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Thursday, March 10, 2005
Capabilities
In the aftermath of Federal Election Commissioner Bradley Smith's prediction that bloggers will soon be regulated as political contributors under the McCain-Feingold Bipartisan Campaign Finance Reform Act, Senators John McCain and Russ Feingold have been at pains to reassure us all that the Act was never intended to apply to us, and will never be used in that way.
Shall we have a big chorus of "Yeah, right" -- ? Armed with a federal court's decision that a Website's link to a politician's campaign site constitutes a contribution-in-kind, the FEC could easily put Website operators -- most particularly politically active bloggers -- under its crosshairs. McCain and Feingold just might be perfectly sincere in their statement of intentions, but that has no bearing whatever on the capabilities their infernal Act has placed in the regulators' hands.
A military man will tell you: in assessing a threat, capabilities matter far more than intentions, especially when the signals coming from the "capable" entity are mixed.
Consider terrorism. Most Americans regard Black Tuesday and the fall of the twin Towers as the inception of the War on Terror. But Osama bin Laden had declared his fatwa against America about a decade earlier. During that decade, he and his followers attempted numerous strikes on American persons, properties, and institutions. Most of these barely blipped the national radar; the major exception was the first attack on the World Trade Center, which killed six people and did many millions of dollars of damage.
During that decade, bin Laden's intentions were quite clear, but al Qaeda's capabilities had not yet risen high enough to wreak the degree of destruction that finally made us sit up and take notice. Therefore, our intelligence agencies, which thought they had a good picture of al Qaeda's capabilities, tended to understate the threat they represented. That led to an enduring low priority placed on monitoring it and countering it. But al Qaeda was steadily building its capabilities: its network of adherents and willing suicide bombers; its system for the distribution of orders and funds; its support base among nominally unaffiliated Muslims. When it had made ready, it struck, bringing us the Black Tuesday atrocities.
Consider the income tax. When the Sixteenth Amendment was being debated on the floor of the Senate, one of its opponents rose to ask the body what it could say to reassure the American public that this tax would not rise to seize some unconscionable fraction of their earnings -- perhaps as much as ten percent! A pro-income-tax senator rose and replied that the country need never fear such a development: "The people would never allow it!"
But the capability bestowed on the federal government by the Sixteenth Amendment, and by later Supreme Court cases that held that the Amendment had placed an unlimited power to tax in Washington's hands, proved more important than the intentions of the legislators who had forged and ratified it. Today the income tax seizes twice as large a fraction of the incomes of private Americans as the "unconscionable" ten percent a senator feared in 1912.
Consider the unholy synergy between "civil rights" legislation and preferential treatment by race. During the debates over the 1964 Civil Rights Act, several of its opponents argued that its provisions could easily be interpreted to mandate racial quotas, particularly in the hiring and firing of employees of private firms. One of the co-sponsors of the act, Hubert Humphrey, declared thunderously that that was no part of the Act's intent, and that if it were ever used in such a fashion, he would eat the entire bill during an open Senate session.
Senator Humphrey is long gone, the courts have had their say, and what has transpired in the realm of federal regulation of labor decisions requires no comment from your Curmudgeon.
Why are so many Americans so blind to the simple fact that intentions change swiftly with time, place, and personnel, but capabilities are persistent?
"Every law transfers power from private persons to government," wrote Isabel Paterson in The God Of The Machine. "Power wins, not by being used, but by being there," wrote Edmund Burke. "Experience constantly proves that every man who has power is impelled to abuse it," wrote Baron de Montesquieu. And "We learn from history that we learn nothing from history," wrote George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.
Is there a millstone heavier than the McCain-Feingold Bipartisan Abridgement Of The Freedom Of Speech Act waiting to be hung from our necks? When we feel its weight, will we learn at last the danger of allowing government such capabilities?
Comments
Bravo Fran. Written exceptionally well (and under 750 words?). IMHO, Walter Williams caliber in your delineations to a point.
I was surprised by the narrow focus of your last paragraph though.
[light-bulb icon] Or is that your challenge to us?
Posted by Pascal Fervor on 03/10/2005 at 11:47 AMFrancis, glad to see someone else talking about intentions vs. capabilities.
I’ve said this several times before, including I think here in comments, but here I go again.
There are four possible situations vis a vis intentions and capabilities:
1. The enemies intentions are benign, and their capabilities do not allow for their accomplishment
2. The enemies intentions are benign, and their capabilities allow for their accomplishment
3. The enemies intentions are hostile, and their capabilities do not allow for their accomplishment
4. The enemies intentions are hostile and their capabilities allow for their accomplishmentIn this case, the enemy is our own government, or at least a substantial minority within it. Considering party politics and the one vote effect, this is enough to say that the enemy has the capability to execute their intentions, whatever they may be. Given this, our focus needs not to be on confirming (or altering) their intentions, but on removing this capability.
No mater what their intentions are, they must not have this capability.
This reverts back to the rights and priviliges issue.
I wrote about it here, in “Rights, Penumbras, and Emanations”, which was in fact inspired by our earlier discussions about the “right” to vote.
My closing lines sum it up for me:
No government gave me my rights, and no government can take them away. No man gave me my rights, and no man can take them away. They are mine, and I will excercise them, and I will defend them.
The only way I will ever have my rights violated is looking down a muzzle, and let me tell anyone who would try: I’m a better shot than you, I fight dirty, and I’d rather die on my feet than live on my knees.
Posted by Chris Byrne on 03/10/2005 at 02:20 PMIt would seem any number of us, in fact, have a clue. What is disheartening is there are so many out there who either have a life time supply of rose colored glasses, or like keeping their heads in the sand regarding the “benign-ness” of our government. And a big point to consider here is the character and track record of one of the sponsers of the BCRA, Senator McCain, take everything you hear from him with a large multigrained piece of salt. He is not to be trusted (as if any of the rest of them are). The man is two ships shy of a battle group, or for you landlubbers, 5 cards shy of a full deck.
Posted by GuyS on 03/10/2005 at 02:41 PMYou might add another piece of legislation that had unintended consequences—the Immigration Reform Act of 1965. I’m sure at least some of its supporters had the best of intentions, but it opened a Pandora’s Box of social problems that weren’t anticipated at the time.
Posted by on 03/10/2005 at 08:32 PM
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