If Major League Baseball players go on strike, Fox Sports will be ready. In summer's answer to the popular Christmas Day "Yule Log" showing, "Ted Williams on Ice" gives overheated baseball junkies a cool, continuous viewing of the cryogenically preserved star lying in state, accompanied by a soundtrack of favorite ballpark songs like "Take Me Out to the Ballgame" and Bruce Springsteen's "10th Avenue Freeze Out." As Fox puts it: "When the dog days come, gather the family around the TV, suck on a sno-cone and see how baseball's last .400 hitter looks at 400 degrees below zero!"
There's a really good editorial on Iraq in the New Republic -- not good because it agrees with me (it does) but because it is extremely thoughtful:
So far Democrats have quibbled with the details of Bush's Iraq strategy, but, because they haven't addressed the preemption theory that underlies it, those quibbles haven't been very compelling. Al Gore recently said, "If the rest of the world does not see what it regards as a sufficient provocation to justify an invasion by the United States, then the diplomatic cost would be extremely high." But "the rest of the world" (i.e., our European and Arab allies) doesn't see "sufficient provocation" because it thinks the old rules still apply, that you don't preemptively attack bad regimes just because they could threaten you down the road. If Gore agrees, then that--and not French and Egyptian opposition--is the reason not to go to war. And if he doesn't--if he thinks the cold war rules have changed--then allied opposition, while unfortunate, isn't reason to hold off. Making international opposition the primary rationale for opposing war with Iraq is essentially a way for Democrats to outsource the moral and strategic thinking they need to do themselves.
. . .
I think Bush is right about preemption. For one thing, we aren't containing Saddam now--he's been free to build up his chemical, biological, and nuclear arsenal for almost four years now. And given the improbability of Saddam's allowing weapons inspectors free rein, not to mention the waning international support for Iraqi sanctions, it's unlikely we can contain him any better in the future. It's impossible to predict Saddam's behavior, but his history with Iran, Kuwait, and the Kurds suggests there's a pretty good chance he'll use whatever weapons he develops to try to dominate his neighbors. And while he might be deterred by the threat of American retaliation, the whole point of acting now is that once Saddam has, say, a nuclear bomb, he'll also be able to deter us.
What makes the Democrats hesitate, I suspect, is a sense that the Bush team's political isolationism will ultimately undo whatever good its military internationalism achieves--leaving the United States more isolated and ultimately weaker. But the answer isn't for Democrats to mimic Europe's support for a containment that no longer contains. It's to advocate what might be called "preemption plus." The premise would be that if we want our war with Iraq to leave the United States more respected in the world, rather than merely more feared, it must be accompanied by a corresponding political intervention--i.e., nation-building. The Bush administration talks about building a showcase Muslim democracy in post-Saddam Iraq, but its track record on nation-building and democratization is awful. In Afghanistan its opposition to a nationwide peacekeeping force has weakened Hamid Karzai's fledgling government. And in Pakistan the Bushies have watched approvingly as Pervez Musharraf has betrayed his democratic promises, leaving himself--and the United States--more and more isolated.
That's a position I could stand behind. I would like to see it more fleshed out, of course. But I think a "Whack and Back" strategy where we do the bare minimum required to preserve our power without offering the resources to make the transition to a better peace is both shortsighted and amoral. I know there are problems with nation-building; I know that neither American might nor American money can make a silk purse out of a sow's ear. But surely many things -- roads, hospitals, elections in which everyone gets to, you know, cast a vote without a gun pointed at them -- are basic, inexpensive, and uncontroversial. Surely, with all the money we'd be spending to get Sadaam, we can spare a little of it to keep the people of Iraq from looting, rioting, and starvation.
If nothing else, it would shut the Euroweenies up for a while. Isn't a little nation building a small price to pay?
A federal indictment, unsealed Friday, described a ring of pedophiles who e-mailed each other pornographic photos of their children being abused, traded tips in chat rooms, and sometimes met in person to swap their children.
"I've rarely seen crimes as despicable and repugnant as the crimes involved in this operation," said Customs Commissioner Robert C. Bonner.
Acting on a tip from the advocacy group Save the Children, police in November 2001 arrested a Danish man and his wife for molesting their 9-year-old daughter.
By examining the man's computer, Danish police were able to identify suspects in the United States and Europe, said Customs agent Mike Netherland.
Profanity is too weak. But if we have to have the death penalty, isn't this the kind of crime for which it should be reserved?
Kris Lofgren has a post on enemy combatant Yasser Hamdi, who was born in Louisiana, though he lives in Saudi Arabia, and thus holds American citizenship. He is currently being held with enemy combatants at Guantanamo, and thus being deprived of what Lofgren argues are his constitutional rights as a US citizen.
Well, yes and no. In fact, there is one sure-fire way to lose your citizenship: enlist in the army of a nation at war with the US. While I'm not familiar with the details of the case, there is at least a plausible argument that Hamdi has forfeited his citizenship by signing up with Al-Qaeda. Of course, that begs the question of why Hamdi did, and Walker-Lindh didn't -- if the distinction is ethnic, rather than the specifics of the case, it's extremelly troubling.
Annals of Innumeracy Another reader of Volokh's page caught this error in an email he got from a reader, but it's sufficiently funny to pass along.
Can you spot the error in this paragraph?
Our tax burden has grown to the point where it may accurately be described as slavery; I am by no means a wealthy individual but the combined government toll on my small business (10 employees) is 67% of all revenue and 76% on the last dollar of revenue.
Let's think about this. If payroll taxes are 67% of revenue, assuming that the business is breaking even, this means that payrolls are 33% of revenue. This is an implied payroll tax burden of over 100%, and though I think that tax rates are too high, I don't think they're quite that bad yet, although that doesn't say what will happen if Democrats take the House and the Senate next election.
I quote this not to point out what an idiot the reader is, but how easy it is even for someone who presumably knows what he's doing to make simple arithmetical errors (as the reader who caught the error pointed out, he's probably including employee tax withholding in that number, although it's still fairly breathtaking at that), and how easy it is to miss them. Probably if it hadn't been pointed out I would have skimmed right over it. Partly because I agree with the conclusion, and am therefore less predisposed to check it, and partly because I don't read every single thing carefully enough to catch all such errors. Be honest -- how many of you would have caught it if I hadn't started by telling you something was wrong?
My favorite example of this is a doctoral dissertation which contained the fairly amazing statment that child abuse has doubled every year since 1950. If you read that in an article, you'd probably think "How horrible" and then move on. But let's do the math. Assume there was one child abused in 1950. In 1951 there would be 2. In 1952, 4. By 1960, 1,024 children would be abused every year. By 1970, thanks to the miracle of multiplication, we'd have over 1 million cases. By 1979, the number of abused children in the US -- nearly 537 million -- would far surpass the number of citizens and residents of the country. By 1983 it would have surpassed the number of people on the planet, and by 1986, the total number of people who had ever lived. Yet a doctoral student in Sociology put that into their dissertation, and it passed. Now, I realize that sociologists are not quite on the same level of mathematical proficiency as, say, nuclear physicists. But even those who denigrate the field grant to its practicioners the assumed ability to add, subtract, and multiply.
The lesson being that if you hear a juicy statistic -- especially one which confirms your beliefs -- it would be wise to do a little figuring before you pass it along.
So there I was getting on the train this morning -- a blessedly empty train with loads of free seats. I was towards the end of the line to get on, but who cared? There were all those lovely free seats.
And then I got on and saw the gentleman who was lying on the last bank of seats so as to simultaneously occupy at least six of them.
Even New Yorkers are polite enough not to want to get into a confrontation in a crowded subway car. I thought about walking up to the seat where his head was parked and saying "Excuse me!" loudly, but first of all, he probably wouldn't have woken up, and second of all, the kind of New Yorker who stretches out to sleep in a subway car during rush hour is also the kind of New Yorker that gets aggressive and refuses to move when politely asked to do so. I resigned myself to standing.
Then a young man in a gray shirt walked up, grabbed his legs, and moved them. He was probably in his early twenties and had a "Don't Mess With Me" look about him. Which was good, because the sleeper, when awakened, was clearly thinking of starting an argument until he got a good look at the guy he was confronting. He wasn't particularly large; just determined. The sleeper scooted over to one seat, and although I am sure our gray shirt hadn't meant to perform a public service, a number of us got to sit down, including me.
I think the young man was either in the military, or had some anger management problems, because he sat rigidly, staring straight ahead, for the entire train ride, behavior I usually associate with insufficiently deprogrammed plebes. Right before the sleeper got off, he tried to start something, poking the young man and saying "Next time you and I are on the train together, just tap me and I'll get up." The young man made no response except to say, very softly, "Don't touch me," whereupon the sleeper backed away to a safe distance.
"You didn't have to grab my legs like that," he said plaintively.
"You didn't have to take up six seats," rejoindered the young man, and defeated, the sleeper got off the train.
Thank God for people who don't allow the worst people around us to take advantage of the decent majority because we're too busy being "Nice". I don't imagine that I'll ever have the courage to take direct action against these types of boors, but I certainly appreciate those who do. And I know that the chances that he is reading this are very slim indeed, but if one of my readers is a guy in a gray shirt who was riding the 1/2/3 line around eight o'clock this morning -- well, God bless you, wherever you are.
And now for the third issue I want to address: the idea that Iraq getting nuclear weapons is somehow the same as China getting them in the 50's; that MAD will just expand to include the new players. Wrong, wrong, wrong.
From the 1950's until the 1990's we've had a very stable nuclear system based on Mutually Assured Destruction. This is necessary because nukes are all offense, no defense; there is no possible stable system except tit for tat, and tit for tat is catastrophic.
But the system was stable, because there were essentially three players: the US, Russia, and China. Britain and France only get them because they're our dorky younger siblings; Israel exists in a special situation in which they don't dare use them unless they're already being destroyed -- but they can keep from being utterly destroyed by belligerent neighbors because said neighbors know that Israel has the will to take the attacking nations with them.
Anyone who's taken part in such games under less stressful conditions knows that the more players you add to the game, the less stable it becomes. The instability increases exponentially rather than arithmetically as each new player is added to the game. There are several reasons for this. The first is that the more players are involved, the more difficult it becomes to assess the likely reaction to any action, and thus the larger the possibility that someone will misjudge and make a catastrophic mistake. The second is that as you increase the number of players you increase the likelihood that an irrational player -- or one who is attempting to be rational, but whose judgement is so poor as to lead them to take apparently irrational actions -- will be introduced gets larger and larger. The third is that in small-player games, signalling is much easier than in large player games, where signals get complicated by alliances and such, and the risk of inadvertently sending a bad signal to a third party constrains the ability of other players to send effective signals about their intentions. The result is that just as it becomes harder for a player to accurately predict what the response to a given action will be, it becomes harder for the other players to signal their intended reaction. And the fourth is that as the players proliferate, it becomes easier to attribute actions to other players. For example, had a suitcase bomb gone off in New York in 1948, we would have known who was responsible. Had it gone off in 1959, we would have had two conceivable suspects. Now? How sure can we be? Sure enough to mount a nuclear response? The moment that there are enough players to mitigate the assured part of mutually sured destruction, the likelihood of a detonation begins to grow rapidly.
It is no accident that Sadaam attacked Kuwait after the fall of the Berlin Wall, when the bi-polar alignment that had forced stability dissolved, and the game was suddenly multi-player.
There is no question of whether Iraq will make the region, and the world, more unstable by acquiring nukes. Such an action is inherently destabilizing, not least because his neighbors will almost certainly attempt to acquire them in response, and because Israel will undoubtedly attempt to maintain MAD by proliferating. One can certainly imagine a signalling disaster that results in an Iraq/Israel catastrophe. But much easier to imagine is a situation where a player takes advantage of proliferation to engage in covert attack. If 5 middle eastern nations have nuclear capability, how attractive would it be for a country that doesn't like us -- which is, really, all of them -- to slip a bomb to Hezbollah? It would be very, very hard to pin on a single state. The threat of assured destruction which makes the nuclear armament stable would disappear.
Oh, I forgot to tell you -- Jim Henley is doing a simply outstanding job of blogging the other side of the Iraq debate. He's weighting certain factors differently from the way I do -- in particular, he is weighting the fear of the state much more heavily (I agree that war is the health of the state, but a quick look back at wars previous to WWII indicates that even a largish war does not have to produce a large permanent increase in bureacracy -- WWII certainly aggravated things, but it was building on earlier ideological, economic and political trends that I don't see operating here), while weighting the risk that Sadaam will pass a nuclear warhead off to a group like Hamas much more lightly than I do. Neither of us can prove our point without looking in Sadaam's head, and of course the only way to do that is to invade so we can open it up and have a gander (how's that for a new pro-war argument, Jim? ;-). But you should definitely be reading his site. I haven't linked any particular post because he's got a bunch of 'em.
The Iraq thread is certainly lively! And one of the things I brought out of it that I think deserves its own post is the question of succession. It impacts the discussion in two important ways: first, because one of the arguments I hear over and over is that we can't remove Sadaam because we don't know who would come after him. And second, because it severely impacts the "containment" question.
Right now, the succession seems to be lined up for Sadaam's son Uday. Uday is a screaming crazy who lacks his father's deft administrative touch, incisive analytical skills, brimming compassion, and sense of restraint. That sounds sarcastic and it's not; it's just true. Uday is Sadaam but dumber and more impulsive.
It is entirely possible that Uday will actually manage to ascend to the throne because his father has done a really breathtaking job of eliminating anyone with enough brains or gumption to lead a coup. It's also entirely possible that someone Sadaam has overlooked may show some initiative, depose Uday, and hang him in the public square. Either way, it's a disaster waiting to happen. It will be pretty damn frightening if Iraq has a nuclear weapon that falls either into the hands of Uday, or gets kicked around like a football during the power struggle resulting from Uday's disposal.
And it's going to happen soon. Dictators do not historically live out their natural lifespan. Sadaam is 65 now; at the first sign of physical infirmity, there's a good chance that he'll be removed, either by Uday, a coup, or a revolt.
So rather than being an argument for not acting, "God knows what will follow after him" is an argument for acting soon. It's safe to assume that Uday is actually worse than any other alternative; and the alternative to Uday is whatever we'll face if we invade now. But if we go in now, we control the process. If we wait, it might be easier to invade -- but if we wait too long, we might have to put on radiation suits. The most realistic nuclear scenario proposed by most defense policy people I've talked to centers around just this kind of scenario: a rogue state, a couple of nuclear warheads, some hostile neighbors, and a power vacuum.
It is also the argument against containment. Although it's possible to argue that we should contain him in the hope that he will fall before he acquires nukes that will become dangerous when the inevitable happens, I think the stronger argument to be made is that containment is not viable because we are too close to an inevitable break in the status quo, which could shatter containment catastrophically. It is like the argument about controlled burning of national forests. Sure, if we do nothing this year, we probably won't have any fire at all, and thus no risk of a fire getting out of hand. But if we do nothing every year, it's almost certain that we will have a conflagration, and because it will start without us, it is much less likely that we will be able to control it when it comes.
Sigh. It's time for the afficionadoes of the party out of power to whine that the government won't let them do what they want. In this case, it's Hendrik Hertzberg reviewing what may be, for all I know, a very good book on how our government isn't sufficiently democratic. Unfortunately, the review turns into an extended whine on how our government isn't sufficiently Democratic. Paleo-liberal, that is. Snore.
The examples that Hertzberg, and presumably Mr. Dahl, the author of the book Hertzberg is reviewing, all resolve to the tired old debate about the structure of our republic; specifically, the compromise structure of the senate that gives small states equal power to big ones in one half of the legislature. It's restated several ways: slavery, segregation, the farm bill, etc - but that's what it boils down to. Hertzberg acknowleges -- barely -- the inconvenient truth that without this structure, we wouldn't have any government to worry about, because we'd still be part of England. He then proceeds to ignore it.
Ultimately, the Democratic plaint is that those goddamn red states are keeping them out of power, though of course one could note that the only place they're in power right now is the body where small and shrinking states like, oh, South Dakota, get to wield the same amount of power as New York. But this power keeps them from passing all manner of goodies that Hertzberg just knows we'd have if it weren't for our stupid constitution:
The Senate is essentially a graveyard. Its record, especially over the past century and a half, makes disheartening reading. A partial list of the measures that—despite being favored by the sitting President, an apparent majority of the people, and, in most cases, the House of Representatives to boot—have been done to death in the Senate would include bills to authorize federal action against the disenfranchisement of blacks, to ban violence against strikers by private police forces, to punish lynching, to lower tariffs, to extend relief to the unemployed, to outlaw the poll tax, to provide aid to education, and (under Presidents Truman, Nixon, and Carter as well as Clinton) to provide something like the kind of health coverage that is standard in the rest of the developed world. The rejection of the Versailles treaty and the League of Nations after the First World War and then of preparedness on the eve of the Second are only the best known of the Senate's many acts of foreign-policy sabotage, which have continued down to the present, with its refusal to ratify international instruments on genocide, nuclear testing, and human rights
Which is funny, because looking down that list, I note that almost all of the ideas on it were, by my recollection, wildly unpopular. Unpopular? Yes. Reconstruction: More than 2/3 of the country against, and that includes blacks in the count. Strikes: popular with no one except the strikers, who were not a majority. Tariffs were widely desired by both business and labor outside of the agricultural south, which wouldn't have been allowed to vote on them, if Hertzberg had had his way, because we'd still have been in the middle of reconstruction (the heydey of tariff arguments ended with WJB) The League of Nations? Not a winner outside of Princeton, NJ. Stay out of WWII? Very popular idea right up until Pearl Harbor. And we all know how well nationalized health care polls.
In other words, the problem with those goddamn undemocratic senators is that they refuse to pass bills that the majority of the public is against.
Most of Hertzberg's arguments seem to contradict each other in this way. He complains that we are undemocratic because we failed to realize some goal, such as abolishing slavery -- then complains that we are undemocratic because we failed to realize some other goal, such as equalizing vote power, that is mutually incompatible with the first. Do the math. The reason we got into the civil war was that a handful of small Calvinist states and the Quaker contingent in Pennsylvania were able to first exert disproportionate pressure on the composition of new territories, and second, force the Federal government to take a stand when the South wouldn't back down. Raise your hand if you think a simple majority of the Union would have voted to end slavery, much less go to war over it. All right, you in the back, go get a history book and come back when you've read it. The majority of the people of the United States didn't care, just like the majority of people now don't really care what worker conditions are like in Mexico -- it's all people who talk funny and live far, far away.
I suspect that what animates both Hertzberg and Mr. Dahl is the belief that if voting were by simple majority, the party they prefer would now control things. But there are a number of reasons that this is untrue.
First of all, the rural areas would never have allowed the urban areas to outpopulate them. At the time of the American Revolution, 85% of the country still lived on farms. And if there had been any threat of those farmers being outvoted by immigrants, they'd have slapped on immigration restrictions, double-quick, to keep that from happening. So the bi-coastal majority that you feel would be pushing your ideals would not exist -- they'd still be back in Europe, causing trouble.
Second of all, the country would be vastly poorer than it is now, and thus unable to afford the things that you want handed out. If farmers in Massachussetts, New York, Ohio, and Pennsylvania had been able to cast their votes with all the other farmers, tariffs would have been dropped. All to the good. But industry would have been stifled to keep power from slipping out of the agricultural sector, and monetary policy would have become wildly inflationary. Go read the platforms of the Democratic party in the 19th century -- not the slavery parts, but the other bits. Not the way you'd want to run a country's fiscal policy. Unless your name is Juan Peron.
Third of all, since many more of us would still be living on the farm, I invite you to visit a rural community -- they're readily available in both Western New York and Western PA, less than 6 hours from New York City -- and count the number of ACLU members, advocates of expansive welfare policies, or even New Democrats you find there. Don't worry -- you won't need more than one hand.
And fourth of all, it is very, very difficult to determine, on the basis of historical vote totals, what the actual votes would have been in the 2000 election under a system like England's. This is for several reasons. Would Americans have voted for Al Gore -- or even Clinton -- if it meant handing them total power? I'm not saying they'd have voted for Bush either -- I think we'd have very different candidates under a parliamentary system. More concretely, there are a number of people who live in areas, as I do, where their vote is irrelevant because their district goes against them. Many don't bother to vote, or cast their vote for wacky candidates. How many Republicans might crawl out of the woodwork in New York City if their vote mattered? I'll tell you this -- my family's from rural New York. There are a lot more non-voting Republicans in New York City, on both an absolute and a per-capita basis, than there are non-voting Democrats in the red counties. Moreover, campaign strategy is so totally different in a districting system than a majoritarian system that it's just not possible to know what the votes would have been if Gore had been running up votes in New York and California, Bush in Texas.
The rest of the piece is a tedious recitation of all the ways in which the system does not work perfectly. But he ignores the more impressive fact that it works. It is the oldest continuously operating republic in the world. Hertzberg tries to duck this by comparing us to a basket of democracies operating since 1950. But this should send our radar up. Why 1950? Why not 1920? Or 1980? Why, because 1950 gives us that warm, fuzzy, postwar leftist Great Society feeling. But 90% of these democracies are children. They're the equivalent of us in 1840. When they start getting all wrinkly and bits of them sag and stick out all over the place and their bald spot starts showing -- that will be the test of their strength. It's like saying I'm a better athlete than Arnold Palmer because I can outrun him. Not that Hertzberg Hertzberg -- or, apparently, Dahl -- is that specific about "better"
Dahl surveys the twenty-two countries that have governed themselves democratically without interruption since 1950. Only six, including the United States, are federal, and in every case "federalism was not so much a free choice as a self-evident necessity imposed by history."
One could say the same thing about speaking French or wearing Liederhosen, but it's unclear why any of these things is undemocratic -- indeed, it would seem that by offering smaller numbers of people greater control it is more likely to be democratic than a system in which 51% of the electorate gets to decide everything for the other 49%.
Only four, all of them federal, have strong bicameralism. Only the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, and France do not use one of the many variants of proportional representation, a nineteenth-century invention.
Only three have birds on their government seal. Only twelve have laurel leaves and latin mottoes. The United States is among only 30% who have chosen Greek Revival for the design of their government seat, and of these, the United States is the only one to combine this style with an Egyptian-themed monument to their first head of state. All the other countries get to stay up until 11:00 and watch TV on school nights.
We get bad marks in "democratic fairness" and "encouraging consensus." In "accountability," we're flunking.
And I can only imagine how we're doing in "Works well with others" and "Puts materials away neatly at the end of the period".
And that's what it comes down to -- "It's not fair." What, I have no idea. I mean, actual things that the country is currently doing disastrously wrong, against the will of the majority, as opposed to pointing out the obvious fact that no country gets things right all the time. Democracy is not, to this crew, "one man one vote" -- it's an infinitely malleable symbol of one particular late-20th century vision of the perfect society, which Hertzberg seems to believe that Europe has and we could get if only it weren't for the pesky old system. How Europe, which managed to sign onto a European Community that is apparently supported by a majority in none of the countries signatory to it, and which is rapidly usurping democratic institutions into unelected bureaucratic fiefdoms, is somehow more democratic, I won't ask. But all those things he points to aren't things we don't have because of the system -- they're things that the majority of the country doesn't want. Hertzberg's complaint doesn't really seem to be that we're not democratic enough -- it's that he can't game the system to ram them down our throats anyway.
You will notice that I, ever solicitous of my readers needs, have provided a tip jar handily located on the left-hand side of the page for your renumerational enjoyment.
I may be coming late to the story, but for those who, like me, have been hiding under a rock for the last week -- Yahoo has voluntarily signed on to help China censor "dangerous" material on the internet. Read it and weep.
So now I'm getting email about whether or not we should invade Iraq. So far, I disagree with most of the arguments that have been sent to me.
The Hang 'Em High crowd is mostly resting their argument after making the case that Sadaam is bad. Undoubtedly true. But the fact is that we don't invade a lot of countries with bad leaders. Perhaps we should invade those countries as well. But invading a country is a big deal. Some of their citizens, and some of ours, will end up dead. If we are going to invade this particular country and not others, it does behoove us to define first, why this country needs some ass-kickin', and second, why the others don't. I don't believe that this is an insurmountable task. But we're not doing a good job of it right now. "We should have done it ten years ago, and now the American public is sufficiently thirsty for revenge that we can" needs a little more justification than I'm generally seeing.
On the other hand, the anti-invasion forces are taking my argument above one step further: we don't invade other countries, therefore we can't invade Iraq. Sorry, chum, that won't fly. There is a will here to ignore the fact that Sadaam Hussein is, in the opinions of experts I trust, attempting to get his hands on nuclear weapons, and likely to succeed all too soon. Several of the emails I've gotten have said "So does China have nuclear weapons and we aren't invading them". That's right. And when they sent troops into neighboring countries to install/prop-up horrendous regimes, we couldn't make them stop, could we? Because they had nuclear weapons and the consequences of such an invasion would be unimaginable. Now imagine Iraq with such weapons. We'd pretty much have to let him have Kuwait, because if we didn't, he'd nuke Tel Aviv.
The anti-invaders are essentially arguing that we should maintain the status quo. But the status quo is not going to be maintained. Iraq with nuclear weapons screws up the balance of power in the region -- hands it over to a nuthatch with an unclear line of succession who has already exhibited his willingness to destabilize the region for self-aggrandizing power grabs based on wildly unrealistic assessments of the rest of the world's military power and likely response. Of course that also describes Uncle Joe Stalin. And it isn't a coincidence that we were closer to nuclear war during the time when he was in power and in possession of atomic bombs than we have ever been since.
There's also the fact that Israel is already nuclear. I have actually heard, from some more dimwitted commentators, that it's somehow "fair" to let Iraq have nuclear weapons too, as if we were the parents and we need to make scrupulously sure that there's no favoritism in the arms race. Well, friends, I'm afraid Iraq's not old enough to have nuclear weapons yet. When they're ready to clean up their room without being asked, take out the garbage, drive their little sister to choir practice, and stop using nerve gas and planned famines against their citizens, they can have a nuclear weapon. I mean, the man has staged enormous tests of nerve gas on entire villages of his own citizens just to see how the stuff works. Now, how can people who have difficulty making it through an anti-war screed without referring to someone who disagrees with them on the subject of civil liberties as a Nazi come to this man's defense?
I am uncomfortable with much of the blind hatred we've displaced onto Iraq as a result of 9/11. But I have yet to hear a single compelling justification for allowing Sadaam Hussein to continue to breathe, much less leave him in control of Iraq. I'd like to see both sides step out of the echo chamber and into the ring for a reasonable debate instead of silly straw-man arguments.
Fritz Schrank has a simply outstanding piece on transportation and solutions. As with all sensible environmental pieces, the conclusion is an old one: There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch.
Should we tax social security benefits? Asks a reader.
God, no.
I wouldn't be against means-testing them, but tax them? Let's think about this. We pay a bunch of bureaucrats to give people the money, and then we pay another set of bureacrats to take it back and distribute it to someone else, like, say, a social security recipient. . .
Why don't we just stop making anything at all and all go to work for the government? Then we can vote ourselves rich.
And the first thing I want to look at is something Wil Wilkinson said (courtesy of Jim Henley). Wil is defending the Times, which says that invading Iraq would be bad for the economy, from Andrew Sullivan, who thinks is would be good:
And NO, NO, NO, lots of military spending will not help the economy. Money spent on tanks and guns and planes and missles and bombs, much of which is promptly destroyed to the tune of billions, is money not invested on the stock market and not used to produce and buy motorcycles and slacks and dishwashers and dildos and cigarettes, etc. Military spending is a largely a transfer program from computer programmers, farmers, and insurance salesmen--you know, regular folks like you and me--to the employess and executives of Lockheed and so forth. This does not help the economy. It does not create wealth.
It does two things mostly. First, it moves a great deal of diffuse wealth and concentrates it in the hands of the war industry. Second, it simply destroys wealth. When the government takes huge amounts of taxpayer money and transfers it to the "military/industrial complex," no new wealth has been produced. Old wealth has been collected and moved. And when the war industry goes on to produce billions and billions worth of stuff that is intended to be utterly destroyed, and then the state goes and destroys it (destroying the enemy's wealth in the process), it should be obvious that all that expensive destruction is the opposite of production. War spending is like dumping money by the truckload into an enormous bonfire in the hope that the towering conflagration will scare off our enemies. We'll be glad if the enemies go away. But we will not have been enriched by dumping our cash into the flames.
Is this true?
Now those of you who know that I'm libertarian-leaning are probably thinking that I'm going to answer "Yes, war is bad for the economy." And those of you who think of me as a "Warblogger" are probably thinking that I'm going to answer "No, war is good for the economy". Fooled you both! The incisive, decisive Jane Galt answer is "Yes and No".
And now those of you who think of me as a female blogger are probably thinking "This is why a woman will never be president. They can't make up their minds" and looking for a link back to InstaPundit. But bear with me. We are dealing with two sets of conventional wisdom here. Wil is citing the Viet Nam CW, which says "War is bad for the economy. It takes men and materiel from production of things people actually want, and puts them into production of things that immediately get blown up and aren't even good for making retro-themed patio furniture." Sully is citing the well-worn World War II CW: "The economy was in the toilet until the war came along and pulled it out." These two pieces of conventional wisdom seem to conflict. Yet in my view, they are both true. Or in other words, both sides, in this case, are incorrect.
In principle, Wil is broadly right. The shift to a wartime economy represents a transfer of resources from consumer production to extremely non-durable, fun-for-no-one goods like grenades and tanks and extremely ugly clothing made of mottled-green or dappled-taupe fabric. (When I say fun for no one, I am of course leaving out the nineteen-year-olds who get to blow things up. I am assuming that this net psychic wealth is pretty much completely counterbalanced, in a cosmic sense, by the extreme non-fun-having of the people who own or occupy the things that are exploded -- not to mention the mental anguish those nineteen-year olds face at the prospect of eating MRE's, forsaking indoor plumbing, wearing hot, uncomfortable clothing in the dessert, and possibly, dying.)
However, economically, this transaction is fairly neutral. Economics, because it is not in the business of making moral judgements, regards the transfer of resources from, say, inventing WebVan, to inventing a smart missile that targets people who have not separated their plastic recyclables from the rest of their garbage, as making little difference to the overall size of the economy. Wil seems to be implying that Lockheed takes the money and lights up a big bonfire outside of corporate headquarters where the executives strip down to their skivvies and dance around on big piles of shredded cash shouting "Ha! Ha! Ha!" But as far as I know, this is not the case. The money stays in the economy; goes, in fact, to many of the same uses to which it went before. Lockheed, etc, must also employ computer programmers who buy farm goods and insurance.
Of course, military spending is a slightly special case. For one thing, as I pointed out above, military activity is extremely wasteful. We don't want to be stingy with those mortar rounds when the enemy is coming over the ridge. For another thing, military spending is not allocated by a market mechanism; it's allocated at gunpoint, through the tax collecting powers of the government. Now, one of the most basic theses of economics is that "Wealth is created when resources are moved from lower-valued to higher valued uses". And the most efficient mechanism for finding out what value people place on the various uses of resources is prices. That signal is pretty much missing, except in the very crudest way, from decisions about military spending. It is almost by definition inefficient.
This does not mean it is unnecessary. When the Canadians are massed at the border and training the sights of their Atomic Ice Guns on Washington, military expenditure is, for most of us, a higher-valued use of resources than the production of this season's Cabbage Patch Doll. Nonetheless, when an economy is already working at its full equilibrium capacity, a war is likely to shrink the economy by redirecting resources to inefficient and, because much of what is produced gets blown up, extremely wasteful, uses.
Note that this is not a moral judgement on whether or not we should go to war; only on the likely economic outcome.
But not the certain outcome. Reading history, it becomes fairly obvious that World War II was pretty good for the American economy. Yet we expended a hell of a lot of steel, coal, food, textiles, and perfectly good young men. How can this be?
Broadly, there are two reasons. The first is that we borrowed some of that. Britain ended the war much poorer than she had started; a lot of that money came here to buy stuff with which to fight the war (and to invest in stuff that wasn't likely to be "liberated" by the Third Reich.) Other countries too sent money here. And once the war was over, we got a double bonus -- highly skilled Europeans, especially Jews, came here to give a bump to productivity, and we had the only functioning industrial economy to sell stuff to Europe's markets.
But the larger, and more interesting effect, has to do with the Great Depression. In 1939 the unemployment rate for the civilian labor force (the draft was instituted in 1940) was 17.9%. Let's think about that. We've got our knickers in a twist now because unemployment might top 6%. Their unemployment rate was 3 times that -- and a huge improvement from the 25% rate in 1933. Most production was far more labor intensive back then than it is now. In other words, there was a huge reservoir of surplus capacity in the United States.
And the reason that there was a reservoir of surplus capacity was that consumer demand was extremely depressed. There are arguments as to exactly why that was -- a Keynesian would tell you the problem was excess savings, while a Monetarist would say the Fed wasn't doing its job. And a Rational Expectations person would tell you that the consumers had to really want to change. But whatever the reason, the unwillingness of consumers to let go of their brass was keeping the economy in what was beginning to look like a permanently becalmed sea of troubles. Because consumers didn't spend, companies produced less stuff, which meant fewer workers, which meant more unemployment, and people thrown out of their jobs didn't spend, which meant companies produced less stuff. . .
World War II essentially broke the vicious circle by subsitituting military demand for consumer spending.
[An interesting side note to this is that Japan has essentially tried to do the same thing with massive government works projects. They didn't work so good in the New Deal, and they aren't working so good in Japan. What's the difference? Well, one argument I heard from an economist who specializes in Japan is that the massive debt required to finance the government works projects makes people so anxious about the future that any positive effect of the spending is effectively neutralized by the negative effect of the financing, which is a strange twist on the Neoclassical model. In this view, only total war can sufficiently alter the economy to break the cycle.]
So the question of what the effect on the economy would be depends on what condition our economy is in.
Well, it's certainly not the Great Depression. A total war is not required to snap us out of the current doldrums. But then, Iraq wouldn't be a total war either. During WWII our budget deficit hovered around 50% of GDP; Iraq would cost a lot, but to put it in perspective, we're talking about a few percentage points of GDP. Percentage points that, if we assume that our natural rate of unemployment is currently a little over 4%, we're not currently using. So while the war will probably be wasteful, I doubt it will have much effect one way or the other. It might give us a small boost; it might give us a small decline; it might do nothing noticeable either way. The crystal ball is cloudy.
Then there's the fact that the decision to invade another country should rest on something more important than whether or not we can boost our national income by doing so. Like whether or not the nuthatch running the place can be allowed to acquire the nuclear weapons he so obviously ardently desires. But if we decide that it's okay to invade other countries just to kickstart GDP. . . well, Canada's in about it's eightieth year of economic malaise. Don't come crying to me when those wily British Columbian paratroopers start landing in your backyard.
