government Is the Problem, Not the Solution", which was of course right in my comfort zone, this essay takes the opposite tack, challenging the value of the free market.

Csikszentmihalyi is bothered by what he sees as the triumph of free-market ideology, to the point where "it is embraced as a final solution to the ills of humankind". He claims that this overreach "risks destroying both the material resources and the cultural achievements our species has so painstakingly developed" and says that things like health, education, infrastructure, environment, human rights, and public safety "need to become part of our social and political agenda".

Well. I had somehow received a vague impression that health, education, infrastructure, environment, human rights, and public safety were on the social and political agenda, but I could be wrong. Let’s take a look at Csikszentmihalyi’s charges and see if they hold up. To begin with, we should ask whether his claim that the free market reins supreme is accurate. A key tactic in political polemics is to exaggerate the gains of one’s opponents, as when the Dittohead right fumes that President Obama is dragging us down the road to socialism. Get people alarmed about the apocalypse and they’ll be ripe for your pitch.

Csikszentmihalyi’s claims seem a little fevered: who exactly is embracing the free market "as a final solution to the ills of humankind?" (Note the use of the inflammatory phrase "the final solution".) Certainly not the Republican Party, which is enthusiastically behind any number of market-thwarting measures, from agricultural subsidies to windfall taxes on oil companies any time the price rises. If Csikszentmihalyi is aiming at genuine free-market ideologues like, say, Milton Friedman, he should be aware that Friedman’s prescriptions have never been more than imperfectly implemented anywhere. (Even in Chile, where free-market ideology was adopted with reasonable enthusiasm, there were always exceptions, such as limitations on capital flows.) And Csikszentmihalyi should actually go and read Friedman, whose temperate (and genuinely liberal) views were a very long way from considering anything to be a "final solution" to our problems.

Such caricatures, of course, are a favorite tool of the polemicist. Csikszentmihalyi’s statement of the free-market position is that it "must take precedence over any other value." Any other value? Who believes this? Who opposes efforts to disrupt human trafficking networks on the grounds that the market must be allowed to operate? Not me, at any rate, or any free-market advocate that I know of. Basic human rights take precedence over the pimp’s right to buy and sell Romanian orphan girls. And it is the proper role of political powers to ensure this. I don’t know of any responsible figure, not even in the darkest heart of the Republican Party, who really thinks that the free market ought to be "the ultimate arbiter of political decisions".

The whole point about the free market is that economic decisions and political decisions are two different animals. Economics is about the distribution of wealth, while politics is about the distribution of power. When politicians try to make economic decisions, they often get them wrong. That’s why people stood in line for toilet paper in the Soviet Union. The proper role of politics is to take care of the things that are more important than economics, such as the legal and institutional framework of society and collective defense against force and fraud. Those things really are important, and they ought to be enough to keep the politicians busy. But they keep losing sight of the distinction.

Adam Smith’s insight was that an economy, like an ecology, is too complicated for politicians to try to micro-manage it. Smith’s "invisible hand" refers to the self-adjusting mechanism of supply and demand. This mechanism is, at this point, time-tested and widely recognized. Even Csikszentmihalyi admits that it is "based on reasonable empirical foundations." Free market ideology simply means the claim that for the most part, as far as any generalization holds water in the real world, in the long run the supply/demand mechanism will do a better job of providing for people’s material needs than any number of government planning commissions. Of course, we have other needs besides the material ones. Those are what politicians, religious leaders and your mom and dad are properly in charge of.

I don’t think Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi is entirely clear on the distinction between politics and economics, as shown by his list of desirable social goods above. Some of them, like human rights and public safety, are not goods that lend themselves to an economic market. They’re things that require the exertion or the threat of force to safeguard. They’re political goods. But other things on that list, like health, education and infrastructure, involve goods and services that obey the laws of economics even if Csikszentmihalyi doesn’t think they should. The free market may help to provide them, and inept political interventions may impede their provision. To make that claim is very far from claiming that the free market is the ultimate value.

So I think, on one hand, that Csikszentmihalyi is more alarmed about the triumph of the free market than he needs to be. We’re a long way from seeing the free market hold sway everywhere. And on the other hand I think that Csikszentmihalyi ought to consider that the free market is not inimical to the things he values. The proper mix of public and private provision of things like health care and education will always be a legitimate topic of debate. And rigid absolutism about the free market is no more justifiable than rigid absolutism about the state. But I think it’s equally rare. Hysteria about the dire effects of free-market ideology only muddies the waters.

Sam Reaves
www.samreaves.com

Dangerous Ideas

2009-05-24T11:00:00.000-07:00

Ask most people what philosophy is and they won’t be able to tell you. I was a little unclear on the concept myself as an undergraduate philosophy major. It took me a few years of adult vicissitudes and political peregrinations to begin to understand how ideas shape the society we live in.

If you need a jump-start to your philosophical program you might take a look at a book called What is Your Dangerous Idea?, edited by John Brockman, the publisher and editor of Edge, a website dedicated to pushing the intellectual envelope. At the suggestion of psychologist Steven Pinker, who provides an introduction, Brockman asked a range of thinkers in a variety of disciplines to discuss ideas they felt were dangerous in the sense that they threatened current conventional wisdom or, in Pinker’s phrase, “corrode the prevailing moral order”.

In his introduction, Pinker gives a long list of provocative questions: Did the crime rate go down in the nineties because of the advent of widespread abortion in the seventies? Does allowing security services to use torture make us safer? Do black men have higher levels of testosterone? Are Ashkenazi Jews smarter? Has religion precipitated more genocide than Nazism? Would functioning markets, i.e. auctions, in organs and adoption rights improve outcomes for transplant recipients and unwanted babies? Do women and men have different aptitudes?

Whatever your ideological orientation, you’re likely to find some of these questions unsettling. Pinker discusses the argument for limiting discussion of dangerous ideas but comes down on the side of rational discussion of even the most provocative notions. And then the fun starts, with contributors throwing out ideas like, “We Have No Souls”, “Everything Is Pointless”, “Groups of People May Differ Genetically in Their Average Talents and Temperaments”, “Science Must Destroy Religion” and “Science Will Never Silence God”. You may have noted that there is no particular partisan slant, which is a refreshing feature. Pinker adduces the lynch-mob response to Lawrence Summers’s suggestion that discrimination is not the only reason for women’s underrepresentation in science as an example of how even academia, supposedly the citadel of rational discussion, behaves like the Spanish Inquisition when received ideas are threatened. The book’s agenda is to open minds.

I’ve just started dipping into the book, but already I’ve found ideas I endorse whole-heartedly and others that challenge me. One essay that caught my eye was “The Evolution of Evil” by psychologist David Buss. Buss suggests that killing can be a perfectly rational response to any number of circumstances and that we have an evolutionarily hard-wired predilection to violence, particularly with regard to “outgroups”, members of another tribe. My reaction was, “Well, of course.” Why anyone should find this surprising is beyond me. But apparently there are still people who, as Buss says, “refuse to recognize that there are dark sides of human nature that cannot be wished away by attributing them to the modern ills of culture, poverty, pathology or exposure to media violence.”

I’ve never had a problem with Buss’s dangerous idea: the religion I was raised with calls hard-wired evil Original Sin. But you don’t have to be a Christian to recognize it. What’s important is to recognize that we need moral codes to set limits to our violent predilections. And if you toss religion out the window, you’d better come up with some other way of encouraging people to set limits on their own behavior, and fast.

But other ideas here do unsettle me, particularly Eric R. Kandel’s “Free Will Is Exercised Unconsciously” and Clay Shirky’s “Free Will Is Going Away”, both of which call into question our traditional notion that people are capable of making choices and bear the responsibility for those choices. I’m a big fan of the idea of responsibility: if you fail to hold people responsible for their behavior you find pretty quickly that there are few limits on their behavior. I think the idea of free will has crucial social utility even if the neural scientists can’t quite pin it down. But truth is important, so we have to consider the possibility that free will is an illusion.

I’m not ready to write it off. I’d throw out the hypothesis that free will is in a sense optional: if you believe you have it you probably do exercise it at least occasionally, while if you don’t believe in it you really are allowing yourself to be buffeted by the deterministic winds. Does that mean you have an excuse for misbehavior?

That’s a philosophical question, and there are lots of them we need to be thinking about, because they determine how we arrange our institutions to handle the messiness of human life. Philosophy needs to be more than just an academic refuge for the inarticulate, and this provocative book puts it back where it belongs, smack in the middle of our public debate.

Sam Reaves
www.samreaves.com

The U.N. on Drugs

2009-04-01T08:35:00.000-07:00

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has gone down to Mexico and conceded the obvious, that Mexico’s hideous problems with gang violence are intimately linked to the enormous U.S. demand for illegal drugs. Unfortunately, she neglected to concede something which ought to be equally obvious, namely that making those drugs illegal in the first place causes more problems than it solves.

The debate rages on between those who think that just a little more repression will allow us to lick this thing and those, like me, who think it’s futile to treat a public health problem as a criminal problem. The current issue of The Economist carries responses in its Letters section to the call it issued a week ago for some form of legalization, and one of the responses provides a good illustration of the old lame arguments wielded by the Prohibitionists.

A spokesman for the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime writes, “Drugs are controlled because they are harmful, they are not harmful because they are controlled.” Well, er, yes. Thanks for clarifying that. Nobody’s claiming that drugs are harmless. The case for legalization does not rest on the idea that drugs don’t hurt people. It rests on the idea that apocalyptic levels of violence, astronomical enrichment of thugs and relentless subversion of legitimate states hurt more people, more seriously, than the struggles with addiction of a minority of users. These evils are the direct effect of the illegal status of drugs and have nothing to do with the effects on the user of the drugs themselves. Criminalizing trade in sought-after goods only insures that the trade will be controlled by the most ruthless criminals, and that they will grow rich. That is the crux of the argument.

The constant harping on the harmfulness of drug use is a massive and dishonest distraction on the part of the drug warriors. The real issue is the catastrophic legal, social and economic effects of prohibition, and there is no greater illustration of willful, stubborn, narrow-minded obtuseness than the refusal of the drug warriors to confront or even acknowledge the issue. The standard reply to arguments for legalization is the disgraceful smear that its advocates are either drug users themselves or are in denial about the harmfulness of drugs.

I’m neither. I’ve seen the effects of drug addiction at first hand. I know that cocaine or heroin or meth can ruin a life. But here’s the thing—so can alcohol. I’ve seen that, too. And we gave up on criminalization of alcohol because we saw that it created more problems than it solved. What is it going to take for our decision-makers to confront the similar but much larger problems spawned by the Drug War? Prohibition made Chicago a cesspool of corruption. Its modern version threatens to take out Colombia, Mexico, Afghanistan...

The esteemed spokesman for the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime continues: “The fact that certain transactions are hard to control does not mean that they should be made legal. I doubt that The Economist would support the legalisation of paedophilia, human-trafficking or arms smuggling as ‘the least bad solution’.” No, probably not. But pedophilia and sexual slavery are wrong because they have victims. People’s rights are infringed. A child is raped, a woman held in bondage. That’s why they are crimes. (For that matter, the laws against murder are imperfectly enforceable. But we try, because murder is the ultimate infringement of rights.)

But when a junkie sticks that needle into his vein, it’s hard to say whose rights are being infringed, even if addiction is involved. The junkie may have surrendered his autonomy to an extent (though never completely, or else nobody would overcome addiction), but that does not constitute one person’s infringement of another’s rights. And properly considered, our criminal code should be set up to protect against the violation of rights, not the consequences of bad decisions.

The usual reply is to sneer at the notion of ‘victimless crimes’ and point out that drug use has ripple effects on people beyond the user. These, it is alleged, are the victims, and they justify the ferocious repression unleashed in an attempt to control the drug trade. But guess what? The list of behaviors that have ripple effects is endless. Alcohol use certainly does. And where those effects lead identifiably to infringements of others’ rights, as in drunk driving, we properly police them. And we would continue to police the identifiable external effects of drug use were they to be legalized.

What we wouldn’t continue to do if we were to abandon the futile and oppressive War on Drugs is to imprison people who have never used violence or fraud against another, subsidize the enrichment of criminal gangs, provide powerful incentives for law enforcement corruption, and discredit the rule of law by insisting that what you choose to put into your system is the government’s business.

Nobody’s claiming that legalization would be a panacea—it would bring a host of new problems that would have to be managed, from increased addiction to the creation of a sensible regulation regime. And we’ll be dealing with the newly enriched drug thugs and their heirs for generations, just as we’re still contending with Capone’s successors in Chicago. But these problems couldn’t possibly be worse than what we have now. Ask the people in Juarez or Tijuana or Freetown or Kabul.

And do me a favor and don’t insult my intelligence or my good faith by bringing up the same old discredited arguments and smears. If you’re against legalization, it's time to raise your game.

Sam Reaves
www.samreaves.com

Mentally taxing

2009-03-16T08:43:00.000-07:00

Expecting sound public policy to come out of Congress is like expecting prime rib to come out of a sausage machine, but sometimes our legislators surpass themselves. The latest turkey to make the rounds of the Capitol building is the proposed mileage tax which would replace the current tax on gasoline consumption. This is an idea so bad as to confirm everything Mark Twain said about our representatives in D.C. (“Suppose you were an idiot and suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.”)

The alleged problem with the gas tax is that as motorists drive more fuel-efficient cars, the gas tax yields less money. And nothing appalls a public servant more than sinking tax revenues. So now they want to tax you on the miles you drive, not the gasoline you buy.

To enforce this, mileage tax proponents want to make everybody install GPS devices in their cars so the government can track where your car has been and how far you’ve driven. Yes, you heard that correctly.

Man, where do you start in taking on this stinker? To begin with, isn’t it a good thing if people are switching to more fuel-efficient cars? Isn’t that what we want, at a time when carbon emissions and dependence on foreign oil are critical concerns? Replacing the gas tax with a mileage tax removes an incentive to watch your fuel consumption. It means if you have to drive 500 miles, you might as well do it in a gas-sucking Hummer rather than an economical Civic. What it amounts to is a subsidy for gas guzzlers. How smart do you have to be to figure that one out?

Smarter than Senator Barbara Boxer, apparently; she calls the mileage tax a “brilliant idea”. But even she balks at the GPS idea, calling it “a Big Brother system”. Well, hello, Senator. Her idea to enforce the law? An honor system in which drivers report their own mileage. This haphazard approach to public policy indicates the fog of cognitive dissonance in which too many of our legislators move.

It’s not too late to deep-six this thing; call or e-mail your representatives in Congress and tell them to start giving the same amount of basic common-sense consideration to the legislative proposals before them that they give to their personal finances. And hope that's not asking too much.

Sam Reaves
www.samreaves.com

Cowards

2009-03-02T21:09:00.000-08:00

Attorney General Eric Holder said the other day that we are a nation of cowards when it comes to talking about race. I’m not sure who he was talking about. Was he talking about Ward Connerly? Bill Cosby? They’ve taken a lot of heat for suggesting that not all of black Americans’ problems are caused by white racism, but they keep on saying it. I think that’s fairly courageous.

What people usually mean when they say that we need a frank talk about race is that they want you to sit still and shut up while they lecture you. Oddly, the people most likely to call for a frank talk about race are usually the most strident in shouting down a Ward Connerly or a Bill Cosby.

The idea that white Americans are all secret racists and that they must be outed before black people can progress further is an appealing narrative for a lot of people. Now, some white people are racists, of course, some of them quite openly. And no doubt others are secret racists. But a lot of us aren’t racists at all. How can we prove it? We can’t. All we can do is go on living in integrated neighborhoods, sending our kids to integrated schools, treating our black neighbors with courtesy and respect, and being honest and even-handed in our discussions of the profound links between race and social status in this country. And sooner or later we’re likely to be accused of racism anyway.

This is one of those non-falsifiable propositions that Karl Popper warned us about. Just as the Spanish Inquisition never let an absence of evidence spoil a good accusation of secret Jewishness, the idea of secret racism is irrefutable. There are people who will never be convinced that a white person can simply and honestly regard black people as peers (which of course includes the possibility of disagreeing with them from time to time). The myth of universal, ineradicable racism, unadmitted or suppressed, is just too appealing.

I’m tired of being a coward, so in response to Attorney General Holder’s exhortation, I’m going to toss out a few ideas here.

First, racism is a human universal and will always be with us. It exists everywhere on the globe and has existed at all times in history. People have always lived in tribes, and modern industrial society, while it has undermined tribalism along with a lot of other traditions, has not eliminated the fundamental human inclination to cluster with similar people and mistrust different people. People don’t even have to be of different races to hate each other. Ask the Bosnians and the Serbs or the Tutsis and the Hutus.

Second, a decline in racism is desirable and, furthermore, quite possible. Racism decreases when there is a perception that people are equal before the law and that nobody is getting special breaks. It decreases when disadvantaged minorities make significant social progress. It decreases in a dynamic, socially mobile society like ours. But it never disappears. Some people are always going to be happier blaming the other tribe for their problems. This is a pathology, but we’re probably stuck with it.

Third, racism can decrease to a level at which, while it is ugly and hurtful, it is intermittent, localized and no longer the primary determinant of a person’s chances of success in life. When this point is reached, that’s about as good as it gets in human society.

Now, I’m not about to declare that we have reached that point in American society. A consensus on that will emerge when it happens. But I imagine we’re closer than, say, Al Sharpton thinks. And I believe it’s a mistake to hold out for the end of racism when you could be getting on with the business of social and economic progress even though some people don’t like the way you look or talk.

The local YWCA where I live sports a sign out front that proclaims that they are “Empowering women, eliminating racism”. I’m fairly confident they’re accomplishing the first part of that proposition, but I wonder about the second part. I don’t think it’s possible. And I think it’s a waste of time to set our sights that high. We should be aiming for something much less abstract and much more attainable—a society in which the color of your skin is not the main thing that determines your chances in life, even if some people insist on being rude about it.

And that’s just a matter of taking care of all the obvious but labor-intensive things we need to worry about in a working democracy—institutional reform, the rule of law, and of course, free discussion. The kind of discussion where a Ward Connerly or a Bill Cosby can be heard as well as an Al Sharpton.

I wonder if that’s what Eric Holder meant.

Sam Reaves
www.samreaves.com

Conflicted

2009-01-06T11:23:00.000-08:00

“We’re on the wrong side,” a friend of mine said recently, referring to American support for Israel against the Palestinians. “I’m sorry, but we’re just on the wrong side.”

At a time when shocking images of civilian casualties in smoking Gaza streets dominate the airwaves, that statement is going to find a lot of sympathetic ears. It’s tough to root for the side that’s leading in the body count by a factor of more than a hundred. Every time Israel goes over a border and starts killing Arabs, you know in advance they are going to lose the war for public opinion, hands down.

Of course, the Israelis don’t care. For them the only war that counts is the real one, the one that determines whether Israel survives. Israeli minds are fairly focused at this point. And with the death camps still within living memory, they’re a little touchy about calls to eliminate the Jewish state.

Which does not, of course, excuse war crimes, ethnic cleansing and the other sins of which Israel stands accused. Victimhood is not sainthood, and it’s hard to sell the Palestinians on the idea that the Jews should get their land because of a European quarrel. There is an irreconcilable difference of perception at the heart of this conflict.

For the West, the primary fact about Israel is that it exists in compensation for the hideous crime of the Holocaust. For the Palestinians, and the Arabs in general, the primary fact is that Israel is the last colonial implantation in their world. At a time when Syria, Iraq, and even the backward Saudis were gaining their independence from British and French colonial hegemony, the area of the Levant known as Palestine was being settled by an influx of Europeans, culminating in the proclamation of the State of Israel in 1948 and a war which resulted, whether intentionally or not, in what can only be called ethnic cleansing.

“Israel needs no reasons to attack Gaza or anywhere else because it is a state that was founded in the beginning on aggression and murder and destruction and expulsion”, wrote Abdel Sattar Qasem on Al-Jazeera Net the other day. That’s certainly not the way most Americans see it, but that’s the way the Arabs see it, and anyone who does not grasp that does not grasp the first thing about the conflict. There is an abyss between Western and Arab perception of the conflict which may simply be unbridgeable.

Israel is an essentially Western nation. It looks and sounds familiar to us, and it has our sympathy because of what Hitler did. But the Holocaust buys no sympathy from the Arabs, who plead, “We had nothing to do with it.” For Palestinian farmers who lost their land, by processes with varying degrees of legitimacy, Israel is nothing but the foreigners who came and took their land. This dovetailed, of course, with religious animosities, and an unsavory element of anti-Semitism has always been prominent in resistance to Israel, further complicating questions of right and wrong. But the Palestinians would resist Israel even if it had been founded by Methodists or Scientologists. In fact, they weren’t too keen on the Turks, who were fellow Muslims. At heart it’s about conflicting claims to the land and sovereignty.

Why are we involved in a mess like this? We are Israel’s primary patron. We give them lots of money and sell them lots of weapons. Those cluster bombs lying in the Lebanon weeds and those laser-guided bombs taking out Hamas big shots and their families in Gaza came from us. It’s not hard to understand why the protesters are massing outside our embassies around the world.

But it’s also not hard to understand why we have supported Israel. It is the closest thing to an open society in that part of the world. It has effective political opposition and spirited debate resting on thoroughgoing freedom of expression and independent courts and congenial social mores. In comparison to the grim dictatorships and stagnant, repressed societies around it, Israel looks pretty good.

But all of those fine qualities have been stressed and have sometimes cracked under the strain of occupying the territories Israel won in the 1967 Six-Day War. Occupation of hostile territory never brings out the best in a society, and it doesn’t take many terrorist outrages to weaken scruples against ruthless security policies, as we in the United States have found out since September 11, 2001.

So what about it? Are we on the wrong side? That’s a tougher one to answer than my friends on either side would concede. I speak Arabic, have traveled extensively in the Arab world, and have many Arab friends. I think the Palestinian grievance is legitimate. I know people who have suffered, directly and severely, from the establishment of the Israeli state and from its occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. I don’t excuse Israeli excesses or discount Arab lives. I’ve made a good-faith effort to sift through the history and the legalities and the arguments on both sides. And it’s still a tough call, whatever my friend says.

To begin with, there’s more than one way to define what the sides are. Viewed solely as a territorial dispute, we may well be on the wrong side. The case for a genuinely independent, contiguous Palestinian state is sound, and Israel’s decades-long efforts to settle the West Bank and hold on to it while undermining Palestinian authority over the territory can be fairly described as duplicitous.

But there’s another way to interpret what the sides are in this conflict. If you believe in the open society and the values that sustain it, in free expression and the rule of law and transparency and accountability, there’s not a lot to like about the Arab world and no reason to expect that a Palestinian state would be any different from any other Arab dictatorship. When the principal warring parties on the Palestinian side are the corrupt successors of the egregious Yasser Arafat and the suicidal extremists of Hamas, the prospects for an enlightened beacon of Arab progress in Palestine are not good.

One plausible way of deciding which side to support in a conflict is to ask, about each side, the question: What kind of world do they want? I was asked once what the difference was between the Iraqi insurgents attacking U.S. troops and the French Resistance attacking Nazi troops. I said it depended entirely on what the insurgents wanted: that if all they wanted was a country free of foreign invaders, then they deserved our respect, but that if what they wanted was a new caliphate and worldwide jihad, to hell with them; I had to root for the Marines.

In the same way, we can ask what kind of world each side in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict wants. Spend a week in Tel Aviv and a week in Damascus and tell me which place looks more like a progressive, forward-looking society. We have a model for what kind of world the Israelis want, and several for what kind of world the Palestinians want, and these models complicate the reckoning of which side is the right side.

None of which grants Israel license to do anything it pleases. Israel must be held to the same standards to which we hold other countries that claim to be advanced nations. But it should be remembered that Israel lives under active hostile threat to an extent that is unimaginable in the comfortable nations where protesters burn the Israeli flag, and hostility does not bring out the best in people or states.

The Palestinians opted for spectacular, provocative violence against civilians as their principal tactic in the wake of the 1967 defeat, and whatever the justifications for that tactic may be, it ought to be clear by now that its principal effect is to harden Israeli hearts. No nation has ever mismanaged its case before the world as badly as the Palestinians.

A lot of energy is expended asserting and denying moral equivalencies in this struggle— each act of violence is justified as retaliation for a previous one, outrage is directed with assiduous selectivity to the other side’s provocations exclusively. At this point, a tit-for-tat accounting is senseless. Analyzing whose provocations are more outrageous gets us nowhere. The only thing to do is determine the fundamental conditions for a solution that will stabilize the situation. And this solution is going to have to be imposed by third parties in accordance with principles rather than interests.

As paymaster, we have considerable influence. And we ought to be able to articulate the required principles. But we keep fumbling. When Hamas gained legitimacy through an election in Gaza sponsored by us, we then refused to recognize the Hamas government on the grounds that it was a terrorist organization, in effect abrogating the election. This confirmed Arab perception of double standards. Hamas is indeed a terrorist organization, but it is more than that: it is also a significant provider of social services in Gaza, and if we deny that an electoral result confers any legitimacy at all, we dismiss the concept of democracy we are supposedly trying to peddle.

Of course, in the wake of the unilateral Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, Hamas booted its chance to rule with the bloody-mindedness that characterizes Arab political culture. All Hamas had to do was administer the territory competently in order to make great gains both in legitimacy and quality of life for its subjects, and instead it encouraged homicidal hobbyists to lob rockets into Israeli towns. It is hard to resist the judgment that the current Israeli invasion of Gaza was intentionally provoked. Extremism and suicidal gestures gain greater glory in Arab political culture than the actual hard work of running a government.

So who do we root for and what do we do? I think we root for anybody who offers to live by the principles that have created such a clear difference between the quality of life in, say, Toronto and that in, say, Aden. In many cases this means rooting for the Israelis, though there are heroic individuals and organizations on the Arab side that are committed to advancing the rule of law, political liberalism (in the general sense) and tolerant civil society.

As for what we do, we go back to the elements of a solution that are already in place and await negotiation of final details. There is widespread consensus that a two-state solution is attainable. Even the Saudis and the Syrians are on board. But there are troublesome details yet to be worked out, and significant resistance on both sides. It’s going to take significant investment of U.S. political capital.

The heart of the problem is that Israel is going to have to make painful territorial concessions, and no Israeli government is ever going to make them without rock-solid security guarantees to compensate for the loss of strategic depth. The experience of Gaza, where Hamas confirmed every Israeli fear by exploiting the withdrawal to increase its attacks, has set back the peace process immeasurably. There is going to have to be a reckoning on the Palestinian side, and we can only hope that Hamas loses the Palestinian civil war.

But there will also have to be a reckoning on the Israeli side. Any lasting solution will be bitterly opposed by the Israeli right, and civil conflict along the lines of that experienced by the French in their withdrawal from Algeria cannot be ruled out. It’s going to hurt.

But I believe that Israel’s long-term survival requires an end to the occupation and the establishment of a viable and genuinely independent Palestinian state. The current situation is not sustainable in the long term; the stresses on Israeli society are too great. Making peace will be a great risk for Israel, and the role of outsiders will be crucial. We should use our power as paymaster and, if necessary, as preeminent military power, to police a two-state solution. The Israelis will not settle for anything less than genuinely secure borders. And the elements on the Palestinian side that will never settle for any accommodation with Israel will need to be suppressed.

It’s a mess, and our role is not a comfortable one. The real question is: should we guarantee Israel’s survival? If the creation of a Palestinian state proves to be a fatal undermining of Israeli security, should the United States step into the breach? (Don’t kid yourself; it will fall on us alone, as the Europeans are terminally conflicted on this question and militarily impotent.)

My answer would be that it depends on the direction Israeli society takes. Not all indicators in the stressed Israeli polity are positive. A genuinely open Israeli society would deserve to be defended. But then, we can hope that the Arabs would recognize the value of a genuinely open Israeli society as a neighbor. And it’s not impossible that Arab society will itself evolve toward the open society as described by Karl Popper, in which power is under control and rational critical discussion determines policy. The open society is always the right side.

The trick, as always, will be to support the most principled elements on both sides, a thing much more easily said than done.

Sam Reaves

samreaves.com

Accountability, cont.

2008-12-07T09:45:00.000-08:00

Holding powerful people accountable for the consequences of their actions can be tough. It’s usually easy for the people at the top to find a scapegoat lower down when something goes wrong. But if the disasters they engineer are spectacular enough, the outcry is usually sufficient to make even powerful people hurt a little and sometimes give up some of their power.

Unless, that is, they hold a government position. In the private sector, people lose their jobs or even go to jail if they precipitate disasters on the job. In government, nothing happens to them unless they lose a war or get their generals so agitated that a coup ensues. In the meantime they’re generally pretty good at image management. There isn’t a tyrant in the world that doesn’t have a sizable fan club.

Multi-national corporations like Union Carbide at Bhopal can do a lot of damage, but but they are minor-leaguers compared with their public-sector rivals.

My local health-food restaurant has a picture of MaoTse-tung up on the wall, looking wise and benign. It’s a nice picture, and it gives the place a touch of color, indicating that the people that run the place have commendably progressive views and think that Mao was generally a fairly good fellow.

They need to read The Black Book of Communism, which details how somewhere between 20 and 43 million people starved to death as a direct result of Mao’s Great Leap Forward in 1959-61. This forced collectivization and clumsy industrialization of the Chinese peasantry laid waste to Chinese agriculture and led directly to what the authors of the book call “what was, and, one hopes, will forever remain, the most murderous famine of all time, anywhere in the world.” Among other attractive features of the scheme was forced labor, which led to minor glitches like the deaths of 10,000 out of 60,000 workers on one huge construction project in Henan.

The authors admit that “Undoubtedly it was not Mao’s intention to kill so many of his compatriots.” He was guilty merely of “economic incompetence, wholesale ignorance, and ivory-tower utopianism.” Those are crimes only if you work in the private sector, apparently. Mao’s reward for his body of work was canonization, both in China and in credulous circles outside it.

Of course, it’s easy to pick on outright totalitarians like the egregious Kim family regime in North Korea or the nightmarish Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. Even the left is a little embarrassed by them. But you’ll still see defenses of Julius Nyerere in Tanzania, who wrecked that country’s agriculture with another forced collectivization scheme. His Wikipedia entry notes laconically that "the country fell on hard economic times", choosing not to detail how Nyerere forced the country’s rural population into camps, expropriated the mercantile class and handed industry over to an incompetent bureaucracy.

I’ve been picking on the left so far, maybe because it irks me that left-wing figures always get a pass for good intentions that is not granted to right-wing villains. If you proclaim socialism or some other kind of utopianism as your goal, you can get away with an extraordinary amount of destructive mischief and outright crimes, and people will still sell T-shirts with your picture on them in health food stores.

But you don’t have to be a totalitarian megalomaniac to wreak havoc on an economy or society. Respected U.S. senators Reed Smoot and Willis C. Hawley did their bit to destroy prosperity in 1930 when the infamous tariff act that bears their name instantly kneecapped foreign trade with the U.S., tipping the rest of the world into depression. They were directly responsible for millions of job losses and the descent of large masses of people into penury, but nobody ever suggested they be put on trial for it. And the well-meaning Wayne Wheeler and Andrew Volstead, who midwifed Prohibition in the U.S. in 1919, were never called on the carpet for the explosion of violence and long-term entrenchment of organized crime that resulted from that little brainstorm. They have ideological soulmates in our present-day government, whose ferocious prosecution of the Drug War fuels gang shoot-outs on U.S. streets, large-scale havoc in Mexico and civil war in Colombia.

The people behind these follies may have only the purest of intentions. But bad government policy can do a lot of damage, and people in government are insulated from accountability in a way that you and I aren’t. Democracy is supposed to provide a check on the worst government abuses, but it’s a blunt instrument and an inefficient regulator. Still, it’s still the best thing we have, and it has to be safeguarded wherever it’s in danger. Hugo Chávez has been busily bankrupting Venezuela for a decade now, squandering its oil wealth on untenable populist social schemes. He’s not the first politician to do that. But what makes him a villain is his scheming to stay in power and eliminate all political opposition so he can’t be held accountable for the damage. The Venezuelans mustn’t let him get away with that.

A certain U.S. president may pop into your mind here. I don’t especially want to get involved in partisan arguments, and there’s no need for me to pile on; there are plenty of people on the Dubya beat already. And my view of the past eight years is probably a little more nuanced than that of the people who foam at the mouth and turn red when George Bush appears on TV. But it’s hard to argue that the second Bush administration has been a howling success. Fortunately, we have a Constitution that says you can’t have more than eight years in the Oval Office. That’s our insurance policy.

Our clumsy and imperfect democracy is the only way, ultimately, we can hold these people accountable. We hand extraordinary power to our politicians, much more than the most devious CEO of a multi-national can ever hope for, and a lot of them misuse it. That’s why the brake pedal of democracy is so important. You can always throw the bums out.

If only everyone else in the world were as fortunate.

Sam Reaves
www.samreaves.com

Accountability

2008-11-25T10:53:00.000-08:00

In 1991 Union Carbide CEO Warren Anderson was hit with criminal charges in India resulting from the 1984 Bhopal disaster that killed up to 8,000 Indians, mostly poor, who had the misfortune to live near the Union Carbide plant that released a deadly cloud of methyl isocyanate into the air early one morning. Anderson was arrested and released on bail when he went to India in the wake of the disaster, then hounded for years by India’s attempts to extradite him following his retirement. He remains a hate figure for many, a symbol of reckless, ruthless multi-national corporations savaging the environment and leaving bodies in their wake as they squeeze dollars out of third-world workers.

I’m perfectly willing to acknowledge that Anderson bore some responsibility for the disaster; there were legitmate criticisms of UC’s safety record and procedures at the plant, and accountability is part of an executive’s job, one reason the top people pull down big pay packets. But in view of the fact that the actual cause of the accident was gross negligence if not sabotage (that remains in dispute) by low-level Indian workers at the plant, the attempt to throw Anderson into an Indian prison seems a bit extreme. Imputing criminal responsibility on the basis of an employee's misconduct? Man, that’s harsh.

But all right, fair enough: let’s agree that the people at the top of a hierarchy need to be held accountable, to the point of doing jail time if necessary, for everything that goes wrong on their watch. Let’s agree further that this should apply not only to the heads of multi-national corporations but also to heads of government.

Now that’s radical. Actually hold politicians accountable for the disasters they cause? That doesn’t happen much. The worst they can expect, usually, is to lose the next election, assuming they allow elections, and slink off to enjoy a cushy retirement.

But to avoid double standards, we need to think about tossing some of these scoundrels in jail. I have several candidates for time in the stocks, based on their performance in office. Let’s start with an obvious one:

Robert Mugabe I’m not sure anyone has ever wrecked a country as fast or as thoroughly as Mugabe, who has ruled Zimbabwe since 1980. We’ll skate over his massacre of political and tribal rivals in the 1980’s and his savage campaign against homosexuals to concentrate on his demolition of Zimbabwe’s economy and society, which began in earnest in the late nineties. When white minority rule ended in 1980, Zimbabwe was a reasonably prosperous country that fed not only itself but much of southern Africa. But much of the best land was owned by white farmers whose ancestors had expropriated it from the natives, and it was accepted that some form of land reform was desirable and inevitable. Under British supervision a program was initiated that promoted peaceful transfer of the land with compensation for the white owners (who had, for all their sins, sunk generations of productive labor into it). This didn’t move fast enough for Mugabe, and in 2000 he staged a referendum which was to allow confiscation of white-owned land without compensation. Surprisingly, the referendum was voted down. Mugabe overruled the vote and encouraged his partisans simply to invade the farms.

What ensued was an orgy of violence and theft. White owners were driven out, some tortured and killed, and the land taken over by Mugabe’s cronies. Agricultural production plummeted. No, that’s too mild. It crashed and burned. It seems that Mugabe’s pals were not quite ready to assume responsibility for running a modern agricultural operation. Zimbabwe quickly became dependent on international food aid. Then, in 2004 Mugabe kicked out the aid organizations, claiming that Zimbabwe was capable of feeding itself.

He also demonized foreign companies, arbitrarily seizing majority stakes in many of them. Most of them left. When the ensuing economic crash left Mugabe without enough tax revenues to pay his growing patronage army (the only well-fed sector of society), he started simply printing money, triggering hyperinflation on a scale not seen since Germany’s in the early twenties.

In 2005 Mugabe had his security forces demolish shantytowns where he himself had encouraged rural poor to settle while awaiting housing he promised to build them. The attacks drove thousands of destitute people back into the ravaged countryside.

Today aid agencies are estimating that five million Zimbabweans, nearly half the population, are in imminent danger of starvation. This in a country that was a food exporter as late as the 1990’s. Millions of other Zimbabweans have fled, many to South Africa, where they have been targeted in pogroms by South Africa’s own poor, who have little to share. In a decade Zimbabwe has gone from being a relatively prosperous African success story to a catastrophic humanitarian emergency.

All of this is the direct result of decisions made explicitly by Robert Mugabe, who remains in power, was invited to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization conference (other African leaders threatened to boycott the meeting if Mugabe was barred) and remains a member in good standing of the African Union.

Mugabe held accountable? Don’t hold your breath. He’s the head of a government, and they are held to different standards than heads of private companies. Which is to say, none at all.

I’ll be writing about other candidates for the Presidential Penitentiary, including some closer to home. Stay tuned...

Sam Reaves
www.samreaves.com

The New Guy in Washington

2008-11-10T08:45:00.000-08:00

The election of Barack Obama as the next President of the United States has people all over the world fanning themselves and reeling with the vapors. Come January, the man at the helm of the world’s greatest power will be a mixed-race outsider with international roots who clawed his way up the ladder, instead of the anointed son of a moneyed family deeply entrenched in the old power structure. That testifies to the dynamism of our political system, which with all its faults still manages to shake things up from time to time.

That’s not to say, of course, that everything is going to be different now or that Saint Barack is going to solve all our problems by a laying-on of hands. He’s got a passel of them to contend with. Not too many presidents have taken office with more crises in progress. And the entrenched interests and the systemic problems remain the same. We’re going to have a black president, but there are no black solutions to our problems, only pragmatic ones which need intelligence to discern and political skill to implement.

So if you voted for Obama, be prepared for the frustrations and the disappointments, and if you voted against him, relax. He’s not going to turn us into Zimbabwe. There’s too much inertia in our system for that. If Obama proves to be a good president, it won’t be because he’s black—it will be because he has the right vision and administrative skills. And if he proves to be a bad president? That’s right—it won’t be because he’s black. It will be because he shares the flaws of our other bad presidents, who it seems to me were fairly pale of hue. Maybe having a president with a melanin-intensive complexion will help people stop fixating on skin color.

If nothing else, Obama’s win is vindication for my side in a couple of arguments I’ve been having for years. First, I never believed it when people said that the United States was too racist ever to elect a black person president. I’ve been hearing this for a long time, from smug foreigners and guilt-wracked Americans, and I never bought it for a minute. All it took was the right candidate. It’s true that Americans won’t elect a candidate who is primarily seen as a black activist—that’s why Jesse Jackson never got out of the box. But Colin Powell would have been a strong candidate, if he hadn’t had the good sense to put his family first. And Obama proves that even a liberal black can get elected, provided he appeals to more than the Bill Ayerses of the world. Obama, like Bill Clinton, got elected because he understands that the country at large is more conservative than the Democratic party. If he’s as smart as he seems, he’ll keep that in mind as he makes policy, too.

The second argument Obama settles is the one about the role of money in elections. Have you heard any progressives whining about the role of big money in elections since Obama broke his promise about public funding and then broke all the fund-raising records? Me neither. Like it or not, in politics money is free speech, and campaign finance “reform” essentially amounts to incumbent protection. I suspect we won’t be hearing much from the left about this issue for a while, now that the left has learned how to raise truckloads of money.

So sit back, keep your fingers crossed, and see how the New Guy does. It’s going to be interesting, at the very least.

Sam Reaves
www.samreaves.com

Double standards

2008-10-29T18:39:00.000-07:00

Conservatives love to complain about double standards in the media, and sometimes it’s just whining and then every once and a while something comes along that makes you think they’ve got a point.

Sandra Bernhard, in a performance her one-woman show in Washington, D.C., last week said that Sarah Palin would be “gang-raped by my big black brothers” if she tried to campaign in New York city.

Hmmm. OK, let’s admit that Sandra Bernhard is an “edgy” comedienne and that she makes a living by provoking and that sometimes we need to be provoked and sometimes we even enjoy it. But still. That’s a contemptible remark. There’s no other word for it. Besides the almost pathological level of vituperation toward a mere political candidate, I think if I were a black man living in New York I might wish Bernhard had consulted me before making that claim on my behalf. A joke about black men gang-raping a white woman? You’ve got to be kidding me. Can Sandra Bernhard really get away with that?

When Don Imus made a vapid, offensive crack about “nappy-headed ho’s” he was run out of town on a rail. And the reaction to Bernhard’s remark? “The fact that the show has a few riffs like this does not — to my mind — make it a "disgusting show...," says Ari Roth of Theater J, the venue hosting Bernhard’s show. “We’re proud that she’s a new emblem and ambassador for our theater and our center... her large heart, her generous talent, and her big mouth are all a big part of who we are.”

As for Bernhard, she explained by saying, "I certainly wish Governor Palin no harm. I'd just like her to explain to me how she can hold such outrageous views - and then go back to Alaska."

Well, thanks for that. I’ll leave it to you to judge whether Sarah Palin’s views are more outrageous than Bernhard’s joke. Maybe you can catch Bernhard’s show in Chicago, where the Tribune gave her an extensive admiring profile on the eve of her appearance there. Apparently the consequences for Sandra Bernhard’s career are going to be, if anything, positive.

That’s too bad. It remains a truly appalling remark. Why are liberals, supposedly differentiated from conservatives by their greater compassion and decency, prone to such rants when faced with conservative females or blacks? Maybe because some liberals are shallow thinkers who cannot conceive of women or blacks starting from different assumptions or interpreting the world in a different way. They are outraged when blacks and women don't conform to their expectations of the correct political view. They assume that blacks and women must be liberals or else they're hypocrites and scoundrels. And if you’re a hypocrite or a scoundrel, you are beyond the pale.

I don’t mind Sandra Bernhard being edgy. I just want her held to the same standards as anybody else. Forget Sarah Palin-- if you’re a black man living in New York, Sandra Bernhard owes you an apology.

Sam Reaves
www.samreaves.com

Free Market Free Fall

2008-10-23T14:56:00.000-07:00

It’s a tough time to be a proponent of free-market economics, with the financial system in crisis and the real economy heading into a recession. As markets plunge and the government reaches into taxpayers’ pockets to bail out the Wall Street crapshooters who got us into this mess, the triumphalism on the political left is growing. The narrative is that the ascendancy of free-market ideology beginning in the eighties has led to a worldwide crisis and a wholesome political backlash (as exemplified in Latin America), as victims of global capitalism begin to fight for their alienated rights.

A good summation of this position was the speech by Naomi Klein at the University of Chicago on October 4th opposing the establishment of an economics think tank named for Milton Friedman. In essence Klein accuses Friedman and his followers of peddling a utopian vision which has not stood the test of reality but has been imposed by force around the world to allow the rich to get richer while further impoverishing the poor. She calls it a “class war” and says that the rich have won but the poor are fighting back.

There’s no question that income disparities have grown as real wages have stagnated and tremendous benefits have accrued to the top income levels over the past couple of decades. Whether or not this constitutes a war on the poor depends on whether you are inclined to perceive intentional malice behind every negative social development. Karl Popper warned against this “conspiracy theory of society”, and I am inclined to agree with him.

One of Popper’s key philosophical insights was that we cannot, as a point of logic, know all possible implications of our statements, and in the real world this is amply reflected in the myriad “unintended and unforeseen consequences of our actions.” So I’m not inclined to believe that people in corner office suites on Wall Street sat there plotting to impoverish people; I’m rather inclined to believe that they sat there looking for ways to make lots of money. You don’t need a cackling, moustache-twirling villain to explain this scenario. You just need ordinary human failings.

I even believe that at least some of those Wall Street titans thought about the poor occasionally. They probably thought that by paying taxes, giving to charity, and, most importantly, helping to mobilize capital to create new jobs, they were helping the poor. This may well have been self-serving delusion. But the only sensible question to ask is whether, in fact, they were right or wrong in their belief. I don’t think that talking about a war on the poor contributes to our understanding of what alleviates poverty. But it gets a gratifying reaction from an audience.

I don’t know whether Naomi Klein endorses the conspiracy theory of society, but she certainly believes that Milton Friedman’s ideas have served primarily to justify an illegitmate, anti-democratic wealth grab. She is raising legitimate questions about the consequences of the ideas Friedman espoused, and those of us who tend to agree with Friedman have to answer them. We have to take a hard look at what we believe and whether real-world experience bears it out. Another thing Karl Popper said was that the scientific attitude is the critical attitude, and we can (and should) subject even our basic assumptions to criticism.

Whether you think current events are refuting your position, of course, depends on how you frame your position, and the temptation always is to do some rapid tailoring of your position as events overtake it. (“I never said that! I only claimed...“ etc.) I’ll try to be as honest as possible about what I believe and how events are affecting that.

There’s no doubt that the current financial crisis has to make us think twice about the wisdom of the current regulatory structure. In particular, it’s getting tougher to defend the decision in 1999 to repeal the Glass-Steagall Act, which separated investment banking from commercial banking. When the act was repealed, I remember thinking, “Well, why not? Won’t this allow banks more freedom to innovate?” Well, I guess it did. If you’re paying attention to the real world, I think you have to reconsider this one.

But I’m going to plead innocent, on behalf of market advocates, to one big charge that Klein implicitly made in her U. of C. speech. At several points she seems to conflate two different propositions: that markets are the best way to allocate economic resources and that markets should be totally unregulated. These are two very different propositions, and I only support the first one.

The first proposition has, I think, been amply borne out in the real world. Centralized economic planning has failed wherever it has been tried, because no bureaucracy can possibly match the demand for and supply of the millions of products that modern life involves. Only a relatively untrammeled price system can do that. (Friedman was far from the only economist to make this point and it is, I think, not widely contested among the economically literate.) Further, the attempt to exercise serious control of an economy must at some point devolve to authoritarianism because it criminalizes consensual economic acts.

This is the proposition I have come to support—that the free market is, by and large, allowing for some real-world cases of market failure that can be remedied without vitiating the principle, the best way to provide for people’s material needs. And I think real-world experience bears this out. Millions have been lifted out of poverty in the past couple of decades as planned economies have been liberalized and market principles have spread.

But I have never believed that markets should be completely unregulated. And I don’t know of many who do. There is a faction of capitalist anarchists out on the libertarian right (or would that be left?) who oppose any kind of state whatsoever, but they are a lonely few.

Laissez-faire does not mean no regulation, as Klein seems to believe. It means that the government should let the price system work to direct resources to where they are most in demand. It means, for example, that the government should not subsidize some products (like ethanol) and penalize others (like textiles from poor African countries). There’s a lot in the free-market position that even the left should be able to get on board with, like opposition to corporate welfare. The phrase laissez-faire applies to resource allocation. It doesn’t mean turning a blind eye to abuses.

Even most Wall Street capitalists think they should be regulated. Here’s what one of them has to say in the current edition of the National Review: “...to proclaim that free markets are always their own best regulator is not only to fly in the face of history and common sense but also to ensure that the debate will be lost.” That’s Andrew Stuttaford, in a good discussion of right and wrong regulatory responses to the crisis.

The current crisis is the result of a catastrophic failure of regulation. And it’s possible that it was the product of the same mistaken conflation of propositions by people on the right that Klein makes out on the left. If our politicians took the free-market position to mean that the government should abdicate its responsibility to oversee our financial and economic system to insure its smooth and honest functioning, they were in error. But nothing in the current crisis makes me doubt the basic wisdom of Adam Smith’s or Milton Friedman’s insights into the efficiency of markets in providing for our needs.

The problem is to get regulation right. Financial innovators are always one step ahead of the regulators. And sometimes they need to be reined in. But regulation can be too heavy. And deregulation is not always bad. Real life involves trade-offs, and there’s an optimal point in the trade-off between freedom and prudent restriction which is hard to locate. Whether you incline more to the freedom end of the scale or the restriction end is part of what defines you politically. People can differ about this in good faith. It ought to be an empirical question. The right and the left can talk to each other if they avoid demonizing each other.

In her speech at the University of Chicago, Naomi Klein talked about the way Marxists were disillusioned by the Gulag, how the left had to undergo a healthy process of re-thinking in the wake of the manifest failure of communism. That doesn’t seem to have made her abandon the left; she just wants the left to be smarter. In the same way, those of us who believe that a great degree of economic freedom is a good thing need to be alert to real-world wake-up calls. We can re-think some things without abandoning the central insights of the free-market position. When all the shouting is over, I think we’ll still be on firmer ground than those that think the government should be in charge of distributing economic resources.

Sam Reaves
www.samreaves.com

Misery

2008-10-05T13:57:00.000-07:00

The Chicago Cubs have done it again, collapsed in futility in their first playoff series for the second year in a row after winning the National League Central Division race. After a lot of hoopla about how things were different now and a genuinely good Cub team had a chance to break the century-long curse and go all the way, the whole thing turned sour and depressingly familiar.

I watched the second and third games in a bar, surrounded by twenty-somethings who reacted to the unfolding disaster with curses, bowed heads, hands thrown up in despair. Me, I laughed. And I was rooting for the Cubs. I told one of them, “Son, I’ve been watching this kind of thing for forty years.”

I decided in 2003 that I wasn't ever going to let this team depress me again. I’ve been a Cub fan since 1967, when my father took my brothers and me to a game in Wrigley Field and the Cubs beat Juan Marichal and the Giants on two Billy Williams homers and a clutch Ron Santo triple. I was hooked, and I thought I was on to a good thing. Little did I know. I lived through the 1969 collapse, the 1984 collapse, the 2003 collapse. I’ve been watching the Cubs collapse for a long time. I finally realized I don’t have to let it affect me. I'm happy when they win, but when they lose I don't have to care. My kids still love me, I don't have any less money in the bank... I don't give a damn. Life is easier that way.

The Florida Marlins have won two World Series titles in little more than a decade of existence; the Arizona Diamondbacks have won once. Meanwhile the Cubs have had one miserable season after another, with occasional brief spasms of competence ending in excruciating failure in post-season action. How do you explain this? What gives? How can this happen again and again? This is anomalous, eye-catching, epic, spooky failure.

I don’t think there are any curses involved. I think at this point the weight of past failures is so heavy that any Cub team going into the playoffs just can't avoid being tight. They can't just relax and play the game like any other team. It's like thinking about breathing. When you start to scrutinize what you normally do on reflex and muscle memory, it's over. And that's where the Cubs are at this point. Any little thing that goes wrong makes them start to think about what they are doing, and it just goes downhill from there.

I don't expect to see a Cub title in my lifetime. It's just not ever going to happen. It's not a curse, it's just psychology. Each failure makes further failures more inevitable.

But, of course, I don't care any more.

The pity is that this was a really good Cub team-- they won the division, and that's what you put a team together to do. There is a large element of chance in baseball-- you can nail one and have it go into a fielder's glove or nub a dribbler that gets through for a hit. That's why they play series-- one game can be decided by chance, but over a series of games the breaks are supposed to even out. And the more games are involved, the more chance there is that the best team actually wins. That's why the old-fashioned pennant race was a better test of who the most talented team really was. In a short series, anything can happen, and mistakes get magnified.

So give the Cubs credit for being the best team in the National League over the course of the year, and the worst in baseball at handling pressure that will only get worse each time they make the playoffs. I’m not making excuses for them—it’s called choking, and they choked big-time, once again. But I’m starting to think that choking comes with the territory for this old, tired, sad franchise. If this Cub team couldn’t handle the pressure, what Cub team ever will?

If you are a Cub fan, you just have to accept this.

But, of course, I don’t care any more. I’m laughing...

Sam Reaves
www.samreaves.com

Oops, again

2008-08-24T14:28:00.000-07:00

The Afghan government is protesting again that a U.S. airstrike has killed a large number of civilians. The U.S. military says the strike in Azizabad in Shindand district took out 30 Taliban fighters and a long-sought commander; local villagers claim that more than 70 civilians were killed. The military says it is investigating and that “All allegations of civilian casualties are taken very seriously.”

Not seriously enough to consider changing our approach, apparently. This report could be a Xerox of numerous previous incidents; I wrote about this a year ago. Again and again we have killed civilians in airstrikes aimed at the Taliban, provoking protests among the people we are supposedly trying to protect. Now, I am aware that we are at war and that a certain amount of collateral damage is unavoidable. But damage remains collateral only as long as it is accepted by the population supposedly being protected. As long as there is a consensus that deaths are accidental and part of the price paid for the benefits of military action, the term “collateral damage” can be used with a straight face. When that damage reaches the point where the population rises in protest against it, it’s not collateral any more. It’s indistinguishable from hostile action. And the Afghans start to wonder who their real enemy is, undermining everything good we’re trying to do in Afghanistan.

Here’s a thought: maybe airstrikes are not a very good tool in counter-insurgency warfare. Maybe when the enemy is not a massed conventional army but rather an irregular force operating among the population of the country supposedly being liberated, airstrikes can do more harm than good. Counter-insurgency, as the U.S. military is rapidly learning, is a whole different ball game from conventional warfare, requiring a patient approach that gets the population of the country working with us. And reducing a village to a smoking ruin seems a poor way to win the villagers over.

This is a tactical question. I don’t question our goals in Afghanistan. The Taliban need to be defeated so they don’t come back and kill all the Afghan girls who have learned to read. But the Taliban are not considerate enough to operate on clearly demarcated battlefields. They hide in villages. And taking out the whole village only turns the next village over the ridge against us.

Forgoing airstrikes, of course, will mean a certain amount of pain for U.S. troops on the ground. Counter-insurgency is slower, harder and more dangerous to infantry and special forces than the airstrike approach. It’s a tough way to win a war. But in the long run it’s the only way. Look at the successful counter-insurgency campaigns in recent history (e.g. the British effort in Malaya), and there’s no mystery about what works, as laid out in an article by Kalev I. Sepp in the Military Review. Better military minds than mine have looked at this problem.

Somebody in the Pentagon needs to think about this. It’s not too late to save Afghanistan, but if we keep on treating Afghan villagers like furniture, it might be before too long.

Sam Reaves
www.samreaves.com

This Just In

2008-08-10T10:40:00.000-07:00

Somehow the desire to wrestle with Big Ideas evaporated in the summer heat, but I keep on reading the papers. Some random news items and the thoughts they provoke:

Pinocchios in Politics: Detroit mayor Kwame Kilpatrick is self-destructing, charged now with 10 felony counts in two separate cases after he allegedly assaulted two sheriff’s deputies trying to serve a subpoena on a friend of his. Kilpatrick had previously been tossed in the clink for violating bond conditions on a perjury rap. I think the pressure’s getting to him.

It’s a sad spectacle any way you look at it. What’s interesting to me is how the whole thing started: with accusations of adultery which emerged in the course of a lawsuit against Kilpatrick brought by a police official he had fired. The suit had nothing to do with Kilpatrick’s love life, but he denied the accusations under oath and was promptly indicted for perjury, starting his death spiral.

Meanwhile, the papers today are full of John Edwards’s confession after repeated denials that he conducted an affair with a staffer while his wife was suffering from cancer. There goes his political career. Maybe he and Kilpatrick can open a hot dog stand together. Then there was Eliot Spitzer. Oh, and the last time a U.S. President was impeached it was all about hanky-panky in the Oval Office, wasn’t it?

The worldly Europeans laugh at us about this. The fact that a political career in the United States can founder on an illicit love affair leaves them shaking their heads. France’s former president Mitterand fathered an illegitimate daughter and lived with his mistress, and the current guy, Nicolas Sarkozy, ditched his wife and hooked up with a fashion model in the middle of his first year in office, all under the glare of the flashbulbs. Nobody’s calling for his resignation, not for that, anyway.

Are we hopeless Puritan boobs in this country? Does a man’s philandering have anything to do with his competence as an administrator, his vision as a statesman? When Georgia and Russia are at war and Pakistan is about to fly into a thousand pieces, is John Edwards really the most important news story? What gives with this?

There’s no question that there’s a strong Puritan strain in our culture; the country was settled by folks who came here because they thought Europe was hopelessly Godless and decadent. There’s no Religious Right anywhere near as strong as ours in Europe. And that’s reflected in our politics.

But there’s more to it than that. Look at what people are actually getting indicted for. Kilpatrick’s original crime was perjury. And Bill Clinton was impeached not for shtuping the help when he should have been attending to matters of state but, again, for lying about it under oath. As for Spitzer, he knew his career was over because he campaigned as a paragon of virtue and then got caught with his pants down.

In other words, Americans don’t like liars and hypocrites. I haven’t heard anyone suggest that JFK was a lousy president because he cheated on Jackie. And Barney Frank is still in Congress despite his dalliance with the head of a male prostitution ring because he admitted everything and threw himself on the mercy of his constituents. At least in Massachusetts, voters can be very forgiving. It’s getting caught and not fessing up that’s fatal.

So if you’re up to no good, whether cheating on your wife or cheating on your taxes (remember, Martha Stewart didn’t go to the Big House because of insider trading but because she lied about it to investigators), whatever you do, just don’t try and deny it. When the snoops kick in the door and catch you with your pants down, you’ll probably be OK if you schedule a press conference the next day, haul your wife in front of the cameras to stand beside you, muster up a few tears and apologize to all and sundry. Americans will forgive just about anything except trying to weasel out of the spanking you know you richly deserve.

Oops: Police in Prince George’s County, Maryland, raided the house of a small-town mayor, shot his two dogs, and kept him in handcuffs for a couple of hours before determining that they had made a mistake in identifying him as a drug dealer. The mayor has been exonerated and received an apology, but the dogs are gone for good.

The War on Drugs keeps producing mistakes like this. When you criminalize actions that are essentially non-predatory, consensual and private, you make everyone’s private life police business. This is a violation of so many American ideals it’s hard to know where to start in listing them. In a country which for the most part does pretty well by world standards at leaving its citizens alone, the drug war is a hideous exception, with Gestapo-like raids, high-handed seizures of property and harsh prison sentences for non-violent actions.

Drugs can do great harm. But drug abuse should be regarded as the user’s problem, like, say, alcohol abuse. Drugs should be regarded as a public health problem rather than a criminal problem. Legalize and regulate, and stop kicking in people’s doors.

Sam Reaves
www.samreaves.com

Fireworks

2008-07-04T19:56:00.000-07:00

It’s the Fourth of July again, and we’re celebrating something. Most people, of course, are just celebrating not having to go to work, an occasion for a party if there ever was one. But the deep-thinker types insist on asking about the meaning of the occasion, and some of them are not in a partying mood. “...the history of my country has been a series of wars of conquest and subjugation masquerading in mainstream discourse as a series of heroic frontiers...” says Clare Brandabur in an essay on the Arabic Media Internet Network. And “...when it comes to black America's history and Old Glory, there is a hypocrisy that cannot be swept away with one hundred tragic 9-11s,” says the pseudonymous Morpheus on Playhata.com.

What about it? Is the Fourth of July a mass exercise in hypocrisy, an orchestrated distraction from the ugly reality of American history? Should we be cringing instead of partying, hanging our heads in shame?

Well, let’s consider. Is there a country on earth whose history doesn’t involve conquest, subjugation and convenient tidying up of history? The Arabs swept across half the globe imposing their religion by force, before they were subjugated in turn by Western colonial powers. The Bantu tribes went marauding into the southern regions of Africa, subjugating as they went, before the the Afrikaners did it to them. And why do the Apache live in the Arizona desert? Because they were driven off the plains by the Comanche. There are few innocent nations, and the European settlement of North America was hardly unique in its expropriation of already occupied land.

Successful expropriation is not what we’re celebrating today. What we’re celebrating today is, on the contrary, the things that redeem American history, the principles and the achievements that manage to raise this project of ours above the familiar sordidness of human affairs. The reason we celebrate the Fourth of July is that on this date in 1776 a document was signed that, uniquely up to that time in human history, asserted as the founding principle of a nation a set of principles, instead of shared ancestry or fealty to a monarch. Unlike say, Germany, where they’re still debating whether third-generation residents of Turkish ancestry can be real Germans, here we say you can be an American as long as you embrace a few key principles. And while those principles were compromised from the start by the existence of slavery and the expropriation of the native peoples, a lot of Americans have expended a lot of blood, sweat and tears over the years to force us back toward those ideals. That’s the central struggle of American history, and that’s the honorable part of it, what we celebrate today.

The ugly side of American history is the human side: the swindles and the massacres and the deportations and the lynchings. Those should never be forgotten, but there’s nothing especially American about them, either. Open a world history text to any page. The particularly American side of our history is how the institutions derived—by fits and starts—from those founding principles have forced us time and again to confront those things. The economy of half the country was based on slavery, and the other half refused to accept that. A cruel system of racial separation was ended by a combination of grass-roots action and pressure from the federal government. And our courts have an irritating habit of telling the government it can’t get away with things that in other countries are done by decree.

A cynic will point out that all of these achievements have been resisted by vested interests. So they have—and they happened anyway, because we were bequeathed a strong and flexible system designed to limit state power and enable reformist zeal. And when we betray our principles, there is pressure for remedy and recompense. It’s an imperfect, clumsy system, but show me one elsewhere that’s done better. There’s a reason why our net migration flow is so overwhelmingly into the United States. Our struggles have produced an extraordinarily dynamic society, with a highly fluid concept of class and a realistic prospect of prosperity for the great majority.

And if you’re black, or Native American? What’s in it for you? Do you have any reason to celebrate the Fourth of July? Well, the African-American community with all its problems is the world’s wealthiest population of African origin, by far. You might celebrate that on the Fourth, without giving an inch on your claim to a fair shake from a society run by whites. As for the Indians, it’s hard to imagine a world in which nobody ever intruded into their stone-age Eden. Sooner or later they would have had to engage modernity. In a best-case scenario, without theft and slaughter, what would the life of the Lakota or the Cherokee look like today? I don’t know. But I suspect that the old ways of life were doomed anyway. Change could have happened without slaughter, maybe, assuming a superhuman prescience and restraint on the part of the settlers the likes of which have never existed anywhere. Ask it this way: is there another framework in which the original nations of America could exist today that would be better than the one that exists, of a modern state ceding sovereignty in local matters to the native communities? If you can’t come up with one, you might as well celebrate the Fourth along with the rest of us.

None of this is to encourage triumphalism or complacency. We’ve got a lot of problems. But we’ve also got institutions and traditions and attitudes that foster solutions to those problems. And those are what we celebrate on the Fourth of July.

Look at the essays I cited above. You’ll see that Clare Brandabur says, “I love my country.” You’ll see that Morpheus says, “...black patriotism stands up for the greatest ideals written into the American idea.” I don’t want to speak for them, but I suspect that these two critics of our historical record recognize, in spite of their reservations, the value of what we’re celebrating today—institutions and attitudes that were designed to manage the strife inherent in human affairs.

So have another beer, guilt-free, and raise a quiet toast to those ideas Jefferson held to be self-evident two hundred and thirty-two years ago. They’re what all the fuss is about today.

Sam Reaves

www.samreaves.com

The Platform, Part Four

2008-06-20T08:09:00.000-07:00

Foreign Policy

George Washington advised the young United States to avoid foreign entanglements, and that’s not a bad basis for anybody’s foreign policy. The trouble is, foreign entanglements get harder and harder to avoid as a country grows and develops. Much of our prosperity is based on trade, and international trade depends on an international rule of law. So isolationism becomes less viable as globalization advances.

I’m in favor of globalization, so I have to favor things that reinforce an international rule of law. This puts me at odds with people who believe that our participation in international organizations such as the United Nations or the World Trade Organization undermines our sovereignty. It also puts me at odds with people who think that any action on behalf of U.S. interests abroad is by definition imperialism and therefore to be opposed. So both the far right and the far left are going to have problems with my position on our role in the world. Tough.

Globalization is inevitable, and, I believe, a good thing. Trade makes everyone richer, and countries that have peaceful trading relations are less likely to go to war. One prominent feature of the run-up to war in the dismal nineteen-thirties was the proliferation of embargoes and tariffs that crippled international trade, spread the Depression, and provided dictators with ready-made grievances. So I think it’s in our national interest, as well as that of the world as a whole, to promote a smoothly functioning system of international trade.

Beyond trade, peace depends on the ability of people and information to circulate freely around the world. Travel contributes to human knowledge, and travelers need security and predictability in their movement. All of this means coordination between nations and some system of international law. And because there is no law without enforcement, this means some mechanism for international coordination of the application of force, i.e. police and military powers.

The UN and the WTO and other world bodies were set up to provide this kind of international coordination, and they are indispensable in some form or other. Those who complain that we surrender sovereignty by belonging to and cooperating with these bodies are, of course, to some extent correct, and they certainly have a point when they protest the corruption and hypocrisy that is so common at the UN. But to me that means only that, like all human institutions, these world bodies need constant maintenance and reformist vigilance, not that we can do without them. We can’t, not if we want to further the globalization that benefits us as much as anyone else. Globalization has to be fair and governed by rules everyone plays by if it is to find widespread support.

So I favor continued membership in and contribution to world bodies such as the UN and the WTO, while at the same time I favor increased insistence on probity and accountability in those bodies. As the major bankroller of the UN and other bodies, we’re in a good position to insist on these things. We should pay our dues and use our leverage to insist on reform.

In general, then, my foreign policy is based on the principle of strengthening the rule of law in the international arena. But what does this mean applied to real-world conflicts? Let’s get down to cases. I’ve talked about Iraq in a previous post, but let’s recapitulate: What are reasonable goals to pursue in Iraq? At this point, we’re playing damage control, having presided over a disastrous collapse in Iraqi society. Our goal in Iraq should be the restoration of basic security. This appears to be achievable; the surge has had real and positive effects. Beyond that, our goals should be modest. We can’t make Iraq a western-style democracy. Only the Iraqis can do that. We can’t prevent Iraq from cozying up to Iran. We can’t even insist that they agree to a long-term American military presence. We can only restore order, leave the basic structures of an independent state in place, and hope for the best. If our experience in Iraq has taught us anything, it should have taught us to avoid hubris.

This applies especially to Iran. Iran represents a potentially more serious danger than Saddam Hussein’s Iraq ever did, with its pursuit of nuclear weapons. Even if they’ve temporarily mothballed their weapons program, once they have enriched uranium, re-starting it is a snap. How scary would an Iranian bomb be? Maybe no scarier than the North Korean and Pakistani bombs. But every time another dubious regime gets the bomb, the world becomes a more dangerous place. If you are bothered about Israel or India having the bomb, you can’t tell me it wouldn’t be so bad if Iran had it. And pious exhortations aren’t going to dissuade the mullahs.

This is the toughest problem of modern statecraft. We don’t want everybody to have the bomb, but we really can’t stop anybody who is determined to get it unless we’re prepared to wage war. And how many wars can we afford?

Keeping Iran from getting the bomb is an urgent foreign policy goal. But it would be good to find a way of doing that short of total war. We should keep in mind that Iran is a much less monolithic state than Hussein’s Iraq was. To an extent, it is even a democracy, certainly more so than our gallant ally Saudi Arabia. The Iranian government is dominated by hard-liners, but there are also strong reformist currents in Iranian society and even rumbles of discontent in government circles about Ahmadinejad’s grandstanding. A war with Iran would instantly legitimize the hard-liners, unite Iranian society in hostility to the West and shove any positive political trends into the deep freeze. So war should be a last resort.

First, in accordance with our adherence to the rule of law, we should make clear that any nation willing to play by the rules is entitled to reap the benefits. We should emphasize to the Iranians that our opposition is specifically to their infractions of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, to which they are a signatory, and their evident lying about said infractions. Then, without waiting for an improbable change of heart, we need to keep up the carrot-and-stick approach, in conjunction with the Europeans, who seem to agree with us (for a change) that Iran is a problem. The carrot is the offer of technical assistance in developing peaceful nuclear power. As for the stick, sanctions have their role. But the unspoken threat of a few quick airstrikes (either by the U.S. or, more plausibly, by Israel) might concentrate minds wonderfully in Teheran as well. It doesn’t have to be total war. We didn’t need a regime change to make Qaddafi have second thoughts about Libya’s weapons program. And even surgical airstrikes should be kept in reserve. But the U.S. should keep the mullahs guessing by refusing to take the military option off the table.

If you think that’s too harsh, you’re not living in the real world. Ultimately the only answer to existential threats in the nuclear age is deterrence. And deterrence is an ugly thing. Deterrence means we are prepared to be just as nasty as anybody else. It means if you hit me, I’ll hit you back. And that’s childish. But sometimes it’s the only way to keep the peace. Deterrence has to be convincing. People have to be sure that we are both willing and able to commit mass slaughter if provoked. And that’s not a gratifying role to play.

But we have to play it. It’s the only thing that works. In the meantime, we can do our best to get everyone to agree that a nuclear arms race is expensive and dangerous, and keep negotiating and drawing down nuclear arsenals and improving international control of nuclear materials and all of that, and we might even make some progress. But we’re always going to need at least a minimal nuclear deterrent. Pacifism is not an option, not in a world where Kim Jong-Il can run a country.

However, that doesn’t mean that all foreign policy problems are military problems. Somebody said that if all you have is a hammer all your problems tend to look like nails, and as the world’s sole superpower, we risk falling into the trap of wanting everything to have a military solution. We have to make sure we use the other tools we have.

The best tool we have is the undisputed appeal of an open society. Migration patterns are the truest indicator of quality of life, and that fence some people want to build isn’t to keep people in. Even the Muslims want to come here. To a high degree, we have a free economy, a fluid class system and a strong tradition of personal liberty and freedom of expression. All these things come under assault from time to time (from both right and left), but so far they’re hanging on. And as long as they do, most of the world will be on our side, most of the time.

We have to take care of those things here at home. We also have to make clear that they are universal values and that we support their extension. That doesn’t mean we can do it by force. That may work sometimes (see Japan and Germany), but it’s damned expensive. We can’t afford that kind of effort more than once a century or so. It’s better to set the example, nurture relations with like-minded countries and realize that living in the real world is going to mean making compromises sometimes. A dose of Realpolitik is always necessary.

I’ve written before that the War on Terror is a mistaken metaphor—as horrific as September 11 was, it wasn’t a military action. It was a brutal and spectacularly successful crime. Al-Qaeda doesn’t have any carrier groups or armored divisions. What it has is a line of cant that a certain type of shallow-thinking person in the Muslim world finds attractive. But they are a minority, even in Muslim society, and if we don’t further alienate and enrage Muslims with invasions and mass civilian deaths, eventually they themselves will defeat Al-Qaeda. It’s already happening in Iraq. Our approach to the Muslim world should be like our approach to anybody else—offer them the benefits of trade and migration and make clear that in return we expect them to act as responsible members of the world community and police their extremists. A good place to start is with Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, our two allies in the War on Terror. We should emphatically support liberalizing political and social currents in those countries.

A full exposition of my foreign policy platform is beyond the scope of a single post because there are a lot of countries and crises in the world. I’ve touched on some of these in past posts, and I’ll deal with others in the future. In general, my approach is based on strengthening the rule of law, even if that means relinquishing a degree of sovereignty, while keeping in mind that ultimately the threat of force is what makes countries toe the line and keeps us safe. I favor supporting the WTO and a serious push for freer international trade. I favor our phased withdrawal from long-term military commitments abroad (like our heavy presence in Korea) and in general a more pacific approach to international conflicts. I wouldn’t have invaded Iraq. But I’m not a pacifist. Afghanistan is a war worth fighting. And there will be others.

But in the long run, the best thing for us and for the world is to promote increased trade and migration between countries, despite the short-term costs to particular interests, because globalization is what will tend to bring everybody’s interests into line. That is not a Utopian vision, but rather a principle to be followed in dealing with the terminal messiness of human affairs. Arrange things so that people have more to gain by trading with their neighbors than by invading them. But be prepared for breakdowns, flare-ups and plain old human savagery. Above all, a U.S. president has to keep a firm grasp on principle and stay on his toes.

Sam Reaves

samreaves.com

The Platform, Part Three

2008-06-03T09:01:00.000-07:00

Controlling spending is the hardest part of fiscal policy, because everybody’s got their hand out, and everybody’s got a case to make. The number of worthy causes that could benefit from a pile of somebody else’s money is infinite, and people are coming up with new ideas all the time. It’s hard to say no when somebody points out a problem that could use an infusion of money, and Congressmen don’t like to disappoint people any more than you do. So we keep getting new spending programs. And once a program is up and running, it’s even harder to get rid of it. Cancel a program and people lose jobs. Even if a program is a boondoggle, a total waste of money, it’s hard to kill it. There are always people passionately defending it. Usually the argument includes a line like, “This program represents a mere (insert small percentage here) of federal spending, which is nothing compared to what we spend on defense.” The problem is that there are hundreds and hundreds of these worthy programs that cost only a small percentage of federal spending. If you don’t find a way to limit them, they add up.

Meanwhile, everyone’s got an idea about what should be cut—somebody else’s pet program. Some things are no-brainers to anyone with a sincere commitment to good policy, like abolishing farm subsidies and corporate welfare programs. There’s no mystery about what the rotten programs are: the Cato Institute publishes a useful guide to corporate welfare. The information is out there for all of us to see. You’d think you could get everybody behind abolishing corporate welfare; if ever there was an issue ripe for bi-partisanship, this is it. Democrats don’t like corporations and Republicans like the free market, or so they say. But even the most egregious federal giveaways are defended by their beneficiaries the way a drunk defends his last half-pint. And legislators stick up for each other because they’re all implicated—vote for my program and I’ll vote for yours. What’s needed is for taxpayers to raise a stink, loudly and consistently. This means you—e-mail your representatives today.

Everyone’s against earmarks — the pork legislators slip into the budget—and they’re scandalous, of course, but they represent only a small fraction of the budget. The truth is that there’s no magic bullet. There’s no simple answer to controlling spending, no single item or category that can be easily slashed to bring down the deficit and make room for the things you think the government should be spending money on. Unfortunately, limiting spending means, sooner or later, attacking the really big items in the budget: defense and entitlements.

The biggest entitlement is Social Security, and it’s going to bust us if we don’t reform it. If we don’t privatize it, at least partially, we’re going to have to means-test it. There’s no reason well-off people should be receiving a Social Security check each month, even if they have been paying into the system all their working lives. They’ll say they’re entitled to that money, and of course according to the terms the program was set up on, they’re right. But besides total privatization there’s no way to reform Social Security without some injustice somewhere. It’s unjust right now because it’s a regressive tax. And people at the lowest economic levels tend to die before they receive the benefits they have paid into the system. It’s a bad deal for them, compared with what they could make with private accounts (which would be inheritable). There is simply no way to make Social Security fair for everyone; that’s trying to square a circle. Either you privatize it or you admit that it’s a redistributive program. And if you admit the latter, you still have to deal with the funding problems, either by cutting benefits or raising taxes. Anything else is dreaming. You have to recognize limits and stand up to the howls of protest that any meaningful reform will bring. Take your pick—but don’t tell me that continuing the program in its current form is an option. Social Security is going to have to be curtailed, somehow, or we’ll go broke.

As for defense, it accounts for roughly a quarter of federal spending, and it would be nice if we could hack it down to size. Yes, it is a huge burden, particularly with two wars going on, one of them arguably unnecessary. I’d love to see defense spending come down, and I’m not especially a pacifist. Disengagement from foreign entanglements would be a significant part of my foreign policy as President, and that would eventually allow us to cut defense spending significantly. But even if we stay out of needless wars, there’s a limit to how much we ought to slash defense spending. National defense is one of the legitimate functions of the national government, and it’s expensive. The people who have those bumper stickers saying how nice it will be when the Air Force has to hold a bake sale are living in a dream world. Even if we weren’t leaking blood and treasure in Iraq, even if we could get the Koreans and the Japanese and the Europeans to assume the full costs of their national defense, we’d still need a relatively large defense establishment, because part of what keeps the peace is deterrence.

But isn’t it perverse to spend so much on war when so many people here at home don’t have access to decent health care? Why can’t we slash defense spending to pay for health care? Well, some would say that paying for health care is a legitimate function of national government, some would say it’s not. Me, I tend to the latter point of view. Health care is consumed by individuals and can be paid for by individuals with the help of insurance. There is a government role in providing a safety net for people who are unable for whatever reason to obtain insurance, but that’s a far cry from having the government directly run a large slice of the economy. Meanwhile, military action by its nature requires centralized decision-making and the coercive coordination of vast enterprises. It’s an inherently collective enterprise, which makes it a great candidate for government control (as well as a significant danger to prosperity and good government—definitely a handle-with-care proposition). So I’d say we’ll always need to spend more tax money on defense than on health care, but I recognize that people can disagree with me in good faith.

This is the debate we should be having. What are the legitimate functions of government, anyway? But instead of debating the underlying issues, we just keep trying to pay for everything, and the costs keep ratcheting up. What we really need is a mechanism to cap federal spending and force politicians to have the hard debates and make the hard decisions each year.

So I propose some kind of legal mechanism to cap federal spending each year. I’m not sure a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution is the way to do it—the Constitution is hard to amend, and for a good reason. The Constitution ought to be concerned with the basic structure of government, not with policy questions like spending and taxation. For a policy question like limiting spending, legislation is the answer. And if we voters (and taxpayers) make enough noise, we ought to be able to shame our legislators into a bi-partisan commitment to fiscal responsibility. A good start might be to stump for the Cato Institute’s measure to cap federal spending, which would cap both discretionary and entitlement spending and would limit spending increases to an indicator such as the sum of population growth plus inflation. This would force legislators to make the tough choices each year.

There are always going to be political fights over limited resources, because needs are literally unlimited. And when you get past the most outrageous layers of largesse, the choices get harder. Reasonable people can differ. But we should never lose sight of the fact that the money the government spends is not free—it comes from you and me. And so the central plank in my platform for controlling federal spending is a cap mechanism that would force the people in Congress to do their job, which is to have a serious debate about what our priorities are and get rid of the things that don’t further those priorities.

Next time: Foreign Policy

Sam Reaves

samreaves.com

The Platform, continued

2008-05-21T13:01:00.000-07:00

Part Two: Tax Simplification

The U.S. tax code runs to thousands of pages, exactly how many it’s not clear (see an amusing variety of guesses along with the correct answer at Trygve.com). Compliance with this monster absorbs millions of hours of labor every year, labor that is thus diverted from productive work. The labyrinthine code is navigable only by specialists who devote years to acquiring expertise in its provisions, another waste of human intelligence. What on earth could possibly fill those thousands of pages? Mainly special favors, provisions that are specifically designed to allow people with friends in Congress to avoid paying taxes. The U.S. tax system is a scandal.

Efforts at tax reform crop up periodically; a major and somewhat effective reform was carried out in 1986, for example. In the twenty-two years since then, however, Congress has been hard at work re-packing the code with special favors, undoing the reform. Reform is tough because every exemption and deduction has eloquent defenders. Give a man a tax break worth millions each year, and he will bring tears to your eyes talking about how vital it is to the health of the nation.

The root of the problem is the idea of allowing reductions in tax liability to encourage certain behaviors. Once this principle is admitted, the system is ripe for gaming. Some exemptions and deductions are (or at least seem) well-intentioned, like the deduction for charitable giving, and others are shameless giveaways to people with influence, like the percentage depletion allowance for mining companies, which allows them to write off a portion of the value of the minerals they extract. (As if they’re not making money from selling the stuff.) All of these breaks reduce revenue, complicate compliance and distort economic behavior.

I say it’s time to scrap tax exemptions and deductions altogether. That’s right, no exemptions. None. Not for your mortgage payment, not for your charitable contributions. I can hear you gasping, “But I’m not a fat cat!” I’m sure you’re not. But I mean it: no exceptions. Nobody gets a break for any reason. By way of compensation, I’d lower your tax rates. “Close the loopholes and lower the rates” ought to be the battle cry of tax reform.

Designing a fair and efficient tax system is tough because there are genuine philosophical differences about what fair means when it comes to taxation. Let’s try to get back to first principles: what is taxation, anyway? As an exercise, write a short essay explaining the difference between taxation and theft. An employer agrees to pay you a certain amount of money in exchange for what you can do for him; the government comes along and says, “Hand over a certain percentage of that or we’ll put you in jail.” Of course, you do receive valuable services in exchange for your money, like sugar subsidies and air strikes on Somali villages. (Am I being too snide?) But payment is not optional. And the government can arbitrarily decide to take more of your money any time it wants.

My point is not to turn you into a tax rebel; a case for moderate taxation with democratic oversight can be made. But proper perspective on taxation requires the awareness that it’s our damn money to start with, something the political left too often forgets. Running the government ought to be like running your local PTA: you decide what you want to accomplish this year, calculate how much money you’re going to need to do it, and figure out a way to raise it. Instead, the government extracts a huge pot of money from us according to an impossibly obscure set of principles that have little to do with how much money is actually needed, and then lets people with clout fight over who should get the biggest chunks of it. Instead of the PTA we have the Black Hand.

Some people think that taxation ought to be used to redistribute money from people who have earned lots of it to people who have not figured out how to earn any of it. Some think taxation should be used to chasten people who were lucky enough to be born with lots of money. Some think we should use taxation to encourage the cultivation of certain crops or the purchase of certain kinds of cars or the setting up of certain kinds of businesses.

Some or all of the foregoing may be desirable; Paris Hilton evidently has too much money and the old woman bagging groceries at my local supermarket probably has too little. But the tax code is not the proper vehicle for achieving social justice. That’s too slippery a concept for congressional appropriations geeks to deal with. And the major problem with letting the tax system be gamed is that the largest faction in Congress is the one which thinks taxation should be used to make certain people wealthy.

So the only meaningful reform of the tax code will be one that scraps exemptions entirely, taking special favors out of the equation once and for all. Now, the next question is whether you go to a flat rate, as a number of countries in Eastern Europe have done recently, or whether you have a progressive rate structure. Here again reasonable people can differ. On the face of it, what could be fairer than a flat rate? Everyone pays X percent of their income, period.

Except that if food costs a quarter of your income each month, ten percent of your income is a lot more to you than it is to someone who spends only a fraction of a percent of his income on food every month.

I’m not outraged on principle by the idea of progressive taxation, but there are some serious caveats. First, there has to be a cap. The curve has to level off. If marginal tax rates get too high, people hide their money, game the system, take their money to Switzerland or just stop trying to make more (thus decreasing investment and job generation). How hard are you going to work to make another ten thousand bucks if the government’s going to take nine thousand of it? High tax rates reach a point of diminishing returns fairly quickly.

So cap it. Ideally the tax rate curve would be asymptotic; as it approaches a reasonably low limit calculated to yield about what the government will need in the coming year (we'll talk about spending control later), the rate would level off, never reaching that limit.

Yes, some people make obscene amounts of money. But then some people like to look at obscene pictures, too. Obscenity is in the eye of the beholder. Who’s to say whether they deserve it or not? Until somebody comes up with a compelling philosophical argument to the contrary, I’m going to say that unless it can be proved by due process of law that you came by your money illegally, you should be allowed to keep the greater part of it. Envy and class resentment are not philosophical principles.

So cap the tax rates. For one thing, people who make obscene amounts of money have to do something with it. Only fools just stuff it in a mattress. Most people invest it, thereby aiding capital formation, economic expansion, and the creation of jobs for people who need them. Even obscene wealth can be socially useful. The idea of taxation as punishment is intellectually bankrupt.

So my platform plank on taxes is the following: Radical simplification of the tax code, meaning close the loopholes and lower the rates. Look at either a mildly progressive income-based system, or one of the transaction-based systems that are being discussed. John Gunther proposes an interesting one in this article. There’s a lot of room for discussion once you’ve deep-sixed the current special-favor regime. Any system that excludes, on principle, the ability of legislators to write special rules for their friends will be an improvement over the current setup.

Of course, the only justification for taxation is to meet the government’s revenue needs, so the primary question remains “How much money does the government need?” I’m inclined to say, “A lot less than it claims.” This will bring us to the next plank in the Platform, the topic of the next post: Controlling Spending.

Sam Reaves
www.samreaves.com

The Platform

2008-05-18T20:22:00.000-07:00

All right, it’s time for me to throw my hat into the ring. The presidency of the United States is up for grabs, and the chances of any of the major candidates meeting my expectations are, as usual, slim. For me, voting is always about damage control. So I guess there’s nothing left but to run myself.

On second thought, I don’t really feel like incurring massive debts, sacrificing all hope of privacy forever, compromising what integrity I may have left and, most of all, risking actual election to what is arguably the world’s most important job. So maybe I’ll take a pass. But instead of waiting to see what Moe, Larry and Curly will come up with by way of policy proposals, I’ve decided to stake out my own positions and challenge the candidates either to endorse them or say why they won’t. (I’m sure they’ll be up late tonight in the Obama, Clinton and McCain headquarters, poring over these proposals.) So in the interests of good government without regard to partisan prejudices, here’s my Platform for the Presidency, 2008:

Part One: The War

This is the major issue this year, for any number of reasons. Now, it should be noted that the war in Iraq is nowhere near having the impact on U.S. economy and society that the Second World War or even Vietnam had—not yet. But it still tops the list, because people are dying. Wars have a way of undermining prosperity, confidence, good government, and, not least, good cheer. So we’ve got to figure out where we’re going in Iraq.

It would be nice to have a simple position on Iraq, like “We should pull all the troops out immediately” or “We should keep a large military force in Iraq as long as necessary to achieve victory,” but, unfortunately, complex situations don’t always admit simple solutions. It’s one thing to say that invading Iraq was an appalling strategic mistake and that our failure to keep order in the wake of the invasion was a shameful abdication of responsibility, and quite another to say that the solution is immediate withdrawal. Once you have broken the water main, it’s a little irresponsible to slink away hoping nobody will notice as the neighborhood floods.

Our destabilization of Iraq has metastasized into a region-wide crisis involving, among other things, a resurgence of long-neglected and disenfranchised Shiite populations. There is no longer any such thing as an Iraq policy divorced from the dynamics of the region as a whole. And our capacity to influence events in Iraq and the wider Mideast, militarily or otherwise, is limited. Step one in forming an intelligent Iraq policy is to abandon hubris and realize that our ability to shape the destiny of an alien, diverse and fractious polity is severely constrained. We need realistic goals.

Turning the Middle East into collection of model democratic states is not a realistic goal. Even determining the long-term shape of the Iraqi polity may not be a realistic goal. Preventing any Iranian intervention in Iraqi affairs is not a realistic goal. All of these are things that are simply not in our control, at least not militarily. We can’t afford the degree of military involvement that would be necessary to achieve the long-term outcomes we think are desirable. Militarily, our goals must be short-term. So let’s look at what can be done.

I think goal number one has to be the re-establishment of internal security for Iraqis. This is a moral obligation devolving on us by reason of our invasion of Iraq. By destroying the old Iraqi order, we assumed responsibility for the most basic function of the state, the assurance of basic life security. As long as ordinary Iraqis can’t go to the market without having a decent chance of making it home, we have an unfinished mission in Iraq. And that means first concentrating on achievable gains on the ground, the nuts and bolts of counter-insurgency. I don’t think that goal is unattainable. Our military action in Iraq has been, intermittently, effective. And we’re getting smarter. Soldiers are good at learning from their mistakes because they have to be. Violence in Iraq has declined as our tactics, not least those of co-opting former insurgents, have improved. The bar must not be set too high—perfect social peace in Iraq is beyond us. But an end to the worst excesses of jihadist cells and sectarian militias is not. And it would be disgraceful to abandon the effort at this point, when the responsibility for the anarchy lies with us. Even more disgraceful would be an abandonment of those Iraqis who have collaborated with us. They should be offered whatever aid and protection they need to establish themselves in safety, in the U.S. or elsewhere.

Goal number two must be to set up and leave in place an Iraqi security establishment capable of keeping internal order. This is largely a technical problem. It means providing training and material assets, and we’re pretty good at that. Here again perfection cannot be the goal, because if it is we’ll be in Iraq beyond John McCain’s hundred years. Ultimate responsibility for integrating the private militias into the military, resolving sectional disputes and assuring national unity lies with the Iraqi government. We cannot make Iraq proof against civil war. But we can provide the elected Iraqi government with sufficient trained battalions to raise the costs of insurgency to deterrent levels. The recent commitment of Iraqi government troops against Shiite militias is an encouraging sign, however indecisive the results.

When we have achieved these two goals, which should be plainly and loudly announced to all parties, it will be time to plan our withdrawal from Iraq. Until then, we’re committed. That’s my platform.

Next time: Tax simplification

Sam Reaves
www.samreaves.com

Ditch the DH

2008-03-30T22:03:00.000-07:00

It’s Opening Day, and I don’t care what the weather’s like: spring is here. The start of the baseball season is psychological springtime, every year. You can’t explain the appeal of baseball to somebody that just doesn’t get it. It’s all tied up with childhood, the cycle of the seasons, optimism and rebirth and all that jazz. Besides, it means the warm weather is coming.

So I’m happy today. I’ll even try not to be a curmudgeon about the designated hitter. OK, I tried there for a second. Now listen up: once again this summer American League teams will play all their games in violation of the fundamental rules of baseball. Corrupted by this example, amateur teams across the country will follow suit, and countless games of baseball will be played by two teams of ten players each, with two players on each side leaving and then re-entering the game several times, in flagrant violation of the substitution rules. This infraction of baseball’s fundamental laws will enjoy the sanction of its highest governing bodies.

This is, of course, a scandal. But sadly, the designated hitter doesn’t provoke arguments any more. There just aren’t many people around making serious and principled arguments against it. Unless we can revive the outrage, we risk seeing this abomination become a permanent and unquestioned part of the game.

So what’s wrong with the DH? First, it violates the principle that every player goes both ways, that every player must play defense and offense. From prehistoric times, a baseball player has had to be able to catch, throw and field a position. If you didn’t have a glove, you couldn’t play. The advent of the DH has produced the baseball equivalent of the football punter, trotted out a few times a game to do his special trick, and hapless if asked to do anything else. In baseball it’s the lug who can hit the ball a mile (if he connects) but can’t throw or track down a fly ball to save his hide, and may not even own a glove.

I can hear you saying that the baseball equivalent of the punter has existed all along: the pitcher who steps to the plate to bat and looks as feeble as Granny at the family picnic. Sure, Dean Chance and his like were a sorry spectacle. But there have always been pitchers who can hit. Surely the pleasure of seeing Rick Sutcliffe knock one out in the playoffs is worth sitting through a few feeble at-bats by lesser athletes in the number nine spot. The reasons why pitchers don’t hit as well as position players are complex, but still insufficient to justify the DH. We should expect pitchers to at least try to hit, even if we recognize that as a group they will never do it as well as outfielders (or even utility infielders).

This brings us to the crucial point, the fundamental reason why the designated hitter is an abomination. The DH is wrong because it is based on a notion that has done great harm to American society in the past few decades: the notion that if people fail to meet standards, the correct response is to abolish the standards. It started in education: sometime in the sixties, the idea began to gain currency that when students fail to work up to standard, the only humane response is to lower the standards.

It was this idea that gave birth to the DH. “Pitchers can’t hit? So why make them? We’ll give them a pass. We’ll let these oafs who can’t field bat for them. We'll spare them both some embarrassment and while we're at it we’ll save the game, which is in dire distress because there isn’t as much scoring as in basketball.”

This latter idiocy, of course, was part of the package: the idea that baseball was dying because the public wouldn’t support a game unless scoring took place at promiscuous levels. This delusion grew with the decline in offense that occurred in the late sixties. Anybody who truly understood (and valued) the game knew that the batting freeze of the sixties was a phase that would eventually pass, as of course it did, even in the DH-less National League. The frenzy to “save” baseball took grotesque forms, including proposals to widen the foul lines, play baseball by the clock, and other idiotic ideas. Fortunately, cooler heads prevailed.

With the unhappy exception of the designated hitter. We’ve had a generation of the designated hitter now, and we can compare DH baseball to the real thing. Has National League ball been less exciting than American League ball? Have NL fans left the ballpark in droves, disgusted by the sight of pitchers at the plate, bored to distraction by a dearth of offense? It was steroids, not the DH, that led to the last offensive explosion in baseball, and anyway that made us all realize that maybe offense isn’t everything. All the DH has done is to inflate AL offensive statistics, prolong a few careers (at the expense of a few young ballplayers stuck on the bench, it should be noted), saved a few pitchers a little embarrassment. It has made life simpler for AL managers. It has devalued the notion of the complete ballplayer and robbed some pitchers of a chance to show what they can do (sorry, you won’t be seeing Dontrelle Willis at the plate this year).

The DH has had its run. It is time for those responsible for the well-being of our game to come to their senses and send it back where it came from. It is time for the designated hitter to be consigned to the dustbin of history.

Sam Reaves
www.samreaves.com

Lonely Colombia

2008-03-13T20:08:00.000-07:00

It seems war has been averted in the northern part of South America, as Colombia, Venezuela and Ecuador agreed to disagree at an emergency session of the Organization of American States in the Dominican Republic this week. This followed Colombia’s bombing of a jungle base on Ecuadoran territory which killed Raúl Reyes, a top leader of the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia), the rebel group that has posed a serious threat to the Colombian state for thirty years. The raid elicited outraged reactions not only from Ecuador’s Rafael Correa, but also from Hugo Chávez in Venezuela. Venezuela and Ecuador sent troops to the Colombian border, and for a few nervous days it seemed as if a real shooting war might break out. The OAS meeting restored calm by agreeing to investigate the matter but, tellingly, stopped short of condemning Colombia. The countries have re-established diplomatic relations and sent the troops back to the barracks.

Mexico is up in arms as well, since it emerged that several Mexican students who were in the camp were killed or wounded. Demonstrations all over the region are condemning Colombia’s Álvaro Uribe for ordering the raid, and President Bush’s declared support for Uribe is taken as evidence that this is yet another case of U.S.-backed oppression of those who would lead Latin America out of poverty and underdevelopment. The FARC has the ear of the world’s university students and those whose sympathies lie on the political left.

Who you root for depends on your political convictions, of course, but it’s getting harder to pretend that the FARC is a legitimate political and social movement. They may have been starry-eyed idealists thirty years ago, but as Colombia has become more prosperous and more democratic, the FARC has become more and more criminalized. Their principal lines these days are drugs and kidnapping for ransom, both of which are lucrative enough to keep them going, but neither of which makes much of a political platform. Colombia’s previous president, Andrés Pastrana, declared a cease-fire, handed over a large chunk of the country to the FARC as a safe zone and started negotiations, only to see the FARC use the breathing room to step up recruiting and widen its drug and kidnapping operations. Many of the FARC’s hostages were kidnapped during the supposed negotiations and some have been held for years.

On the other side, Colombia is a functioning democracy, with alternation of power by elections, an array of genuine political parties and a free press. It is admittedly a democracy under stress, and the Colombian elite has been criticized for its links to the vicious right-wing militias which were as bad or worse than the FARC, but two things should be pointed out: the right wing paramilitaries emerged relatively recently, as a response to the government’s inability to stem rebel violence, and Uribe has made great efforts to dismantle them. The fact that perfect justice has not been achieved (some paramilitary leaders have gotten off lightly) should not obscure the fact that in Colombia today the principal source of violence is the depredations of the FARC, not the paramilitaries or the state.

As for Chávez, his reaction was a guilty one: computers seized by Colombian commandos at the site of the raid allegedly indicate that Chávez has been secretly funding the FARC. If proven, this is much more of an act of war than anything Colombia has done. Meanwhile, under Chávez’s stewardship, Venezuela’s agricultural output has tumbled, requiring it to import large quantities of food from the same Colombia Chávez threatened with war this week, and oil output is declining as Chávez squanders the oil wealth on utopian social schemes, proving again that socialist ideologues should never be trusted with the reins of an economy (see Zimbabwe). Chávez knows that a little saber-rattling helps to distract people from his own incompetence.

Colombia deserves our support in this fight. It is a struggling democracy whose principal problems come from abroad: the raging drug war imposed by the U.S. and the Neanderthal political vision of Hugo Chávez and the FARC, who learned nothing from the fall of communism. Álvaro Uribe has one of the toughest jobs on earth, and he is doing a creditable job.

Sam Reaves
www.samreaves.com

Wolf Dreams

2008-02-10T21:06:00.000-08:00

I’ve just finished reading a thought-provoking book called Wolf Dreams (À quoi rêvent les loups, in French) by Yasmina Khadra. This is the female pseudonym of an exiled former Algerian army officer who made his name writing very dark crime novels set in contemporary Algeria, some of which have been adapted for movies or TV in France. (Khadra writes in French, but several of his books have been translated into English.) His crime novels featuring Algiers police Commissaire Llob are stylish, razor-sharp, noir tales set against the background of Algeria’s repressive political system, corruption, and seething social conflicts.

But Khadra has also written several novels which depict, from the inside, the ferocious Islamic insurgency which raged in Algeria in the 1990’s. I’ve read two of those, In the Name of God (Les agneaux du seigneur) and now Wolf Dreams. And I’d say that anyone who wants to understand Islamic extremism ought to read them, too.

In the Name of God focuses on a village in rural Algeria as it succumbs to a local band of fundamentalists led by a charismatic imam. Wolf Dreams is set mainly in the capital, Algiers, and follows a young man’s trajectory from unemployment through religious awakening to full-fledged insurgency. Both books provide a chilling look at how a compelling ideology can channel malice, legitimize thuggery and suppress humanity.

Indeed, the most disturbing element of Khadra’s depiction is the human familiarity of his characters. To most of us, jihadists can never be more than caricatures—the violence of their rhetoric and their actions is so extreme that they are simply opaque. We can’t locate the human being in there anywhere. So our only reaction is revulsion. And that’s only natural—people who decapitate hostages on video can hardly expect anything else. But while the jihadists have willingly suppressed their humanity, they are not a new species—and Khadra shows us where they came from.

This is by no means to plead for sympathy. Khadra is quite explicit about the appalling cruelty of the Islamists, particularly toward women. (Kidnapping, sexual slavery and eventual murder is the frequent fate of female victims of Islamist raids.) There are no redeeming features of the Islamic insurgency to be found in these books. But Khadra’s point is that the men (and yes, women) who are drawn to jihadism are no different from people who have been drawn to extremist movements elsewhere. People who are disaffected, alienated, maybe just bored, are easy prey for ideological snake-oil peddlers. And extremist ideologies make explicit and effective use of the old, toxic claim that the end justifies the means.

Khadra’s message is that Islamic extremism is like all the other extremisms that have come and gone. It is an ideology peddled by a ruthless minority in a society under stress. In this it resembles Nazism in the crumbling Weimar Republic or the totalitarian brand of Shinto espoused by the military clique that took Japan into the Second World War. This means that it can be beaten.

Of course, that first means that it has to be fought. It can’t be appeased. Sometimes we are going to have to shed blood in resisting it, because it is ruthless. But also, while it can be beaten, it can’t be beaten only by military action. When all the Al-Qaeda bases have been bombed to rubble and all the leaders killed or captured, there is still going to be a long arduous task to be done—the task of engagement and debate and patient insistence on the political values that so exasperate totalitarians: the rule of law and plurality and tolerance and rational debate and limits on power.

Some people claim that Islam is incompatible with these values, that it is essentially totalitarian. I don’t think it is—I think the appeal of these values is powerful enough to change Islam without destroying it, just as they changed Christian society in the course of the Reformation. I think the existence of voices like Yasmina Khadra’s is evidence of that.

Yasmina Khadra is a Muslim and an implacable opponent of jihadism. He’s also a humane and tolerant observer of people and a fine writer. I recommend his books highly.

Sam Reaves
www.samreaves.com

Free Trade

2008-02-04T16:38:00.000-08:00

Free trade is a tough sell for a lot of people. When your job goes south, or west to China or wherever, it’s asking a lot to expect you to wave the banner for unhindered trade between nations. When you’re sitting there looking at unpaid bills with the first faint stirrings of desperation in the pit of your stomach, textbook explanations of comparative advantage are not going to be much comfort. You’re going to find it hard to be philosophical. You’re going to be much more inclined to call your congressman.

On the other hand, when Nissan opens a plant that gives you and your cousin jobs, or the company you work for adds an extra shift because their export sales have doubled this year, you tend to take it for granted. And when was the last time you wrote a politician to say thanks for that Chilean wine you’ve been getting at the Safeway because it’s just as good as the stuff you used to buy and a lot cheaper?

Free trade produces small numbers of obvious victims and large numbers of anonymous beneficiaries. That asymmetry is a problem for the people trying to make the case for free trade. This includes most economists, but economists don’t write our laws. Politicians do, and they’re the ones fielding the phone calls from the laid-off workers.

The victims of free trade are easy for journalists to find, and they always have specific decision-makers to blame—- the executives who decided to shift production to China. The beneficiaries, on the other hand, mostly don’t have a clue about how much they pay for shoes or televisions compared to people elsewhere or even about how prices are set. All most people know is that they wish prices were lower and jobs were more plentiful. So when they turn on the Chinese-made TV set they got such a good deal on and see politicians telling them that foreign competition is bad, they are happy to believe it.

A good example is the current controversy in Mexico over the lifting of tariffs on corn. Thousands of people, mostly farmers, protested in Mexico City on January 31st against the lifting of tariffs on corn from the U.S. The farmers protest that they can’t compete with subsidized corn coming from big mechanized producers north of the border. They’re right—they can’t. But the real question is whether that ought to be their aspiration. Most Mexican farmers farm less than five acres. They’re subsistence farmers, in other words. Now, I’m not sure why subsistence farming is so glamorous to anti-globalization activists-- perhaps it’s because Indians hacking at small uneconomical plots are so much more photogenic than tractors on big efficient farms. But the reality is that subsistence farming is poverty farming. Most subsistence farmers are dirt-poor, and a lot of them can’t wait to get off the land and go to the city and get a job in the Nike factory.

In Mexico, a lot of subsistence farmers have been given an incentive to stay on their farms and keep raising corn by government subsidies. Without them, most Mexican farmers would have either left the land or made the transition to more economical crops better suited to their plots. (Corn is particularly ill-suited to the small, arid plots that the poorest Mexicans farm.) Mexico would import most of its corn from the U.S. And all Mexicans would benefit from lower prices. (The way ethanol subsidies are currently driving up corn prices on both sides of the border, to the benefit of farmers but the detriment of consumers, is a separate issue and much more of a scandal than free trade.)

But it is true that any change in economic arrangements, like letting in cheap corn or moving production to China, is going to hurt some people in the short run. So what about those people who can’t pay the bills because their jobs have disappeared? Don’t they count?

Sure they do. But media coverage and outrage are selective. Few tears were shed for laid-off oil workers when the oil business tanked in the eighties. And environmentalists want to shut down whole industries based on coal and other carbon-producing technologies. I imagine at least some environmentalists are aware that people will suffer as carbon-related jobs disappear. But they don’t think that those jobs are more important than solving the carbon problem.

We should look at free-trade related job loss the same way. Laid-off workers should get temporary assistance and a new job. And, in a dynamic economy like ours, they usually do. Meanwhile, the gains from free trade make the economy as a whole more productive, which benefits everyone.

Most people, whether in the U.S. or Mexico, don’t understand how markets work to efficiently allocate resources. All they know is that there oughta be a law to protect them from economic adversity. And there usually is—which just prolongs economically inefficient and even contradictory arrangements, like paying subsistence farmers to stay on the land while letting in imports they can’t compete with. Putting politicians in charge of deciding what should get produced and how much of it is a recipe for absurdities like our tangled farm policy here in the U.S. Eliminating subsidies and tariffs and letting companies and individuals seek the best deal wherever they can find it is a much better way of making economic decisions.

And that’s all free trade is. Now, it’s quite true that NAFTA, CAFTA and all the other FTA’s that are popping up are not really free trade agreements—they’re managed trade agreements, which means they are messy political compromises with all that implies in the way of payoffs, bribes and sweetheart deals. But even under NAFTA’s absurd thousand-plus pages of micro-managing, Mexico and the U.S. both saw exports grow and unemployment fall. The warts on NAFTA are not an argument against free trade; they’re just another argument against politicians trying to run the economy.

And that’s the real problem. Politics always trumps good economic policy.

Sam Reaves
www.samreaves.com

Is there a doctor in the house?

2008-01-27T09:39:00.000-08:00

The health care crisis has stepped to center stage in the political debate in the U.S., with every serious candidate in the presidential campaign offering his or her menu of solutions. This has been a political minefield, or third rail if you prefer, since Hillary Clinton found out in 1994 that “socialized medicine” is the most potent slur since “communist” in American political culture.

All of the candidates propose some solution resting on the private insurance market. Nobody’s going to get very far advocating a government-run single-payer system in the United States. Whatever its merits, it’s just not going to fly politically in this country. Proponents of a single-payer system think this means that we are hopelessly backward or brainwashed by evil special interests. They seethe with frustration at the inability of the political class to come up with anything to solve the problem of 47 million people without health insurance of any kind.

Our political class makes me seethe, too, but I’m not sure a single-payer system is the answer. To start with, let’s look at the problem. In fact, we have plenty of health care. The United States is by far the world leader in medical innovation and availability of advanced care. The problem, of course, is paying for it. Almost nobody can afford to pay for that fancy health care directly, and a lot of people can’t even afford insurance to cover their medical expenses. What we really have is a health care affordability crisis.

So how do we make health care affordable? Most advanced countries have implemented some kind of single-payer system, in which the government, using tax revenues, either provides health care directly by making health care providers government employees, as in Britain, or pays private sector medical providers for the procedures they perform, acting essentially as a big monopoly insurance company, as in Canada. In most places this public care can be supplemented by private insurance, resulting in a mixed system. France has an excellent mixed system which by all accounts scores well on patient satisfaction and outcomes; the only problem with France’s system is that it’s very expensive. It’s been running in deficit for years, and the Sarkozy government has promised to find ways of cutting its heavy costs.

All health care systems are expensive, of course; here in the U.S. we pay more for health care than anybody else in the world. Health care is intrinsically expensive because it involves a lot of fancy equipment and infrastructure, and doctors and nurses require a lot of training. And they don’t work for free. (That’s the problem with declaring health care a “right”—you have no inalienable right to somebody else’s labor. You have to pay them for it.) So all health care systems face the problem of making health care affordable.

How do you make something very expensive affordable? By sharing out the load, somehow, so that individuals don’t have to bear the full cost. This makes particular sense in areas in which great costs may arise unexpectedly and due to no fault of the consumer’s. There’s no reason to make other people pay for your SUV or your vacation in the Bahamas, because you can live without those things. But if you get hit by a truck and require multiple surgeries and months of hospitalization, it hardly seems fair to condemn you to bankruptcy because the truck driver was watching a pretty girl instead of the road. So nearly everyone agrees that there should be a mechanism for pooling resources and relieving individuals of the full cost of the care they need, at least for catastrophic care.

Traditionally we did this by insurance, which is a pretty good idea, despite all of the problems and complications involved. An insurance company pools resources and spreads risks. It also controls costs, because it has to make a profit, and it can’t afford to pay for everything, no questions asked. So insurance companies are stingy. But that stinginess is limited by competition—if an insurance company is too stingy, its customers seek a better deal elsewhere. So in a competitive market, insurance companies are going to have to give consumers a reasonable level of protection, or they’ll go out of business. And for most people, most of the time, private insurance companies do a reasonably good job of protecting them against catastrophic expenses.

However, there are always people who can’t afford insurance, because they can’t afford anything else, either, like food. What to do about the destitute is a perennial problem, and has traditionally been dealt with by private charity or a government safety net. In theory, insurance and charity (whether private or government-supplied) ought to cover everybody’s needs.

However, in real life there are always people who slip through the cracks—they fail to buy insurance, they lose their job and their insurance coverage along with it, and so forth. And getting caught without medical insurance can bankrupt you. There are a lot of horror stories out there. So many people argue that the government should simply take over the business of providing health care and make sure everyone gets what they need.

Unfortunately, that doesn’t make all the problems go away. Even assuming that government is competent enough to organize efficient delivery of health care (not an open and shut case), government programs still have to pay for all that care somehow; the doctors and nurses still deserve to get paid. And if you tell people that something is now free, you will find that suddenly everyone wants as much of it as they can get, and the amount people want you to spend skyrockets. Even the most benevolent government has to find a way to limit costs.

Now, there are two ways of limiting the amount of money spent on something: you can put a price on it, in which case the limits of people’s ability to pay control the costs, or you can declare that it is free and have bureaucrats decide how much of it is going to be provided, and to whom. A system like Britain’s tries to do the latter. When something is free, there are no limits on demand other than whatever the system can bear. That’s why Britain has long waiting times for operations you can have tomorrow here in the States.

Most countries that have government-provided health care also allow people who can afford it to pay for private care out of their own pockets or from private insurance. These mixed systems may be the best compromise; France’s system works along these lines. In other countries there is strong opposition to allowing the wealthy to pay for extra care, on ideological, egalitarian grounds. (This is an issue in Canada to some extent.) But there seems to be a consensus in most places that it’s fine to let the rich buy extra care if they can afford it, as this can ease stress on the public system.

Here in the United States we have a Frankenstein’s monster of a mixed system that nobody sane could have designed, which provides terrific health care to those who can afford it while leaving large numbers of people out in the cold and creaking under enormous administrative costs that suck money out of our pockets without giving us improved care in return. Starting with private provision of health care and insurance, we have set up a handful of expensive government programs that do for slices of the population (the elderly, the poor, veterans) more or less what the state health systems of other countries do, while encumbering the private insurance market with countless mandates, no doubt well-intentioned, that significantly raise the cost of insurance. Further, the decision to give tax privileges to employer-provided health insurance has welded health care to employment, which means that losing a job, changing jobs or just being self-employed exposes people to disaster. Our system, in short, has lots of health care to offer but is extraordinarily inefficient at getting it to people who need it.

So what’s the answer? A lot of people point to Canada’s system, in which the provincial governments play the role of insurer. Paul Krugman argues forcefully for the Canadian option in an article in the New York Review of Books. There is no question that the Canadian system would be much simpler and cheaper than ours, while covering more people with basic care. The doubts about the Canadian system have to do with the fact that, like any government-run system, it limits costs by queuing, making people wait for non-emergency care. Some claim that this problem is exaggerated, but it seems to be real, as discussed in David Gratzer’s article in City Journal.

Another concern is innovation: it’s no accident that the U.S. leads the world in medical technology, as it’s possible to get rich here by inventing new drugs, devices and medical procedures. The profit motive may be unwholesome, but it works. A system that made all medical personnel government employees or limited the amount of money they could make from inventions would dry up innovation in short order.

So I think the best system is always going to rely primarily on private provision of health care and insurance. But that leaves a lot of room for argument. You don’t have to declare health care a right to recognize a legitimate government role in insuring that as many people as possible have access to health care. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that the government should be in the health care business. It might mean that the government merely assumes the costs of adverse selection resulting from freeing up the insurance market to make insurance more affordable for most people. (See Krugman’s discussion of adverse selection in the article cited above.) A government-backed insurer of last resort supplementing a freer insurance market and tax reforms uncoupling insurance from employment might make more sense than blanket government coverage.

The simple fact is that any system to provide health care will have to accept limits and trade-offs. You cannot simply declare something to be free and expect it to be produced spontaneously. Anything that involves material resources and people’s labor will be subject to the laws of economics even if you think that it shouldn’t. Only a system driven by profit will sustain high levels of innovation and flexibility. And somebody’s always going to have to pay.

Beyond these principles, I’m open to suggestions.

Sam Reaves

www.samreaves.com

So long, Ron

2008-01-19T08:03:00.000-08:00

The January 30 issue of the New Republic features an article by James Kirchick which exposes some unsavory views apparently held by Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul. Kirchick took the trouble to dig up old copies of a series of newsletters published by Paul in the eighties and nineties and found them to contain numerous items which can only be described as racist, homophobic, and anti-Semitic.

This concerns me only because I once voted for Ron Paul, as I mentioned in a previous post. I voted for Ron Paul when he ran as the presidential candidate of the Libertarian party in 1988. I have voted libertarian for years and was even a member of the party for a while because neither of the two major parties represents my views, which are in general pro-market, small government, pacific though not pacifist, and socially tolerant. The Libertarian party is the only U.S. political party that peddles that line. I was aware, of course, that there was a fringe element in libertarian circles, but then there’s a fringe element in a lot of political movements, particularly the outsider ones. I did my best to ignore what I called “the black helicopter crowd” and joked about it with those that didn’t share my views.

Some people come to the libertarian movement from farther left, like me, and some come to it from farther right. I was aware that Ron Paul was one of the latter, but I was not aware that his views, as expressed in a series of obscure political newsletters published without bylines but with his name on the masthead, were so outright hostile to blacks, homosexuals and Israel (read: Jews), and so accepting of an array of right-wing conspiracy theories and nostalgia for the Confederacy. It is one thing to take a principled stand against black victimology and quite another to suggest, in response to an Al Sharpton provocation, that New York be renamed “Welfaria, Zooville, Rapetown, Dirtburg or Lazyopolis.”

So I hereby renounce any sympathy for Ron Paul. And I imagine that the New Republic expose will cause large segments of Paul’s support to calve off like icebergs plunging into the sea. It is to be hoped, anyway. Libertarianism is essentially tolerant and liberal, and there’s nothing of either in Paul’s views.

There will be a salvage operation, of course; Kirchick reports that the Paul campaign is already claiming that Paul was not directly responsible for the more inflammatory items that appeared under his name, a predictable and laughable attempt at spin. There will also be those who argue that while Paul’s language was intemperate, the points are valid: welfare abetted the black underclass culture, white guilt impedes frank talk about black problems, etc., etc. But you can’t separate language from views that easily: intemperate language indicates intemperate thought. Sorry, Ron. As far as I’m concerned, you’re toast.

It would be a pity, however, if the Ron Paul crash-and-burn worked to discredit libertarian views in general, because I think in general they’re sound. Kirchuck recognizes in his article that Paul is “nothing like the urbane libertarians who staff the Cato Institute or the libertines at Reason magazine.” Thanks— while I’m not sure I’m a libertine, I like to think of myself as reasonably urbane, and I still think that most Americans are like me: they understand that capitalism is a pretty good thing and that the government shouldn’t get too big for its britches, and they don’t think their neighbors’ sex lives or private vices are any of their business. I think, in other words, that most Americans are really libertarians, and I think that’s why they’re frustrated with the big-tent, messy, incoherent, flawed coalitions that are our two major political parties.

If you’re interested in what appeals to me about libertarian thought, read David Boaz’s book Libertarianism: A Primer (The Free Press, 1997). It’s thoughtful and temperate, and I really hope that after all the shouting about Ron Paul is over, it’s that strain of libertarianism that will gain ground. I’d love to see the libertarians shake off the lunatic fringe and start appealing to the majority of Americans who I suspect share their views. But I’m afraid first we’re going to be smeared in the Ron Paul controversy.

Ron, you haven’t done liberty any favors.

Sam Reaves
www.samreaves.com

They ought to be ashamed of themselves

2007-12-16T22:30:00.000-08:00

Congress has just passed two bills that illustrate everything that’s wrong with Congress. If you want examples of how politics trumps sound economic policy, producing outcomes that benefit the few with political clout at the expense of the many without, take a look at the recently passed energy bill and farm bill.

The energy bill throws money at ethanol companies by mandating that 7.5 billion gallons of ethanol and biodiesel be used every year. What’s wrong with that? Only the fact that Brazilian sugar-cane-based ethanol can be produced much more cheaply and efficiently than U.S. corn-based ethanol. Ecologically and economically, we’re better off buying ethanol from Brazil. But Brazilian ethanol is kept out of the U.S. market by a tariff. The sole purpose of this tariff is to protect inefficient U.S. ethanol companies who have friends in Congress.

Sometimes it seems that the only purpose Congress serves is to protect favored businesses. Consider our system of farm subsidies, which has just been renewed by the passage of the farm bill after a complete cave-in of efforts to reform it.

Government payments to farmers come in many varieties and have two principal effects: Some of them raise prices that ought to be lower, and others depress prices that ought to be higher. The so-called Conservation Reserve Program pays farmers to convert cropland to “vegetative cover” in the name of conservation. That’s right, farmers get dough from Uncle Sam for not growing any crops. At the same time, quotas and tariff barriers keep out cheaper crops from foreign countries. The effect is to restrict the supply of agricultural products and keep prices high. For example, it’s been estimated that sugar quotas double the price of sugar for consumers in the U.S.

But the worst subsidies are those that guarantee minimum prices for certain crops, encouraging U.S. farmers to grow things that otherwise would be money-losers for them because of their high production costs. We’re growing cotton in the Arizona desert, with expensive (and subsidized) irrigation systems, which is then sold on the world market for less than it costs to produce. Yep, you heard that right—American farmers, growing things which can be grown far more cheaply and efficiently elsewhere, can dump their high-cost crops on the world market (don’t Congressmen howl about other countries dumping things on the market below cost?) thanks to payments from the federal government that keep them in business.

The result, of course, is that world prices are depressed and farmers in, say, poor African countries who are not lucky enough to be subsidized by their governments, struggle to compete. They get screwed, big-time. Our farm subsidies are the greatest enemy of developing-world farmers, the single greatest legitimate grievance of the poor world against the rich (the Europeans are also major villains in the farm subsidy game).

But isn’t all this necessary to save the endangered family farm? Well, most farmers don’t get any subsidies at all. If you’re not growing one of the anointed crops, you’re on your own; you have to grow something people are willing to pay for and figure out how to market it. Meanwhile, in 2003 the top 10 percent of subsidy recipients collected 72 percent of all subsidies and the top 5 percent collected 55 percent of payments. (These figures are from a good discussion of the problem put out by Citizens Against Government Waste) The great majority of subsidy payments go to the biggest, best-off farming operations, i.e. the type of farmers who can afford to hire lobbyists.

The best way to reform the subsidy system would be to blow it up. Just get rid of all the subsidies and let farmers figure out what crops there is a demand for and set about providing them economically. But this is unlikely to happen as long as a Congressman’s real constituency is the people who pay for his campaign instead of the people who cast the votes.

Our farm subsidy system is a scandal and an outrage, as are the ethanol subsidies in the new energy bill. Both bills show Congress at its worst, stacking the deck for their friends and contributors while insulting our intelligence with their rhetoric. Senator Tom Harkin, supposedly a progressive, called the farm bill “a solid, forward-looking, fiscally responsible bill,” with a straight face. Most of his colleagues appeared to agree.

They ought to be ashamed of themselves.

Sam Reaves
www.samreaves.com

Cut 'em off

2007-11-27T19:45:00.000-08:00

An all-star conglomeration of diplomats, heads of state and miscellaneous power brokers is descending on Annapolis, Maryland for a Mideast peace conference sponsored by the Bush administration. In addition to the the headliners, the Israelis and the Palestinians, a supporting cast including the Syrians, the Saudis and the Egyptians will be there. Just about everyone with a stake in the region will have a representative in Annapolis, all hoping to bash out some kind of agreement that will put an end to the festering conflict at the heart of the turmoil in the Middle East.

What are the chances? Hard to say. The problems in the Middle East go beyond Israel and the Palestinians. But it’s a starting point, so let’s look at it: the implantation of what is arguably a European state in the Arab territory of Palestine following the Second World War was, from the Arab point of view, a colonial invasion at a time when most Arab countries were freeing themselves from imperial masters. Whether the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in the wake of the establishment of Israel was a cold-blooded crime or an unintended consequence of a war provoked by Arab intransigence, it’s asking a lot of a Palestinian in a Lebanese refugee camp to embrace the state of Israel as a benign neighbor.

The trouble is, there’s a lot to like about Israel. In a region whose political culture is characterized by autocracy, obscurantism, hysteria and brutality, Israel is a functioning democracy with a free press, a lively opposition and a strong strain of the kind of masochistic internal dissent that is found only in the truly open society. Granted, its forty-year occupation and partial colonization of territory taken in war has placed that democracy under intense stress and led to abuses that no nation can be proud of. But for a country like Syria, whose unelected ruler in 1982 largely obliterated one of his own cities when provoked by rebellion, to criticize Israel for its treatment of Palestinians in the occupied territories is, to say the least, a touch hypocritical.

The truth is that much Israeli brutality has been a direct response to outrageous provocation. The slaughter of schoolchildren and the suicide bombing of Passover dinners is not best calculated to win the high moral ground. The Palestinians could have been the poster child for persecuted minorities, and instead they turned themselves into the bogeyman of the 20th century. They needed a Gandhi and they got Arafat.

The state of Israel was midwifed by the United Nations, and insofar as nations recognize the legitimacy of the U.N., it is incumbent on them to recognize the existence of Israel. The United States has no need to apologize for its support of Israel, and it should be noted that the greatest gains achieved by Arab polities, the Camp David accord which returned the Sinai to Egypt in 1977 and the Oslo accords of 1993 which created the Palestinian Authority, were achieved under American sponsorship. Is defending Israel a legitimate American interest? Only insofar as defending a democracy is a legitimate interest of other democracies. It should be regarded as an international interest.

None of which, of course, means that the Palestinian grievance is illegitimate. There is little dispute that there ought to be a functioning Palestinian state alongside the state of Israel. The question is how to get there.

A viable Palestinian state will require Israel to relinquish much of the territory it has colonized in the past forty years, which will entail a searing internal conflict in Israel, including possible civil strife. The sooner this conflict gets underway and is resolved, the better for the long-term health of Israel. The occupation is simply unsustainable. It has corroded and corrupted Israel. Details of borders and territorial swaps are trivial compared with the fundamental conflict between those who favor territorial concession and those who think that Israel can hold onto the West Bank forever. I believe the latter position is folly, and the greatest long-term threat to Israel, but it is the Israelis who must decide.

Relinquishing territory, however, will undoubtedly bring a whole new set of security problems, as demonstrated by the chaos in Gaza since Israel withdrew from the strip in 2005. It is sadly predictable that sizable Palestinian factions will insist on exploiting any Israeli withdrawal to step up attacks on Israel. Extremism is endemic in Arab political culture, and Palestinian irredentism will not disappear with the establishment of a functioning Palestinian state. And on past form, the Palestinian government, whoever ends up constituting it, will be unable to restrain it, even if willing. (If not willing, they should not be allowed to form a government.)

That’s why any solution will require a sizable presence of foreign troops in the new Palestine to guarantee Israel’s security. It would be best if these troops did not come from the United States. However, they must come from some country that is willing to devote blood and treasure to policing the peace, whose military is willing to pull the trigger. Israel will not accept a token force that winks at rocket attacks and cross-border incursions. Serious military repression of insurgent Palestinians unreconciled to the peace will be essential. Just as Israel must deal with its internal conflicts, so must Palestine. And should serious Israeli irredentism lead to violence, that also will need to be suppressed, by international forces if necessary. What nobody wants to say aloud at the conference table is that peace is going to mean pain, on both sides. But somebody has to say it.

No solution is possible without a security guarantee that the Israelis will accept. This guarantee should be international, not American. Perhaps the countries of the European Union, traditionally better viewed by the Palestinians, could muster enough firepower and resolve to shoulder the burden of policing the peace. It would be an indication that Europe is serious about being a world power.

Peace between Israelis and Palestinians, of course, would not magically make problems in the wider Mideast go away. The region is a briar patch of oppressed minorities, suppressed dissent, unmet needs, unbalanced economies and sheer reactionary bloody-mindedness. And the situation has been enormously complicated by our clumsy destruction of Iraq. Even before the invasion, however, the fundamental problem in the region was social and political stagnation, as indicated in the U.N.’s 2002 Arab Human Development Report, which pointed out the fundamentally closed and illiberal nature of most Arab societies.

There is little the West can do to change this except to exert leverage where it exists. We could start by refusing to send any more money to autocracies like Saudi Arabia and Egypt until they consent to significant reform and liberalization. We could take the next step by refusing to send any more money to anybody in the region. Declare a five-year phaseout of all military aid to all countries in the region and see how minds get concentrated. This does not mean abandoning Israel. It means internationalizing the security of Israel. We should not foot the bill alone.

There are, of course, no guarantees that anybody can bring peace to the Middle East. But if we can’t solve all the problems, we can at least refuse to pay for the wars.

Sam Reaves
www.samreaves.com

The Pesky Amendment

2007-11-18T20:28:00.000-08:00

The never-ending debate about gun control in the U.S. has been moved along, or at least stirred up a little, by the publication of a book called Out of Range, by Mark V. Tushnet, which is the subject of a lengthy review and discussion by Cass Sunstein in the current New Republic. Tushnet takes on the vexing question of what the Second Amendment to the Constitution really means. Yeah, that one. The only one the ACLU isn’t too crazy about. The one about guns.

The controversy over guns will never die, because it’s about a lot more than the Second Amendment. Whether or not you think the government should restrict or even abolish individual ownership of firearms goes to the heart of what you think about society, government, and human nature in general. But in this country a large part of the debate centers on that troublesome Amendment, which states, in case you’ve forgotten: “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.”

The question, of course, is whether this establishes an individual right to own guns or only a collective right for the states to field their own militias. Partisans of gun control point to the introductory phrase and say, “What could be clearer? They’re talking about state militias.” Gun rights proponents retort, “Whatever that phrase says, the main clause is crystal clear. What’s to argue about?”

Unfortunately, as Tushnet discusses at length, when you look at the legal history, not much about the Second Amendment is crystal clear. Gun rights supporters may be dismayed to learn that the Supreme Court has repeatedly appealed to the collective-right interpretation to uphold federal firearms laws like the 1934 National Firearms Act. (That’s why the sawed-off shotgun you have under your car seat is illegal.) However, the legal ground may be shifting, as the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled in March that D.C.’s gun ban was unconstitutional. The fight isn’t over.

Tushnet concludes that the amendment itself is too ambiguous for either side to claim victory on the basis of the text alone. His attempt at a plausible interpretation comes down to this: “We each have the right to keep and bear arms so that we can participate in the militia—the body of the people—and thereby keep governments from becoming tyrants.”

Which, I have a feeling, isn’t going to put an end to the debate. What does all this mean?

Maybe it just means that the world has changed since the Constitution was written, and that the Second Amendment isn’t a very good guide to firearms policy in the modern world. It wouldn’t be the first time that parts of the Constitution looked outdated. (I don’t recall a problem with quartering of troops any time recently.) I think Tushnet’s formulation is about right: the framers of the Constitution wanted citizens to have weapons, and the reason they wanted that was so that each state could raise a militia. That’s the way things were done back then, and the militias were seen as an important counterweight to federal power. The two parts of the Amendment are both there for a reason, but the burning political question that motivated it isn’t so burning any more. The Second Amendment is about the distribution of power, not the extent to which firearms should be regulated.

Now, before you gun prohibitionists pop the champagne corks, think about the fact that the Amendment takes for granted widespread private ownership of guns. The fundamental assumption is that most people are going to have guns around, certainly enough to raise a militia. If the Second Amendment has anything at all to say to us today, I don’t really see any way around that main clause. It assumes that people have guns and affirms that this is a desirable thing. I can’t see any interpretation that would support outright prohibition of private gun ownership.

However, that’s a far cry from saying that the government shall impose no regulations whatever on the private ownership of weapons. That leaves a whole lot of room for debate. And I don’t think the Second Amendment can take us very far in thinking through issues like licensing, registration or assault weapons bans.

Let’s start with first principles: I believe that self-defense is a fundamental right. Furthermore, I think that effective self-defense is a fundamental right. (Talk to the woman being stalked by an abusive ex-lover.) Unfortunately some people don’t agree, and they have made it illegal to own firearms in the city where I live and in numerous other places around the U.S. I think those laws are unjust and should be repealed. That woman should be able legally to own a gun for her protection.

But that doesn’t mean that no restrictions at all are admissible. I believe everyone has the right to drive a car as well, but I damn sure want to know that the person behind the wheel has undergone some kind of training and licensing procedure, because you can do a hell of a lot of damage with a car.

Rights come with responsibilities, and I’d like to see a comprehensive program of training and licensing of anyone who wants to own a firearm. Treat guns like cars, in other words; I’m not the first to say it. But that means recognizing an unequivocal right to own the things. There’s no significant movement to outlaw cars in this country. If there were, car owners would be reluctant to register their cars. There is a persistent and serious drive to outlaw firearms. Gun owners will not support licensing and registration schemes until they’re sure such schemes are not a prelude to confiscation.

Here’s a modest proposal: Let’s eliminate that pesky introductory phrase to the Second Amendment so that it reads unambiguously, “The right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed.” Let’s repeal all the local laws that outlaw private ownership of firearms. And in exchange, let’s implement effective rules on training and licensing of gun owners and put in place registration regimes comparable to those for cars.

It’s going to require concessions from both sides.

Sam Reaves
www.samreaves.com

Lula sí, Chávez no

2007-11-11T21:52:00.000-08:00

On November 2, Venezuela’s National Assembly approved a number of changes to the country’s constitution, proposed by President Hugo Chávez. The amended constitution will be submitted to the voters in a referendum on December 2. The changes would, among other things, abolish presidential term limits, allow the President to suspend some civil liberties by declaring a state of emergency, and allow expropriation of property without a court ruling. The stated intention of the reforms is “the construction of socialism.” Where have we heard this before?

Socialism continues to be a fatal temptation for a large segment of Latin American opinion, in part no doubt by reaction to U.S. meddling in the region through the years. There’s no question that the United States supported corrupt oligarchies in Latin America for decades. There’s also no question that socialism is a fool’s game. Reaction is a poor basis for policy, whether you’re a right-wing reactionary or a left-wing one.

If ever an ideology has been discredited by real-world experience, it’s socialism. No better system for institutionalizing penury and oppression has ever been devised. By 1989 it was clear that the most ferocious opponents of socialism were the people that had to live under it. Migration patterns are an infallible guide to quality of life, and it’s no accident that the migrant flow runs overwhelmingly out of socialist countries.

But capitalism by itself can’t provide the good life. All it does is ease the provision of material goods. You need a lot of other things along with capitalism, like the rule of law, sound institutions and social mobility lubricated by widespread education. In their absence, capitalism just gives you corrupt oligarchs and spectacular inequality. So people equate these things with capitalism and want to go back. The siren call of socialism is irresistible.

The problem is that you can’t have socialism without authoritarianism, because real thoroughgoing socialism requires the criminalization of independent economic activity, the very type of activity that provides the abundance that we take for granted. And that’s why Chávez knows he is going to need dictatorial powers in order to institute socialism.

It’s a bad bargain for Venezuela. What should we do? Nothing. Chávez is only going to hurt Venezuela, unless he gets serious about his alliances with people like Iran’s Ahmedinejad. Until Chávez makes some move that overtly harms our strategic interests, he is best left alone to get on with the business of impoverishing Venezuela. If he goes far enough down that road, the Venezuelans themselves will take care of him.

The worst thing we could do would be to make another Latin left-wing martyr out of Hugo Chávez. Because the C.I.A. aided Pinochet’s coup in Chile in 1973, you can’t get anybody on the left to admit that Salvador Allende was anything but a saint, even though Allende had trashed the rule of law by ignoring court decisions, creating parallel state organizations to rival any he failed to load with his supporters, decreeing expropriation of foreign property without compensation and allowing the creation of revolutionary militias under no lawful control. Martydom confers blissful oblivion.

So let’s not make a martyr of Hugo Chávez. Instead let’s watch him self-destruct, while meanwhile directing the attention of Latin Americans who want social and economic progress to the real success story in Latin America: Brazil.

Brazil is currently ruled by Luiz Inácio da Silva, nicknamed Lula, a trade union leader who was elected president in 2002. It was feared that the rabble-rousing Lula would give in to populist urges and socialist dreams and give away the store.

Instead, he chose a market-oriented finance minister and central bank chief, respected agreements with the IMF, maintained budgetary discipline and in short acted like a responsible head of government who understood how the world worked. At the same time, he instituted practical, intelligently designed programs to alleviate poverty, like tying welfare aid to education, consolidating hunger programs and strengthening infrastructure for small-scale farming.

The result? Economic growth, low inflation and the accompanying availability of credit are aiding the creation of a new middle class. Incomes for the poor are growing faster than those of the rich. Significant poverty reduction is occurring. This is happening because Lula is allowing capitalism to work.

Lula understands that socialism is candy and capitalism is vegetables. Candy’s more appealing, but it gives you a stomachache. It’s the vegetables that give you what you need. In Brazil, Mexico and yes, in Chile, where another nominally socialist president is also showing good judgment in not reversing free-market reforms, smart leaders are letting capitalism slowly bring people out of poverty. They know that there are no short cuts except to strengthen the institutional bases (like schools and fair court systems) that allow the poor to benefit from economic growth.

Meanwhile, Chávez and his protegés in Ecuador and Bolivia are offering poor Latin Americans the candy of socialism, financed by the oil boom. It will be interesting to see who’s better off in ten years or so.

Sam Reaves

Enola's Boy

2007-11-04T19:29:00.000-08:00

Paul Tibbets is dead. The man who piloted the Enola Gay (named after his mother) on its bombing run over Hiroshima died on November 1st at age 92. Reaction around the world was mixed and muted, reflecting the uncomfortable ambiguity of his place in public awareness and, now, history.

Some people said Paul Tibbets was a hero; others that he was a war criminal. Which is it? How should we remember Paul Tibbets?

The bomb he dropped killed more than a hundred thousand people, almost all of them civilians, in a single horrific, world-changing conflagration. Together with a second bomb dropped on Nagasaki a few days later, it forced the military regime that had led Japan into a disastrous war to contemplate surrender.

The man himself was unapologetic to the end about what he had done, insisting that his action had saved lives by shortening the war. His uncompromising stance made him an easy figure for some people to hate, and a harder one to defend than if he had expressed sensitive, conciliatory second thoughts.

What you think about Paul Tibbets, of course, depends on what you think of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. So what about that? Was our use of atomic weapons on two Japanese cities one of history’s great crimes?

Look it in the face, and a plausible first reaction is: how could it not be? How could the incineration of a hundred thousand men, women and children not be a crime? Sketch for me a philosophical position that excuses the purposeful killing of an entire civilian population, even in retaliation. Even given the Rape of Nanking and the Holocaust, even considering that the Axis powers had obliterated standards of civilized behavior, that six years of war had coarsened and brutalized the best of democracies, how can we not condemn slaughter on a scale like that?

And yet. An elderly gentleman of my acquaintance, a life-long liberal and an educated, humane man, who was sitting on Okinawa with the remains of his battered division contemplating the invasion of Japan when the bomb was dropped, told me, “Well, we were sure glad they dropped it.” And he said it with a smile. I doubt he took any pleasure in thinking of the hundred thousand dead Japanese civilians. But I doubt he loses any sleep over them, either.

Any argument justifying the dropping of the atomic bomb on Japan must be a purely utilitarian argument. Utilitarian arguments take no account of rights. They are based on mere calculus: this number of lives versus that number, this bottom line versus that one. The notion of individual rights says that some things are wrong no matter what the reason. Rights are “side constraints”, in Robert Nozick’s term; they are supposed to trump utilitarian calculations. We are rightfully suspicious of utilitarian arguments precisely because they override rights.

Most of us, however, would concede that in an emergency we sometimes have to choose the lesser of two evils, and it is here that utilitarian arguments come into play. In an emergency, rights can be seen as a luxury.

So what it comes down to is asking whether we were in an emergency situation when President Truman made the decision to use nuclear weapons on Japan. Were the circumstances so dire that there was no alternative to dropping the bomb?

The consensus that has allowed most of us to live with the way the Second World War ended is that they were. The war was a fundamental threat to civilized society, and we were close to the end of our tether. It was an emergency.

This consensus is not universally accepted, of course. There is a rival school of thought that holds that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were indeed crimes, great enough to undermine the legitimacy of the United States as a law-abiding power. Maybe. But nations are not at their best under extreme stress. There are better things on our record than Hiroshima, like the post-war reconstruction of Japan. And all nations should be judged by the same standards. We were not the only ones to systematically attack civilian populations in the great moral collapse of the Second World War. We weren’t even the most ruthless. We were just, in the end, the best at it.

Paul Tibbets didn’t invent the atomic bomb. He didn’t make the decision to drop it, either. So I’m not inclined to regard Paul Tibbets as the great villain of the piece. But his passing ought to make us think hard about nuclear war and how we can avoid getting to a place where the cold hard calculus of numbers trumps our right not to be incinerated. There’s no magic formula—neither simple-minded pacifism nor reckless belligerence is going to insure our safety. All I ask is that whoever has the nuclear football should never lose sight of the stakes.

Sam Reaves
www.samreaves.com

So crazy it just might work...

2007-11-01T19:22:00.001-07:00

Some things you get tired of writing about because after a while it’s like pounding your head against a wall.

The War on Drugs is one of them. But I can’t help it. I have to keep saying it. The War on Drugs is folly, a stupendous waste of resources.

The U.S. has just agreed to send Mexico $1.4 billion dollars to help fight drug trafficking. This comes in the wake of a serious escalation in drug-gang violence in Mexico that has taken a toll on journalists, politicians and law enforcement officers, not to mention innocent bystanders. The aid will go for aircraft, scanning equipment, communications systems, technical assistance, training, the whole panoply of material and know-how that has been deployed in the fight against the drug trade in the U.S. My guess is that all that equipment and training will have approximately the same effect it’s had here at home. Meaning, not much. Last time I looked, we still had a “drug problem”.

I put it in quotes because what it really is is a drug prohibition problem. That is, the violence and corruption are effects not of the drugs themselves, but of their illegal status.

It’s an old argument. It seems self-evident to some of us, but others are horrified that anyone could even think of legalizing cocaine, heroin and other harmful drugs. There’s a deep, deep conceptual divide between those who favor legalization and those who favor ever more intense prosecution of the drug war.

I’m not sure how to bridge that divide. It must go to the heart of our most basic assumptions. I’m one of the ones that thinks it’s foolish to try to police what people ingest in their pursuit of pleasure. I look at the historical example of Prohibition, which made Al Capone a millionaire, and see an irresistible analogy with the modern prohibition of cocaine, which turned a handful of Colombian street toughs into world-class tycoons. The violence and the corruption and the staggering enrichment of scoundrels which are the most flagrant evils associated with drugs have nothing to do with what happens to your brain when you snort cocaine or inject heroin. They are, exclusively, effects of the fact that to do so is illegal. And that’s easy to fix.

None of which is to deny that drugs can have disastrous effects on individuals. At this point the usual response of the drug warriors is to start cataloguing the horrific consequences of drug use—the addiction and psychosis and subversion of personality and all the rest. As if that settled things.

My shift in thinking about drugs started when I asked a friend who worked in drug rehab at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago what the most dangerous drug out there was, expecting her to say heroin or PCP or something similar. Without batting an eye she replied, “Alcohol.”

When I was in college, I could not help but notice that the most spectacular incidents of vandalism, aggression, impaired driving, sexual misconduct and general recklessness, not to mention serial vomiting, all involved alcohol. I have a brother who is a police officer; he estimates that ninety percent of his calls involve alcohol abuse. I have friends whose lives have been severely impaired by alcoholism, to the point of job loss, long stints in rehab, financial ruin, health collapse and family breakdown. Why isn’t alcohol illegal?

Because we tried that, and all we got was Al Capone. We came to our senses and realized that criminalizing a substance merely puts the traffic in that substance securely in the hands of the most ruthless elements of society. It transforms a public health problem into a public safety problem. It empowers thugs. It creates vast criminal fortunes. It creates failed states by requiring that a country’s most valuable crops be guarded by private armies.

None of these things is inevitable. They are direct consequences of our refusal to treat the harmful effects of cocaine, heroin and other drugs the same way that we treat the harmful effects of alcohol, namely, as health problems or problems of private conduct.

I don’t know why this isn’t obvious to everyone. Some people whose judgment I respect are strongly for the continued prohibition of drugs. I don’t understand their reasoning. But given the utter failure of our ever-escalating efforts in the extraordinarily expensive Drug War to erase or even significantly diminish the use of these drugs, what do we have to lose by giving legalization a try? We might have more addicts, but we’d certainly have less violence.

How much worse off could we be?

Sam Reaves

www.samreaves.com

The Bell Curve Again

2007-10-22T18:45:00.000-07:00

It keeps coming back: every few years somebody revives the argument about whether there are significant differences in intelligence across races. This time it’s James Watson, the Nobel Prize-winning co-discoverer of DNA, who has ignited the usual firestorm by saying that Africans are less intelligent than the rest of us.
Or something like that. Here’s the crux of what he actually said in an interview with the Sunday Times Magazine:
“...all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours - whereas all the testing says not really.”
...and then:
“There is no firm reason to anticipate that the intellectual capacities of peoples geographically separated in their evolution should prove to have evolved identically. Our wanting to reserve equal powers of reason as some universal heritage of humanity will not be enough to make it so.”
The reaction was fast: Watson was fired from his administrative position at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory a couple of days after the interview, and a spokesman for a British human rights group said: “[Watson’s statement] amounts to fueling bigotry and we would like it to be looked at for grounds of legal complaint.”
At the same time, other people were accusing Watson’s critics of political correctness, suppression of free discussion, and a refusal to consider evidence which goes against orthodox notions. Do they have a point? Watson’s statement was an empirical claim, which presumably can be tested for its truth value. Should he lose his job, or even be prosecuted, because it makes a claim most of us are reluctant to admit could be true?
Not many of us are conversant with the relevant science, and it often seems to boil down to conflicting claims. “...geneticists, psychologists, neuroscientists and educationalists have rebutted [the claims of scientific racism] many times over,” said biologist Steven Rose in The New Statesman. Meanwhile, a respondent using the name Caledonia in a discussion on the Pharyngula science blog confidently states: “People who are actually familiar with the basics of psychometric testing also know that various ethnic subpopulations score differently on the scale of large groups. And yes, attempts have been made to account for these differences, and obvious things like SES and nutrition can't account for all of them.”
Who’s right? How are we to make sense of all this? Most of us find racist views repellent. We’d love to think that there’s no scientific basis for racist views. But is that just wishful thinking? What about that nagging voice that says that if we are really open-minded we have at least to consider evidence that things might not be as we’d wish? Well, a few random thoughts come to mind right away: No, people shouldn’t be prosecuted for offering unpopular opinions. They shouldn’t lose their jobs merely for making claims about matters of fact, even if those facts are unpalatable (and still in question). There is a whiff of censorship in the reaction to Watson’s statement. The reaction lends credence to those who claim that liberals enforce an orthodoxy of thought in the media and society at large.
But other random thoughts occur as well: Why do people keep bringing this up? What is the utility of a claim like this in the first place? If Watson (or Charles Murray of Bell Curve fame) is correct, the statistical distribution of intelligence (the infamous “bell curve”) for people of African descent is shifted to the left of the bell curve for people of European descent. In other words, the average intelligence of the first group is lower than that of the second. Well, my first observation is that the shift is fairly slight, no matter how you plot it: a whole lot of black people are still smarter than a whole lot of white people. But more importantly, the amount of information about any given individual conveyed by the bell curve is exactly zero. There is no way of telling where any given individual lies on that curve except to test that person individually. In other words, if we are treating people as individuals, which is what we should be doing as a matter of profound and unshakable principle in this country, the curve is useless. It is a curiosity at best.
So why are some people still doing research on this? There seems to be a fairly broad consensus in biology that the notion of race is not biologically significant. (See a good discussion of this at pbs.org) And the notion of intelligence is pretty fuzzy, too. The Mensa quiz doesn’t quite nail it, I’m afraid. There are different types of intelligence, and intelligence isn’t graven in stone even within one person’s lifetime. It seems to me that the idea of racial differences in intelligence presumes a firmer idea of both race and intelligence than is actually warranted.
But just for the sake of argument, let’s concede that the categories and the differences are real: my response is still, “So what?” Plain old waspy Americans like me are supposedly on average less intelligent than Asians or Ashkenazi Jews. Am I worried? No, as long as I’m hired, fired, stroked, chewed out, rewarded, punished, prosecuted, acquitted, scorned, respected, hated or loved on the basis of my behavior as an individual, and not on the basis of my membership in a group, whatever the statistics about that group. That, the insurance of equality before the law and institutional fairness to individuals, is the central problem, the central struggle of American society or any other society. The question of which group is more intelligent on average is simply and utterly irrelevant.
So while it’s wrong to try to censor science, there’s nothing wrong with questioning a research program. I’m just wondering why this particular research program still appeals to people.
An abashed James Watson apologized for his remarks a few days after the controversy broke, saying he was “mortified”. Here’s an interesting question: Why didn't he stick to his guns?

Sam Reaves
samreaves.com

Talking Turkey

2007-10-15T19:34:00.000-07:00

Congress is threatening to pass a resolution proclaiming that the slaughter of a million Armenians by the Ottoman Turks was genocide. Offended, the modern Turks are up in arms, saying they may retaliate by refusing to allow the U.S. to funnel supplies through Turkey to Iraq. In addition, the Turks are peeved with us because PKK rebels based in our Kurdish protectorate in Iraq keep coming over the border to kill people and blow things up. The Turks are threatening to go into Iraq to do something about it. Turkish-American relations are a trifle on the tense side these days.
The Turks don’t have a good press in this country; when we think of the Turks most of us think of Jose Ferrer’s creepy Turkish colonel in Lawrence of Arabia or the nightmare jail in Midnight Express. And there are lots of Armenian-Americans who know the history because they heard it from elderly relatives who survived the horror. But bad press or not, I have to say the Turks have a couple of legitimate beefs here.
First of all, what is Congress doing wasting its time with resolutions like this? Which Congressional committee was it that produced this? The House Committee in Charge of Lecturing Other Countries About Their Past Crimes, was it? I guess we should be grateful Congress has solved all our problems so they can move on to Monday-morning quarterbacking other countries’ histories.
But wasn’t the death of a million Armenians genocide? Well, I wasn’t there. All I have to go on are the various historical sources. Some of them call it genocide, some of them don’t. Who cares what they call it? It seems fairly clear that it was a horrific slaughter of a defenseless population by a backward despotism. If you want to call it genocide, call it genocide. If the Turks don’t like that, they’ll argue with you. But it’s a historical argument, or maybe just a semantic argument. There’s no reason to turn it into a political argument. The debate is similar to the one about what happened to the Native Americans. Call that genocide, and a lot of patriotic Americans will get hot under the collar. The point is that the debate is best left to the historians, not the politicians. Imagine what would happen if the French parliament passed a resolution declaring what happened to the Cherokees genocide. You might well agree with them—but a lot of people wouldn’t, and the ensuing political dust-up would be pointless. You’d wonder whether the French parliament didn’t have anything better to do.
The House resolution is essentially a piece of mischief. If it’s not an underhanded way of undermining our campaign in Iraq (that’s the cynical view, and I’d hate to think it’s true), it’s certainly grandstanding to oblige some influential constituents of Nancy Pelosi. The proper purpose of a legislature is to pass the laws required for the functioning of our institutions and exercise oversight of the other branches of government. Somebody please explain to me how this resolution furthers any of that.
As for the PKK, they’re on our list of terrorist organizations, as well as the EU’s. They have carried out assassinations and bombings across Turkey, and if I were Turkish, I’d be peeved, too, by their ability to find safe haven in Iraq. We should make clear to the Iraqi Kurds that in exchange for our gift of their country to them, they are to exercise some responsibility and rein in the PKK.
None of the above is to take Turkey off the hook for any of its sins. Turkey has stupidly and stubbornly repressed Kurdish language and culture, and the Turkish army’s counter-insurgency campaign in southeast Turkey has been at times criminally brutal. Turkey is an imperfect democracy living under the constant threat of military intervention and nationalist extremism. But it is a working democracy which has shown signs of reform and liberalization, much more so than any other Muslim country, and as the best hope of demonstrating that Islam and democracy can co-exist, its legitimate interests deserve our support. The House resolution, whatever its truth value, is empty symbolism and thus a piece of irrelevant foolishness, and Turkey deserves what influence we can exert to prevent murderous attacks coming across its border from our Kurdish client state.

Sam Reaves
www.samreaves.com

Torture? Not us...

2007-10-07T09:56:00.000-07:00

President Bush says we don’t torture people. Nobody believes him. Well, I suppose some people do. But they have adopted a definition of torture (no organ failure, no torture) so restrictive as to be meaningless. And handing prisoners over to other countries that practice torture without restraint makes the whole denial thing a joke.
So what’s the problem with torture, anyway? This is the security of our country we’re talking about, isn’t it? Doesn’t the end justify the means here? We’re talking about harsh treatment of a few murderous fanatics in order to prevent a mass slaughter of innocents. What wouldn’t be justified?
I’m willing to take a hard look at the question. I don’t want another September 11th any more than you do. And those who say that torture never works are simply wrong. The French army used torture quite effectively to break up the FLN networks responsible for the bombing campaign in Algiers in 1957. Was it justified there? Can it ever be justified?
There are some hard issues here. Let’s think first about the ends and means thing. The best discussion of ends and means I know of is in a footnote to Chapter 9 of Karl Popper’s The Open Society and Its Enemies. Popper raises three questions to ask about any claim that a good end justifies a bad means: (1) Will the means in fact lead to the end? (2) Can we realistically assess which is the lesser of two evils? (3) Will the means itself create new ongoing problems?
Our response to the first question is a matter of intellectual humility. Millennia of experience with unintended consequences ought to make us skeptical of easy claims here. The seemingly clear cases like the French campaign in Algiers are very limited in scope: Massu’s paratroops crushed that particular network, but the larger war was lost anyway, and along with it the prestige of the French army. How many lives were saved? Impossible to answer. Some, almost certainly, in the short run. But how many French lives were lost subsequently to increased Algerian bitterness and opposition? The calculus gets pretty tough. Torture does not win friends, even if it can accomplish immediate tactical goals.
As for the second question, the non-fatal suffering, however intense, of a handful of al-Qaeda operatives set against the lives of large numbers of Americans in a hypothetical rerun of 9/11 is fairly easy, as assessments go. But it gets harder if we think about an ongoing policy of torture or physical pressure or whatever you choose to call it over a period of years. This leads to the third question. What are the long-term effects? Moral authority is a real asset in a world where the great majority of governments are distinguished by ruthless cynicism. It is an intangible asset, which may appear insignificant when set against the very real danger of mass murder. But in the long run the attitudes of people around the world, their desire to do business with us and listen to our entreaties and respect our interests and safeguard the travelers we send out around the world, is materially affected by our moral standing. And the longer we maintain a policy that allows torture, especially if we continue to be dishonest about it, the more that standing suffers.
The only possible justification for torture is on a strictly utilitarian calculus in which the act of torture would prevent a significantly greater evil in a direct and unambiguous way. But utilitarian arguments, overruling what Robert Nozick called “side constraints”, are valid only in emergency situations. The ticking-bomb scenario favored by torture’s apologists might qualify, but those scenarios are mercifully rare. In a true ticking-bomb scenario, all bets are off, and I would hope that any U.S. personnel in a position to defuse the bomb would do what is necessary. But that’s a far cry from institutionalizing torture in the long-term fight against Islamic fascism. We shouldn’t go there. It creates more problems than it solves. It de-legitimizes our power and manufactures enemies. It throws the moral authority we like to claim out the window. President Bush should take the steps necessary to insure that when he says we don’t torture people, he’s telling the truth.
Sam Reaves
www.samreaves.com

Lose the War Metaphor

2007-09-25T21:23:00.000-07:00

The War on Terror is heading into its seventh year this fall. Six years and counting. That makes it longer than either World War, longer than the Civil War, and closing fast on Vietnam. The good news is that so far the casualty count is a lot lower than those other wars, even counting the people who died on September 11, 2001. It’s a low-intensity war, unless you’re unlucky enough to live in Baghdad or Helmand province. Once again, Americans for the most part get to watch it on TV.
Are we winning? You tell me. There hasn’t been another 9/11, and that’s good, but on the other hand, Iraq, where five years ago there were no suicide bombings, YouTube decapitations or Shiite death squads, is now a vast exercise ground for thugs of all stripes, most of them hostile to us. Whether or not going into Iraq has made us less safe, it has certainly made most Iraqis less safe, and given the ghastliness of the Hussein regime, that’s a real feat. Even if you concede that Saddam was a direct threat to us, it’s hard to argue that our invasion has had a successful outcome.
Afghanistan is different: pretty much everyone, even the nervous Europeans, agrees we had to go into Afghanistan, and if we’d left it at that we’d probably still have most of the world on our side. But even in Afghanistan the jihadists are far from beaten.
So it’s the shooting-war part of the War on Terror that seems to be giving us, the world’s undisputed military top dog, the most trouble. Why?
Maybe it’s a conceptual thing. I’m starting to think that ‘war’ is the wrong way to think about this. After all, the 9/11 attack was largely planned by a handful of guys in an apartment in Hamburg, and all the carrier groups and armored brigades in the world are useless against a roomful of guys muttering in Arabic.
George Soros raised howls of protest from conservatives a while back when he said that maybe we should have treated 9/11 as a crime against humanity instead of an act of war. The proper response to a crime, of course, is intelligent police work rather than war. That didn’t sit well with the hawks. I think the hawks should take a second and think again.
We love to declare wars in this country. We also have a War on Drugs, and there used to be a War on Poverty. I guess we must have won that one, because you don’t hear much about it anymore. Every once in a while some politician identifies a serious problem and decides he has to declare war on it. That’s supposed to get everyone mobilized for a big national effort, I guess. It’s supposed to justify extraordinary measures, and, usually, great expenditures. It signals that the politicians are serious.
The problem is that the war metaphor can mislead us, and I think it’s misled the Bush administration in a serious way in the current crisis. I think in the shock after 9/11 they looked at our first-rate military machine and saw that nothing could stand against it and therefore decided it would solve all our problems with Islamic thuggery. So they declared the War on Terror.
Here’s the problem with that: in a real war, the kind our military was designed to fight, there is an enemy government with a seat of power and a chain of command. It has at its disposal a military machine that can be located and engaged and, if you’re better, destroyed. And then the enemy government can be compelled to do whatever you want it to do, including coming out with their hands up.
But where’s Bin Laden’s capital? Where are his carrier groups and armored brigades? The September 11th attack was carried out by half a dozen guys with box cutters. Yes, there were the camps in Afghanistan, where those guys learned their tricks. And our military took them out in short order. Insofar as there was a locatable enemy, the shooting war worked just fine. But then it got harder. There are a whole lot of guys in a whole lot of apartments, muttering in a whole lot of languages. And you can’t send the B-52’s to bomb Hamburg.
George Soros was right: what we need to defeat Al-Qaeda is principally good intelligence and patient police work that doesn’t alienate the populations that shelter our enemies. We need people who can speak the languages and people who know how to cultivate informants, and flexible and adaptable security agencies that don’t squabble over turf. We need a lot of good smart tough cops, and we will need a lot of time.
That’s not satisfying to a lot of people. They want the bang. They want to turn sand into glass. They want to make somebody hurt. 9/11 was an act of war, they insist, so let’s give the bastards a war. Wasn’t 9/11 an act of war? OK, sure. How about Timothy McVeigh’s blowing up the Murragh Building? Was that an act of war? And who do you declare war on there? You don’t. You put the cops to work, and they track the bastards down.
Here’s another problem with calling this a war: in many people’s eyes, it grants legitimacy to the criminals. In a real war, it’s understood that the other guy is fighting for his country, just like you are. His government may be at fault, but you don’t hold that against him. Diplomats can argue about the merits of the case. Calling what we’re in now a war says to millions of people around the world that Bin Laden has a case, that the suicide bombers are more than deranged killers, that Musab Al-Zarqawi qualifies as a patriot. It grants the killers a status they don’t deserve. Sure, being a criminal suspect may grant you some procedural rights that being an enemy combatant doesn’t, but it’s a loss in the propaganda war. Calling the Al-Qaeda thugs enemy combatants grants them a dignity they don’t deserve. It undermines our case.
Please don’t misunderstand me. I am not pleading for appeasement or soft treatment. When the enemy is locatable and armed and hostile, I’m fine with sending in the Marines. The problem is that this enemy is so often not locatable, and when he is, he is hunkered down in a house full of women and children who don’t deserve to die with him. Or he is embedded in a university in Europe, or lying low in an office job in the U.S.
If we want to find him and stop him, we have to get smart. We have to stop thinking about invading countries and start thinking about intelligence and investigation and infiltration and patient assembling of data. We have the best military in the world, and they have done everything we’ve asked of them. But not everything is a military problem, and military action can alienate a population and turn it against us in the wink of an eye. I think the war metaphor led us into disaster in Iraq, and it’s time to retire it.

Sam Reaves
www.samreaves.com

Enough already...

2007-09-22T16:55:00.000-07:00

OK, let’s see. We have, what, another year and change before we can vote on this? To look at the paper you’d think the presidential election was next month. Every other day there’s a debate, every other day somebody else throws his hat in the ring. Thompson’s in, Gilmore’s out (raise your hand if you ever knew he was in), Hilary’s not woman enough and Barack isn’t black enough, Mitt’s for the surge and Rudy’s for guns. Snore.
Other countries manage to pull off elections for the top spot in a matter of weeks. In a parliamentary system it’s a brisk, well-choreographed procedure. Here it’s a two-year death march. Maybe three.
I don’t know what can be done about it. You can’t forbid people to campaign; that would be a restriction of free speech. You can try and police how and from whom and how much money they raise, and you can get indignant about states moving their primaries farther and farther from the general election in a fatuous race to be first, but when it gets right down to it you can’t stop the ambitious and the wealthy and the deluded from launching what are nowadays essentially permanent campaigns.
Does this agonizing baby-kissing marathon make our democracy better? Does it produce stronger candidates, promote more thorough discussion of issues? Don't make me laugh. There’s a ruthless process of elimination, for sure. It weeds out the inadequately funded quite effectively. That means we’re left with candidates who know they have I.O.U.’s coming due, because not even Mitt Romney’s rich enough to fund a whole presidential campaign all by himself. The Darwinian process of a U.S. presidential campaign reliably produces candidates who are masters of horse-trading, back-stabbing and lip-zipping. The political process produces superb politicians.
The trouble is, they don’t always bring policy-making skills and insights along with them, and that’s what good government requires.
My standards for a U.S. president are actually fairly low. I have realistic expectations. I don’t need a genius. Reagan showed us that you can be an intellectual mediocrity and change the direction of the country, if you know how to delegate and nap. Clinton showed us you can preside over prosperity and positive social changes with dubious levels of personal integrity. (My expectations are a little higher than the current occupant of the White House, but I’m not going to pile on. There are enough people on the Bush beat already.)
What do you need to be a good U.S. president? First, I think you need firm principles that you can articulate clearly and keep sight of through the fog of war, even if it’s only political war. Oh, and they should be the right principles, too, did I mention that? Good means more than just effective. What are the right principles? Here’s where we might quibble a bit, but I think most of us will agree that the reason our country has always had more people trying to get in than trying to get out has something to do with high levels of economic, political and social freedom.
Second, a president has to be a competent administrator. This cannot be over-emphasized. It’s an administrative job. It’s delegating, hiring and firing, prioritizing, information-gathering and decision-making under pressure. Not everybody has these skills. Not even everybody who wants to be president has these skills. We should take a hard look at the field with an eye to who has high-level executive experience and who doesn’t.
Third, a good president has to be a salesman. He or she has the world’s biggest bully pulpit, and a president can shape the debate like nobody else. A good president can make us think about the world differently.
Sadly, most of the candidates are best at the third requirement. They wouldn’t be in politics if they weren’t great salesmen. But that’s not enough.
What are the chances we’ll get a good president out of this depressing cattle call? Slim, I’d say, going on past form. But you never know. Every once in a while somebody survives the process who actually fills the bill. We can always hope.
In the meantime, I’m already tired of these mopes. Wake me up next November.

Sam Reaves
www.samreaves.com

The end of the Outfit?

2007-09-11T19:14:00.000-07:00

In the end it was a little anticlimactic. There were headlines, but they were overshadowed by remembrance of much bigger events on the same date, six years before. When it came, the decapitation of the Outfit came quietly. On Monday five top Chicago organized crime figures were found guilty of a smorgasbord of federal charges, racketeering conspiracy at the head of the list. Seventeen citizens in an uncomfortably warm room in the Dirksen Federal Building in downtown Chicago decided that a handful of old men were guilty of the crimes the U.S. government had charged them with. They made a fairly short job of it—after ten weeks of testimony and arguments, with mounds of evidence to wade through, they took only a few days to agree on the verdict. In the course of deliberations they asked the judge for a fan and a dictionary. The word was, they wanted to make sure they understood what usorious meant.
The federal government is about to put the top leadership of the Chicago Outfit in jail, for a long time. If you know anything about the history of Chicago, this is a big deal. For fifty years the Outfit acted more or less with impunity in this city. Prohibition had undermined the rule of law so thoroughly that the city’s political structure, court system and police were all deeply compromised by ties to the gangsters. Prohibition made the Capone gang rich and entrenched it in the city’s power structure. A nexus of crooked politicians, crooked cops, crooked judges and just plain crooks of all stripes insured that the hoods got their cut of just about every significant economic activity in the city. Reformers came and went, but nothing seemed to change. Mob hits went unpunished, payoffs went up the line.
Meanwhile, books and movies glamorized organized crime. We followed the Corleones and the Sopranos and cared about them. They became part of our historical narrative, immigrants scrapping for their share of the pie. Top Outfit guys in Chicago had celebrity status. They gave to the community; their neighborhoods were safe. Too often we forgot that gangsters are bullies, cheats, thugs, killers. They wouldn’t be gangsters if they weren’t.
It took the power of the federal government in the form of the R.I.C.O. statue and the Greylord investigation to start chipping away at Outfit power. Outfit guys saw the handwriting on the wall. They started keeping their sons out of the business. They sent them to college and watched them become lawyers, bankers, doctors. In the meantime, the world changed. The Next Big Thing in crime passed the Outfit by as the money shifted to drugs. The blacks and Latins assumed the role the Italians had played in the 1920’s: outsiders on the make. In a sense the decline of the Chicago Outfit reflects the rise of the Italian-American community as a whole and the changing demographics of the country. In the twenties it was the Italians who were poor, alien, excluded. Their criminals exploited Prohibition to gain wealth and power. Today it’s somebody else, but the story is the same. Smart thugs exploit opportunities.
Is the Outfit dead? Organized crime experts say we’d be fools to think so. As long as there’s vice, we’ll have organized crime. The Outfit isn’t going away. Somebody else will step up to take James Marcello’s place as boss, because there’s just too much money to be made off vice. But we can hope he'll inherit a lesser organization. We can hope that the days when the Outfit was a shadowy but real pillar of the Chicago power structure are over. We can hope it will never again have significant veto power in the courts, the police department, the state legislature. We can hope that the Outfit is just another gang now, and an aging one. And we can hope as we struggle with new gangs and new rackets and the eternal temptation to corruption that we won’t be fooled again.

Sam Reaves
www.samreaves.com

Churchill didn't say it...

2007-09-10T18:33:00.000-07:00

One of my favorite quotes is, it turns out, mistakenly attributed to Winston Churchill. I’ve been using this line for several years and confidently telling people that Churchill said it. You’ve probably heard it: “A man who is not a liberal at age twenty has no heart; a man who is not a conservative at age forty has no brain.”
There are variations; in some versions it’s “socialist” instead of “liberal”; sometimes the age is thirty instead of twenty.
Doesn’t matter. Churchill, it turns out, didn’t say it, or at least didn’t say it first. Apparently the existence of different versions reflects the fact that it has been said by different people at different times. The most reliable attributions appear to be to a couple of nineteenth-century French politicians, François Guizot and Aristide Briand, with Guizot saying it first. Maybe Churchill cribbed it from them in turn.
It’s a good line, which accounts for its popularity. But it bugs the hell out of liberals, which is understandable. Chicago Tribune columnist Eric Zorn even ran a couple of columns about the line a while ago, inviting reader responses. I don't know if it bugged him; I’d call Zorn a liberal, but whatever he is, he’s a thoughtful writer who’s never afraid to consider the other side.
I didn’t get involved then, maybe because I wasn’t sure what I thought. But for what it’s worth, here’s what I think now: Guizot and Briand and Churchill had hold of a truth, and even if you didn’t wind up a conservative, there’s wisdom in it that you ought to be able to concede.
Full disclosure: I don’t know how much it had to do with my internal anatomy, but I’ve moved to the right in my political views over the past couple of decades. I’d still call myself a liberal rather than a conservative (how can a man who believes that both sodomy and cocaine should be legal be called a conservative?) but I’m a liberal in the way Gladstone or the young Churchill was a liberal. I’m a small government guy. I’m an economic conservative and a social liberal, to give you the usual oversimplification. (I'll break that down a little more some other time.) If you have to slap a label on me, you can call me a libertarian, though I’m not especially anxious to be identified with the black helicopter crowd. If this helps, I am the only person I know who has actually voted for Ron Paul.
We can argue about libertarianism some other time. For now let’s look at that quote: what does it mean, and is there a formulation we can all agree on?
When I think of the quote, I remember my own political trajectory: I grew up in a devoutly religious but intellectually stimulating household (no, it’s not impossible); one parent was a Democrat and the other a Republican who usually voted Democratic; I was a fairly standard peace and love and rock and roll liberal through college, flirted with Marxism, hung out with radicals in Chicago and outright Communists in France; voted for Jimmy Carter and Walter Mondale, rued the election of Ronald Reagan, and all the time kept reading, thinking, talking with people. I lived in countries where things didn't work as well, and wondered why. In the middle eighties I finally got around to reading The Open Society and Its Enemies, by the man whom the title of this blog honors. That pretty much took care of the Marxist thing, which had always smelled a little fishy to me. I started to educate myself about economics. I read more Popper. I heard some people say that Reagan was ruining the economy and I heard other people say that Reagan was saving the economy and I had an epiphany: they couldn’t both be right. There had to be some empirical grounds for deciding the question. I looked into it and decided that the conservatives were mostly right about economics. The trouble was, they were still wrong about other things. I had kids and rediscovered the meaning of original sin. If I didn’t start believing in God again, I at least started to appreciate the ethical content of religious tradition. I became more intellectually humble. I learned that very few people are wrong about everything (OK, there are a few out there that are truly hopeless). I realized that political views are just hypotheses about how the world works, and that there shouldn't be any reason we can’t discuss those hypotheses as calmly as any others.
Look, here’s all that happened: life experience tempered the incandescent idealism of youth. And that’s all Churchill, or whoever said it first, was talking about. Even if you’re still out there on the left, I imagine you’ve undergone the same process: you see what works and what doesn’t. You learn that human life is a messy, chaotic process that doesn’t always cooperate with Utopian plans. Maybe you’re still a socialist, but you learned something from 1989. Maybe you’re still a passionate critic of our criminal justice system, but the time you got mugged cured you of your sentimental attitude towards street criminals. That’s all we’re talking about. That’s what the quote means, and because the men quoted above all wound up as conservatives, they put it in terms that favor that point of view. But there’s a core of truth in it for everyone. You’ve got to learn from the things life throws at you, temper theory with practical experience.
If your views didn’t get tempered by experience, if you’re still throwing Molotov cocktails at police cars or looking for excuses for Pol Pot, then you’re the guy Churchill was talking about who has no brain. I'm not sure what we can do for you.

Sam Reaves
www.samreaves.com

These divided states...

2007-09-03T12:14:00.000-07:00

I'm getting tired of hearing about the things that divide us in this country. Red states, blue states, black and white, haves and have nots... To hear some people talk, the United States is a balkanized patchwork of warring clans. On a sunny Labor Day with the usual ethnic and socio-economic grab bag jostling for grill space out by the lake, it's a good time to take a skeptical look at that notion.
All these divisions exist, of course, but they're greatly overrated. Start with the red and blue state thing: this is a media-created artifact of the electoral college system which greatly oversimplifies the political and social map. You can run a red and blue analysis county-by-county or township-by-township in any given state and come up with a more accurate map, but even that is going to steamroller complexity: heck, I grew up with "red" and "blue" factions in my family. In the reddest of red states you will find wine-sipping, sandal-wearing Kucinich enthusiasts, and in the bluest of blue states you will find Limbaugh-loving, gun-rack-in-the-pickup meat eaters. And everything in between. So give the color thing a rest. The truth is that we all live in purple states.
As for black and white, far be it from me to proclaim an end to racial divisions, but I can't be as pessimistic as the Faces at the Bottom of the Well crowd. Control for social factors that are not inherently linked to the amount of melanin in a person's skin, and racial disparities start to flatten out. That is, if you get an education, delay childbearing until you're in a stable marriage with a decent income, and don't blow all your income on intoxicating substances, the odds are you are going to have a successful life, whatever color you are. If you can't do those things, you will probably be poor and miserable, and this goes for black, white or any other color. I have a brother who is a prosecutor in a mainly rural Indiana county, and his description of the local white underclass sounds just like what we hear about the urban black underclass: absent fathers, substance abuse, disdain for education. In other words, even our underclass culture crosses racial lines. That's good news, because all these things are correctable problems, and there's nothing inherently black or white about them.
Even the real divisions of language and culture tend to disappear over time, as children of immigrants assimilate. This is happening even with Hispanics, who have found more accomodation for their language and culture than any other group in U.S. history. Our culture is powerfully assimilative, and if we let it work it will embrace all comers.
None of the foregoing is to deny that there are real conflicts of interest to be worked out in our messy society. But that's what the political process is for, on all levels from your local PTA to the Congress of the United States. We have a strong civil society and a panoply of institutions to work out the conflicts, and if we don't panic about our divisions, they will get worked out.
The things that unite us are stronger and deeper than the things that divide us. So don't panic. Human life is inherently messy, but American society is as good as any on earth at dealing with that messiness. And personally, I think that unruliness is part of the fun.
Sam Reaves
www.samreaves.com
Technorati Profile

Hearts and minds

2007-08-26T21:01:00.000-07:00

Winning hearts and minds in the war against Muslim extremism ought to be a slam dunk. After all, few people, even in the Muslim world, can possibly find that kind of puritan totalitarianism very attractive. I’ve lived in the Arab world—and give or take the usual cultural gaps, people there are pretty much like we are. Nobody likes being bossed around by fanatics. Mainstream Muslim culture is more socially conservative than ours, to be sure—but it’s not insane, and it’s prey to the same secularizing, modernizing pressures that Christian culture has undergone. It shouldn’t be too much of a stretch to keep several hundred million Muslims at the very least neutral toward the West, if not actively sympathizing with us in opposition to the Taliban and Al-Qaeda. Muslims aren’t stupid, and they can see as well as we can who’s perpetrating the bulk of the atrocities in Iraq and Afghanistan and who wants to outlaw music, cinema and fun in general.
So why aren’t they rallying to us wholeheartedly? Well, for one thing, we keep killing a lot of them in airstrikes. Afghanistan’s president Karzai has been complaining about the high rate of civilian casualties in coalition airstrikes for some time. Now that three British soldiers have been killed by American bombs, maybe someone over here will listen.
Now, every war has friendly fire incidents, and I understand as well as you do the difference between collateral damage in a strike on a legitimate military target and the deliberate targeting of non-combatants. But from the point of view of the victim, lying in the hospital with bandaged stumps where his legs used to be, the effects are indistinguishable. When your house is taken out by a laser-guided bomb from an A-10 Warthog, your loved ones obliterated or crushed under the rubble, it’s not much of a consolation to be told that the pilots were trying for the mujahideen next door. The horror is the same for you as it is for the victim of a Hamas suicide bombing in Israel. When mistakes like that are repeated time and time again, the apologies start to wear thin. You start to wonder at what point carelessness becomes callousness, and the line between callousness and hostility can be hard to trace.
Now, I understand that if you’re a U.S. Army or Marine squad leader taking fire from a house across the valley, what’s foremost on your mind is going to be how to take out that hostile fire with the least risk to your men. The lives of your men are a lot more important to you than the lives of whoever is in that house, and if you can call in an airstrike on that building, you’re going to do it. And I’m going to try hard not to second-guess you. I want your men to make it home as much as you do. But here’s what our military leaders have to understand: in a conflict like the ones in Iraq and Afghanistan, if you’re killing a lot of civilians, you’re losing the war. Period. You are not going to win the populace over, no matter how much reason and enlightenment you have on your side, if you keep blowing them up, especially if at the same time you are asking them to condemn their cousins for blowing up their hereditary enemies. That’s asking a lot of intellectual sophistication and emotional detachment.
I don’t know what the acceptable ratio of civilian to combatant casualties is supposed to be. And I sure as hell don’t have a good suggestion for that squad leader out there taking fire. But somebody in Kabul or Baghdad or Washington has to look at things and figure out how to kill the bad guys without taking out the whole neighborhood. Otherwise, we’re going to lose. Period.

Sam Reaves
www.samreaves.com

Let 'em come

2007-08-11T12:55:00.000-07:00

OK, let’s solve the immigration problem. Let’s crack down, let’s get tough. Here’s what we do: First, we fence off the border with Mexico. It’s only 1,500 miles or so. That would be--hang on, have to go price fencing at Home Depot... Hmmm. That’s a lot of fencing. But hey, it’s a serious problem, so let’s spend the billions. We’ll run the fence right through Big Bend National Park, ignore the environmentalists’ protests. At the rate of a hundred yards a day, pretty good going for a competent crew, we’ll have the sucker walled off in... Wait a second. Fencing off the border might not be as easy as it sounds. But if we could put a man on the moon...
All right then, tackle the other end of the problem. Go after the employers who knowingly hire illegal aliens. Threaten them with fines or even jail if they don’t double-check to make sure all their employees are legal. Put the burden of checking the papers on the guy who needs to get his apples in before they rot, or the contractor who has two weeks to get the concrete poured. Round up the illegals, all twelve million of them, and bus them back to the border. (OK, that’s a lot of buses, but if we could put a man on the moon...) The resulting job vacancies will be filled by our domestic unemployed. People will stream eagerly out of Oakland into the Sacramento Valley to pick the vegetables...
Let’s get serious. Massive illegal immigration does pose certain problems for the United States, but they are not existential, nation-threatening problems. (The existential threat to the nations of America started in 1492, and it’s over. The Americans lost, and the Europeans won.) Furthermore, the various draconian solutions proposed would be absurdly costly and futile, like, well, building levees around New Orleans.
To think seriously about immigration we have to think seriously about scale. The illusion of “taking control of our borders” rests on an inability to conceive of the distances and spaces and numbers involved. If a few thousand people per day want to sneak across a line fifteen hundred miles long, you’re just not going to stop them all. You will catch a few, maybe enough to create deterrence locally, but then they’ll just go look for another crossing point. When you’ve sealed off all the easy ones they’ll start trashing Big Bend National Park. Large voluntary population movements cannot be easily controlled. They just can’t. Only incentives will do it.
It makes more sense to police things at the other end, where the stepped-up enforcement measures just announced in Washington could create enough fear in employers to make them pickier about whom they hire. But there are costs as well as benefits here. How much additional paperwork can a small business take on without cracking under the strain? How easy is it going to be for employers to find legal workers all of a sudden? It’s easy to demonize employers who hire illegal aliens (and no doubt some of them do it knowingly and just don’t care). But it’s harder to come up with alternatives for them. When there’s work to be done, you hire who’s there.
Furthermore, how much are you willing to pay for groceries? Maybe you’re willing to pay a lot more to insure that your vegetables were picked by Americans. But maybe not everyone has as much money as you. Poor people benefit from low prices, or had that never occurred to you in your outrage over companies using cheap labor to hold down their costs? Tell you what, you explain to the people living from one Social Security check to the next that grocery prices just doubled because we kicked out the Mexicans.
From a purely economic point of view, the case for open borders is strong. If the rich can shift their capital anywhere in the world at the touch of a button, why shouldn’t the poor be able to take their labor where it is most valued? Mexicans are doing exactly what blacks did when they came north in the Great Migration, and a lot of white people didn’t like that, either. But somehow the economy survived. Competition, in labor just as in everything else, is what holds down costs and makes the economy efficient. So if you’re only interested in economic efficiency, you ought to throw the gates wide open.
The trouble is, economics isn’t the only thing involved. There are two genuine problems posed by massive illegal immigration. The first is the rule-of-law issue. If you have laws on the books but fail, year after year, to enforce them, it undermines the rule of law on which any decent society has to be based. It tells people that the law is no longer supreme, that instead expediency is supreme. And that’s a really bad message to send. It makes people who have taken pains to observe the law (like those who jumped through all the hoops and waited all the years to gain legal residence in the U.S.) wonder why they bothered. Whatever the merits of our immigration laws, the fact that their enforcement has been completely ineffectual is a serious failing.
Now, some essential laws are hard to enforce, and no law is perfectly enforceable. Difficulty of enforcement alone is not a reason to ditch a law. But if enforcement is so difficult or costly that we just can’t be bothered to enforce it, it’s time to ask whether we ought to have the law. If the prohibited activity is not in and of itself harmful, maybe we don’t need that law. That’s the case for some kind of amnesty on immigration, some recognition that our immigration policy has simply been overtaken by events and it’s time to reconsider it.
However, there are problems with amnesty as well (such as the bird it flips to the aforementioned people who jumped through all the hoops). If all an amnesty does is let everyone off the hook, it just tells people that we’re not serious about our laws. So there has to be some kind of process for legalization. You have to make people jump through some hoops. You have to say to them: we’re willing to let you become legal, but you have to prove that it means something to you by taking these steps. Then the debate is over how many hoops we make them jump through.
The second problem with mass immigration is cultural. Any country needs a certain amount of cultural unity. We need a common language, we need common allegiance and a common culture. That does not mean a bland cultural uniformity: there is plenty of room in this country for preservation of diverse traditions. But we need a common core of values.
Now, U.S. culture is very powerful and appealing. People tend to want to assimilate to it. Even if the first generation sticks to the old-country ways, their children usually don’t. Left to themselves, people assimilate automatically. Unless, that is, they are actively encouraged not to assimilate. And that is the effect of some policies that may be well-intended but have the effect of encouraging ghettoization and separatism. It is folly to try to provide education and official documents in every language under the sun. There is no need to pass legislation to make English our official language; all we need to do is to refrain from caving in to demands to conduct official business in anything else. People are very good at learning the languages they need to function. All we need to do is let them get on with it.
Our immigration “problem” will sort itself out if we focus on essentials: maintaining a legal framework that allows migration but encourages integration. I say let them come, but expect them to assimilate.

Sam Reaves
www.samreaves.com

Is George Bush a conservative?

2007-07-27T20:39:00.000-07:00

Well, he calls himself one. He calls himself a compassionate conservative, which is a fine thing to be and not at all impossible, whatever our left-of-center friends would have us believe. I just question whether George Bush really is a conservative. (I’m going to suspend judgment about the compassion thing.) I used to wonder that about Richard Nixon as well—how a man who imposed wage and price controls and presided over unprecedented growth in the welfare state qualified as a conservative was a little baffling. (Maybe all you have to do to qualify as a conservative is to wave the flag a lot, which is disappointing for several reasons, since the flag is supposed to represent us all.) As for Bush, I’m not just talking about the Medicare Drug Benefit and No Child Left Behind and the spiraling budgets. I’m talking about his response to 9/11, and I’m talking about Iraq.
Now first let me say that September 11, 2001 would have dealt a tough hand to anyone who happened to be president on that day. President Al Gore would have faced the same hideous choices George Bush faced, and maybe he would have handled them better, and maybe he wouldn’t have. 9/11 was a supreme crisis for American government policy, a test by fire and a reputation maker or breaker. And some of the things Bush did were good and had to be done, and some of them I have my doubts about.
The first thing that made me wonder was his creation of a huge new government bureaucracy charged with what was called homeland security. (I’m not sure what was wrong with the word “defense”.) I don’t think that was a conservative response. A conservative response would have been to look at the institutional failures that led to 9/11 and fix the institutions and the dysfunctional relations between them that led to the problem. Creating a whole new institution, and an expensive one at that, is not a conservative response.
Then there’s Iraq, and I’m not talking about the invasion. What really made me wonder how George W. Bush could be called a conservative was the decision to disband the Iraqi army, dismantle the civil service and start all over from scratch. That’s not how conservatives operate.
The best book I know of about why some people are conservatives and some people are whatever the opposite is (I’m not going to use the word liberal because of its ambiguity) is Thomas Sowell’s A Conflict of Visions. Sowell traces the origins of our political views to what he calls the constrained and the unconstrained visions of human potential. The unconstrained vision holds that reason is supreme and humanity is amenable to the Big Makeover. Its proponents admire intellectuals and love big plans. Proponents of this vision are drawn to the various manifestations of utopianism, from mild socialism to communism and fascism. That generally corresponds with the political left (fascism is placed on the right because of its ethnic/nationalistic component, but remember that Mussolini was an admirer of Lenin and Hitler’s party was the National Socialists.)
On the other hand, the constrained vision sees humans as too messy and intractable to be malleable and prefers merely to get the incentive structure right so that productive activity will be encouraged and damage will be limited. Its proponents believe that knowledge is too widely disseminated to permit planning of something so complex as an economy, no matter how smart the people at the top may be. People who hold the constrained vision tend to be drawn to free enterprise and the evolved wisdom of long-standing institutions. They are conservatives. As Sowell puts it, “To those with the constrained vision, it is axiomatic that no individual or council can master [the complexity of social processes], so that systemic processes—market economies, social traditions, constitutional law—are relied on instead.”
Now, if there ever was a utopian project that ignored systemic processes and aimed at the Big Makeover, it was the attempt to raze all Iraqi social institutions and rebuild them from scratch. I’m not going to get into whether this project could have been accomplished if only it had been undertaken more competently. My point is that it was not a conservative project, that Rumsfeld and Bremer and Bush up there at the top undertook something in Iraq which should have made any true conservative’s hair stand on end.
Maybe they didn’t go into Iraq intending to do that—maybe they were overtaken by events and went lurching from crisis to crisis, improvising wildly. I’m more inclined to believe that than I am to think that the destruction of Iraqi society was cynically planned. But I don’t think a true conservative would have gotten himself into that position. A true conservative might have undertaken the invasion, if he believed Iraq posed an imminent threat (he might equally have looked at Iraq and decided that conservative principles ruled out such a high-stakes gamble.) But a conservative would have made damn sure to maintain order after the invasion. He would have defeated the Iraqi army but kept it intact with generous surrender terms, purged the officer corps and set up a reliable strong man. He would have tossed the top Ba’athists in jail but kept the Ba’ath-dominated civil service functioning. He would not have tried to re-make Iraqi society from the ground up. That is the very last thing a conservative would try.
So if George Bush isn’t a conservative, what is he? Who knows? I don’t think he does. He is a product of our political system, which rewards money and inertia rather than philosophical depth. He wound up as president because with his connections and his name he was a safe compromise choice for a messy and not entirely coherent coalition, which is what both our major parties are. Our party system doesn’t promote independent thinking or ideological focus. It promotes salesmanship, mediagenicity and political acumen (as opposed to policy acumen). And that goes for both sides of the aisle.
Most people’s views are too complex to be reduced to a label like “conservative” or “liberal”, and arguing about the meanings of words is usually a waste of time. But when you try to use a word as a claim to legitimacy, you’d better make sure you have a legitimate claim to it. Conversely, if you try to use a word as a bludgeon to destroy someone’s legitimacy, you’d better make sure you’re using it accurately.
So the next time someone tells you George Bush is a conservative, ask what the evidence for that is.

Sam Reaves
www.samreaves.com

Taking Stock of Bonds

2007-07-22T12:40:00.000-07:00

So what about Barry Bonds? What are we supposed to make of this if we care about baseball? Does he deserve our respect, if not our adulation? Or should we boycott the celebrations, hold our noses, turn our backs?
There are lots of ways of looking at it. Imagine this: imagine that Barry Bonds, instead of being famously surly, conceited and arrogant, had the sunny disposition of a Mays or a Sosa. Would we care about the steroids?
Not nearly as much, is my guess. If Barry Bonds were not so personally repellent, we’d be finding ways of excusing the drugs. If he were media-friendly, congenial to fans and popular with his teammates, we’d be rooting for him. We’d be pointing out that baseball had no policy on steroids at the time he was allegedly taking them and that the pitchers were furiously bulking up at the same time. We’d be sheepishly groping for reasons to overlook the cheating because we love heroes. But heroes can’t be jerks, at least not in public. Bonds’s toxic personality has hurt his case immensely.
Here’s another way to look at it: no matter how strong you are, you still have to hit the ball. Baseball history is full of muscled-up sluggers who could hit the ball a mile but couldn’t hit it often enough. If sheer strength were the only factor in hitting home runs, Frank Howard or Dave Kingman would be the home run king. The fact is that Barry Bonds was, even before the steroids and the hormones, one of the best there ever was at making contact with a pitched baseball. Throughout his career he has displayed all the virtues you try to teach: pitch selection, patience, taking what the pitcher gives you. He is a smart and disciplined hitter and should be remembered for that even if his late-career power totals are discounted as the product of cheating.
What produced that extraordinary run of power hitting in the latter half of his career was not just the steroids, either: it was a confluence of factors including diluted expansion-era pitching and smaller retro-style ballparks. Bonds benefited from these along with everyone else. Homer totals for everyone went up in the nineties, and I don’t think they were all doing steroids.
Factors other than innate skill have always affected baseball numbers. How many homers did Willie Mays lose to the treacherous Candlestick winds? How many of Hank Greenberg’s homers were due to stolen signals flashed from the coach in the stands? Because any individual event in baseball is hostage to so many factors, we require large sample sizes to make judgments. And even those judgments have to be taken with a grain of salt. All of them.
So how much difference did the steroids make? Some, for sure. That conclusion is unavoidable. If you’re already a good hitter, extra strength is going to turn warning-track outs into extra homers. It’s impossible to deny that Bonds (and the others who have been caught cheating) saw their homer totals inflated by the drugs they took to add muscle that wouldn’t have been there otherwise.
Enough to disqualify him from the record books? That way madness lies. Records are just an accounting of what happened on the field. And monkeying with the accounting doesn’t change what went down. Everyone saw it. You can’t go back and change the records and make home runs vanish. If you don’t want Barry Bonds to show 756 homers in the record book because you don’t think he deserves it, you have to find a way to keep him off the field. You have to suspend him for cheating. If you’re that concerned about it, you have to ban him for life. If you don’t have the courage to do that, you have to record what he does between the lines along with what everyone else does. If you couldn’t muster the authority to put in place a policy on steroids, you have to accept what happened on the field.
So we have to give Bonds his place in the record book. Do we have to applaud him? That’s a matter of taste. We’re not obliged to like everyone who breaks a record. Ty Cobb was another famous jerk. Pete Rose wasn’t everyone’s cup of tea. We don’t have to like them, but we have to recognize what they did.
Barry Bonds may be a scoundrel, but all those home runs really went out of the ball park. People saw them. If you really can’t stand the idea of Barry Bonds as home run king, the only thing to do is wait until Rodriguez or Griffey or somebody more to your liking comes along and eclipses him. And it will happen—that we can be sure of. Like everything else, time will take care of Barry Bonds.

Sam Reaves
www.samreaves.com

My Vote

2007-07-17T07:49:00.000-07:00

The war in Iraq is a very polarizing topic. It’s hard to stake out a nuanced position. For some people, if you concede any merit at all to the idea of the invasion, you are a hopeless warmonger, and for others, if you have any doubts at all about the way the war is being conducted, you are a spineless defeatist.
So sue me. Here’s what I think:
Every Iraqi I knew in 2003 supported the invasion. They sure as hell have their regrets now, however. This means something.
The fact that you can make a list of specific errors we’ve made in Iraq (failure to keep order, disbanding the army, etc.) means, logically, that it is possible to envisage a scenario in which we did not make those mistakes. Would things be better if we hadn’t? Almost certainly. Crucially though, what was the likelihood of our not making those mistakes? If you’re going to say, “Not great, with this bunch of cowboys in power,” I’m going to be hard pressed to come up with a response.
To me, all this means that while the invasion in and of itself wasn’t necessarily a mistake, it was a high-risk play. And you don’t bet immense stakes on a high-risk play unless you really have to. In March 2003 a friend asked me if I thought the invasion was a good idea. I said, “Ask me in five years.” So I’ve still got until next March, but I have to say, it’s starting to look as if the invasion of Iraq was a grave strategic mistake.
However, we’re there. What are our options now? Somebody said that in Vietnam we should have declared victory and withdrawn early on. That has a certain amount of appeal in Iraq. We did win— we toppled Saddam. We can bring the troops home and have a parade. Or can we? I don’t think anybody really knows what will happen if we just withdraw. Those who can’t imagine that things could get worse than they are now are merely deficient in imagination. On the other hand, a U.S. withdrawal might concentrate minds wonderfully. And at this point, American troops may be simply drawing fire that wouldn’t exist if we weren’t there. Nobody knows. The situation is complex and rapidly evolving.
I have some sympathy with those that say the surge should be given a chance to succeed, but what happens if it doesn’t? How many more surges do we commit to? How long are we willing to stay in Iraq? Benchmarks are a great idea until the Iraqis fail to meet them. Then what?
I don’t think our commitment to Iraq can be open-ended. We can’t afford it. Vietnam showed us what a protracted unpopular war does to the military and to society at large. I think we need to set our own benchmarks and leave when we meet them. Number of Iraqi troops trained, for example. Get the battalions up and running, wish them luck and start pulling out. We will have botched the occupation but made an effort to repair the damage. We cannot assume responsibility ad infinitem for Iraqi civil strife. We can declare a tie at the end of overtime and withdraw.
The situation in the Middle East will continue to be volatile whether or not we have troops in Iraq. They can have a war with or without us. I vote for without.

Two cheers for democracy

2007-07-12T20:02:00.000-07:00

It’s too early to call for a post-mortem on Iraq; while the country may be in intensive care, it’s not dead yet. There is still a chance that a stable and independent Iraq might someday emerge. But one thing that ought to be declared dead as of today is the idea that anybody, sole superpower or not, can simply install, proclaim, ship in prefabricated or impose democracy.

I’d go further and say maybe we should take a hard look at whether democracy ought to be our priority in the first place.

Heresy, I know. But Fareed Zakaria, in his book The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad, claims that the world may actually have suffered from the spread of democracy in the last decade. Making a crucial distinction between democracy and freedom, he points to countries such as Russia as examples of places where premature democratization has failed to produce a free society. So in the light of our experience in Iraq, let’s ask: should the installation of political democracy in countries in crisis be our principal aim?

It’s facile to assume that democracy, in the sense of holding free and fair elections, ought to be the supreme political value. A simple commitment to majority rule cannot be made the highest value. If fifty-one percent of the electorate votes to send the Jews to the ovens, must we simply shrug and say, “Hey, that’s democracy for you”? If you bang the drum too loudly for democracy, you may be embarrassed when the Palestinians vote Hamas into power.

I’d say the highest political value is good government. That means government that polices abuses, maintains conditions that promote reasonable prosperity, and otherwise lets people go about their business. Democracy is not irrelevant to good government, but the two are most certainly not equivalent.

So what’s the relationship between democracy and good government? It’s mainly negative. Democracy certainly doesn’t guarantee prosperity. The backlash against democracy which has appeared in Russia and Latin America is due in large measure to bitter disappointment that it has not brought more material benefits. But democracy promises material benefits only indirectly; it promises at best a restraint on destructive governments. The best democracy can do is to remove a government that destroys prosperity. Democracy is a brake, not an accelerator.

In a functioning democracy, politicians are limited in their folly by one prime consideration: sooner or later, they have to stand for election. Presuming the elections are reasonably fair, the need to take it to the voters means that a politician has at least to pretend concern for the public good. He may, of course, cater dishonestly, disingenuously or manipulatively to public opinion. Ultimately, however, if he commits too great a blunder or crime, he will be punished by being dis-elected. That’s democracy’s hole card: you screw up too badly, you go home. It is a blunt but effective weapon.

If we’re looking for a principle to guide us in our dealings with failed states (or those we have destroyed by invasion) I’d suggest that the highest value has to be security. A reasonable assumption that you will live till sundown is the prerequisite for just about any human activity. If you have to invade a country, make sure you get the security situation under control and provide a semblance of good government (by benevolent military despotism if nothing else) first. Then you can worry about creating the conditions for democracy.

But what are those conditions? A well-considered constitution is generally considered to be important, but even that is not determinate: Egypt has a written constitution; Britain does not. Take your pick. The truth is that democracy is more than just a set of electoral arrangements; it’s a culture. The set of institutional arrangements we call political democracy must rest on a solid cultural foundation that promotes rational discussion, protects free expression of ideas, and tolerates dissent. These are characteristics that cannot be legislated, and they are not universal. In too many countries, the ad hominem argument and the conspiracy theory are the primary forms of political debate. Meanwhile, personality cults exalt the ruler above the institutions of the nation. These may appear grotesque to the Western observer, but in some places they rest on a long tradition of deference to power. The rule of law cannot prevail unless there is a cultural consensus in its favor.

The good news is that cultures can change, and sometimes rapidly. Examples are plentiful of rapid cultural change, for better or worse. And this is where anyone hoping to promote democracy where it has never existed must begin. Positive cultural changes cannot be imposed, but they can be encouraged. Simply removing constraints is a good first step: dismantling the machinery of censorship, removing barriers to the importation of ideas. The next step is to nurture free discussion, to establish the principle that refutation is a better response to pernicious ideas than repression. And sometimes you do have to exercise power: those voicing unpopular opinions may need to be protected from others intent on silencing them by violence.

Finally, of course, all human institutions are fallible and require maintenance. Installing a democracy is only the beginning. Good institutions require constant supervision, vigilance, tinkering, criticism and adjustment.

That’s the real battle in Iraq, and everywhere else.

Family Secrets

2007-07-08T19:00:00.000-07:00

Mob-watchers are enthralled with the so-called “Family Secrets” trial going on now in Chicago. On trial are a handful of broken-down old men who twenty or thirty years ago were among the most feared gangsters in Chicago history. They include Frank Calabrese, Sr. who is suffering the special indignity of hearing his brother and his son testify against him. Now that’s an unhappy family. If you have any illusions left about the glamor of organized crime after The Godfather and The Sopranos, this trial ought to take care of them.

The Outfit ain’t what it used to be, its power much reduced by RICO, Greylord and ongoing federal pressure. Nowadays, a Chicago organized crime expert told me, “Outfit guys want their sons to become investment bankers, because that’s where the money is.”

There, and in drugs. The big money these days flows to the black and Hispanic gangs who control the drug trade.

History repeats itself. Prohibition spurred gang warfare, made Al Capone a millionaire and entrenched his successors in the Chicago power structure. Now the G.D.’s and the Vice Lords shoot it out over drug markets on our streets and a handful of Colombian thugs have become world-class tycoons. We looked at what Prohibition did, coughed to cover our embarrassment and ended it, but so far the penny hasn’t dropped with regard to our current drug laws.

Here’s a conjecture for you: organized crime feeds off vice laws. Not the activities themselves—rather, the fact of their being illegal. That illegality is the lifeblood of organized crime. Now, it should be clear that there have always been thugs and always will be. Absent prohibition, it’s unlikely that Al Capone and Sam Giancana would have opened a bookshop or gone to med school. They would have remained what they were—thieves and predators. But it is also unlikely that they and their associates would have attained the wealth and power that they did. It was Prohibition—which made the trade in alcohol suddenly much more lucrative and insured that it would be controlled by the most ruthless elements in society—that made Capone wealthy and made Chicago a synonym for gang violence. And it was the criminalization of the hitherto non-criminal (and not essentially violent) business of selling people alcohol that undermined the rule of law and fatally corrupted Chicago’s institutions.

Vice is always in demand. It may not be good for us, but we can’t seem to do without it. Most of us can indulge the occasional guilty urge without crippling our lives; some of us can’t. The casualties make the prospect of eliminating vice seem attractive. It’s not easy to watch a life blighted by alcoholism or see a man destroy his marriage by dalliance with prostitutes. So we pass laws to criminalize vice, under the delusion that banned objects and activities magically disappear. What happens? Vice laws put criminals in control of the traffic. They insure high profit; they put the trade squarely in the hands of precisely those elements that care the least about the law. Vice laws make thugs rich.

And what is the effect on the institutions that are there to enforce the law? Overworked cops decide that policing other people’s private needs is not worth the trouble. They note that there is no coercion involved in a transaction between a dealer and his customers and wonder why they should bother to disrupt it. The temptation to accept a gratuity for allowing consensual transactions to proceed becomes significant. Corruption spreads. The prestige of the law suffers.

We should have no illusions: legalization is no panacea. Drugs and prostitution, like alcohol, can destroy lives. But they are not themselves essentially violent activities. (Yes, coercion is a key element of prostitution sometimes. But is a woman more or less likely to appeal to the law for relief if the activity in which she is engaged is considered criminal in and of itself?) The business of providing drugs and prostitutes is made violent by being criminalized.

Wouldn’t it be worth a try to treat these as public health problems, like alcohol, instead of as criminal problems? Prohibition created the Outfit. Are we going to let the modern version subvert our institutions in the same way?

There are principled arguments and people I respect on both sides of this question. Let me know what you think.

Sam Reaves

www.samreaves.com

2007-07-07T08:49:00.000-07:00

OK, I stole the title. I confess. But I stole it in tribute to a great thinker. Full credit: Conjectures and Refutations is the the title of a collection of essays by Karl Popper, the great philosopher of the open society (and critic of its many and persistent enemies). Why slap this highfalutin’ title on a modest genre writer’s blog? Because I think Popper was one of the great heroes of modern thought, and because conjectures and refutations are pretty much what I hope to lay out there on this blog. My conjectures, your refutations, my refutations of your conjectures—hey, we can all have fun with this. And we may learn something in the process. Popper taught us that that’s how knowledge advances—I throw up a theory, and you try to knock it down. It’s an approach that demands intellectual humility, something in short supply in most talking shops.

Not that I set this up to do a whole lot of philosophizing. I’m a novelist, to be more precise a genre novelist. I write crime novels, under two pseudonyms. As Sam Reaves I’ve published six novels set in Chicago, that quintessential American city, boisterous and corrupt and endlessly dynamic. As Dominic Martell I’ve published three suspense novels set in Europe, exploring other cities that have intrigued me, particularly Barcelona, my favorite city on the face of the earth. By birth I’m a middle American with my feet planted solidly in the corn, but by choice I was an expatriate for several years. Two poles orienting my life, two pen names and two very different kinds of novels. Why crime fiction? Partly because that’s what I grew up reading and partly because novelists need drama and crime has built-in drama. I’m not going to get involved in arguments about the merit of genre vs. serious fiction. Of course there’s a distinction, and of course the borders are fuzzy. And if genre fiction is a lesser art than serious fiction, it can at least display all the literary virtues.

So this page isn’t for philosophy, certainly not in the academic sense. I’m just borrowing Popper’s approach to learning. All I hope to do on this page is talk about things that interest me and see if anyone has anything interesting to say in response. A novelist has to be a generalist. I’m not an expert in anything, but I know a little about a lot of different things. I’ll be talking about books, politics, culture, history, sports (OK, I’ll try to keep that to a minimum), pretty much anything that comes down the pike. I’ll run my conjectures up the flagpole and see who salutes. Maybe I’ll learn something. Or maybe you will. Anyway, I hope we’ll have a good time.

Sam Reaves