Girl Scout Death Squads

Another front in the war to ensure you eat virtuously: Girl Scout Cookies. As the author, Katherine Mangu-Ward, points out, at least this particular campaign isn't advocating a government ban--yet. But the same puritanical impulse drives this as the trans fat ban, and this sounds like busybody meddling to me. I hope the Girl Scouts resist the pressure. I think I'll buy an extra box or two this year.

More IATF RFC

Kling follows up and, among other things, defends the link between libertarians and "conservatives" by arguing that the Left is "religiously" worse than the Right. I'd say he's right about the Left's ideological religiosity, but wrong that it is worse than the Right's. As long as placating the Republican base means visiting Bob Jones University and paying respects to the likes of Falwell, Robertson, and Dobson, the GOP can never really be the party of liberty.

The term "social engineering" is often used sneeringly by "conservatives" to dismiss "liberal" programs aimed at, say, ending poverty. But "engineering" really just refers to a teleological enterprise, i.e. trying to shape or build a structure (or other artifact) with a specific goal or vision in mind, and this can be accomplished by proscriptions as well as prescriptions. What are prohibitions against all manner of individual choices, such as with whom we may enter into life partner relationships, and what sort of chemicals win intake in private, if not "social engineering?" Maybe we don't see these restrictions as such because we are accustomed to them, but those sorts of limits are certainly designed to make our society "better" by constraining our individual choices. Just because something is traditional doesn't make it right. Like Kling and his "liberal" friends, I myself lead a pretty traditional or "conservative" lifestyle, but living conservatively either brings its own rewards or it doesn't. If it does (and I find that it does), then the government need not enforce it; if it does not, then government sanction is unjustified and counterproductive.

In proving my libertarian bona fides, let me take just a moment to vent at the Left again. Just as Kling decries how the GOP Right has betrayed small government conservatives in the arena of fiscal responsibility, so to has the Democratic Left stomped all over small government ideals in the domain of personal liberty. Just to cite a couple of examples, they want to essentially expand the drug war to include tobacco, and they also seem hell-bent on legislating the foods we are allowed to purchase and eat. And there are at least a couple of dimensions to these prohibitionist impulses. One of their big justifications is that because society is on the hook for medical expenses incurred by poor lifestyle choices, society is thereby empowered to prohibit those choices. This is, indeed, Hayek's road to serfdom in spades, look no further. If the government is daddy when it's time to pay the bills, then you have to live by daddy's rules… But while fiscal responsibility is the enabling tool for government expansion in this scheme, it is hardly the ultimate impetus; the driving force of the Left's vision of the nanny state is plain old unadulterated Puritanism. Junk food and tobacco simply do not fit into the moral standards of today's so-called "progressives," and they are going to take them from you by force, if need be.

No, I cannot abide the Right's Bible-thumping moralizing, but I can only occasionally barely tolerate the Left's preachy paternalism—just long enough to vote for divided government, which I did. Principled non-voting increasingly looks like my preferred approach, in general, with a vote for the Democrats if divided government is at stake.

Jon Stewart Fodder

We had CNN on at my house this morning, just before I left to go to the office. They were camped out at the airport (in Houston, I think) in order to get the shot of Lisa Marie Nowak, the crazy homicidal astronaut lady, do a perp walk from the plane to the police car. Yes, CNN had a reporter and camera crew waiting at the airport so we could see the crazy astronaut lady walk about 20 feet across a runway. This, of course, set me into full rant mode. Thank goodness they were there for that! Clearly the most important news of the hour. It's not like there's a war on, or grave environmental threats, or nuclear proliferation, or anything else to worry about.

(Just as a point of clarity: I don’t condemn the whole storyline outright. It is indeed a startling, shocking story, so I can understand why it is news, in a general sense. While it isn’t necessarily the better angels of our nature that find such a sordid tale compelling, it is pretty near a universal failing, and I won’t be a hypocrite on this, and so I won’t join the inevitable tut-tutting of a certain elitist class of social critic that is bound to emerge, predictably, from the woodwork. But it is this particular “event” that is so ridiculous. The woman got off a plane. Completely significance free. Absurd. CNN, at long last, have you no shame!?)

But the thing that caught my ear was this: I happened to be still in the room when the actual "event" occurred, and I heard the CNN reporter make a comment along the lines of, "well, a number of the people standing around here are wondering why they've been standing around for some time, just to see this few seconds of a woman getting off a plane." Yes, yes, it's the people who are foolishly standing around for this trivial "event." I'm sure the CNN camera crew had nothing to do with it. If that particular clip doesn't make it onto The Daily Show tonight, I'll be disappointed. But isn't this sort of candor a potential CLM, for a news channel reporter? Surely pointing out the idiocy of the entire enterprise live on the air has to be a major faux pas, perhaps just short of blurting out obscenities.

Trade and Morality

I rather enjoyed this recent pro-trade piece by Tim Worstall at TCS, in which he lays out a strong moral case for trade, and I would add that I more or less agree with his position and its underlying reasoning. It did, however, remind me by association Steve Landsburg calling John Edwards a bigot in Slate a couple of years back--which I liked a good deal less. The overall point is much the same: trade is unquestionably turning hundreds of millions of poor people into non-poor people, and therefore a force for good in the world. Opponents of trade are therefore on some pretty shaky ground, especially since workers in the developed world aren't really any worse off absolutely than they were, it's just that the rich are getting richer faster, so that they are relatively less rich than before.

That last point is pretty important, however, in making the case to middle class and working class people, and in the realm of politics in the rich countries of the world. If someone is actually being harmed by globalization, it is rational for them to get upset about it. And if you're a politician who is trying to represent those people, it makes sense to give voice to that discontent. It doesn't make you a racist, just mistaken. Perhaps it's bad form to quote yourself, but it can be efficient. I posted this in the Slate Fray as a response to Landsburg:

Let's be clear--this is not about agreeing or disagreeing with your position on international trade. ... I come down as a pro-trade sort of person. That is, assuming that the truth is probably somewhere between the Lou Dobb's scare-mongering, "outsourcing is evil" alarmism and its polar opposite ..., I think the polar opposite is closer to the truth. I think the free traders (and I have to assume you are one) are probably right. (I support Kerry and Edwards, however, because other issues outweigh the trade issue for me.)

But that has little to do with calling John Edwards a xenophobe or worse. The argument for trade is that we will ALL be better off in the long run, NOT that a foreign worker is just as deserving of a given job as an American. If the idea of free trade is merely that foreigners deserve American jobs, then it is NOT xenophobic to oppose it. In fact it would be a dereliction of duty for an elected official to do otherwise. We elect officials to represent our interests, not to engage in some sort of international welfare program.

I repeat, I think trade is good--Ricardo's comparative advantage and everyone ends up wealthier and all that. But that means that trade is GOOD for Americans, not bad. That's an argument a politician could (and probably should) make. But you aren't saying that, you're saying that if someone running for office believes trade is BAD for Americans, they should support trade anyway, because Americans have some moral duty to give other people their jobs. You are arguing that giving the welfare of Americans priority over the welfare of foreigners makes a politician no better than a common racist. Nonsense, and shame on you.

Worstall, as I indicated, makes the same basic point about trade without the nasty slur used by Landsburg, but I am saying that you still need to make the case in terms of "everybody wins." "Everybody else wins, you get screwed, but you should be all right with that because you're helping poor people!" is not only a political loser, but not necessarily a moral winner either. If the fat cats are getting ever fatter, why is it the middle class' duty to sacrifice for the poor?

Dramatic and growing income inequality might have negative implications for democracy, but it isn't necessarily bad in and of itself, as long as absolute income keeps growing across the board. Conflating relative poverty with absolute poverty is the sleight of hand that Krugman and many others engage in. Krugman, since I think he supports trade, must be angling for good old-fashioned redistribution. Others are trying to shut the borders, to both goods and people. Some of them are xenophobes (Lou Dobbs, Tom Tancredo, and Pat Buchanan come to mind), but others are merely misguided.

Toon Terror Stalks Beantown?

Without much information to go on, my immediate gut reaction to the great Aqua Teen Hunger Force Terrorism Scare was that it was a bunch of BS hype. Looks like my gut was right. (O Wise Gut, is there anything you can't figure out?) I didn't finger Fox News right off the bat, but that too was pretty predictable, if I had given it a bit more thought. A nice twofer for the breathless Fox hypester morons, as it fits beautifully within a pair of their master narratives: the "War on Terror" and the "Culture War."

It's way past time to remember our FDR and calm down a little, or a lot, actually. This idiotic scaremongering gives support to a sentiment I've been meaning to express for some time: the terrorists have won.

Kling's IATF RFC

I set out to respond to Arnold Kling's interesting "IATF RFC" article at TCS, but realized as I digested his piece that I might well fall outside the scope of his intended audience. Kling has described his own journey as that from the "far left" to a libertarian right, and his RFC suggests to me that he may be a bit more of a neocon than I had realized. However, let me hasten to add that while I don't exactly share their worldview, I don't use the term "neocon" as a slur, and indeed see some valid points in their program. I would further hazard a guess that I have moved along a similar ideological evolutionary path as Kling, but perhaps not as far. I neither would have describe myself as initially "far left," nor would I choose the term "conservative" to attach to my current libertarianism. I side with Friedman (and according to Friedman, Hayek as well) in preferring the term "liberal." As an acknowledgement to modern usage, it is possible we have to accept "libertarian," but it seems to put us into a political/linguistic ghetto.

I continue to adamantly reject the GOP as the proper home of a (classic) liberal or libertarian. It also occurs to me that I see a revision to a classic libertarian metaphor which helps explain why. I would argue that there are at least two roads to serfdom. There is the road of creeping statist economic encroachment which concerned Hayek as he coined the phrase, and his intellectual heirs, Friedman chief among them, have focused their efforts there. It does seem that we have slid further along this road in recent decades, but this "progress" always seems to come in fits and starts, and, significantly, there are occasional "setbacks" to this march, where economic freedom ekes out an actual victory. (Think of both welfare reform and the expansion of the earned income tax credit under (gasp!) Clinton.)

But the other road to serfdom is even more direct, and progress can move swiftly. I refer to the expansion of an ever-grasping, preening, imperious, and unaccountable executive. As has been a recurring theme ever since I started this blog, the current administration has engaged in not merely an aggressive advance of executive power, but a breathtaking disregard for the rule of law. In a particularly revealing profile of Cheney's chief of staff, David Addington at the New Yorker, we can see that this executive power grab was really in the "master plan" all along, and that 9/11 was opportunistically seized upon to advance the agenda. To be fair, I would note that 9/11 was more than mere pretext, since Cheney and Addington surely genuinely believe in this mission, and that the attacks not only advanced but also justified their cause. (I found the Addington piece via an excellent overview of the Addington/Cheney/Bush power grab by Dahlia Lithwick.) But this vastly expanded vision of Presidential power is still a fundamentally bad idea. As important as our Constitution was, the Magna Carta was probably even more fundamental, as the notion of codified law and limited powers owes its modern incarnation to that document. Secret executive detention without independent judicial and legislative oversight is precisely what the Bill of Rights was intended to stop. We proceed down this road at great peril to our freedom. Surely, the Star Chamber is another form of serfdom.

On social issues, Kling also surprised me a bit. I agree with him and many, many others, so-called "conservatives" and "liberals" alike, that the family is an institution of great importance, even primacy. While his passing mention of gay rights seems tolerant, it is a bit less so than I would have expected. I see no particular reason for a "profound" skepticism regarding gay families and their role in strengthening (or weakening) families overall. I also raise an eyebrow when I note that Judeo-Christian values are singled out by Kling for mention when discussing religious foundations of our modern moral values. I do not subscribe to the notion that, say, Islam in inherently less tolerant and peaceful. Yes, yes, I have heard ad nauseum about Mohammed and the other Caliphs' roles as simultaneous political and religious leaders, as well as the warlike passages of the Koran. But you really do not have to spend much time with the Old Testament before you run across barbarity on an epic scale. The Israelites were told by God to exterminate all sorts of heathens (and apparently often did as they were told), and separation of church and state is nowhere to be found! History and cultural evolution have produced a (generally) more benign religious tradition in the modern West. The problem with large swaths of the Muslim world is precisely that-cultural and historical, both India and Indonesia represent relatively healthy and open societies with large numbers of Muslims. I do NOT accept that violence and intolerance is "baked into" Islam in some way. As a secular person (but with a religious upbringing), I think that while all of the major religions are potentially intolerant and dangerous, they can also be instruments of positive change.

Most of the rest of Kling's libertarianism I can heartily endorse. He has written numerous articles advocating effectively for reduced government interference in health care, for example. And I have almost come 'round to endorsing vouchers for education, thanks to the writings of Friedman, Kling, and others, but I still have a cavil or two about how it can be done constitutionally and fairly. I'll leave those for another time.