One Year On, and the Outlaw Administration Rolls On...

A year after I began posting here, writing about the outlaw administration, our esteemed leader shows no greater respect for the law, other than that which he makes up as he goes along.

Dahlia Lithwick has a handy recap on the Bush administration's continued progress into unchecked, illegal, extra-legal, and post-legal governance. Just for the record, we have not only exported "terror suspects" for torture by "friendly" governments, we have exported innocent people for torture, at least twice. Oops. And we have clearly tortured Jose Padilla as well, at this point. This includes sleep deprivation, isolation, sensory deprivation, stress positions and extreme cold. (If your going to argue about whether this is torture or not, go have a nice argument with Bill Clinton about what constitutes sex. The rest of us understand torture when we see it.) As to whether Jose Padilla is actually guilty of anything, well we may never get to know. After successfully keeping him out of the legal system for years, the administration may or may not actually prove its case in a real court someday. Surely it wouldn't just drop the charges and release an allegedly dangerous terrorist. Of course not, that could never happen here!

Happy New Year!

Happy Holidays! (And Yes, I Mean That Literally)

In our last few days slouching toward Bethlehem, let me pause a moment to offer my own brief thoughts on the “controversy” concerning how we extend our warm wishes this time of year. Never minding (much) the breathless hyperbole of the Christmas warriors over at Fox, I was ever so mildly disappointed to see the highly readable Jacob Sullum over at Reason pitch in his own two cents dismissing “Season’s Greetings” and “Happy Holidays” in the now-standard way—that is as lily-livered euphemisms by cautious Christians who do not wish to offend anyone. (Sullum’s column is otherwise cogent and well-argued, and I recommend it, as usual.)

I have always (as opposed to dreaming this up in response to the recent brouhaha) thought of these phrases as entirely straightforward and unrelated to political correctness. There’s Christmas (which should always be called such, not the execrable “Xmas”) and then, a mere seven days later, New Year’s Day. Um, hello, that’s two holidays. Two, as in plural. And two holidays that are essentially unrelated, New Year’s being perfectly secular. As for “Season’s Greetings,” if you throw in Thanksgiving, the slightly-over-a-month period contains three major holidays (here in America, at least) and is widely considered the “Holiday Season.” That’s all there is to it, as far as I’m concerned. When I was but a wee southern child, back in the free-wheelin’ 70’s, people were not overly concerned about offending Jews or other non-Christians, at least with something as innocuous as “Merry Christmas.” It’s just that the “classic” phrase “Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year” shortens quite nicely and efficiently to “Happy Holidays.” The only possibly valid line of critique I see here would be of the well-worn “what’s the harried modern world coming to if we’re so rushed we can’t take a couple of seconds to… blah, blah, blah.” To this I would say that there is grain of truth in it, and for what it’s worth I generally take the extra moment with friends, family, and colleagues to say the longer phrase—unless I happen to know that they don’t celebrate Christmas. However, if you consider the many, many interactions we have, for example, with cashiers, casual acquaintances and such, those few seconds can actually add up, when multiplied by hundreds!

It is certainly possible that in some quarters, “Happy Holidays” has taken on this PC role, but it isn’t necessarily so, and I steadfastly refuse to believe that there is a thing wrong with it. So whatever your sacred tradition, or lack thereof, Happy Holidays! And if you don’t appreciate that, to hell with you! ;-)

Cheeseburger In Purgatory

(With apologies to Jimmy Buffett and Pastor Martin Niemöller.)

When they came for the pot,
I was silent;
I was not a pot smoker.

When they came for the tobacco,
I did not speak out;
I was not a tobacco smoker.

When they came for the trans fat,
I held my tongue;
I did not eat (much) trans fat.

When they came for my cheeseburger,
There was no one left to speak out.

Mystery of Capital Rides On...

A well-written article at TCS by Peter Schaefer about unlocking the “dead capital” of the developing world, and what a huge opportunity it could be for everyone. I like just about everything he has to say, although I am curious as to why the name Hernando De Soto never comes up. (Answer: ah, I see, he does link to De Soto’s book, as I just did.) At any rate, my one quibble is with the assertion that (mostly) all the developing world needs (I’m paraphrasing and simplifying) is “America’s original blueprint”. That is, the work of the framers at the end of the 18th century, who, in his view, set up everything so well that our economy evolved into its potent, modern form as a matter of course, flowing inexorably from the framers’ genius. I would argue that it is a bit bigger than that. The true construction of America’s prosperity and freedom both started earlier and ended later than the era of the framing itself. To take them backwards, De Soto points out how the process of squatting, followed by formalized property rights, played out over a couple of centuries. This is something that Schaefer seems to acknowledge at certain points, but that gets lost in the simple assertion of the framers as the fount of all this goodness. The framers did some good work, but to the extent that this pattern is the root of modern wealth, it is as much a cultural phenomenon as a political one, or even more so. The framers recognized and helped formalize some of this approach, but the cultural values that gave birth to it before the framing, and perpetuated it afterwards, are really the key.

Property rights, and the securing thereof, are indeed key, but there is a crucial, fascinating, and paradoxical twist. A modern economy clearly relies, in part, on stable and secure property rights, but they cannot be entirely rigid and fixed! If they were, then they formalization process itself would never really work! If you respect the property rights of the wealthy landowners who nominally “own” all this land being squatted upon, then you can’t formalize the squatters’ rights. Indeed one “critique” I read of De Soto’s policy prescriptions suggested that his ideas made things worse because some official landowners go in and forcibly evict squatters when they see formalization coming. I put “critique” in scare quotes because I don’t think much of this line of criticism. Allowing the wealthy, “official” title holders to evict the squatters is absolutely ass backwards of the De Soto plan. You can’t say that an approach that does the exact opposite of the intended plan is the fault of the plan. You have to deal with the rich landowners up front, in whatever manner will work. I’d say in general you’re best advised to buy them off. Use the foreign aid money to do it. Most of the foreign aid to the poorest countries gets skimmed off and goes to the wealthy already, and this way you’d at least get some tangible return on the investment!