Wednesday, October 27, 2004

Terminally Confused Dept.

In arguing for the imposition of a legal obligation to vote, Dan Abrams demonstrates only that he needs a new dictionary:

The goal is not to examine your reasoning, but to remind eligible citizens that it’s more than a right to vote. It’s an obligation. A message to all who say they don’t have time or they forgot. It’s not unconstitutional or undemocratic to say you have to do certain things for your country.

BZZZT! Wrong, Dan, but thank you for playing. A right to do X always implies a corresponding right not to do X. Jury service is not a right. Neither is military service, when conscription is in force. Imposing an obligation to vote would imply that voting is not a right.

In fact, voting isn’t a right in the strict sense. It’s a privilege. But a man who fumbles the meaning of the word “right” should be given time to recover before being confronted with a word of three syllables.

Consensus And Constitutional Order, Part Six: Look To Your Margins!

After a sad event a few years back, Ann Coulter came out stridently against the decriminalization of recreational drugs. The sad event was her failure to gain the nomination of the Connecticut Libertarian Party for United States Congressman, which she wanted in order to run against Republican-In-Name-Only Chris Shays. Since Coulter is self-diagnosed as suffering from “Irish Alzheimer’s” ("We forget everything but our grudges"), denigrating libertarians and libertarianism as a false front for legal drug abuse became a major motivating force in her life, second only to finding a boyfriend who’d just shut up and listen, for Pete’s sake!

Today, Ace Of Spades saw fit to remind us of that particular sadness. It got your Curmudgeon thinking about...what else? Economics.

They who argue about drug use on the basis of moral absolutes are taking the short end of a big bet. Moral absolutes are premises. You simply can’t argue about premises. You can argue about the consequences of acting on a certain premise—and you should. After all, what could change a man’s mind about his premises, other than a demonstration of the ruin that would follow from their widespread adoption?

This is the practical import of Kant’s Categorical Imperative, the most important economic statement ever disguised as a philosophical dictum.

I’ve argued in previous segments of this series that even a consensus that appears overwhelming might not be strong enough to sustain its enactment into law. For many, this is a hard idea to grasp. The reasons are several, but the most important one is the Law of Unintended Consequences. This mighty Statute derives from both physical law and human nature:

• You can never do only one thing.—Marc Steigler, David’s Sling.
• Living systems don’t react to your thrusts according to what you want; they react according to what they want.—Your Curmudgeon, Eternity Road.

Like the Categorical Imperative, the Law of Unintended Consequences is fundamentally a statement about economics. More specifically, it’s about incentive changes at the margins of an ongoing process, and the responses to those changes by the persons concerned with the process.

Before the Harrison Narcotics Control Act, there was a small—tens of thousands—opiate-using populace in the United States. The great majority of these persons were originally from China; they’d come here to build the railroads, and had brought recreational opium use with them. They were not considered a social problem by anyone except hard-core xenophobes, who passionately wanted them gone from the country. The Harrison Act was one of the strokes in the xenophobes’ campaign toward that end.

The Harrison Act made the coolies’ drug practices illegal, which imposed a disincentive on them to stay here. But, as Marc Steigler wrote, you can never do only one thing. The Act also changed the incentives for people at the margins of the drug trade, and in so doing reshaped our society in a calamitous way.

Laws that forbid voluntary transactions between consenting individuals are essentially unenforceable. The consenting individuals will still find one another. If they have any privacy available to them, they can transact without anyone ever knowing about it. In the case of drug criminalization, the incentives for selling drugs increased greatly. Prices exploded. Organized crime, which shortly thereafter would be deprived of the liquor market by the repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment, saw the opportunity and pounced. Black markets are ruled by violence, and who had more capacity to wield violence than the great criminal families ensconced in the cities? Drug users, now classed as enemies of society, said to themselves “might as well be hanged for a sheep as for a lamb,” and abrogated all allegiance to civil law.

All the State could do was introduce false faces into the mix: persons trained to simulate sincere interest in the banned practice, but who are really either police officers or informants for them. This involves enormous effort and a huge commitment of resources by the police, but the return on investment has been poor, and has brought a set of hideous secondary consequences of its own, ranging from police participation in the drug trade to the murder of unmasked “narcs.” Kim Wozencraft’s fictional autobiography Rush gives the reader a close look at the resulting dynamic. That dynamic arises from the desires and ingenuity of what would in any other setting be considered a pitifully small minority of Americans.

To oppose a powerful dynamic requires an equally powerful counter-dynamic. As long as the percentage of Americans interested either in selling drugs or buying them remains above the infinitesimal, no such dynamic can be constructed. Ever-harsher penalties won’t do it; the probability of getting caught, prosecuted, convicted and sentenced is simply too low. Greatly intensified anti-drug efforts won’t do it; every dollar or man-hour spent on drug crimes is diverted from other venues for law enforcement that sensible people know are far more important—and most Americans, no matter how they feel about illegal drugs, are sensible.

Drug use is rampant in America’s prisons. Wardens’ conference after wardens’ conference has proclaimed it to be the worst, least tractable problem the penal system faces. There could be no better demonstration of the unenforceability of these laws.

But we have yet to address the central tragedy of the anti-drug campaign. When the Harrison Act was first proposed, the small populace of opiate users was of no particular interest to most other Americans. They were few, easily avoided, and made little mark on society. The changes at the economic margin brought about by the Harrison Act, most particularly the violence in the drug black market, the huge revenues flowing to organized crime, and the creation of a lawless subculture at odds with above-ground American society, have imposed huge costs on all of us: risks to our lives and property, disorder in our larger cities, and fears for the well-being of our children.

No sensible man would argue that drug abuse is a good thing. That’s a self-refuting argument. But no sensible man, given the history of drug prohibition in the United States, would claim that the benefit sought by the promoters of the Harrison Act has been achieved—or even that, had it been achieved, it would be worth the terrible human cost paid for it to date. Yet this is what happens when you mess around with the margins through the force of law.

Like other Americans, most American libertarians have no personal interest in drugs. No doubt a few do; that’s the nature of large populations. But the typical libertarian is much like anyone else: outside of his politics, he’s concerned about earning a living, raising his family, and providing security to his children. He believes that the Drug War impedes the attainment of other social goods in a catastrophic and ruinously expensive way. It’s slanderously unfair to tag him as a druggie because he views this particular bit of extended social engineering as a tragic failure. After all, quite a lot of “mainstream” conservatives believe the same thing.

When the subject is electoral politics, the party Libertarian—note the upper-case “L”—gets slapped around more than is due. Yes, those votes, if they were directed to a GOP candidate, could make the difference in a close election. But to hear the critics talk, you’d think the votes were stolen from the Republican candidate, when in fact he had no claim to them that would hold water for five seconds.

I’m not a party Libertarian. I was once, but I became disenchanted with the LP and decided to disaffiliate myself from it. But take heed, ye loyalists of the major parties: you will not seduce party Libertarians out of their fold and into yours by insulting them and deriding their convictions, regardless of the issues involved.

Imagine if the party under discussion were the Right-To-Life Party, which still runs candidates of its own in New York and several other states. Are party Libertarians, who’ve dedicated so much time, money, and effort to popularizing their views over the thirty-two years of their history, less deserving of their autonomy of mind than these others? Would you who deride them deprive them of the opportunity to exercise their franchise as they please, if you had the means to do so?

Just how many margins do we want to mess with before we grow up?

Timing Is Everything

“Our plan was to run the story on Oct. 31, but it became clear that it wouldn’t hold.”—CBS News executive producer Jeff Fager, on the missing-Iraqi-explosives story.

But why wait? Why wait to run the story for even one additional instant, once it was fully investigated, confirmed, and written? Isn’t getting the news out first the essence of the much sought after journalistic scoop?

You know why.

Loose Cannon Alert!

Colin Powell has really put his foot into it this time:

TAIPEI, Taiwan — Secretary of State Colin Powell (search) has angered Taiwanese officials and lawmakers by making unusually strong comments denying that the island is an independent nation and suggesting Taiwan should unify with China.

[...snip...]

According to a State Department transcript, Powell told Hong Kong’s Phoenix Television: “There is only one China. Taiwan is not independent. It does not enjoy sovereignty as a nation, and that remains our policy, our firm policy.”

[...snip...]

Taiwan is highly sensitive to any kind of language — especially from Washington — that might suggest their democratic island is part of the communist mainland. Taiwanese view China’s government to be repressive and have spent decades resisting rule by Beijing, which occasionally threatens to use force to bring the island under its sway.

Only a couple of years ago, shortly after the EP-3E incident—you do remember the EP-3E incident, don’t you? —President Bush said publicly that the United States would do whatever it takes to help Taiwan maintain its independence from the “People’s Republic of China.” (That’s Red China, to all you Tom Lehrer fans out there.) To this end, America sells sophisticated weapons systems to Taiwan all the time; I should know, as I make some of them. So Powell’s statement is false-to-fact on a rather quick test.

General Powell had better get onto the right page in the playbook pretty damned quick. President Bush has protected him from the consequences of his gaffes to this point, but openly contradicting Dubya on a matter of such importance cannot be allowed to go uncorrected.

Tuesday, October 26, 2004

Blogroll Expansion

My word, the things you miss when you’re not paying proper attention!

Please give a warm welcome to Eternity Road’s latest blogroll residents:

• Mean Mr. Mustard 2.0
• FreedomSight
• American Future

Long may ye wave, gentlemen.

380 Tons

If you follow the Old Media, you’ve undoubtedly read or heard about the 380 tons of conventional munitions missing from the al-Qaqaa weapons depot in Iraq.

If you follow the Blogosphere, you’ve undoubtedly read about the Kerry / Edwards campaign’s attempt to use this “discovery” to the detriment of the Bush Administration. You’ll also have read several conservative bloggers’ attempts to minimize the importance of the loss, by comparing the missing hoard to the 600,000 ton explosive arsenal known to have been in Saddam Hussein’s possession on the eve of Operation Iraqi Freedom.

This morning, The Drudge Report has added a bit of relevant extra detail to the story:

But tonight, NBCNEWS reported: The 380 tons of powerful conventional explosives were already missing back in April 10, 2003—when U.S. troops arrived at the installation south of Baghdad!

An NBCNEWS crew embedded with troops moved in to secure the Al-Qaqaa weapons facility on April 10, 2003, one day after the liberation of Iraq.

According to NBCNEWS, the HMX and RDX explosives were already missing when the American troops arrived.

“The U.S. Army was at the site one day after the liberation and the weapons were already gone,” a top Republican blasted from Washington late Monday.

The International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors last saw the explosives in January 2003 when they took an inventory and placed fresh seals on the bunkers.

Dem vp hopeful John Edwards blasted Bush for not securing the explosives: “It is reckless and irresponsible to fail to protect and safeguard one of the largest weapons sites in the country. And by either ignoring these mistakes or being clueless about them, George Bush has failed. He has failed as our commander in chief; he has failed as president.”

A senior Bush official e-mailed DRUDGE late Monday: “Let me get this straight, are Mr. Kerry and Mr. Edwards now saying we did not go into Iraq soon enough? We should have invaded and liberated Iraq sooner?”

All of which is a great relief to Bush / Cheney supporters, very bad for the Kerry / Edwards campaign, for ABC News, for CBS News, for MSNBC, and for CNN, and most especially bad—verging on catastrophic—for the New York Times, which “broke” this eighteen-month-old story with unseemly haste and would have loved to get it onto the airwaves even faster.

But it’s not so good for us on the Right, either—and not because the sensationalized, politicized aspects of the original story are all false-to-fact.

We mustn’t go minimizing the loss of 380 tons of explosives.

HMX and RDX, while not as sophisticated as some of the explosives in the American formulary, are potent enough to do quite a bit of harm. 380 tons is a tough figure to wrap one’s imagination around, so allow me to take a smaller figure—100 pounds—and tell you what I could do with it.

With 100 pounds of RDX:

• I could have brought down both towers of the World Trade Center—no airliners required—and still have had enough left over to destroy the Murragh Building. Or:
• I could have mined every major subway line in New York and stopped them all, all but paralyzing a city of 8 million people. Or:
• I could have re-enacted the assault on the USS Cole three times. Or:
• I could have killed about 20% of the attendees at the most recent World Series game. Or:
• I could have mined 100 separate airliners and destroyed them in flight, killing between 20,000 and 40,000 travelers.

I’ll grant you that 100 pounds of high explosive isn’t all that’s required for these acts. Access, preparation, technical knowledge, and the willingness to embrace both effort and risk would all come into play. But what makes you think those things are absent from the Middle East?

380 tons is 760,000 pounds. That’s 7600 times the amount I used for my practical examples.

There are two acceptable responses to a credible accusation of serious wrongdoing, whether negligent or malicious: either contrition or disproof. Do not attempt to minimize the charge...especially when it’s a charge that could take thousands of innocent souls out of this world for good.

Monday, October 25, 2004

The Political Peter Principle: An Example.

Would you like to sample the ultimate in self-delusion, right off the well-fatted hoof?

Rosie continued: “Every single thing this White House has done goes against the foundation of what our country was built on. For us to tell the United Nations we would ignore their doctrine and their resolutions, for us to say that we will not adhere to the Geneva Convention during this war. We are America, we are better than that. We were built on the foundation of freedom and truth and equality for all people. And the rich, corporate, horrible, horrible people who have been destructing and ruining everything this country was made on has been really unbelievably damaging to all of us spiritually, emotionally, monetarily.”

Rosie advised the audience to ignore any and all media in last days of the election race and to keep telling themselves “Kerry by a landslide!”

“Just remember this, don’t believe the media in these last nine days. Tell yourself every day when you wake up and every morning when you have a worry or a doubt or whether you believe FOXNEWS: Kerry by a landslide. Because America knows the difference between genuine and junk.”

Just in case you were wondering:

• United Nations: founded in 1946.
• Earliest Geneva Convention: 1864 (see this excellent reference guide).
• United States of America: founded 1776, formalized 1787.
• No, the Constitution does not mention either the United Nations or the Geneva Conventions.
• 54% of the households in the United States own stock in the corporations those “rich, corporate, horrible, horrible people who have been destructing and ruining everything this country was made on” run for us, by and large quite ably.
• Salaries in the United States are so high that the unions alone, were they to live on half their incomes for two years, could purchase the Fortune 1000 at the end of that period.
• The poorest quintile of the American population, if moved as they were to any European country, would qualify as “middle class.”
• There’s no such word as “destructing.”

Any further questions, Rosie?

Reason Or Rationalization?

As Andrew Sullivan strains to build a case for supporting John Kerry, he draws the much more sensible John Leo into serious consideration of an unserious argument:

On his popular blog, Andrew Sullivan made this case for John Kerry: “9/11 has changed things—even within the Democratic Party”; the war on terror “has to be a bipartisan affair”; Kerry clearly says he won’t relent in that war; electing Kerry “would deny the Deaniac-Mooreish wing a perpetual chance to whine and pretend that we are not threatened.” These are serious arguments.

To his credit, and as we would naturally have expected, Leo sees a large fragment of the danger:

Indeed, that blame-America attitude, once confined to the hard left, has been leaching into the soft left and the Democratic Party. A Pew survey last August reported that 51 percent of Democrats and 67 percent of liberal Democrats believe that America might have motivated the 9/11 attacks by doing something wrong or unfair in dealings with other nations. Admittedly, America’s strong support for Israel may have influenced the poll. Still, it’s astonishing that so many Democrats are willing to point a finger at their own country for the devastation of 9/11. In the poll, most Americans rejected this notion decisively, and Republicans rejected it overwhelmingly.

In Commentary magazine, Norman Podhoretz wrote of a “trickle-down effect” of virulent anti-Americanism. The anti-Iraq-war demonstrations were a grab bag of contradictory constituencies, many of which had nothing to do with war and peace. But they held out the promise that the hard and soft left, by refusing to criticize each other, could form a powerful alliance. So ordinary Democrats raised almost no objection to the many hate-America themes at these marches. (Few liberals and almost no reporters mentioned that the rallies were organized by unreconstructed Communist-front groups and Maoist fans of North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il.) Some of the dumber themes—Bush=Hitler and no blood for oil—moved into the mainstream left. Many stars in the Democratic firmament praised Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11, which carries some of these themes, including the belief that an evil alliance between the Saudis and the Bush family explains the war in Iraq.

But while this is a sufficient case against the Sullivan claim, it’s not a complete treatment.

Kerry is committed to the idea that “the allies”—for him, that’s France, and possibly Germany—must be in accord with our strokes in the anti-terror campaign. Every unguarded word from his lips reinforces that conviction. Inasmuch as France has evinced a deep hostility toward the whole idea of an anti-terror campaign in the Middle East, for financial and geopolitical reasons that do not support a French claim of idealism, giving Paris a veto over our Middle East initiatives would equate to throwing the whole concept overboard.

Kerry is also committed to saying whatever will get him elected, as innumerable examples have shown. He cannot be trusted to hold any particular position once in office, simply because that position was part of his campaign strategy. Contrast this to the behavior of President Bush, who followed through on all his campaign promises, including the ones, such as the steel tariffs, that hurt him with his base.

Sullivan’s argument fails the smell test, too. The War on Terror is not his first priority, as he has made clear many times this past year. Would Andrew Sullivan have bothered to advance so foolish a rationale for supporting Kerry if President Bush were to proclaim himself in favor of same-sex marriage?

Now, now, let’s not always see the same hands!

What, Again? Yawn…Or Not.

John Kerry’s instinct toward mendacity goes well beyond his combat exploits in Vietnam:

U.N. ambassadors from several nations are disputing assertions by Democratic presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry that he met for hours with all members of the U.N. Security Council just a week before voting in October 2002 to authorize the use of force in Iraq.

An investigation by The Washington Times reveals that while the candidate did talk for an unspecified period to at least a few members of the panel, no such meeting, as described by Mr. Kerry on a number of occasions over the past year, ever occurred.  At the second presidential debate earlier this month, Mr. Kerry said he was more attuned to international concerns on Iraq than President Bush, citing his meeting with the entire Security Council.

“This president hasn’t listened. I went to meet with the members of the Security Council in the week before we voted. I went to New York. I talked to all of them, to find out how serious they were about really holding Saddam Hussein accountable,” Mr. Kerry said of the Iraqi dictator.

Speaking before the Council on Foreign Relations in New York in December 2003, Mr. Kerry explained that he understood the “real readiness” of the United Nations to “take this seriously” because he met “with the entire Security Council, and we spent a couple of hours talking about what they saw as the path to a united front in order to be able to deal with Saddam Hussein.”

But of the five ambassadors on the Security Council in 2002 who were reached directly for comment, four said they had never met Mr. Kerry. The four also said that no one who worked for their countries’ U.N. missions had met with Mr. Kerry either.

The former ambassadors who said on the record they had never met Mr. Kerry included the representatives of Mexico, Colombia and Bulgaria. The ambassador of a fourth country gave a similar account on the condition that his country not be identified.

This connects so powerfully with Kerry’s other predispositions—his egocentricity and his internationalism—that one is tempted to say, “Of course! What else could we have expected?” But sober Americans who might yet, for unimaginable reasons, be undecided between Kerry and President Bush ought to ask themselves whether they really want another lying egomaniac in the Oval Office. Particularly one who seems eager to subordinate American sovereignty to a “global test.”

Je Voudrais Une Hot Dog, Avec La Works

The de facto international tongue is English, but don’t you dare say that to a Frenchman:

A campaign to make French the official language of European law has been launched in an attempt to show the world that France will not bow to the ascendancy of English without a fight.

Maurice Druon, a well-known academic and writer, says the French version of any EU text should be seen as legally binding.

“Our language reduces the risk of different interpretations,” said Mr Druon, whose manifesto sent to the European Council was co-signed by the procurator-general of the French supreme court, Jean-Francois Burgelin, and the president of the Paris Bar, Jean-Marie Burguburu.

The campaign touches on a sensitive topic for the French establishment, which has been concerned for some time about the declining international clout of “the language of Molière”. In less than 20 years, the proportion of EU documents originating in French has been more than halved.

Teaching unions and politicians have reacted with indignation to a report calling for English to be obligatory in the school curriculum, while one of President Jacques Chirac’s objections to Peter Mandelson as an EU commissioner was that his French was not up to scratch.

The foreign ministry has called for a spirited campaign for the language in Brussels while the Académie Française, which campaigns relentlessly for pure French, says defence of the language should be “the major national cause of the 21st century”.

Considering that even in France, the use of English to discuss modern developments in finance and information technology is unavoidable, this looks like a quixotic quest. Why on Earth would the other nations of Europe, nearly all of which do require English proficiency in their government-run schools, bow to this?

Of course, France has big plans for the EU. Cross-taxation and heavy regulation of inter-state but intra-EU commerce are vital to its scheme for shoring up its rapidly collapsing welfare state. But Paris must somehow sneak those provisions past the other national capitals without having them closely questioned—and having them written in a language whose subtleties only the French can grasp is as good a thrust as any.

The French won’t be satisfied until France’s word is law throughout the EU. Those lovable guys.

(Thanks to Captain’s Quarters for the heads-up.)