Creative capitalism: a conversation

Michael Kinsley alerts me to a website he has started to help write his next book on what Bill Gates has termed "creative capitalism"

Creative capitalism: a conversation

From the website:

"Creative Capitalism: A Conversation is a web experiment designed to produce a book --a collection of essays and commentary on capitalism, philanthropy and global development -- to be edited by us and published by Simon and Schuster in the fall of 2008. The book takes as its starting point a speech Bill Gates delivered this January at the World Economic Forum in Davos. In it, he said that many of the world's problems are too big for philanthropy--even on the scale of the Gates Foundation. And he said that the free-market capitalist system itself would have to solve them.

This is the public blog of a private website where a group of invited economists have spent the past couple of weeks criticizing and debating those claims. Over the next couple of months we'll be posting much of that material here, in the hopes of eliciting public commentary. Some of the public commentary -- the comments posted on this blog -- will also be used in the book. (Comments to the effect of "capitalism is evil and Bill Gates is a fool" probably won't be used. But we're genuinely open to opinions of all stripes, and all of the contributors who do end up in the finished product will be paid on a per-word basis, which should work out to between one and two dollars per word.)

The same goes for economics bloggers who write about the stuff here on their own sites: If we can get permission, we'd like to use that material too.

We also invite contributions by email. You can send submissions to conorjclarke [at] gmail [dot] com. (Anything you send can be posted here, though we might edit it a bit first.) We are especially interested in contributions from economists and anyone working in development. But we welcome pretty much anything that's interesting and well-written."

Bill Gates and Warren Buffett have a really interesting conversation on that pager about what Bill means by "creative capitalism."

"Warren Buffet: I would rather have Bill, if he will, give me the main points.

Bill Gates: Well it’s not completely well defined. It’s a phrase that I used in a speech at Harvard a year ago, because I totally believe in markets as such powerful forces for drawing out innovation and creating things that are sustainable. And yet, you do get trapped in this situation where the markets serve where the dollars are, so you don’t get markets meeting the needs of the poorest. And so how do you bootstrap or support the needs of the poorest so markets are reaching out to them. I mean, when I view the last hundred years as an experiment in how good markets are, the answer is very, very clear and very strong. It’s one of those things that’s so clear people won’t even discuss it with you anymore. Like in this [Edward] Teller biography: he says, Look, if he didn’t believe in innovation, he would have been a communist. If the economy is a zero-sum situation, then you ought to try some crazy sharing thing. It’s only the innovation and pie-growing activity that made Teller feel comfortable with the capitalistic approach. And I think that that’s been validated.

You often hear people saying that companies should do something besides profit maximization. And it’s amazing how strong a message is hidden in words like 'diversity' or the broad term 'corporate social responsibility.' Warren and I were just at the Microsoft CEO Summit for the last couple days and it was amazing how many of the talks were about how a company needs to have core values of who they are and what they do as the thing that makes the employees feel they have a purpose and guides their action. And how that needs to be really at the center, even more so than the short-term profit metrics. Jack Welch was very good on that and Lee Scott [CEO of Wal-Mart] was very good on that, I think in a very sincere way. I think it’s more true all the time.

Bill George [of Harvard Business School] ran the leadership panel, and he was saying how the younger generation really wants to go to work with people who have a purpose. So what I’m saying is when people write down that purpose, when they write down their values, that an element of that should be: what can we do based on our skill set, our innovators, whatever unique capacities we have as a company--what can we be doing for the poorest 2 billion? And that can either be taking more risk in terms of trying to develop markets there, which is C.K. Prahalad-type stuff, or just doing things like the Merck donation that are not profit seeking and yet not giving up huge percentage of profit.

So somebody can read the words 'creative capitalism' and say, 'Okay, Bill Gates said that you should serve the poorest 2 billion and ignore profit.' That is not what I intend to say at all, but then I am being a bit ambiguous about how far you go in being willing to give up something. Am I saying one percent? Two percent? Three percent? Nobody who sets these dual roles is very good about being clear. I mean, what do they say you’re supposed to give up for corporate social responsibility. Well, they’re not willing to be numeric because they feel like the two goals, profit and social responsibility, aren’t totally at odds over time—or diversity, or whatever the value is.

I understand it best in terms of the big companies of the world: pharma, banks, technology companies, food companies. Buying from the poor world, supplying to the poor world, having scientists and innovators who come together to think about the poor world. It’s best defined for me there, and then I think, “Okay, how concrete is this?” I go back to this thing of: Okay, if all companies did as well as the best do, then it would be pretty dramatic in terms of the rate of improvement for the poorest. And a year from now I’ll know a lot more about this, because in my new time back at the Foundation I’ll meet with heads of pharma, heads of food companies, heads of…I’ll meet a lot of these companies and try and get a sense of, do they agree that in their hiring it would help them, do they agree that in their reputation and maybe seeking long-term markets it would help them and see how concrete a response is possible.

Warren: But as Bill was talking, it just occurred to me that if you don’t trust the government to do a lot of things very well—and business will never trust them to do that; rich people will never trust them to do that—and if, on the other hand, the honor system doesn’t work particularly well in terms of how many people behave (and this idea just occurred to me ten seconds ago so it will take a lot of refining): what if you had three percent or something like that of the corporate income tax totally devoted to a fund that would be administered by some representatives of corporate America to be used in intelligent ways for the long-term benefit of society, This group—who think they can run things way better than government—could tackle education, health, etc. or other activities in which government has a large role. And it would have this forced funding of three percent of corporate profits or some sum like that. Ace Greenberg used to insist that all the managing directors of Bear Stearns give four percent to charity, and in December he went around and talked to everyone who hadn’t yet given his four percent. And he told all the Jews that they had to give any shortfall at year end to Catholic Charities, and he told the Catholics they had to give it to the United Jewish Appeal. Well this would be a variation on that. Take three percent—pick a figure—of corporate income. That would be, perhaps, $30 billion a year (you would exempt small companies). If there are things to be done in society that the market system doesn’t naturally lead to, something like this would be a supplement to the invisible hand. It would be a second hand that would come down for society—administered in a business-like manner—and it might be interesting to see what a system like that might produce...

Bill: I think there are going to be corporations where expertise builds up to solve problems that is not built up any other place. And your hypothetical is a little strange because what we’re faced with is a world with vast disparities in wealth that have to do with what country you’re born into and you wouldn’t have that if you had one person running the world and so, you know, the degree to which a little bit of innovation can make a huge, huge difference whether it’s an LED flashlight or something you can roll to move the water that you used to have to carry.

Some of these innovations--when you see them you say, 'Oh, well, obviously that rationally should have happened,' but it only happened because somebody cared. Now you could say in the grand sweep of time capitalistic economics would have come up with that. Well, there’s a lot of suffering between now and eventually that this thing can deal with.

The brilliance in innovations inside universities--we haven’t talked about universities here because I haven’t thought about that as much, although even some of them are starting to get involved. Getting them to take their innovation power, thinking power, awareness raising power, into these things is another part thing that I think is important and I hit a tiny bit on that in the Harvard speech, but we have all this expertise. You need to apply it. Drugs are just such a clear, clear case. The government doesn’t know how to make drugs. They don’t know how to trial drugs. There’s no government in the world that’s in the business of doing that. So you’ve gotta send the signals…now I admit that you could do it if you had a single world government. You could do it just by giving money to the poor and then letting the market speak out. I think you could design a utopian system that would do it that way and then you wouldn’t have to rely on--you could have robots working at the company. Whereas here I’m actually explaining the fact you have people who care about humans working at the company.

Warren: But I think the most realistic model actually can be the Gates Foundation. If you’re really looking for ways to take huge amounts of resources over time, and they are going to be huge aggregations of resources, and you show the world that something is a better system than government and will work better and can attack things that government can’t and so on; and that will use resources efficiently. I think people will look for that--not 100 percent of the people, not maybe 50 percent of the people, but a lot of people will. But I think it could be a demonstration project like nothing else the world has ever seen.

Michael: The retiring CEO of the Gates Foundation--she’s very excited about the idea of a middle institution that’s not non-profit and it’s not for-profit. It’s a low-profit, and I think [Grameen Bank founder] Muhammad Yunus has suggested this and basically it runs like a corporation except all the money is put back in.

Bill: Well, there are such things, you know, there are mutual operations that are like that, you know, the recreational co-op, which is pretty sizeable now a days…What percentage of the hospitals in the U.S. are under that type of structure--50 percent, 60 percent?

Warren: If I owned 100 percent of Berkshire I could have set it up that way. But I think the model of intelligent, private philanthropy will look superior to governmental spending in many areas. I don’t think there will be a shortage of funds over time and I think there will be a lot of people who will make a lot of money who don’t now have the faintest damn idea about how to best funnel that money back to society, but will, nevertheless, feel like they want to funnel that money back to society. I think intelligent private philanthropy has a huge potential.

Bill: Yeah. I would say two things about that. One is there will be an effort with more to spread the word about how much fun it is to do philanthropy--either the way I’m doing it, where you get deeply involved, or the way Warren’s doing it, where you look and you pick somebody who you’re excited about their approach and you back them to go do it. So I’m going to meet some percentage of the very rich people in a quiet way and encourage them. It will be all their credit if they choose to do it, but I’ll say that (a) philanthropy is good, and (b) the hardest part of philanthropy, which is getting to poor countries because learning how to do that, knowing it’s effective, dealing with some of the challenges there, you know, showing them where that works and in a few cases maybe they will want to partner with us. I think upping that goes along with upping the corporate part, which is the creative capitalism, and goes along with upping the academic attention to the problems of the poorest.

Things like grand challenges are another kind of innovative thing here where we might dial a grand challenge in micronutrition and it might be some guy at Nestle in that food lab who sees that thing and says he can solve it and he needs a little bit of forbearance from his managers to take, you know, five or 10 people and write it up and come to us and say they’ll transfer that technology or something. It doesn’t take some big diversion of a profit.

Also, to the degree The Gates Foundation works, we are engaged in these things where companies like GlaxoSmithKline--even though we’re funding a lot of the work--they’re putting some of their top innovators on the malaria vaccine. You’ll never figure out the numbers, but there are some opportunity costs where those people could have worked on something else. Now if one or two of them were people who said they would have retired if they couldn’t work on this or figuring out how fungible that resource really would have been for them and what it would have done. It would be pretty hard to beat America on that, but they are really giving up opportunity costs to do these things. If we work it will be partly because people like GSK are going along with us or [India’s] ICICI Bank are going, or Nestle are going along. And that list, you know, a year from now will be a lot longer.

Warren: Over the years, by his letter, Bill will be talking to more rich philanthropists or potential philanthropists, you know, than anybody ever has in the world. I mean Carnegie is still talking 100 years later or whatever it may be since writing The Gospel of Wealth. Bill’s model can have a huge potential and it can have a huge potential with smart people who may think of variations on it. He’s in a unique position to talk to the world on it and the world wants to hear what he has to say. It’s a great opportunity.

Bill: Just to be clear what Warren’s referring to: I don’t know if you’ve heard, but I’m going to do something that in the world of philanthropy that is much like what Warren’s annual letter is in the world of business. And the target is that the first one of those will come out this January.

I do think talking with rich people globally, they will be interested. Not necessarily that they will do anything, but for me to say, 'Oh, wow, this went well, this went poorly. Damn these governments who can’t do this and that.'

Mike: You get the letter if you could give away money and you don’t actually have to be giving it away yet?

Bill: The letter will be on the Internet. We’ll promote it as, 'Hey, maybe you’d be interested in reading this thing.' And there will be a number of constituencies, but potential givers are a big part of it. Somebody who works at a UN agency I bet, you know, some of them will read it. Some people in poor world governments will read it. Some people in the drug industry, who knows.

Warren: They will all read it every time.

Bill: I’m going to get the jokes from Warren and so that is--

Melinda: The clean ones.

Bill: No Mae West.

Warren: It’s got huge potential, because you’re actually doing it. I mean it has so much more impact than some academic writing about it or something. Everything goes through your mind and they love it. They want to know that. They get a chance to sit down with Bill Gates and talk about philanthropy or listen about it anyway. They can see what you’ve done and they can say all kinds of things. Really, look at Carnegie’s thing. I mean it isn’t that amazing what he wrote or anything like that, but it influences people a century later. I mean this has got 100 times the potential."

For policy folks, it's got to be kind of funny to read Bill say something naive like this:

"...now I admit that you could do it if you had a single world government. You could do it just by giving money to the poor and then letting the market speak out. I think you could design a utopian system that would do it that way and then you wouldn’t have to rely on--you could have robots working at the company."

...and then read Warren say this...

"I mean it has so much more impact than some academic writing about it or something."

I always love when people talk about serious thinking and writing like it isn't doing something. As if all those wise things just get thought up and written all on their lonesome. I'd be curious to see what kind of world we would have where people were always doin' stuff without studying it, seriously, or if people didn't write about the important stuff. Warren's got to be curious about what his world would look like without Ben Graham - the man whose work he credits all his wealth to - doing all that there them book learnin' and writin'. And we all need to reflect, seriously, about what the world would look like without the writing of people like John Stuart Mill, Adam Smith, Karl Popper, Mary Wolstonecraft, Shakespeare, Mark Twain, Harper Lee, Benjamin Graham, and the writers of the Bible. Not all of those folks are academics, of course. But they do go to the point. Thinking and writing are doing something. And, often, they are the most powerful things to be done, when we're not bullshitting ourselves.

But I also agree with Buffet's larger point. Most people are more convinced by what they see than what they read (even when they're wrong). It's a curious, reasonable, if often foolish tendency we have. But it also often one of the most powerful final words on many matters and makes enough sense to be true.

I do happen to seriously believe in what Gates is arguing. It is an important reason why I believe in the capacity of for-profit and non-profit markets to handle most areas of public service and commitment that are not ones government uniquely or ideally performs or performs well. And I think this is a better focus, generally, than either a strictly for-profit focus in the market or a focus on government responsibility for society's needs or a non-profit focus that is not focussed on results and accomplishment.

This is a nice opening play on this concept. The rest is up to us. Actually, no matter happens, the rest is up to us.

Here's to using our opportunities wisely.

I still haven't found what I'm looking for.

My favorite U2 song, by far.



Though the better version is still, and always, backed with the New Voices of Freedom gospel choir on the Joshua Tree and Rattle and Hum tours.



Theme song for life. And that's how it should be.

The case for sensible universal acess to health care

Politics is often so shrill and mindless, that I've often felt that many policy questions are a matter of just sitting down dispassionately with evidence, rather than the self-righteous fits that people are often so given to.

Single-payer health insurance as a route to a commitment to universal access to health care is one such issue, I believe.

It is encouraging that the architect of the Quebec single-payer system has arrived at the same conclusion.

Canadian Health Care We So Envy Lies in Ruins, It's Architect Admits

"Back in the 1960s, Castonguay chaired a Canadian government committee studying health reform and recommended that his home province of Quebec — then the largest and most affluent in the country — adopt government-administered health care, covering all citizens through tax levies.

The government followed his advice, leading to his modern-day moniker: 'the father of Quebec medicare.' Even this title seems modest; Castonguay's work triggered a domino effect across the country, until eventually his ideas were implemented from coast to coast.

Four decades later, as the chairman of a government committee reviewing Quebec health care this year, Castonguay concluded that the system is in 'crisis.'

'We thought we could resolve the system's problems by rationing services or injecting massive amounts of new money into it,' says Castonguay. But now he prescribes a radical overhaul: 'We are proposing to give a greater role to the private sector so that people can exercise freedom of choice.'

Castonguay advocates contracting out services to the private sector, going so far as suggesting that public hospitals rent space during off-hours to entrepreneurial doctors. He supports co-pays for patients who want to see physicians. Castonguay, the man who championed public health insurance in Canada, now urges for the legalization of private health insurance.

In America, these ideas may not sound shocking. But in Canada, where the private sector has been shunned for decades, these are extraordinary views, especially coming from Castonguay. It's as if John Maynard Keynes, resting on his British death bed in 1946, had declared that his faith in government interventionism was misplaced.

What would drive a man like Castonguay to reconsider his long-held beliefs? Try a health care system so overburdened that hundreds of thousands in need of medical attention wait for care, any care; a system where people in towns like Norwalk, Ontario, participate in lotteries to win appointments with the local family doctor.

Years ago, Canadians touted their health care system as the best in the world; today, Canadian health care stands in ruinous shape.

Sick with ovarian cancer, Sylvia de Vires, an Ontario woman afflicted with a 13-inch, fluid-filled tumor weighing 40 pounds, was unable to get timely care in Canada. She crossed the American border to Pontiac, Mich., where a surgeon removed the tumor, estimating she could not have lived longer than a few weeks more.

The Canadian government pays for U.S. medical care in some circumstances, but it declined to do so in de Vires' case for a bureaucratically perfect, but inhumane, reason: She hadn't properly filled out a form. At death's door, de Vires should have done her paperwork better.

De Vires is far from unusual in seeking medical treatment in the U.S. Even Canadian government officials send patients across the border, increasingly looking to American medicine to deal with their overload of patients and chronic shortage of care.

Since the spring of 2006, Ontario's government has sent at least 164 patients to New York and Michigan for neurosurgery emergencies — defined by the Globe and Mail newspaper as 'broken necks, burst aneurysms and other types of bleeding in or around the brain.' Other provinces have followed Ontario's example.

Canada isn't the only country facing a government health care crisis. Britain's system, once the postwar inspiration for many Western countries, is similarly plagued. Both countries trail the U.S. in five-year cancer survival rates, transplantation outcomes and other measures.

The problem is that government bureaucrats simply can't centrally plan their way to better health care.

A typical example: The Ministry of Health declared that British patients should get ER care within four hours. The result? At some hospitals, seriously ill patients are kept in ambulances for hours so as not to run afoul of the regulation; at other hospitals, patients are admitted to inappropriate wards.

Declarations can't solve staffing shortages and the other rationing of care that occurs in government-run systems.

Polls show Americans are desperately unhappy with their system and a government solution grows in popularity. Neither Sen. Obama nor Sen. McCain is explicitly pushing for single-payer health care, as the Canadian system is known in America...

However the candidates choose to proceed, Americans should know that one of the founding fathers of Canada's government-run health care system has turned against his own creation. If Claude Castonguay is abandoning ship, why should Americans bother climbing on board?"

I favor a commitment to universal access to health care, actually. I just think a single-payer system or any system driven by government is far from ideal and trades off with the advantages of a private market unnecessarily.

A voluntary, decentralized for-profit and non-profit commitment to universal access to health care is a better model. It offers more diversity, more choice, better care and better opportunities for care for everyone, it threatens the advantages of our private health care market not one iota (in fact, it very much supports those advantages since it alleviates pressure to curb the all-too-taken-for-granted advantages of our health care market, with all of its research and development, specialties, technology, pharmaceuticals and drug research, and all of the plethora of advantages of a robust health care market), it offers patients the ability to more readily navigate a robust and forever imperfect marketplace of ideas, relationships, options, etc., in a way that a socialist system could never match, and it could, as Castonguay suggests, be easily transitioned to from single-payer systems, by simply decentralizing control of existing hospitals, doctors' offices, drug manufacturers, and the like from the top-down model currently in place in Canada and giving them autonomy and responsibility for patient issues and results.

Public education, the field I work in currently, is the last bastion of socialism in the United States, and it should be plenty evidence of the failure of that route to anyone not dead-set on defending its every failure. Like health care, the freedom of choice and the freedom to develop institutions that care for peoples' most basic needs is critical to strong institutions and strong services.

What maintains socialists commitments is not their success. What maintains them is persistent defense of the part of their apologists, the fear that abandoning socialist projects equates with abandoning people and serious needs, much agnosticism and ambivalence on the part of a lot of citizens, and the lack of adequately argued and understood alternatives.

Decentralized for-profit and non-profit markets, the kinds that are advocated by school choice advocates in the United States, is the strongest general idea to address institutions where citizens have commitments to universal access to fundamental needs in modern societies, like education and health care.

Properly conceived, it is the only reasonable way to offer the highest quality care and services to the most number of people possible. And it is the only way to most adequately and constructively address inequities in those services, with a given understanding that such inequities will never fully be addressed, no matter what system is now or ever adopted. We can reduce the inequities, we cannot eliminate them, ever. And decentralized for-profit and non-profit markets offer us the best opportunity to do that in a way that single-payer and socialized care and services could never, in their wildest dreams, accomplish.

Here's to one more important voice to contribute to that chorus.

Where the Hell is Matt?

This guy's gets it.



And fuck the assholes who can't get it figured out. Sorry you're such a prick.

I'm with Matt.

This is why pressure will not work in Zimbabwe

Because that's the problem. Or, at least, it is the consistent excuse that Mugabe has to offer.

Zimbabwe official: Mandela bowed to West

What Robert Mugabe is consistently able to use as propaganda to rally people of Zimbabwe to his utterly ugly, failed, and ridiculously dysfunctional leadership is Zimbabwe's past colonial relationship to Great Britain, and, by extension, the West, and the manipulation of internal Zimbabwean affairs by foreign forces.

We've already poisoned the well with imperial activity. Manipulating them further only strengthens Mugabe's hand. The abuse of power does have consequences, whether we want to face those consequences or not. And, in this case, our abuses of power have kept a murderous, repressive thug in power.

Morgan Tsvangirai's suggestion for United Nations peacekeepers to guarantee a free and fair election is the best proposal I have heard thusfar.

He is now disavowing it, I think likely in response to pressure from Mugabe and his government mouthpiece, the Herald, referring to Tsvangirai's talk of United Nations troops as calling "for military intervention in Zimbabwe disguised as peacekeepers," which prompted Mugabe to rally Zimbabweans to "vote for the ruling party to show the world their resolve to defend the country's sovereignty and independence." And that is the heart of the problem.

I agree with Tsvangirai that United Nations peacekeepers guaranteeing a free and fair election is the most ideal way out of this mess. The people of Zimbabwe need to remove this despot, if despotism is not to become a habit in Zimbabwe and if liberal and democratic principles are to take root. The troops should be made up by as many African nations as possible, and some from Zimbabwe, if some independent Zimbabweans might be able to volunteer for such a force (Zimbabwean government forces should either be excluded or only included if it is absolutely clear that they can act independently, a likelihood I doubt), and as few European and American forces, as possible. We need a competent and credible professional troop presence. If African nations can do the trick, that would be ideal. But if they cannot, as many non-European and non-American troops as possible would be best to ward off fears of foreign invasion or occupation by Zimbabwe's most recent imperial masters or those they associate with them.

We want these elections to be free and fair. We also want Mugabe booted, is the truth. But we neither want to determine that outcome for the Zimbabwean people, nor do we want them to keep him in power as a bulwark against British and Western imperialism. Zimbabweans should bring Mugabe to justice, ideally, which can best happen with a self-determined democratic election that ousts him from power and brings him to justice for his horrific crimes against Zimbabwe and humanity.

We will find this in most places around the world, today. It is our abuses of power that undermine our ability to use our power wisely. This is a valuable situation to learn that lesson. Because learning it will make all the difference in the success or not of our efforts.

Real strength

I don't care what the folks who convinced Heinz to pull this ad, say. I think it rocks. It's so completely gay. And I mean that in the most awesome way possible.



The day that this ad gets played and most people think, "That's pretty goddamn sweet," and not "Those guys threaten my marriage" is a day for us to be proud of ourselves.

And that's what real strength looks like.

"Life is complicated"

David Brooks' essay in the New York Times, today, is the best I've seen about the Bush Administration, the war, and politics, generally, in a long time.

"The additional fact is that Bush, who made such bad calls early in the war, made a courageous and astute decision in 2006. More than a year on, the surge has produced large, if tenuous, gains. Violence is down sharply. Daily life has improved. Iraqi security forces have been given time to become a more effective fighting force. The Iraqi government is showing signs of strength and even glimmers of impartiality. Iraq has moved from being a failed state to, as Vali Nasr of the Council on Foreign Relations has put it, merely a fragile one.

The whole episode is a reminder that history is a complicated thing. The traits that lead to disaster in certain circumstances are the very ones that come in handy in others. The people who seem so smart at some moments seem incredibly foolish in others.

The cocksure war supporters learned this humbling lesson during the dark days of 2006. And now the cocksure surge opponents, drunk on their own vindication, will get to enjoy their season of humility. They have already gone through the stages of intellectual denial. First, they simply disbelieved that the surge and the Petraeus strategy was doing any good. Then they accused people who noticed progress in Iraq of duplicity and derangement. Then they acknowledged military, but not political, progress. Lately they have skipped over to the argument that Iraq is progressing so well that the U.S. forces can quickly come home.

But before long, the more honest among the surge opponents will concede that Bush, that supposed dolt, actually got one right. Some brave souls might even concede that if the U.S. had withdrawn in the depths of the chaos, the world would be in worse shape today.

Life is complicated. The reason we have democracy is that no one side is right all the time. The only people who are dangerous are those who can’t admit, even to themselves, that obvious fact."

Best line I've read in a long time. And the heart of what is most true about liberal and American democracy today or ever.

More true than even Lord Acton or George Orwell.

And probably the most important lesson we can take for this whole godforesaken political period. And maybe from any period.

Glad someone else said it and not me. Thanks David.

Let freedom ring

Given the dissing of Reagan's greatest legacy - his diplomacy with the Soviet Union and his persuading Mikhail Gorbachev of the failures of Communism - I thought this was an appropriate time for this.



This isn't about Barack Obama, a man I've less likely to vote for, today, than I first encountered him. This is about smart policy.

Let freedom ring.

This argument is not new

Same shit, different era.

Real courage and the depth of ignorance and denial

If you need any more evidence of the depth of ignorance and denial that government officials often have about their efforts, this article is quite the exhibit.

West Links Drug War Aid to Iranian Nuclear Impasse

It's passages like this one that make me wonder if government officials are capable of rational thought, at all, sometimes:

"Western nations have told Iran that they could cut off any new help to Iran's anti-drug units unless the Islamic regime halts uranium enrichment, which Washington and its allies worry could be used to develop nuclear arms.

The warning was a small but potentially significant item tucked amid an array of trade and economic incentives seeking to sway Iranian leaders to strike a deal. Iran has not formally responded to the package, presented June 14 by the five permanent United Nations Security Council members plus Germany.

But Iran has repeatedly said it will not back off uranium enrichment — pushing the European Union to consider wider sanctions and placing the little-known drug trafficking fight in jeopardy.

It's the type of pressure that strikes the United Nations as counter-productive.

A 'heroin tsunami' could hit Europe if the drug interdiction by Iran is weakened, warned Antonio Maria Costa, the director of the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime.

'We should definitely assist Iran in this respect,' he said.

Roberto Arbitrio, head of the U.N. drugs and crime office in Iran, said the war on drugs should be viewed as 'a non-political area of mutual interest.'"

It's not just that Milton Friedman's arguments about the counterproducivity of the drug war are so much stronger and more clearly true (warning the beginning of this video is way cheesy).



It's not just that the statistics on the drug war are so clearly point to more violence, crime, and harm, rather than less, as a consequence.

And it's not just that anyone familiar with drug culture, at all, knows just how fruitless and easily circumvented this drug war is. And anyone who watches the news and pays attention to the broader culture, for any substantial period of time, should be aware of that fact, at this point.

What is so insane about the reasoning by these government officials is that they are debating the advantages of suspending aid for a drug war that has utterly failed in Iran as much as in the West, and which collaborative efforts are focussed on the country to best illustrate the failure of repressive drug measures. The Taliban banned opium production, even while it partnered with opium producers to fund their efforts, and while repressive drug laws remain on the books in Afghanistan, they have seen record production levels each year following a briefly successful Taliban imposed ban - a ban on an industry that then and currently derived much profit from it and a ban which producers they have collaborated with believe increases their profits as a premium for an illegal trade - and which prohibition funds many of the efforts of some of America's and the West's most serious enemies, namely the repressive terrorist forces of Al Queda and the Taliban.

All of this is done to sanction Iran's development of nuclear weapons, an effort which has failed for 5 years straight right in front of the eyes of the entire world and which there is, in fact, very serious issues to be discussed and debated, namely how Iranians will provide for self-defense against many enemies that they have much reason to believe might attack them, namely Israel and the United States.

This is how repressive forces perpetually rationalize themselves. They identify an enemy more dangerous, often, but not always, more dangerous as a consequence of repressive policies - and the drug war is most certainly one of those situations; the violence associated with drugs is undoubtedly, to my mind, driven substantially by its illegality, as with alcohol prohibition, the other most murderous and violent period in 20th century American history (1933, the height of alcohol prohibition, and the late 1980's and early 1990's, with the advent of new drug laws and the height of the drug war, are the two highest points of homocide in American history) and they rationalize repression as a function of danger that, often, they have created or exaccerbated. The repressive regimes of the Middle East and Arab states rationalize in such ways, regimes like Iran, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt; as do many regimes in Africa, like Zimbabwe, Sudan, Algeria, Kenya, Somalia, Rwanda, and the Congo; those in Southeast Asia, like North Korea, Myanmar, China, Pakistan, and Thailand; nations of Central and South America, including Cuba, Columbia, Bolivia, and Venezuela; and still too often in the liberal democracies and illiberal governments of the West, especially Russia, Serbia, and Turkey, but really all of the liberal democracies and illiberal and undemocratic governments of the world, including the United States, Israel, Great Britain, France, Germany, Mexico, and most of the liberal and illiberal governments of the world. This, despite the fact that their repression often worsens the problems that repression was rationalized for, in the first place, instead of improving them.

The greatest irony in this example being that the Taliban were, likely, the most cyncial purveyors of this lie, both claiming to have wiped out drug production under their reign through a ban on drug cultivation and brutal reign, a ban that has subsequently and dramatically failed with a vengeance, and who profited then and now from such production and the boon to profits that drug prohibition has always proved to be.

This is how it has been since the beginning of humanity and civilization, and it was this propensity that necessitated the efforts of thinkers like Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Baron de Montesquieu, Voltaire, Adam Smith, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Edmund Burke, Mary Wollstencraft, Alexis DeToqueville, John Stuart Mill, and their intellectual brethren, James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, Frederick Douglas, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lord Acton, George Orwell, and the like, to criticize, reform, and/or rebel and revolt against this kind of repression, and promote freedoms and liberal democratic values and institutions that most citizens of liberal democracies take for granted, today, and which provide hope to many citizens of illiberal and undemocratic nations, even as they, too, often fear that the problems of humanity are caused by too much freedom rather than too much repression, despite the ample empirical evidence to the contrary.

Fear has always been the great deterrent and obstacle to freedom. It is what drives terrorists of all stripes. It is what motivates dictators and despots of all sorts. It is what leads democratic leaders, since the advent of liberty and democracy, to rationalize almost all of their most sordid, ugly, and illiberal legacies.

It is fear and not reason that drives this unholy drug war, just as it has been fear and not reason that had driven the entirety of our illiberal and undemocratic past.

And the idea that fear and not reason will triumph today where it has failed for the entire course of humanity to resolve our most serious concerns, problems, and conflicts is the most damned foolish notion that humanity has ever conceived.

And the idea that we would celebrate that damned foolish notion at the beginning of the 21st century, after a century that witnessed the clearest and most undeniable vindication for the causes of freedom and democracy of any century to date, is the senseless, absurd, stubborn, and dimwitted death throes of that timid, fearful, and otherwise cowardly and irrational concept.

It is not strength and never has been. It is and always has been cowardice. It is yellow-bellied. And it is no way to lead a life or anyone else, for that matter. Cowardice demands respect when it cannot earn it. It compels when it cannot persuade. It bullies and intimidates when it cannot summon real strength or virtue.

Real courage respects reason and freedom and does not turn to force except when violence warrants it.

Real courage only uses force when violence and aggression are used against the free and reasoned will of those involved, including when reason and free will leads people to poor conclusions or outcomes, unless it is literally and clearly not possible for a person to reason adequately of their own accord, and it is clear that no other route is possible or viable. And when aggression or containment are needed, because no other routes that respect liberty are possible, courage, reason, and humanity call for the least possible necessary aggression or containment to be used. And no matter how I or you qualify it, those who seek to rationalize repression and violence will always do so, as long as it confirms their own stubborn and righteous notions of controlling and harming their neighbors for their own good. They can be persuaded different. But, ultimately, as always, each individual and independent conscience will decide this question, in the end.

Real courage is not premised on fear. Real courage is premised on strength and confidence, compassion and humanity, and a thoughtful and freely chosen commitment to virtue and decency. Everything else is counterfeit. Always has been. And hence the march of freedom and progress over the course of history.

Real courage and respect is not premised on fear. Fear is the opposite of respect and courage. Honest respect does not require fear. And genuine courage operates despite fear, not because of it.

What 21st century liberal democracies and illiberal and undemocratic cultures need, what all of humanity needs at the turn of this century, is a commitment to real courage and independence of thought and judgment, which respects freedom and democratic values and the free and independent conscience and virtue that underpin them. Real courage does not manipulate or otherwise show contempt and disrespect for those values and the consciences of others. It shows genuine compassion and respect for the lives, consciences, and freedoms of others.

Manipulation is the tool of the weak. It is not the regular instrument of governance or self-governance of the strong. Strong people engage others with respect, love, concern, decency, thought, engagement, and dignity, as a rule. Those of honest strength do not need to manipulate others, except in the rarest of occassions, and even then it should be presumed against, as much as possible.

That exception will always be used by the forces of violence and repression to rationalize their foolish and ugly activities. Always.

And it will be effective only until free and democratic peoples wisen up and take freedom, democracy, and respect for the conscience that underpins them, seriously.

Real courage does not prey upon the ignorance and fear of others. Real courage enlightens and honestly faces challenges with a genuine concern for others and for an honest assessment of the life as it is, not (only) as we might wish it to be.

And is that kind of courage that I respect and have always respected in the world.

And this policy, like so much policy today, is not a function of that kind of courage. It is a function of power and the obsession with having and keeping it, and the depth of ignorance and denial that operate at its behest. It is Lord Acton wondering aloud why he said anything on the subject of politics at all. It is John Stuart Mill wondering if he should have remained with the British East India Company. It is George Orwell wondering why he did not go into investment or write pulp novels for big profit.

It is the utter failure of those in power to come to terms with the limits of their enterprise. And the foolish ventures that they will engage in to reinforce that failure of recognition.

Real courage explores and faces honestly facts of life that are counterintuitive and challenge us to reason beyond our biases of confirmation and immediate experience.

Real courage does not settle for ignorance or denial or stubborn defenses against even more stubborn facts.

Real courage faces life honestly.

And this policy squarely does not.

And that gap is the dilemma to be resolved for the cause of genuine freedom, democracy, and progress in the 21st century.

Finally, all that cheatin's over

Why wait for the Zimbabwe elections to conclude, when we can have Zimbabwe-style justice right her in the U.S. of A.

High school student faces 38 years in prison for hacking grades

He won't do any or much time, likely, is the truth (though any time would be an abomination).

But does anyone think that such penalties would actually deter cheating and swapping grades in the future?

Good luck with that, I'd say.

Finally, we can stop worrying about such shenanigans from the always deterable next generation. God knows such hoodlums have wreaked enough havok as it is.

Now back to dirty politics as usual.

Force as a governing philosophy, numero tres

I tell you. When you observe the brilliance and effectiveness of force as a governing philosophy in Robert Mugabe's Zimbabwe, I don't know how you can really question it, frankly. You gotta see the pictures of this remarkably effective form of governance.

And, of course, the economic results of a repressive economy:

"In her pink-and-yellow Indian sari, Neeti Patel sees the customers come into her shop, look longingly at the sandwiches, and walk back out empty handed.

It's not that her prices are high – a sausage sandwich sells for a mere 30 million Zimbabwe dollars, or about $1.25. The problem is that Zimbabwe's skyrocketing inflation – now the world's highest, running at more than 100,000 percent a year – keeps her costs rising. A 30-pound bag of potatos cost 90 million in the first week of March. Now that same bag costs 160 million, and her potential customers simply don't have the money."



And this account, really, should be fairly convincing, I think.

'All Robert Mugabe's campaigning goes on after dark'

"Last weekend we had a big pungwe - a political indoctrination meeting - on the farm. It was after Mugabe had come to our little town of Chegutu, southwest of Harare, and addressed the crowd with threats of 'war'. A pungwe starts when the shadows lengthen and the sun goes down and darkness falls over the land. It does not stop till after the sun has risen again.

All our workers had to go, as well as all their wives with babies and any children over the age of 12. Some of them didn't go; so the mob sent little bands of chanting youth militia with sticks to fetch the absentees, drag them out of their houses and beat them for non-attendance. Through the night we heard the chanting and the slogans and the re-education speeches ringing out into the cold darkness for hour after hour after hour. On and on it went, striking fear into my heart. I got up and paced around in the cold night, listening...

It was a frosty morning. 'The major [Major Tauye, brought in from the Army to run pungwes in Chegutu district] was waving his gun around everywhere,' he went on.

I learnt that the MDC polling agents were made to put their forehead on the ground and lift their whole bodies up on their toes and then hold the position as they shook in the cold. After some time they were given sticks and had to beat each other.

The Major then said: 'You say we beat you! We don't beat you! You are the ones that beat!'

'Will the people vote?' I asked.

'We are in pain but we cannot speak because we do not know who will tell. Even if we make a report the police will not help,' Amon said.

I had seen the hope for a better future draining out of him. He had been kicked off one farm already and I sensed he was worried we would throw in the towel too.

'I will not leave,' I said. 'They must shoot me if they want me off...'

We drove through the gate and down the drive. Straight ahead there was a line of large rocks blocking the road. As we got closer, men wielding sticks got up and started coming menacingly towards us. Our presence had the effect of a stone thrown into a hornets' nest. Soon the rocks started to fly in our direction. I saw figures running through the bush to try to get around behind us and cut us off. 'OK, let's get out of here,' I said and reversed as fast as I could.

Between the Etheridges and ourselves we have spent nearly 30 hours at the police station this week making reports and failing to get a reaction.

Yesterday we finally saw our first observers. We met them at the police station. Having the observers there worked like magic: police reacted and even moved quickly after we reported that all the Etheridges belongings - the ones that had not yet been stolen - had been dumped on the side of the main road.

When the observers left to come to my house, James's wife Kerry and his brother were ambushed and started getting beaten with sticks. The police stood by because they had not brought bullets for their guns and the senator's men were armed. They had to run for it and managed to get away.

While I was on the way back to my family with the observers, our workers were rounded up by youths with sticks going to the pungwe. They started demanding that Laura come out of the house and they beat one of our dogs with a stick at the gate. Then before I got there they headed off again, running across the veldt like a pack of wild dogs seeking their next prey.

The observers didn't know about pungwes; and they have been advised not to go out after dark, so I suppose they will never see them. Almost all Mugabe's campaigning goes on after dark. The pungwes have spread like a great cancer even to town.

Owen, one of our workers in Chegutu, said he has had to go to all-night pungwes for the past three nights.

'Will you be an MDC polling agent again?' I said to Lorence, another worker, this morning.

'Ah no.' he said. 'We are too afraid for that. We need to get out of here before the pungwe tonight because they are going to beat us.' I got them into town and gave them fifteen billion dollars each for their bus fares to a 'safe' house 80km away.

As I went around town I talked to people. It was tense. They were full of fear and terrible stories about atrocities taking place; but we were together. I could sense a strong undercurrent of solidarity in the common load of suffering that we are all bearing."

Humanity has been seriously resistant to giving up force as a governing philosophy and embracing more genuine freedom and democratic engagement for much of its existence.

And the situation in Zimbabwe should illustrate why. Because force is so effective as a governing philosophy, clearly.

Either that or our fears plunge us down destructive pathes, perhaps.

All I know is that Zimbabwe makes the case better than most around the world, today.

Robert Mugabe is either a genius or a madman. Perhaps we are all mad. Or just damned foolish. Or just so effective that the results are just too difficult to recognize (or make themselves known).

Robert Mugabe takes force as a governing philosophy seriously. Maybe we should too. And be done with this handwringing and pussyfooting.

This is the direction that philosophy takes us in.

Thank goodness that there is at least one regime in the world tough enough to take it seriously.

What force as a governing philosophy looks like, part deux

Just a reminder of what we are up against and what repression and regression, the opposite of progress, looks like.



Every time Americans, Westerners, liberal democrats and anyone celebrates force as a governing philosophy, this is what that philosophy looks like in reality.

Much of the world takes seriously force as a governing philosophy. Most of the history of humanity has done so.

And this is what that legacy looks like when we are not sugarcoating and rationalizing it.

Be careful what you wish for.

There are people who would like to make sure that you get it.

In fact, it is the entire purpose of terrorism.

And if the terrorists don't do it to us, perhaps we will do it to ourselves.

That is the choice we face today.

What force as a governing philosophy looks like

Mugabe thugs killed and mutilated MDC youth activists

"The murderous violence being driven by President Robert Mugabe’s militias reached new levels today with the killing and mutilation of four young men, the largest number of fatalities in a single incident in the last 10 weeks of Zimbabwe’s election campaign.

Three of the men were Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) youth activists, defending the home of a local official from attack by Zanu (PF) youths in the sprawling dormitory township of Chitungwiza about 30 km south of Harare.

The third was a passerby, abducted because he did not know the Zanu (PF) youths’ secret slogans and salutes used to identify supporters. All of the victims had their skulls smashed, said relatives who had seen the corpses in separate mortuaries. Some had their lips and genitals cut off...

Earlier, Tendai Biti, the the MDC deputy opposition leader, was charged with subversion and election rigging – offences that could carry the death penalty on conviction.

The bodies of Archford Chipiyo, 28, the son of Philemon Chipiyo, district chairman of the MDC in Chitungwiza, Yona Genti and the unidentified young man were found in tall grass at the side of the main southward highway out of Harare at around midday. The body of the fourth, Nyoni Light, was dumped near a shopping centre on the outskirts of Chitungwiza.

The township, with a population of more than a million, has been the scene of numerous petrol bombings, abductions and assaults in the last week as marauding Zanu (PF) mobs dragged mostly young people out of their homes and forced them to join them, marching through the night...

Philemon Chipiyo, 59, a respected alderman for the Chitungwiza town council for the last 25 years, said that a mob of about 200 Zanu (PF) youths attacked his home at midnight on Tuesday, but were repulsed by his guards...

He sent one of his sons, Alban, to Harare central hospital morgue to identify the three bodies found next to the highway. 'Alban said Archford’s lips were gone and his eyes were pulled out,' he said. All three had crushed skulls.

Austin Chipiyo, another son, went to Chitungwiza hospital to identify the body of Ngoni Light. 'His head was also broken,' he said. 'His genitals had been taken off. They were in his trousers. I saw it myself.'"

Congratulations to all of those embracing this governing philosophy. Robert Mugabe would be proud.

And there is no better example of the bankruptcy of this governing philosophy than the repressive dictatorship in Zimbabwe.

This is what it looks like.

Be careful what you wish for.

You just might get it.

Why the debate over detention matters

Hotair, a favorite conservative video site I frequent, offers this bit of evidence that the debate about detention matters.

Abu Quatada: Radical cleric to be released in 24 hours

'Qatada, who is accused of giving advice and support to terrorists including the leader of the September 11 hijackers, has been described in official documents as a 'truly dangerous individual' who was 'heavily involved, indeed at the centre of terrorist activities associated with al-Qa'eda.'

He has been convicted twice in Jordan in his absence for conspiracy to carry out bomb attacks on two hotels in Amman in 1998, and providing finance and advice for a series of bomb attacks in Jordan planned to coincide with the Millennium.

It was those convictions which allowed him to argue in the Appeal Court he would not get a fair treatment in his home country.

With the prospect of extradition removed, the Ministry of Justice has been forced to release him by the Special Immigration Appeals Commission.

The bail order was signed this afternoon and he is expected to be released from Long Lartin jail in Worcestershire tomorrow.

He is will be electronically tagged and put under a 22-hour curfew at his family home in Acton, West London.

He will not be allowed a mobile phone or access to the internet and the bail conditions include a long list of Islamic radicals with whom he is banned from communicating, including Osama bin Laden."

This detention debate is not over with, yet. Basing important matters of national security on political correctness rather than sober judgment is a mistake. The British authorities are doing their best to account for the situation, here. But their dilemma illustrates why we need to think carefully and thoroughly about how such matters get resolved reasonably.

And, more broadly, still, this illustrates why on-going engaged reasoned and practical policy discussions and debates need our attention rather than the distractions of the politics of personal destruction.

The stakes are too high to engage important questions any other way.

Luckily, we're up to the challenge.

A Father's Day message to remember

I'm voting for John McCain, at this point, at least until I hear from Barack Obama that he is not pressing for a withdrawal (and abandoning his regressive trade, health care, and other economic policies would be persuasive to me, as well).

But I have to say that when Obama makes speeches like this one, he makes it very difficult for conservatives to dismiss him.



That's how it should be. That's what I want to keep seeing this election. I want to see both of these candidates keep taking the high ground and competing for who can take the highest ground, not who can sling the lowest blows.

This is a good opening gambit by Obama. We'll see what McCain has to offer.

And I have to say for McCain's sake and the sake of conservatives, if they go for the low blow, they're going to get their asses handed to them. And if they keep down that path, I might be one of the people handing it to them.

Buck up, little soldiers. Make your children proud this election.

And if you don't, look forward to sitting it out for 4 years.

Because we are changing the way elections are run, this time around.

Happy Father's Day.

Boumediene and the future of liberty

I'm still reading the decision, but, while I share conservative concerns about terrorists escaping justice to freshly kill more Americans, Boumediene looks like a good decision to me.

This argument within the decision looks exactly right to me:

"That the Framers considered the writ a vital instrument
for the protection of individual liberty is evident from the
care taken to specify the limited grounds for its suspension:
"The Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not
be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion
the public Safety may require it." Art. I, §9, cl. 2; see
Amar, Of Sovereignty and Federalism, 96 Yale L. J. 1425,
1509, n. 329 (1987) ("[T]he non-suspension clause is the
original Constitution's most explicit reference to remedies").
The word "privilege" was used, perhaps, to avoid
mentioning some rights to the exclusion of others. (In
deed, the only mention of the term "right" in the Constitution,
as ratified, is in its clause giving Congress the power
to protect the rights of authors and inventors. See Art. I,
§8, cl. 8.)

Surviving accounts of the ratification debates provide
additional evidence that the Framers deemed the writ to
be an essential mechanism in the separation-of-powers
scheme. In a critical exchange with Patrick Henry at the
Virginia ratifying convention Edmund Randolph referred
to the Suspension Clause as an "exception" to the "power
given to Congress to regulate courts." See 3 Debates in
the Several State Conventions on the Adoption of the
Federal Constitution 460­464 (J. Elliot 2d ed. 1876) (here
inafter Elliot's Debates). A resolution passed by the New
York ratifying convention made clear its understanding
that the Clause not only protects against arbitrary suspensions
of the writ but also guarantees an affirmative
right to judicial inquiry into the causes of detention. See
Resolution of the New York Ratifying Convention (July 26,
1788), in 1 Elliot's Debates 328 (noting the convention's
understanding "[t]hat every person restrained of his lib
erty is entitled to an inquiry into the lawfulness of such
restraint, and to a removal thereof if unlawful; and that
such inquiry or removal ought not to be denied or delayed,
except when, on account of public danger, the Congress
shall suspend the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus").
Alexander Hamilton likewise explained that by providing
the detainee a judicial forum to challenge detention, the
writ preserves limited government. As he explained in
The Federalist No. 84:

'[T]he practice of arbitrary imprisonments, have been,
in all ages, the favorite and most formidable instruments
of tyranny. The observations of the judicious
Blackstone . . . are well worthy of recital: `To bereave
a man of life . . . or by violence to confiscate his estate,
without accusation or trial, would be so gross and notorious
an act of despotism as must at once convey the
alarm of tyranny throughout the whole nation; but
confinement of the person, by secretly hurrying him to
jail, where his sufferings are unknown or forgotten, is
a less public, a less striking, and therefore a more
dangerous engine of arbitrary government.' And as a
remedy for this fatal evil he is everywhere peculiarly
emphatical in his encomiums on the habeas corpus
act, which in one place he calls `the BULWARK
of the British Constitution.'' C. Rossiter ed., p. 512 (1961)
(quoting 1 Blackstone *136, 4 id., at *438)."

I have read many of the criticisms of the court and I am making my way through the decision and the dissents. So I am open to my early impression being wrong on this matter.

Guaranteeing habeas corpus does not seem like sound judgment, to me, at this point, because no terrorists will ever escape justice. They undoubtedly will. As they undoubtedly do currently. As they undoubtedly would, do, and have under any legal regime, no matter how security-minded, liberal or illiberal. It would be very difficult to argue that more illiberal regimes that engage in more indefinite detentions without such concerns for civil liberties in places like Pakistan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Libya, Yemen, and the like do not continue to have problems with known terrorists escaping justice or terrorism being effectively wiped off of their political radar screens. Each of these countries arguably have far worse problems on both counts.

The question is are we willing to follow such examples, to similarly sacrifice liberal democratic values, with such poor results to show for it?

Guaranteeing habeas corpus seems to me to be good law, at this point, because it comes to terms with this fact of justice, no matter the legal regime, and affirms that an independently important judicial priority is guaranteeing that innocent peoples' liberties are not sacrificed, and certainly not indefinitely, without some kind of recourse to challenge such detention and expect those detaining them to present evidence that demonstrates that their detention is just. Without such evidence, they should not be in detention in the first place, or, at the very least, a clearer and more obvious path to securing evidence should be clear in the minds of those detaining them because the reasons for detaining a suspect are so clear and warranted. Those whose mindsets and policies are driven around fear rather than evidence get impatient about civil liberties and due process when lives are at stake.

And that is exactly why habeas corpus is such an established legal principle. And that is the point that the court is making in this decision.

A serious concern for civil liberties is the future of conservativism, liberalism, and liberal democracy, because it is the only decision that is squared with liberty and the liberal democratic values that underpin them.



I'm open to being persuaded differently on this question, by either American conservatives or British Laborites, whose similar position is argued in this video, convinced of the case for more indefinite or longer detentions. I don't want Americans or anyone killed by terrorists any more than anyone else. I am persuaded by the Labor representative in this discussion that some kind of procedure for petitioning to hold suspects that law enforcement, military officials, and prosecutors have more confidence are, in fact, terrorist suspects, while evidence is being gathered, is needed. But allowing the terrorists to scare Americans, Brits and others into abandoning our liberal democratic values is exactly the point of terrorism, as London's conservative mayor, Boris Johnson, argues eloquently in that discussion of civil liberties.

I've read a lot of the praise and criticism for the decision. Now I need to plow through the decision and its dissents.

As well as respond to Courtney's question, read and work on my book, clean my apartment, do a character sketch for this theater script my roommate and I are working on and coordinate work on this film idea, get this Father's Day card out, today, continue reading Intelligent Investor and do my financial and investment work, work on lesson plans for next year, get Devang's boxes sent out to him, and try to manage my time, money, energy and resources to get all of this done.

Perhaps I'm a little too ambitious. How someone so ambitious could be so goddamn lazy, I have no clue, but somehow I manage it.

One thing at a time.

Starting with Dad.

It's the little things

It's the little signs of progress that warm my heart.

James Q. Wilson - Can I Be a Meaningful Blogger?

"A lot of readers have suggested that I am not a helpful blogger because I refer people to other studies for data to support my arguments. These critics are probably right. Were I devoted to blogging full time, I would quote all the data and summarize all of the studies, thereby getting nothing else done. I had assumed when I started my blog messages that people would pause, think, and look up facts. A few have, but most seem to have opinions they like to express quickly. There is nothing wrong with this, except that it doesn't advance knowledge. Let me join the opinion parade by offering a few of my own: This country imprisons too many people on drug charges with little observable effect. A better solution can be found in Hawaii, where a judge uses his powers to keep drug users in treatment programs (it's called Project Hope; look it up). The costs of crime are hard to measure (so are the costs of confinement). The reader who does not want to drive five miles to find the book, Prison State, that discusses this in detail is wasting my time and his. It is not hard to study deterring crime, but I can't imagine trying to teach someone in a blog how to do a regression analysis. I wish I could do that, but it would take time, and blog commenters seem not to have much time."

The fact that the most prominent proponent of "broken windows" policing seems to be advocating some form of drug legalization is a great sign.

You combine Rudy Giuliani's courage in taking down mafia figures - people engaged in serious and dangerous criminal activity - with a greater attention to liberty around issues where freedom is a better corrective than law enforcement or stiffer sentences - drugs and guns are two of many such places, to my mind - and you will have much more effective law enforcement, a culture of liberty which better promotes responsibility around such issues while acknowledging the limitations of governance, and liberal democratic commitments that we can be proud of.

And this is an important sign that this is, likely, the direction in which we are moving.

Free peoples can't romanticize repression for very long. It goes against their grain. It also violates common sense and leads to an awful lot of failure that responsible people will want to correct.

There is a reason that humanity works from less freedom to more freedom over time. It's not just because it's sweet or because their mommies told them so.

It's because it makes for better citizens and societies.

You doubt that? Spend some time in North Korea or Iran. Then come back and tell me how great repression works.

I'll keep my freedom, thank you very much. And I expect more and better.

Because that what it means to be an American. And to love liberty and democracy.

Geek alert

This is totally a nerdy aside, so be warned.

I am reading a really excellent book written by my undergraduate thesis advisor, David Ericson, the most thoughtful and decent political science professor or professor of any kind I studied with at Wichita State University - that's why I wanted him as my advisor - called Debate over Slavery: Antislavery and Proslavery Liberalism in Antebellum America - that argues the exact idea that is responsible for why Dr. Ericson had so much influence on my thinking and on me.

His book is a brilliant and elaborated argument for how proslavery and antislavery arguments before the civil war were both made in the tradition of American liberalism - "a general set of ideas that appeal to personal freedom, equal worth, government by consent, and private ownership of property as core human values" - and how those arguments, and Abraham Lincoln's historically contexual antislavery argument of "a house divided against itself cannot stand," in particular - guided the historical events that led to the civil war.

Dr. Ericson puts responsibility for war squarely on the shoulders of Abraham Lincoln, arguing, I think correctly, that the American civil war was not inevitable, but rather the result of Lincoln's argument and the reaction of Southern moderates to that argument.

Civil war military historian James McPherson has argued, I think accurately, as well, that the American civil war could likely have been resolved diplomatically with intervention by the French government admidst the war.

But Dr. Ericson gets to the heart of the matter in this book: the American civil war could have been averted by the participants, up front, and specifically by Lincoln, by other options. And the most serious option that matters to me and I think follows from Ericson's overall reasoning is that it could have been resolved given a commitment to a more genuinely and liberal democratic argument in favor of peaceful debate over the matter of slavery arriving at a consensus that would resolve the question as a matter of law and, in the process of having that debate, persuading the consciences of slaveholders and non-slaveholders, alike, to give up slavery as an illiberal institution. The fact of so many European countries, including the British Empire, abolishing slavery by law rather than by civil war is prima facie evidence that the United States could have resolved the question of slavery than by other means than civil war.

That war is the bloodiest in American history. It killed 600,000 people. And it is the avoidance of such civil wars, ironically, that inspired Thomas Hobbes to make his original argument, in the Leviathan, for governments premised on reason rather than on the domination of one religious group over another or on religious premises, at all, and which helped Great Britain and other countries to adopt governing principles that aimed and largely succeeded to transcend the kinds of civil wars that divided the American union.

It is an important argument about arguments, ideas, and choices and their responsibility for the unfolding of world events. And it is the most important influence that Dr. Ericson had on my thinking and on my life.

The failure to take the debate over ideas and arguments seriously enough likely, in my mind, led to the unecessary deaths of 600,000 Americans that might have been avoided with a more sustainable and workable political resolution based upon a democratic debate that persuaded Americans of the need to abolish slavery.

And it is the failures of power and the failures of those who have it and aspire to have it to take seriously such debates, the arguments that underpin them, and better ideas arrived at by such reason, that is the most serious and tragic mistake of governance and humanity in all of its history, I believe. It is responsible for more human misery than any of the mistakes that humanity has been subject to, I believe.

And it is a legacy that can end only as humanity and its governing leaders take responsibility for the mistake.

And correcting that mistake is the focus of my writing and my life.

Talk about a teacher having an impact on a student's life.

Thanks, Dr. Ericson. For everything.

North Korea, Norwegian Black Metal, and Vice TV

Andrew Sullivan, again - goddamn, that guy is on the cutting edge of so much shit - shares this video tour of North Korea, this morning, that points me to a really exciting, interesting new news source - VBS.TV, Vice magazine's on-line video portal - that I have a feeling I will be visiting often.




And if you can't get yourself worked up about a behind-the-scenes look at the Not-So-Democratic Peoples' Republic of Korea, then Vice TV features stories like this one on the Norwegian Black Metal scene.



And if your curiosity about Scandanavian death metal is not piqued, you might check out this visit Vice folks take to the heart of Sudan.



It's a whirlwind of domestic and international news, music, and assorted stories you're not gonna find on network TV, that's for sure.

All I gotta say is: mainstream media is in deep shit.

D-Day

Great Satan's Girlfriend reminds me that today is June 6, the 64th anniversary of the D-Day invasion of Normandy.



D-Day is one of the most important reminders of the sacrafices are, at times, unavoidable in the cause of freedom and democracy.

It is also a reminder, for all of our insecurities about liberal values being weak in the face of governing philosophies of force and repression, that liberal democratic values clearly make us stronger, by any objective standard.

Not only do those intimidated by the likes of Hitler and his formidable use of force for whatever purposes they deemed worthy forget that he lost this battle and that war, but that all of the serious governing philosophies of force - Nazism, Communism, Fascism, imperialism, theocracy and Jihadism, Baathism and other cults of personality - have all either long since lost power or grow weaker with the march of freedom.

In the case of Normandy, that was for a reason:

"Although there were several well-known disputes among the Allied commanders, their tactics and strategy were essentially determined by agreement between the main commanders. By contrast, the German leaders were bullied and their decisions interfered with by Hitler, controlling the battle from a distance with little knowledge of local conditions."

What is missing is not an empirical basis for the notion that freedom and democracy serve us better, even in wartime.

What is missing is the courage for us to acknowledge it as so, so scared are we of our own liberal democratic shadows and so much do we lack confidence in our own decency and nobility of purpose.

It need not be that way.

And today is a good day to remember that.

To tame the savageness of man, and make gentle the life of this world

In honor of Bobby Kennedy and the 40th anniversary of his tragic assassination, today, I wanted to offer a glimpse of why I take Bobby Kennedy's legacy as seriously as I do.



Bobby and I would have our disagreements, if he were alive, today, I am sure. We both have a passionate concern about real poverty, the people around us, and improving the conditions of the lives of our neighbors. Where Bobby was a lifelong liberal who often looked to the heritage of his party - an affiliation I shared most of my life - to government to solve those problems, I am a independently-minded policy thinker who sees a government as often a temporary solution, around most issues that are not directly related to national and international security and domestic law enforcement, that needs to give way to freely engaged efforts by a democratic civil society to look after our neighbors and be our brother's keeper.

Where Bobby was loyal to the American Democratic party and all of its ideological failings and blindspots, I am a political independent, loyal to all decent peoples, a cautiously idealistic realist, inspired by the noblest ideals of all humanity and highly disillusioned by both major parties in America and most who seek power in the world and their self-righteous tendencies towards pious assumptions of final answers on so many serious policy questions that they do not nor could they ever have in any final form, who simultaneously assumes, largely, a good faith commitment on the part of most political participants and most liberal democratic and often many illiberal and undemocratic citizens to address questions in ways that they care about passionately and sincerely, if often wrongheadedly. I am a liberal and a conservative in both of their most noble liberal democratic traditions and aspirations, I hope. And I am and have been subject to each of their sanctimonious and foolish shortcomings, as well, sadly.

Where Bobby saw a Vietnam War irrevocably lost, a source of seemingly endless unnecessary tragedy, and desperately needing an American withdrawal, I see of that war as I see of our current war, a tragic but noble effort to liberate millions of people from the grip of despotism and autocracy that can only be abandoned at the expense of many innocent lives. Both wars were engaged poorly, I believe, with the United States failing to take nearly seriously enough the fears and aspirations, the consultation and the self-determination of two sovereign peoples, too careless with its enormous power and the trust it is founded upon, and with failures of pragmatic political and military planning associated with both efforts which led and continue to lead to far too many unnecessary and tragic deaths, of Americans and of Iraqis and Vietnamese.



Bobby Kennedy was a man subject to such failings, as well. As am I.

But Bobby also embodied America's and liberal democracies' most noble aspirations, as well.

And most noble of all is his commitments to humanity articulated in these two beautiful speeches, and, most especially, the final lines from his impromptu eulogy for the Reverend Martin Luther King.

"My favorite poem, my -- my favorite poet was Aeschylus. And he once wrote:

Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget
falls drop by drop upon the heart,
until, in our own despair,
against our will,
comes wisdom
through the awful grace of God.

What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence and lawlessness, but is love, and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or whether they be black.

So I ask you tonight to return home, to say a prayer for the family of Martin Luther King -- yeah, it's true -- but more importantly to say a prayer for our own country, which all of us love -- a prayer for understanding and that compassion of which I spoke.

We can do well in this country. We will have difficult times. We've had difficult times in the past, but we -- and we will have difficult times in the future. It is not the end of violence; it is not the end of lawlessness; and it's not the end of disorder.

But the vast majority of white people and the vast majority of black people in this country want to live together, want to improve the quality of our life, and want justice for all human beings that abide in our land.

And let's dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world. Let us dedicate ourselves to that, and say a prayer for our country and for our people."

To tame the savageness of man, and make more gentle the life of this world.

I have never heard a stronger articulation of the aim of humanity and its governance.

And this speech is the finest, I believe, I have ever heard from any American politician.

For all of our romance with "swagger and bluster and the wielders of force," at this tragic point in American and world history, Bobby Kennedy is an important reminder for all of us of the perils of the divisions and painful realities such swagger reflects and sows.

As Bobby said it much more eloquently:

"For when you teach a man to hate and to fear his brother, when you teach that he is a lesser man because of his color, or his beliefs or the policies that he pursues, when you teach that those who are different from you threaten your freedom or your job or your home or your family, then you also learn to confront others not as fellow citizens, but as enemies. Our lives on this planet are too short, the work to be done is too great. But we can perhaps remember, that those who live with us are our brothers, that they share with us the same short moment of life that they seek as do we, nothing but the chance to live out their lives in purpose and in happiness, surely this bond of common fate, this bond of common roles can begin to teach us something, that we can begin to work a little harder, to become in our hearts brothers and countrymen once again."

It is for this reason that Bobby Kennedy is one of greatest political figures in American history, and one of its wisest thinkers and leaders.

And it is for this reason that I mourn and mark every 5th of June, not just this one.

"To tame the savageness of man, and make gentle the life of this world."

We will do our sincere best, Bobby. Godspeed.

"I can't hear you. Take those boogers out of your mouth."

A friend recommended Zach Galifianakis, recently, and I located this gem.



Pretty hilarious and adorable.

Nice way to get the day started.

Back to Hobbes.

Torture and the realities of force as a governing philosophy

Andrew Sullivan alerts me to Taxi to the Dark Side, winner of the Academy Award for the 2008 Best Documentary, that I'll have to see if I can get my hands on it, when I get the chance.



It is very troubling to witness what people will rationalize, foolishly, in the name of fear.

I actually do believe in exceptions on matters of torture. I agree with experts that, typically, winning the confidence and relative trust of captives is more likely to yield more reliable information and that torture tends to yield less reliable information by means that are often very ugly, especially when one considers the innocent people against which torture is too often used.

There are times, though, when I would be willing to make exceptions. They are rare and ones easy to rationalize in uglier directions. But there are times when danger is genuinely imminent, when interrogators are clear, without doubt, that they are dealing with someone who is responsible for and/or has important information about that imminent danger, when time is of the essence and is too short for more decent efforts to yield information, and when more aversive, aggressive methods have a higher likelihood than more trust-building measures to yield information. The least possible necessary aggression and force should be used, generally. But I have a broad tolerance for compromising that principle when lives are on the line and other methods are not likely to save them in time. Such circumstances are rare and generally hypothetical. But I think it is valuable to acknowledge and discuss and debate them, up front, so that interrogators are less likely to rationalize torture.

But, generally, torture is both wrong and counterproductive. The case of Ibn Shaykh al-Libi, cited in this documentary, who was tortured to provide testimony to a connection between Saddam Hussein's regime and Al Queda developing chemical and biological weapons capability, is an excellent example of the problem with this tendency when torture is used.

It is a classic and foolhardy human tendency to turn to tough when we are afraid, when deeper, more honest and reflective thinking is what is needed. It is the oldest, most tragic, and most pernicious of mistakes of human history.

The rationalization of force for whatever purposes, even when our purposes are undermined by force, is the oldest, most destructive, most foolish tendency in human history.

In fact, it was because of this tendency, in the religious wars of 16th and 17th century Europe, where millions of people lost their lives over hundreds of years of struggle to forcibly convert Protestants and Catholics and to determine which religious followers would govern nations, that people like Thomas Hobbes, Baron de Montesquieu, Voltaire, John Locke, Jean Jacques Rousseau, John Stuart Mill and so many other political thinkers, challenged this notion that force rather than liberty and reason should guide our consciences and the ways we govern.

Modern liberal democracies are so removed from that horrific and tragic legacy, that we have the luxury of forgetting its destruction and its valuable lessons.

Torture is a function of that legacy, not the inevitable villain amongst the heroes of force as a governing philosophy. It is this philosophy and its ugly history that has rationalized torture and its ilk for the long stretch of humanity.

And that is the still tragic history of regressive periods, like our most recent and still historical and political period, when force rather than freedom and reason is rationalized as a means to finally rid the world of its vices, like torture, and their practitioners.

It has never accomplished either. It never will accomplish either. And the illusion that it might has plagued humanity at least since the beginning of civilization.

And today, as then, it has left a wake of human destruction that is undoubtedly unparalleled by any other human vice imaginable.

It is time for that legacy to end.

The last throes of ideology

Brilliant analysis, after my own heart, by Janet Dailey in The Daily Telegraph, this morning.

The death throes of 20th-century ideology

Just a taste:

"You and I, and the millions of despairing Britons who are either personally victimised by these idiotic policies or who sympathise with those who have been, can see clearly not only that common sense and proportionality are vanishing commodities in public policy, but that those in power seem to be losing their grip on recognisable reality.

So who is it, then, that is technically insane? Lots of people, obviously: this mania has infected whole swaths of the governing and public administrative classes.

In order to understand how perfectly ordinary functionaries - and even some seemingly lucid politicians - have come to be swept up in mass psychosis, we need to understand what all these various instances of it (not to mention dozens of others, which there is no space to list here) have in common. What is the thread that runs through the obtuse failure to understand the consequences of not collecting rubbish, of making the police (and the hospitals) conform to Soviet-style production targets, and of using draconian espionage techniques on blameless citizens?

It is the confusion, the desperate disorientation of a collapsing belief system. What we are living through is nothing other than the death throes of 20th-century ideology: the idea that the state is the only repository of civic virtue and moral authority.

The notion that Big Government (whether in the central or the local form) could solve all social problems, and through its interventions achieve absolute justice and harmony, is collapsing. And in its last moments, in its disbelief and agony at its own failure, it is lashing out in every direction: if the earlier measures haven't dealt with crime/public disorder/anti-social behaviour/under-performing hospitals/insufficient recycling, we must add yet more layers of official interference.

If government fails to achieve its objectives, it must be because it isn't doing enough, isn't being sufficiently pro-active - so let's pass another law, bring in a further layer of intrusion, take away another dimension of personal responsibility from community life.

But somehow, everything that government does makes things worse: leads to more perverse consequences and unforeseen complications. And the panic increases and the desperation grows and we get yet more laws and rules and targets and misapplied regulations.

Because they have taken so much power over our lives, we feel free to blame the governing classes for everything that goes wrong. And they feel they must address our every difficulty because everything is their fault. (Indeed, their interventions so frequently exacerbate our problems that we are actually quite right to blame them much of the time.)

When there is a real crisis - not just dog poo or over-loaded wheelie bins - the solution always follows the same formula: take more power away from the people.

For example, the price of home-heating is now a serious problem, so what does the Government suggest? A return to zero VAT for heating fuel, which would lower the price instantly and significantly for everyone? Nope. What they propose is a hugely intrusive programme (at present illegal under data protection laws) in which private financial information about the poor would be handed to power companies, in the hope that the disadvantaged might be given more leeway in paying their bills.

So somewhere in the corridors of Whitehall, someone could have the power to decide which of us is deserving enough to have the confidential details of our hardship handed over to some anonymous manager at British Gas or Npower for their compassionate consideration. (Why not medical records, too? Surely the chronic sick could be given heating privileges?)

This madness is not all Gordon Brown's fault. He just happens to be the man presiding over the final moments of a political philosophy that has reached a dead end."

Brilliant. Dead-on. And much more genuinely liberal and democratic, in the John Stuart Mill and Alexis DeToqueville sense of those terms, than any of the nonsense pretending to be both this political period.

This is one of the central theses of my book. Ideology functions, today, much like religion in 16th and 17th century Britain and Europe. Protestants and Catholics fought and warred over which sect had rightful claim on legitimate religious authority and political governance throughout Europe during the 16th and 17th centuries. It was these wars, in Great Britain, in particular, that inspired Thomas Hobbes to write The Leviathan as a treatise in favor of reason and secular thought to guide and provide legitimacy to governance. This is the reason Hobbes is considered the father of modern political science. His writing was a turning point in enlightened thought and reason, inspiring many Europeans, and, later, Americans, to commit themselves to reason as the basis for modern life that could transcend such bloody and pointless divisions and wars.

Ideology, I believe, serves a similar, if moderately more reasoned, function in 20th and early 21st century liberal democratic politics. Politics and matters of governance are not only seriously confused and confounded by ideological political battles. Reasonable policy, and the reasoned debate and discussion for pragmatic policy, is seriously distorted and obscured by ideology and its adherents. And more genuine liberty and democratic engagement is undermined by ideology and its commitment to power at the expense of both liberty and more reasoned policy and use of force, when force is necessary and the only best option.

And Janet Dailey does a nice job of illustrating the insanity that ideology, especially the ideology of power and the state settling matters of personal and public morality, engenders in contemporary life.

Ideology, like religion, is a lazy person's means of letting groups and an established body of thought attempt, futilely, to think for us, rather than taking up the responsibilities of independent and critical thought, judgment, conscience, and subsequent action more seriously and honestly.

Ideology is the last throes of humanity in its immature state attempting to settle its problems by the intellectually and otherwise lazy and dishonest means of power and imposition rather than by engaged and honest liberal and democratic thought.

And like its dubious ancestoral precedents in religious warfare, ideological warfare will and is similarly failing to reasonably and pragmatically address our most serious problems because it cannot do so.

Only reasoned thought and engagement offers that opportunity.

And folks like Janet Dailey and I make those arguments and wait for the world to come to terms with the limits of ideology and power to resolve our most serious problems and conflicts.

And if the efforts of Hobbes, Montesquieu, Voltaire, Locke, Rousseau, DeToqueville, Mill, Wolstonencraft, Dewey, Hayek, Friedman, and the like, offer us any guide, it is that though such a wait involves patience, history has a way of vindicating reason and liberty and more honest, genuine, and democratic engagement over the pursuit of power of so many illiberal forces that the hubris of those who would substitute power for free thought and conscience is stunning, to say the least, if not ultimately doomed.

My theoretical work in the use of least possible necessary aggression addresses the issue of how and how much force should be used when it is necessary and no other real options exist, not just when the use of force suits our fancy or our self-righteous notions of the world, and offers a guide for how the most limited government reasonable can be effectively employed to address the limited issues that government, and government alone, can do effectively and a plan for how many functions that liberal democratic and even illiberal and/or undemocratic governments have assumed but perform more poorly than a liberal democratic civil society would perform can be transitioned to a freer, more decentralized civil society that provides for needs independent of central governing authority.

Liberal democracy - meaning, a free egalitarian, meritocratic, democratic community and marketplace of ideas, choices, and consequences - is still the most viable and workable governing and living arrangement available, more honestly and thoughtfully conceived. And though the use of force is an important and limited function of a more genuinely conceived liberal democracy, it is incompatible with liberal democracy as a central governing philosophy. Hence the reasonable conflicts between liberal democracies and their illiberal, force-driven counterparts throughout the 18th, 19th, 20th, and early 21st centuries.

The early 21st century, as Janet Dailey wisely observes in this piece, have been the last and regressive throes of 20th century statist, power-driven ideologies of the 19th and 20th centuries. And the failure of those ideologies will give way to a patiently cultivated commitment to independent thought and reason guiding political thought and governance in the 21st century and beyond.

Pragmatic reason is the only practical guide to policymaking now or in any era. And that it has been overcast by ideological battles, in the 18th, 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries, and religious battles in the 16th, 17th, 18th, 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries, is a foolish legacy for the world to come to terms with if we want more reasoned, effective, and honest policies and liberal democratic societies and cultures in the future.

And recognizing the problem of ideology for what it is, as G.I. Joe would say, is half the battle.

Or as Shakespeare might have put it:

And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

- The Trial of MacBeth, Act V, Scene V

Here's to signifying something.