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
Sunday, August 24, 2008
Sunday, August 10, 2008
This Just In
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
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
Friday, July 4, 2008
Fireworks
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
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
Friday, June 20, 2008
The Platform, Part Four
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
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
Tuesday, June 3, 2008
The Platform, Part Three
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
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
Wednesday, May 21, 2008
The Platform, continued
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 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
Sunday, May 18, 2008
The Platform
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
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
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