Positive Liberty

Of course it’s impossible to judge the ultimate effect of this type of political event in real time, which is why pundits–which I seem to have become–are so often wrong. But Obama’s campaign raised between $8 and 10 million just in the 24 hours following Palin’s speech, equalling in one day what the Republicans claim to have raised in the week since Palin was announced as the veep nominee. Given that Obama’s fundraising kicked into high gear after her speech, rather than after she was introduced, I’d say the nastiness Jason and I both sensed was sensed by a goodly number of others (note: I wasn’t moved to contribute to anyone except my local beer distributor).

No doubt she’s energized the Republican base, but she’s been a great energizer for the Democrats, too, which I don’t think is what McCain had in mind when he picked her.

As I said, judging these things in real time is tricky. It’s possible Palin has the charm to bring in enough voters to help McCain win a couple of key swing states. But I have a feeling in my gut that I’m watching a slow-motion train wreck, the unfolding of a classic political blunder that we’ll be talking about for years to come.

The pseudonymous Thoreau writes,

[R]eading the accounts from the Twin Cities, I read of a city that has been militarized unlike anything seen in the US for a very long time. Are punks breaking windows such a terror that a city must be militarized, that journalists must have their homes raided by SWAT teams, and that all who would carry a sign must risk arrest or worse? The answer, of course is obvious: The pen that makes the sign is far mightier than the stick that breaks the window, and so they fear that pen.

This is a culture of fear. The police tactics will be rationalized on the grounds that “if it saves just one officer’s life” even though the officers have many ways to defend themselves. The war being fought was pitched as a response to a hypothetical threat that might materialize in some distant day, if a dictator were to ignore his own interests and every disincentive and conduct an attack that would not increase his power one iota. The police state we face is justified largely in response to a terrorist organization that has killed many fewer Americans than the cars we drive. We accept the stationing of troops in every corner of the globe, and meddling in every conflict on the earth, because we are assured that this is necessary for our safety. We are the safest people on the face of the earth, and yet we unleash a horror upon ourselves and others because we are afraid.

At the risk of reaching too far, I don’t think it’s entirely a coincidence that these things are done by a country that removes swingsets from playgrounds, even if the swings are above a soft, sandy patch that is safer to land on than the hard dirt underneath the swings where I played as a kid. (Even worse, I can remember climbing on a jungle gym that was above concrete!) A culture that will spend money to get rid of fun toys because of exceedingly rare risks seems to be the sort of country that would go to any length in response to even the most remote threat. When people actually feel safer at the airport because some dumb thug took away their shampoo in response to an implausible threat, they will go along with anything.

Jim Babka’s recent comment to one of my posts brought to mind just how much Christians — even those who purport to believe the Bible infallible — differ on the proper interpretation of specific doctrines. Sometimes the differences don’t really matter; sometimes they do. I asserted Christianity teaches self-sacrifice. Babka replied: “Christianity is not about self-sacrifice, but living for a higher cause. The distinction is important.” I await his explanation. When you google the terms “Christianity” and “self-sacrifice” you see there is a strong current in biblical Christianity that teaches this is what Christianity is about.

Dr. Gregg Frazer’s thesis teaches Christianity is about self sacrifice. Indeed, he sees tension between that and the idea of “enlightened self interest” or “self preservation” as put forth by Locke et al.

I’ve come across a number orthodox Christians who don’t like John MacArthur’s interpretation (which is Dr. Frazer’s) of biblical Christianity precisely because it’s so similar to how Rousseau and Nietzsche characterized Christianity (before Marx) as a temporal opiate and hence something where tyrannical rulers can make Christians into good slaves. Yet, I find this interpretation of Christianity to be authentically biblical and well within the tradition of orthodox hermeneutics. After all, Nietzsche and Rousseau weren’t shabby thinkers. And neither is MacArthur. Continue Reading »

St. Paul, MN, police raided the headquarters of a group planning to protest the Republican National Convention. Nobody was arrested, but a large group was detained for a while. No clear reason was given for the raid.

St. Paul Police spokesman Tom Walsh said they were executing a search warrant.

“The cause for the search warrant is not public at this time,” Walsh said.

That’s legalese for, “We’re preemptively raiding their headquarters to send a warning.”

I’ve had people tell me that libertarianism fails because it’s out of sync with human nature. I fully agree–the police state is where human nature leads us.

I found this interesting bit on my brother’s blog. Apparently John McCain told a newspaper in Peublo, Colorado, that the Colorado River Compact should be renegotiated to give the southwestern members–Arizona, Nevada, and California–a larger share of the Colorado River’s water.

A little background for those who don’t follow western water issues, which are among the most contentious and fascinating but little known politics in the country. (The Eastern media don’t cover it much, because it mostly plays out in flyover country–places where news execs go to rent a fancy cabin and do a little flyfishing while interacting with the locals as little as possible.) The Colorado River Compact was created to deal with the issues of using the water in the Colorado River. It’s a classic collective action problem: no one state has an incentive to conserve the water, but collectively their incautious use is destructive. Mexico is also a partner to the Colorado River, but not to the Compact, and often so much water gets taken out that the river dries up before reaching Mexico, and what does get there is a sludge of agricultural pesticide runoff. (In contrast, the Canadian provinces of Ontario and Quebec are Associate Members of the Great Lakes Compact, so Canada’s voce is heard in those matters.)

But traditionally California has gotten the lion’s share of the water, and Arizona, with an ever-growing Phoenix, keeps claiming more and more. Recognizing that a long-established use of water is harder to reverse than a new claim to more water, the more northerly states in the Compact, particularly Colorado, which is also ever-growing, have been fighting tooth and nail to prevent California and Arizona from getting rights to more water, which would limit how much Colorado could use.

So McCain’s comments, if played up by Obama, could easily cost him Colorado’s electoral votes. Colorado, having had an influx of Californians in the ’90s and ’00s, keeps edging closer to going into the Democratic column. Had it done so in either 2000 or 2004, the Democrats would have won the presidency. McCain’s odds of winning the presidency without Colorado–slimmer than Kate Moss’s ass.

From WCCO in Minneapolis.

Minneapolis Police Chief Tim Dolan handed out honors to a team of officers involved in a botched raid at an innocent family’s home more than seven months ago.

A few days before Christmas, the SWAT team, acting on a tip from an informer, burst into the house looking for a gang member’s guns. The homeowner, Vang Khang, was not a gang member but he was a gun owner, and hearing someone break into his home he grabbed his shotgun so he could protect his six children.

He fired at the intruders, who fired back. The SWAT team members were uninjured because they wore protective gear. No one else was harmed although the house was riddled with bullet holes (fortunately for Vang Khang, it appears as though the Minneapolis SWAT team doesn’t spend much time at the practice range).

A police investigation determined that they police had received bad information from the informant. Nevertheless, the police chief honored the officers involved with medals and commendations, saying:

“This is a perfect example of a situation that could have gone horribly wrong, but did not because of the professionalism with which it was handled.” … “The officers put themselves in harm’s way. They were shot at and shot and deserved to be recognized,” said Dolan in a statement defending the awards to the SWAT team

10 bonus points for the best comment (deadline: 9:00 AM Sunday (Eastern time).

It is a cliché among many psychologists and economists that human beings behave self-interestedly. Moreover, since Adam Smith’s somewhat theological, somewhat anthropomorphic “invisible hand” metaphor, it has been almost an article of faith within the latter discipline that the collective, societal result of individual self-interested behavior is ironically salubrious.

It is a faith to which I also ascribe, although like all but the most zealous of religious fanatics I season that faith with the occasional heresy here and there. Crucially, however, it needs to be noted at the outset that not just any sort of self-interested behavior contributes to the common wealth and greater good. Specialization and trade, voluntary association, bargained-for exchanges, common rules and some sort of enforcement mechanism to address rule breaking are all necessary elements for human society to flourish economically, for the invisible hand to prove, as it were, optimally dexterous.

Most importantly, “self-interested” is not synonymous with “selfish.” Continue Reading »

NPR ran a story today commemorating the 40th anniversary of the riots police brutality at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago. The story, while generally interesting and almost informative, contained this stunning attempt to whitewash history:

Michael Heaney, a political scientist at the University of Florida, says that because of 1968, “we’ve now become a ‘movement society.’ ”

“What 1968 demonstrated was that protest could be an effective tactic for bringing about social change,” he says. “So important new protest tactics were invented: the sit-in, the large demonstration. And people learned that this was a way they could effectively influence the government.”

That’s right, the mostly white protestors at the Democratic Convention in 1968 led to the invention of the sit-in and large demonstrations. Those uppity nigras in the 1950s couldn’t possibly have had anything to do with it. It couldn’t be that the 1968 demonstrators actually learned some of their methods from those ig’nant southern blacks, could it?

And make no mistake: Heaney is (like me) very, very white, as you can see.

Is it really any wonder that Michelle Obama hasn’t always been proud of the U.S.? Even left-leaning academics and the liberal National Public Radio seem eager to give our collective memory a bad case of vitiligo.

I apologize on behalf of my profession (that Heaney is a fellow political scientist is galling–that anyone with a Ph.D. who studies social movements could make such a statement is appalling); really, we’re not all like that.

[Addendum: Why does it matter? Because the civil rights movement of the 1950s/60s was a voluntaristic collaboration of people who undertook great individual risk to protest against the worst thing government can do--discriminate among people on an arbitrary basis. The 1968 protestors opposed a war that sought (however unwisely in its implementation) to forestall a collectivist, coercive, ideology of government. They had every right to protest, I probably would agree with some of their issues, the cops were wrong to crack skulls, and yet their importance, in every respect, pales in comparison with the civil rights movement. It's a case of real freedom fighters vs. frustrated idealists, and Heaney has chosen to ignore the real heroes of liberty.]

I recently asked PL readers why people had such inaccurate views of libertarianism. As a follow-up and as a way of more fully introducing myself to PLers, I thought it would be appropriate to explain what libertarianism means to me.

I actually began, when I first began really thinking about these issues, as a “market socialist.” At least that’s what I called it, although one of my friends derided the idea that socialism could be market-based. Continue Reading »

In Jason’s post about the new Encyclopedia of Libertarianism, he says,

Time and again, libertarians find themselves in a strange situation, one that liberals or conservatives seem to face a lot less often: Very energetic people denouncing us for positions we don’t even remotely support, and never have, and that are dead wrong on purely libertarian grounds.”

I experience this as well. Continue Reading »

Leitmotif: Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard. — H. L. Mencken

Assorted links, in which various parties get what they deserve, below the fold. Continue Reading »

They do this and maybe this. And this is the best we can come up with?

This:

The U.S. military is segregating violent Iraqi prisoners in wooden crates that in some cases are not much bigger than the prisoners.

The military released photos of what it calls “segregation boxes” used in Iraq.

Three grainy black-and-white photos show the rudimentary structures of wood and mesh. Some of the boxes are as small as 3 feet by 3 feet by 6 feet tall, according to military officials. There was no image released of a box that size.

The average Iraqi male is 5 feet 6 inches tall, according to the Iraqi Ministry of Health. That leaves little room for a prisoner to move once placed inside.

And maybe this:

An extremely reliable and well placed source in the intelligence community has informed me that Ron Suskind’s revelation that the White House ordered the preparation of a forged letter linking Saddam Hussein to al-Qaeda and also to attempts made to obtain yellowcake uranium is correct but that a number of details are wrong.

The Suskind account states that two senior CIA officers Robert Richer and John Maguire supervised the preparation of the document under direct orders coming from Director George Tenet. Not so, says my source. Tenet is for once telling the truth when he states that he would not have undermined himself by preparing such a document while at the same time insisting publicly that there was no connection between Saddam and al-Qaeda. Richer and Maguire have both denied that they were involved with the forgery and it should also be noted that preparation of such a document to mislead the media is illegal and they could have wound up in jail.

My source also notes that Dick Cheney, who was behind the forgery, hated and mistrusted the Agency and would not have used it for such a sensitive assignment. Instead, he went to Doug Feith’s Office of Special Plans and asked them to do the job. The Pentagon has its own false documents center, primarily used to produce fake papers for Delta Force and other special ops officers traveling under cover as businessmen. It was Feith’s office that produced the letter and then surfaced it to the media in Iraq. Unlike the Agency, the Pentagon had no restrictions on it regarding the production of false information to mislead the public. Indeed, one might argue that Doug Feith’s office specialized in such activity.

And this is how we react?

A man with a black hood pours water on the face of a prisoner in an orange jumpsuit strapped to a table: no, it’s not Guantanamo Bay naval base, but New York’s Coney Island amusement park.

The scene using robotic dolls is an installation built by artist Steve Powers to criticize waterboarding, a simulated drowning technique the United States has admitted using on terrorism suspects, but that rights group say is torture.

“Waterboard Thrill Ride” beckons a sign along with cartoon character “SpongeBob SquarePants” who appears tied down and exclaiming: “It don’t Gitmo better!”

…about prewar intelligence this time, not about God.

It’s like the opposite of the X-files. I don’t want to believe. I really, really don’t:

A new book by the author Ron Suskind claims that the White House ordered the CIA to forge a back-dated, handwritten letter from the head of Iraqi intelligence to Saddam Hussein.

Suskind writes in “The Way of the World,” to be published Tuesday, that the alleged forgery – adamantly denied by the White House – was designed to portray a false link between Hussein’s regime and al Qaeda as a justification for the Iraq war.

The author also claims that the Bush administration had information from a top Iraqi intelligence official “that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq – intelligence they received in plenty of time to stop an invasion.”

The letter’s existence has been reported before, and it had been written about as if it were genuine. It was passed in Baghdad to a reporter for The (London) Sunday Telegraph who wrote about it on the front page of Dec. 14, 2003, under the headline, “Terrorist behind September 11 strike ‘was trained by Saddam.’”

The Telegraph story by Con Coughlin (which, coincidentally, ran the day Hussein was captured in his “spider hole”) was touted in the U.S. media by supporters of the war, and he was interviewed on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

“Over the next few days, the Habbush letter continued to be featured prominently in the United States and across the globe,” Suskind writes. “Fox’s Bill O’Reilly trumpeted the story Sunday night on ‘The O’Reilly Factor,’ talking breathlessly about details of the story and exhorting, ‘Now, if this is true, that blows the lid off al Qaeda—Saddam.’”

I so hope this is false. If credible evidence emerges, though, it’s just one more reason for impeachment, and possibly the most credible one of all. Yes, I know it’s late. I don’t care. Right is right, and wrong is wrong.

The first line of defense runs as follows: “The U.S. government would never do anything like this. We’re the good guys.”

But it has, again and again. Fabricated reasons for war are not only the stuff of action movies and political novels. They are historical facts: The U.S. casus belli for entry into the Spanish-American War, World War I, and Vietnam all ranged from subtle entrapment (the RMS Lusitania) to outright lies (the Gulf of Tonkin incident) to a doubtful, unsolved mystery (the USS Maine).

There were indeed other justifications for war against Iraq; I am currently reading Douglas Feith’s War and Decision, which discusses several of them. But fabricating even one reason, and presenting it to the American people as the truth, is grounds in my mind at least for impeachment. We would never tolerate an employee knowingly lying to us about a matter of a few thousand dollars. Why should we tolerate our state employees knowing lying to us about a matter of a few thousand American lives?

That’s sure what it looks like. Isn’t it? Blame Saddam Hussein for something you did to yourself, and you get the war you wanted all along. Wouldn’t hurt if some prominent left-wing types dropped dead along the way, either.

I do hope that’s not what this is. I’d have a hard time imagining the type of evil it would take. Who knew about Ivins’ alleged activities, and when? And with what intent? Even if he acted alone, and without authorization, it’s awful enough. But it’s terribly convenient the way the entire thing was so quickly linked to Iraq.

As Theresa Nielsen-Hayden once said — words to be written in stone — I deeply resent the way this administration makes me feel like a nutbar conspiracy theorist.

Here’s a line from Charles Rangel’s National Service Act:

To require all persons in the United States between the ages of 18 and 42 to perform national service, either as a member of the uniformed services or in civilian service in furtherance of the national defense and homeland security . . . .

Ah, homeland security. The only excuse that permits absolutely anything. Just so we’re clear…

Required = involuntary.
Service = servitude.

And…

Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime where of the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

A “homeland” that tolerates involuntary servitude would not deserve “security.” It would deserve… well, we already got that, once upon a time.

I hope I don’t sound like too much of a fire-eater here, but I’m going to take a pledge, and I’m going to encourage others to do the same:

I solemnly swear that I will never take part in any involuntary civilian service at the behest of the federal government, regardless of the consequences.

I know, I know. I worded around the military draft. One battle at a time, and this one’s nearer.

So… Who’s signing up? Anyone under 42 want to burn a draft card with me on the Mall? Feel like being a test case for the first Thirteenth Amendment suit at the Supreme Court in who knows how many years? In The Agora? The Crossed Pond? Snarky Bastards? I’m looking at you guys! You know how fun it would be to watch Justice Stevens squirm out of the Thirteenth Amendment with some nonsense about evolving legal standards. Take the pledge, encourage your friends to do the same, and refuse to be a conscripted slave.

Also — this could be the most important part — refuse to compromise on the terminology. A slave is a slave, even if nice people like Charles Rangel or perhaps Barack Obama are the ones holding the whips.

Barack Obama? Yes indeed. He touts a “universal voluntary public service.” Right on his website. But if it’s voluntary, it won’t be universal, and if it’s universal, it won’t be voluntary. The plan is self-contradictory right down to the details: There’s a “required” 100 hours of service for graduating from college… but it’s apparently not “required,” since you’ll still be able to graduate without it. (Unless you’re poor, in which case you’d lose your financial aid.)

I’m not sure which is more distasteful: Actual involuntary servitude, or a politician who feels he has to pander to the slavery-pushers by promising what they want, and not delivering it. I also find it interesting that whenever you’re running for president, it’s somehow not undignified to ask others to do stuff for you, en masse, unpaid.