The Torturers

Goddamn fuckers.

Yes, I am culpable too. If you are an American, or one of our "allies" who facilitated this, then you are culpable, too. I should have done more. I didn't know exactly what to do. I did squeak my little pipsqueak voice out into the uncaring void. I did contribute to Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. I didn't do enough. I have let the petty distractions of life stand in the way of a moral duty. I am sorry.

I mention and link to some of my stuff on torture below, not because I want "credit" for anything, but because I don't feel like repeating myself. Again.

Yes, prosecute them. Nothing less is really acceptable. If our chickenshit system won't do it because of political cravenness, maybe some of them might forget themselves and go to Europe, or Canada, or somewhere else, where maybe they'd get snatched up and held to account there. A boy can dream, anyway.

Goddamn fuckers.


(If you are someone who believes that the torture that happened under Bush can be defended, this is a rare opportunity to say whatever you want to me without response. I will not respond to or engage with any arguments of that sort, at this point.)

Some of my old stuff, if you care...

12/31/05 - Outlaw Administration My very first blog post ever. Summary: the Bush administration was an outlaw administration, and not in the cool Waylon and Willie sense, but in the need-to-go-to-jail sense. Torture is featured.

1/24/06 - Outlaw Outsourcing. Summary: No smoking guns, at that time, to directly link Rumsfeld, Cheney, & Bush to Abu Ghraib, but not really necessary. Aside from the semantic games they loved to play about waterboarding and such, it had just been documented how we used dictatorial or authoritarian governments nominally "aligned" with us to torture on our behalf.

12/30/06 - One Year On, and the Outlaw Administration Rolls On... An anniversary piece, of sorts, for my blog. Summary: Includes a handy recap of some of the known facts about our torture practices, including legal documentation of the torture of Jose Padilla, a U.S. citizen.

1/27/07 - Thatcher on "gitmo." Summary: Margaret Thatcher shamefully and dishonestly compared her treatment of certain IRA prisoners--which, whether you liked her decisions or not, were conducted according to the rule of law--with the Bush administration's practices at Guantanamo Bay, where Bush asserted unchecked executive power beyond the rule of law (and was eventually overruled). An excerpt (not quite on the main topic of the post):

...as for "rendition," i.e. the outsourcing of torture to unscrupulous foreign governments, one would hope such a practice would be considered despicable in its own right, but the fact that completely innocent people have been tortured at our behest should shame even the most hard-core Bush defender. Should, but apparently doesn't. Disgusting. It shames me as an American, even though I didn't vote for Bush.

I had a "mini-series" on waterboarding, and the confirmation hearings for Mukasey as attorney general, in November 2007. Here, here, and here.

Why the Teabaggers Really Were Full of It (and I Don't Mean Tea)

**Special note to any of my GOP-minded friends that might happen by here. I do, in fact, call some of your partisans "twits" and "pinheads" below. But I am sure I didn't mean you, and I do stand by my characterizations of those who did and said the specific things discussed.**

In the midst of a good, friendly debate over at the DinkZone blog, my bud Heath (tongue-in-cheek) said he hoped I "had fun teabagging" on Wednesday. While far too much has already been made of this whole dismal spectacle, I feel the need to take a moment to distance myself from this particular "protest." If you told me, in abstract terms, about some people who legitimately believed that our government was excessive in size, and who decided to take April 15 as a day to stage a peaceful, respectful, and principled demonstration in favor of reducing said wasteful government, then, yes, I would confess that it sounds like something I might endorse, or hell, in which I might even participate.

Of course, the "tea parties" that took place on Wednesday were nothing of the sort. Yes, the twin facts that various entities and individuals within the GOP establishment, including Fox News, organized and promoted it heavily, even while Fox simultaneously hyped the parties as "spontaneous citizen protests" would have been funny, had it not been so insulting to our collective intelligence. But beyond that, the blatant hypocrisy of so many of the twits that showed up at these events was truly hard to stomach. After sitting by and watching 8 years of astounding fiscal irresponsibility and the biggest expansion of federal spending since at least LBJ, now is the time to get outraged at excessive government spending!?!? Anybody who really meant a damn word of their "I believe in small government" speechifying, would have to admit that the Bush administration has trounced all others in recent memory in expanding spending, executive power, and secrecy. To pick this moment, and this (still very new) administration as your target is ridiculously and transparently partisan and oxymoronic (or perhaps just moronic), even if the provenance of this "movement" had not already made that clear.

Please don't associate me with any of these pinheads. All of this was really enough to put yours truly, a genuine believer in limited government, off his lunch. Nearly as much as feeling obligated to finally go look up "teabagging" at the Urban Dictionary. Now there is something I really did not need to know.

Christmas Trees and Kandy Keynes

So, in the interest of "getting it" and not being labeled as some wild-eyed extremist, let's consider the theoretical, and perhaps empirical, case for government "stimulus." (Am I alone in wishing that Beavis and Butthead would make a brief reappearance to snicker idiotically at the phrase "stimulus package"?) Hopefully, I can get my economist friend to offer a critique, if I am missing something fundamental.

The true essence of Keynesian stimulus theory is psychological. The free market critique of Keynes seems so straightforward as to be unassailable, as long as pure rational market actors are assumed. That is, neither the government nor the private sector can magically create wealth. It is, as always, a marriage of capital and labor to produce something of value. And if the government is allocating capital, then it is inevitably displacing something else that could be done in the private sector, i.e. opportunity cost. A quick sanity check on this: the money must come from somewhere! So the government must either tax it, borrow it, or print it. Either taxing or borrowing removes the money from private hands, and printing it is the ultimate illusion (no new stuff, just more money to buy it with--inflation). So, in a classic, rational market, government stimulus could be compared to scooping water from the deep end of the pool and pouring it into the shallow end.

But the reason Keynes could be right would be that, in the midst of a severe downturn, a crisis of confidence can cause those with capital to basically withdraw from rational investing. That is, there are bound to be good opportunities somewhere (there always are, there have to be, it's just a matter of finding them) it's just that in this moment of crisis, investors have no faith in anything and want to sit on their cash. So, enter the government. Said fearful investors, unwilling to bet on anything else, are nonetheless willing to lend to the government, i.e. buy treasury bonds. By being the borrower and spender of last resort, government gets the money moving again.

Keynes in a nutshell: psychological! Unless you really do believe that government, on average, as a matter of principle, actually does a better job at allocating resources than the private sector. And if you do believe that, then I think maybe the "S" word does apply... though I won't utter it, seeing as how mercilessly McCain (for whom I did not vote) was mocked.

And so, further, it does not really matter, from this point of view, whether the money is particularly well-spent or not. Yes, other things being equal, it is better for government to spend wisely rather than unwisely, but if what you want is stimulus, and if Keynes is right, just show me the money! Enjoy the Christmas tree of a bill that we have! Let us hope our children don't regret having to pay for it...

Gödel, Escher, Bernanke

I have recently been thinking about Gödel's Theorem and the regulation of markets. No, seriously... I know. I can't help it.

It is extremely important to note that I recognize a serious hazard here. It is dangerous to attempt translation across domains of knowledge, and such attempts often go awry, but I believe there is at least a slight chance that there is something real with this idea.

The question is whether the law can be accurately described as a "formal system," which has a mathematical definition. It seem plausible to me to suggest that it can, because all legal questions ultimately seem to boil down to a binary choice: Is action X lawful? That is, given a set of facts, describing the actions of some person, group, or entity, were those actions permitted or prohibited by the law?^* In greater detail, the laws and regulations would represent the axioms of the formal system. Furthermore a grammar exists (largely inscrutable to most of us, but natural for lawyers, judges, and such) for constructing assertions or statements in this system, e.g. "Being that, on the Eleventieth of Smarch, Homer J Fonebone did willfully violate article diggity-two, section naughty-five of the state penal code..." (Heh, heh, he said "penal.") Finally, at least in this brief treatment, the grammatically valid statements in this system are ultimately adjudicated as "true" or "false," i.e. a verdict. The law in practice, messy as it is, surely never obtains the status of a formal system, rigorously defined, but in idealized form, this is a reasonable model of what law aims to be.

Now, Gödel tells us, for those who have not visited our friend Kurt recently, that any rigorously constructed formal system must be either incomplete or inconsistent. That is, the system will either contradict itself by producing at least two derived statements that actually contradict each other, OR, if such contradictory statements are prohibited, then the system cannot validate the truth or falsity of all possible statements. That is, there can never be a simple, mechanistic algorithm for determining the truth of any and all possible statements in the system.

If this does, in fact, apply to law, then the signs are certainly all around us. I see two major consequences: First, this renders the idea of "strict constructionism" logically impossible. Various "lower" courts are often arriving at blatantly contradictory conclusions on matters of constitutional law, and since the law, at least in theory, must be consistent, the Supreme Court must resolve the dispute. In doing so, the court sometimes makes new law, which, if I am correct, is not (necessarily) arrogance or hubris, but actually a logical necessity. This is not to say that the Court is always right, or that it does not sometimes exceed its proper bounds, but merely that existing law, as written, will never be both complete AND consistent. This is not quite the same as the classic "the framers couldn't forsee everything" argument, but a statement about logical inevitability.

The other consequence relates to the currently heated "debate" (really at lot more like ad hoc and ad hominem arguments hurled about the chattering political commentariat) concerning regulation and the economy. I have more than once heard prudent, thoughtful people argue that no matter how much we regulate, clever accountants, CEO's, CFO's, and lawyers will find a way to innovate to find "loopholes" that enable some sort of behavior that was intended to be prohibited. I have always found myself nodding, or even exclaiming, my agreement. Now, it seems that this argument may possibly be mathematically true.

Finally, as always, yes, we need regulation. Regulation is just law at the lowest level, and without the rule of law, not only will markets fail to function, but society collapses. But I do believe the Gödelian argument, if valid, points in the direction of so-called "principle based regulation" as an alternative to the minutely detailed proscriptive framework that dominates the modern regulatory landscape. Rather than chasing the mirage of a perfectly tuned and adjusted vast edifice of rules, which will inevitably fail to cover all situations, we should formulate the problem as one of basic principles. Regulate transparency, disclosure, and clarity. Do not, as a rule, try to prohibit any particular contractual arrangement between parties, but rather ensure that the parties fully disclose relevant obligations, and do our best to ensure that disputes about any given contract can later be sorted out effectively and fairly by the courts, for when the shit inevitably hits the fan.


Notes

* I am expressing the problem in language suitable for criminal law, but the reasoning should apply equally well in the civil arena, with suitably adjusted verbiage. Also, the observant, or lawyerly, reader will have noted that I asserted "given a set of facts," omitting the courts' role in actually finding facts. I understand that finding facts is also one of the chief duties of our legal system. This actually makes the argument stronger. Not only are courts needed to find the facts, but they can never be replaced by some mechanisitic framework even taking the facts as given. (Return)

Greed, Gekko, and Us

Gordon Gekko has emerged as a stock figure in the national psyche, or at least he's a recurring figure over at the Slate Culture Gabfest. And apparently, the "Greed is Good" speech is a cultural touchstone in itself. (I must confess to never having seen all of Wall Street, from whence the character and speech come, but I'm pretty sure I've got the gist of it. Apart from Emilio's turn as Otto in the delightful Repo Man, I tend to avoid the Sheen boys.) Apparently Gekko's little oration, in blind disregard of the practically unambiguous evil of the character himself, actually became a rallying cry for the era that followed. "Greed is good!" an unironic cheer of the striving, trading classes.

I think the problem is largely semantic. There used to be a term, although I have not heard it in a while, for an alternative to "greed," namely "enlightened self-interest." Perhaps it was too unwieldy or just didn't fit the times, post Gekko, but it seems worth considering. As someone who will still stick up for the ideals of free markets, even in these dark hours, it is precisely this distinction that matters. "Self-interest" is fine. It is natural, healthy, and IS in fact the driving force of economic growth. (Innovation, among other things, enables growth, but the engine is self-interest.) As long as you play the game by the rules, it is fine to try and make money, even a lot of it, and I believe it should be your right. "Greed" is actually the exact point when things go off the rails--it is the point where you break the rules in order to get ahead. Breaking the rules, in economic terms, basically means theft in one form or another (fraud, for instance, is merely another form of theft).

Even Gekko, when he first introduces the "G" word into his monologue, actually says, "Greed, for lack of a better word..." He is thereby implicitly acknowledging something about the semantics and connotations of the term. Gekko is indeed evil, and indeed greedy (so I am given to understand, since I still haven't seen the film), but the speech he is giving is arguably about self-interest, and defensible on those terms, if you permit the distinction. If you do NOT lie, cheat, and steal, then it is OK to get what you can in the world. Simple enough.

But this has never been entirely accepted, even on the terms I propose. There seems to have always been a conflation between the two forms of self-interest, and it is not merely a left/right distinction. "Populists" of both flavors have always stood ready to impugn the profit motive. Making money is an unseemly pastime for the moral scolds of both stripes. The left maintains, incorrectly, that it must involve exploitation of someone, by failing to distinguish between positive sum and zero sum transactions. The right holds, incorrectly, that it must undermine other values like family, country, and God.

Yes, greed is bad, by definition. But "enlightened self interest," now that makes the world go 'round! Or so I will hold...

First thing we do, let's kill all the canaries and roosters!

Comes word from on high that market regulators are considering banning or otherwise restricting short selling, to "help stabilize the markets." Genius. Thank God our men and women of vision are on the job, saving us from the evil speculators.

It brings to mind how in the old days, miners would take various birds, most famously canaries, down into the mines, presumably because they enjoyed the plumage--the mines being otherwise such a dark and dreary place. Trouble is, the birds would die occasionally, and there was very often a buildup of toxic gas in the mine at the very same time! Clearly the canaries were a serious hazard, the gas buildup often sickening or even killing miners. Thankfully, the practice is now a thing of the past, the birds are rarely taken into the mines, and the number of gas-related miner deaths has declined apace!

On a related note, it has come to my attention that nearly all recent stock market declines have taken place during daylight hours (market local time, that is). Given the seriousness of this problem, I call for a large scale rooster-slaughtering program. Eliminate the sunrise, and I can nearly guarantee that the stock market will stop dropping (if not immediately, then at least after one final round of selling). Yes, this does raise the problem of how we will get more chickens in the future, but I am simultaneously calling for our genetic scientists to get to work on cloning hens, which should resolve the matter in short order.

You can thank me later.

Hold On Tight to Your Burgers, or At Least Chew Fast

William Saletan is on the case in the new "War On Junk Food". I'd like to point out that, while I was aiming at humor with Cheeseburger in Purgatory (and note that the pictured food in Saletan's article is a cheeseburer), my tone was light, but the substance was heavy. That is, I was really serious about the threat. Given their druthers, the nanny-staters will ban junk food, and the comparison to drugs will fuel the fire. At least some of the folks over at Reason are fairly sanguine about all this (Nick Gillespie, I believe, among them). Their point being that this will amount to overreach, i.e. people will revolt when they come for our cheeseburgers. I hope they are right, but I am personally a bit more antsy. In spite of ample evidence that marijuana is no worse than, and quite likely more benign than, alcohol, it remains banned and people are being locked up every day for possession. If evidence doesn't really matter, then even specious evidence, such as some of this speculation about "food addiction" can be a powerful weapon in the hands of the demagogues.

Gentlemen, Start Your Waterboards!

Just to keep track, and wrap up my commentary on Mukasey and torture: all four of the Democratic senators who are running for president skipped the vote on Mukasey's confirmation. (That is, Clinton, Obama, Biden, and Dodd.)

As strongly as I feel about this issue, I probably have to say that I would consider a vote to confirm a disqualification. As it is, I would say they all get big black marks next to their names for general weaselly lack of courage and/or conviction.

McCain also skipped the vote!(?) If someone forced me to vote for one of the "major" Republicans, I would probably hold my nose and pick McCain (but I'm sure glad no on can force me!). So, philosophically, does McCain get a pass on this? On the one hand, I could see forgiving him a lot on the issue of torture, if someone can earn a "pass" I would guess he qualifies. On the other hand, if anyone should know better, then that's him as well... Anyway, it's his unequivocal denunciation of torture that has distinguished him from the other Republicans, as far as I'm concerned. That's why I would choose him, if forced.

In short, none of the senators who are running for president actually voted on Mukasey's confirmation. Now that's courage!

Tortured Logic, and the Outlaw Administration Rides On

We've addressed the nauseating semantic games about "waterboarding," also known as "drowning," here before, but there is also an opportunity to deal with legal precedent. The game, apparently, is to treat the status of this procedure as somehow "ambiguous" and "unsettled" as a point of law, or a matter of individual (and apparently partisan) opinion, at least in the hands of people such as right honorable Senator Orin Hatch, when discussing our (apparently) new attorney general.

Bullshit.

The technique (and a number of closely related procedures) have all been defined in American courts as torture. This is not partisan or political; it is about as firmly established as law gets. Former J.A.G. Evan Wallach gives a brief history in the Washington Post. If you are up for a longer read, check out Wallach's journal article (in draft form) heavily laden with citations.

We include some relevant quotes here. These are taken from the "Judgement of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East", which was convened in the aftermath of WWII to try Japanese war criminals.

The practice of torturing prisoners of war and civilian internees prevailed at practically all places occupied by Japanese troops... Methods of torture were employed in all areas so uniformly as to indicate policy in both training and execution. Among these tortures were the water treatment...
...
There were two forms of water torture. In the first, the victim was tied or held down on his back and cloth held over his nose and mouth. Water was then poured on the cloth... As he opened his mouth to breathe or to answer questions, water went down his throat until he could hold no more...
...
In the second, the victim was tied lengthways on a ladder, face upwards, with a rung of the ladder across his throat and head below the latter. In this position he was slid first into a tub of water and kept there until almost drowned. After being revived, interrogation proceeded and he would be reimmersed.

The practices map precisely with those described in our current discourse as "waterboarding." I guess the modern penchant for euphemism knows no bounds. So, as explicitly as possible: we tried and convicted Japanese soldiers for torture, for using these techniques on American soldiers, as well as civilian internees.

Any questions?

The Democratic "leadership" has, once again, proven itself worthless and spineless. Dahlia Lithwick efficiently eviscerates Feinstein's "elegant" compromise, which is really nothing but a sham, a cave-in being spun as a compromise. Those feelings I have--where I am inclined to vote for Dems because they are, in all their awfulness, still the lesser evil--are going fainter every day...

Waterboarding is Drowning, Not "Simulated Drowning"

I find myself, again, getting viscerally angry as we play semantic games about torture. I don't want to repeat all the arguments in detail. I understand there are those who make arguments about the moral acceptability of torture in certain circumstances, and I do not accept those arguments.

If you have thought seriously and deeply about the issue and disagree, I can respect that, even if I believe you are profoundly and dangerously wrong. But let's not obfuscate the issue with contrived rhetorical dodges--if you support torture, you should say so and defend your position. Waterboarding is a form of controlled drowning, not "simulated drowning." (Follow the link, it is compelling stuff, and please note the source, this is no liberal-pinko-commie pansy, this is a U.S. soldier whose job was training soldiers to withstand torture. Think about it.)

The Bush administration wins yet another victory over a compliant press corps as long as they are permitted this phony distinction. Torture is torture. Are you up for it?

The "Tyranny" of Scale?

I really do love Slate. Generally excellent writing, a decent ideological balance (or at least intellectual honesty), and a fascinating array of topics. But there is the occasional clunker, such as this piece of pseudo-economic "thinking" on "The Tyranny of the Market." by Joel Waldfogel. I could not refrain from jumping into the Fray, here is my post from that forum:

Lord, what dreck. So there is a minimum necessary size of a market for some product before it becomes profitable to make that product. Hallelujah, Mr. Waldfogel has discovered economies of scale, thanks for sharing that with us! Somehow I suspect that Friedman, Hayek, and von Mises (with a couple of Nobel prizes between them) had actually heard of this concept.

Heavy sigh. No, free markets are not, in fact, magical fairy gum-drop land, where all is a happiness and light. They're just (almost always) better than the alternative. Setting aside the hard-core free market question of whether it is appropriate to take from the majority to benefit the minority (or vice versa!), Native Americans have not, generally speaking, had to go barefoot up until now, I suspect. Aside from making do with ill-fitting mass produced (and therefore inexpensive) shoes, I don't doubt that many purchased specially made shoes--when they could afford them. And there's the crux, to the extent that Native Americans had trouble finding shoes to fit them (as opposed to Nikes, which is not the same thing) it was almost certainly a matter of money. Another news flash: poverty causes deprivation. While generally libertarian, I am not religiously so, and so I am not opposed to any and all welfare spending. The best way to help people with little money, in the short run, is to give them money. With money, they can get shoes, or food, or medicine or whatever the hell they need, and the government doesn't need to enforce an arcane list of requirements on businesses in order to force them to make specific products. In the LONG run, the best way to help poor people is economic growth, and here the record is unequivocal: capitalism beats the pants off socialism.

What the modern shoe industry (and economic activity in general) has accomplished is to continually provided better and better products at better and better prices. Those people who had the most common feet shapes and sizes benefited before those with atypical feet. What is gratifying about Nike's decision is that they are now giving a new group of consumers access to the same superior products, in terms of price to performance, that others with more typical feet have been enjoying for some time. The fact that Nike doesn't see a lot of direct profit in this line of shoes, but is doing it anyway for goodwill and good PR, is ALSO a sign of market economics at work. Good PR is good marketing, just to restate yet another observation that should be obvious, but apparently doesn't occur to Waldfogel.

The good news is that the march of technology and entrepreneurial innovation is pushing economies of scale lower and lower. A prime example being the "long tail" of Chris Anderson fame. Without the same physical limitations of a traditional bookstore, Amazon is able to offer something like a bajillion times more titles (forgive the technical lingo, I've been reading too much economics), because low inventory and other overhead means it needs to sell fewer and fewer of any given title to make money. Similarly, technology has changed the profitability scale at the publisher level as well; digital presses have lowered the cost of printing dramatically, so that books become profitable at much lower production numbers, and many more titles with smaller market potential can now be published.

Much the same can be said for vast swaths of products in many different markets, including pharmaceuticals, another topic touched on here. But it should not escape notice that one of the major contributors to the $1 billion price tag on getting a drug to market is... (anyone?) government regulation. This is not to say we should have no oversight of the industry, but the cost of getting FDA approval is huge, and makes the bar ever higher for the marketability of any given drug. Allowing greater flexibility in approval for smaller niche-market drugs would almost certainly work better than some hypothetical mandate to force researchers to work on some particular drug type.

A final note: Since the market allegedly "tyrannized" them, why don't we ask Native Americans just how well the U.S. government has taken care of them over the years? Any takers?

Copyright Cops on the Ooze

Libertarian types (such as myself) are generally sympathetic to "privatization" plans, as long as they don't represent blatant giveaways. The general idea being that the private sector can do many (but not all) things more efficiently, etc. because the profit incentive is not inherently evil; and that there really is something to this "invisible hand" thing.

One government function that is NOT appropriate for privatization is policing, as a rule. This is not to suggest that private firms might not be a good choice for providing security, say, at specific sites where public assets need protection. What I'm talking here is about actively seeking out and arresting criminals. Once again, we see signs of a trend whereby the government is effectively deputizing private citizens or organizations to enforce laws, in this case, copyright laws, and doing so at the behest of the recording industry.

Without rehashing the intellectual property debate in full, we obviously do need to respect copyright. But the current state of law has skewed heavily, ridiculously even, in favor of the big-monied copyright holders and away from traditional, constitutional limits on intellectual property protection. Now, we not only have big media writing the laws (with their bought-and-paid-for congress-people) but writing more laws to force colleges to police their draconian copyright laws.

Companies that we do business with are being forced to monitor our phone calls, scrutinize our finances, and who knows what else. Librarians are forced to watch our reading habits, and now schools are supposed to rat out their students for sharing files? This seems like some amoeba-like police state in progress, pseudopods oozing ever so gradually into more and more parts of our society.

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.

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.

Thatcher, the IRA, Gitmo, and Torture: Not the Same

An article by Peter Cuthbertson at TCSDaily discussing Margaret Thatcher's legacy, and whether Hillary Clinton can (or should, or really intends to) claim it, makes a decent point or two, but also engages in some fairly deplorable rhetorical sleight-of-hand, as does Thatcher herself, apparently. While I have mellowed a little on Ronald Reagan, I still don't think much of him, and it is at least in part because, as I have argued here before, he wasn't really a small government conservative. All talk and no walk. (Or two be more precise, he actually enlarged government, so it's really backwards walk.) Thatcher, on the other hand, actually did take on and reduce some of the sclerotic welfare state she inherited (and was widely reviled by the left for it, even more so than Reagan), and I believe probably does deserve some credit for rejuvenating the British economy. More significantly, I have come around to the view that the staunch moral stance that both leaders took against totalitarian communism was, in fact, both important and the right thing to do, and they are to be commended for it. I think they were, indeed, vindicated by history, although mainly because of Reagan and Gorbachev's historic Reykjavik summit and subsequent treaties, not because "they won" the cold war. (I think the continued pressure at the very end of the Soviet Empire helped push it over the cliff, but it was clearly the inherent flaws in its system, combined with the 40-something years of the Cold War, that really did it in, of course.)

But Mrs. Thatcher and Mr. Cuthbertson really go beyond the pale when trying to equate Thatcher's strong anti-terrorism stance against the IRA with the current "war on terror." Cuthbertson admires Thatcher's strong stance against leniency or special treatment of IRA terrorists, and rightly so. But then, we fast forward to modern times and, as Cuthbertson writes:

In prosecuting the war on terror, she would make little time for those whose chief cause is to prevent the rendition of terrorist suspects or improve conditions in Guantanamo Bay. Instead, her response to court rulings favorable to terrorists has been the exhortation that "Conservatives everywhere must go on the counter-offensive against the New Left human rights brigade."

Well, gosh, I guess maybe the treatment of detainees at Guantanamo and rendition of suspects to foreign governments really is just the same as Britain's treatment of IRA bombers… Except… something is tickling at the back of my mind, some nagging little detail… what was that? Oh yeah, now I remember-it's called the rule of law.

The IRA prisoners, with whom Thatcher refused to negotiate or show clemency, or to capitulate to when some (in)famously went on hunger strike, were all convicted criminals. They had been duly tried, convicted, and sentenced in accordance with the laws of the United Kingdom. They were also incarcerated in actual prisons under humane conditions, in accordance with the law and modern standards of criminal justice. On the other hand, the Guantanamo detainees have persisted in a legal nether-world, their status invisible, and their jailers unaccountable to anyone outside of the direct chain of command back to the White House. Yes, of course all freedom- and life-loving people want terrorists locked up or dead, but how do we know they're terrorists? Because Dick Cheney says so? Why have most of the Guantanamo detainees been quietly released since the administration was told (by the Supreme Court, not some "liberal" human rights groups) that it had to actually take steps to prove that the detainees are actually guilty? The questions answer themselves. And as for "rendition," i.e. the outsourcing of torture to unscrupulous foreign governments, one would hope such a practice would be considered despicable in its own right, but the fact that completely innocent people have been tortured at our behest should shame even the most hard-core Bush defender. Should, but apparently doesn't. Disgusting. It shames me as an American, even though I didn't vote for Bush.

It seems like those who support this illegal behavior must be taking the old saw "break some eggs to make an omelet" to heart. While this expression apparently did not originate with Stalin, it is widely attributed to him, and rightly so, I'd say. I reject the hyperbolic rhetorical overreach of saying that Bush is "just as bad" as bin Laden, or the more general version that the U.S. is "just as bad" as the terrorists. I also don't have any particular problem with Bush's (in)famous use of the term "evildoers." But I do think that when we torture, solicit torture, and trash our proud heritage of freedom AND the rule of law--truly the envy of the world, or at least it used to be--by disregarding the Constitution, then at some point that "evildoers" finger does begin to turn back at us.

Gross Errors

I think Daniel Gross does a generally good job discussing economics in the Moneybox column over at Slate, but his recent two-part (so far) series on the labor market and immigration misses the mark, I think. While not an anti-immigrant stance per se, that is clearly the net result of his analysis, although he at least officially blames business owners and/or managers for the "problem" that he sees. In answer to the "we can't find Americans to do these jobs" argument, he trots out a standard dismissal: just pay more! Gosh, why hasn't anyone thought of this before? Just pay more and Americans will do the work!

Does the word "inflation" ring a bell? While Gross wants to attribute the problem to greed by business owners and managers, or perhaps stinginess on the part of the customers of these businesses, he loses sight of one of the basic concepts of economics (or is deliberately ignoring it). If the price goes up for the exact same thing, that's inflation. Doesn't matter if it's milk, eggs, or labor. The price of labor will work its way through the economy and less stuff gets produced and consumed. No free lunch, folks!

Consider landscaping, a business I know a little bit about. To be sure, if landscapers raised their wages they are paying for labor dramatically, they surely could find some price point at which Americans will be enticed away from other work, or out of comfortable non-work (but since we continue to have low unemployment and high workforce participation, as Gross points out, there's not a whole lot of non-working slack), but there is only so much profit margin in any business. Most landscapers I know aren't fat cats eating truffles on their yachts. To stay in business, they will have to raise prices to their customers. Now, surely there may be a few people in the market for landscaping who aren't price sensitive. The real fat cats are going to get their landscaping, if that's what they want. But the rest of us non-fat cats are sensitive to little things like price. So, raise the price of landscaping and what happens? People buy less of it. People may buy the plants and do it themselves. (Or go down to Home Depot and pick up some Mexicans! ;-) Or do without.

And there's the rub! That is real work that doesn't get done, and therefore real wealth that doesn't get created. So you can say that we just have to raise wages, but that doesn't really create wealth, it actually does the opposite.

No. Free. Lunch.

The Nutrition Nannys March On

As the drums of the food police beat on, the Reason website remains an island of sanity. Be prepared to fight for you cheeseburgers, or cheese doodles, or whatever gustatory indulgences you prefer. Please note how Dr. Lustig explicitly advocates government intervention and "de-emphasis of the concept of personal responsibility." This is, of course, necessary to protect--wait for it--the children. Won't somebody PLEASE think of the children! They ARE coming to save you from yourself, and if you prefer not to be treated as a helpless child, be prepared to speak up!

Popular Economics - Mini Book Reviews Part II: The Undercover Economist

In The Undercover Economist, Tim Harford offers pellucid discussions of many important concepts. The style is lively and engaging, but he does not shy away from tackling some of the big problems facing society (and its economists), and I saw little evidence of an ideological ax to grind. That is, while he might be a bit (or a lot) more taken with the power of markets as a force for good than your average leftist, this is to be expected from most modern economists, and he also takes an honest, thoughtful look at the places where markets break down.

In a chapter ("Crosstown Traffic") dealing with externalities, when he snarkily tells an earnest young environmentalist (could easily have been someone like me, once upon a time) that he traveled to the meeting by anthracite-powered steamship from Australia, I'm sure I chuckled aloud. Admittedly, it was a snotty way to make a point, but a point well worth making: moral posturing has very little to do with actually solving problems. And although the case has been made many times, by many eloquent spokespersons, that economic development and environmental progress are not contradictory but complementary, we can always use another voice making the case intelligently. Because, unfortunately, too many partisans of the left and the right still haven't gotten the message--or won't acknowledge it, for political purposes.

I would heartily recommend this book as an introduction to economics. While it actually deals with a wide-ranging array of topics including environmental issues, income inequality, trade, and macroeconomic growth, Harford manages to make even the mundane microeconomic discussions (he opens with purchasing a cup of coffee) lively and engaging, as opposed to the deathly dry nature of most economics textbooks I have picked up. It's probably as good as you can get without getting significantly into the math. (Math is good! I'm all in favor of it, but perhaps the average reader, even an intelligent one, doesn't pick up a book expecting to manipulate variables for entertainment...)

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!

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!

Frontline, Wal-Mart, and Trade

I've been a huge fan of Frontline over the years, it’s one of the best shows on TV. The “Is Wal-Mart Good for America?” report, which I just saw last night, doesn’t seem to live up to its typically high journalistic standards. While maintaining a superficial level of even-handedness, it definitely seemed like it had an anti-Wal-Mart axe to grind. Another way of putting it is that it appeared to be a largely anti-trade piece, with Wal-Mart as our “evils of globalization” poster child.

Possible ideological biases aside, part of why so many of these pieces skew anti-trade is laziness. It’s extremely easy to show sympathetic images of factory workers being laid-off, their livelihoods, and lives, upended and uncertain. But the upside is really there, it’s just harder to show, partly because it’s more diffuse. Sure, as one of the anti-trade economists observes, working class Americans are BOTH consumers and workers. Consumers pay lower prices, and nobody really thinks that is bad in itself, but then closing factories does hurt a smaller number of people badly. He proceeds to state that he “believes” the net effect on the American economy is bad. This is in response to a Cato Institute fellow (probably “fellow” in both senses) who pointed out the standard upside: the greater well-being of all the cost-conscious consumers, who then have more money to spend on other things, which in turn stimulates the economy and creates jobs somewhere else.

Well, I don’t know that it’s clear whether “Cato-guy” or “Protectionist-guy” is right, in the balance. It depends, crucially, on the where the savings go. Say Jane consumer buys a Chinese-made blouse for $15 instead of an American-made one for $20. It’s all about what Jane does with the $5 she saved. Does she just sink it into more cheap Chinese goods? If so, Mr. Protectionist is probably right. Or does she put it toward some domestically produced good or service, or God forbid, save it? If so, Mr. Cato is probably right.

This is a complicated issue, and one I find very interesting. The answer(s) is (are) not so straightforward. Economists don’t all agree, but there is actual data out there. For instance unemployment has remained low and I believe that in general, real wages have held steady or risen, and the share of national income going to labor has remained stable. Seems like a point for pro-trade, but there are still subtleties to be explored. For example, how does the job and wage picture break down across income groups, skill levels, etc.? Why not show some of the data, and let some economists duke it out? I expect the cable news networks, with their tiny attention spans and competitive ratings pressures, to take the shallow route (I can hear Lou Dobbs beating his one big drum now), but this is public television, for crying out loud! Do some work guys! If PBS doesn’t do it, who will?