As she notes in her book The Boy Kings: A Journey into the Social Network, it wasn’t all a happy time.  While Facebook initially appealed to Losse on its promise in expanding and deepening human connections to a society that increasingly discarded them—which, incidentally, simply reflects incentives created by the expanding redistributist state—she soon began to question the enterprise as it tended to encourage the vainest connections over everything.

If you disagree, then ask yourself:  Would you redefine friendship as Facebook friendship?

Although many people clearly do use Facebook with great success to promote their interests and careers, and while many families and friends use its platform to maintain connections that would otherwise fizzle, the economics of Facebook suggest that it is mostly the domain of high schoolers and retirees, of people out of the labor force due to minimum wage laws, ridiculous expansions of government disability and unemployment benefits, or pension-based incentives.  When discussing this aspect of Facebook in my economics classes (in the context of time costs), I often note the news story from earlier this year describing Facebook’s oldest user, a 105-year-old grandmother, usually followed by the joke, “She wants to waste what little time she has left.”

It’s that waste that came to bother Losse the most during her time working for Facebook in Palo Alto and, later, Menlo Park, from September 2005 to the spring of 2010.  She found Facebook appealing to people who connect more easily with others digitally than in real life, or who find a bigger thrill in watching other people live at the expense of living rich, unplugged lives themselves.

In the beginning, however, Facebook offered her a decent opportunity for someone with a non-technical skill set in Silicon Valley where she helped resolve user disputes and spamming attempts, all while answering questions like, “What does poking mean?”

As Facebook grew, so did the social divisions within the firm, and it is here that Boy Kings is most disappointing.  Whether conscious of it or not, Losse’s explanations are quasi-Marxist, tinged by the angst toward the injustice that no matter how hard she worked, she still comprised the lower paying segment of Facebook’s payroll, while her colleagues in engineering working equally hard were paid much better, often frittering away money that Losse would have packed away to help pay her Bay-area rent.

Had Losse studied economics in college, she might have decided the bigger injustice is the malinvestment in human capital that results when government pushes students into degrees less demanded by labor markets.  Economists call this government failure and it explains why the additional productivity and (by extension) the additional revenue Losse could offer Facebook were somewhat less than those offered by the more technically minded.

Thankfully, Losse does not dwell ad nauseum on such injustices in Boy Kings, and instead focuses on the false intimacy that is often the appeal of the Internet and of Facebook in particular.  Toward the end of the book, Losse describes a weekend Rock Band session at Facebook’s headquarters in which she and two friends participated, broadcasted live with real-time comments displayed on the wall of the company game room.  She writes:

“The fans watching us on the Internet were perplexed to see me there, since another rule of the Internet states that there are no girls on the Internet, and they proceeded from questioning my gender or even my existence, to telling me [their sexually-explicit desires].  This was standard Internet behavior, and I barely blushed, though it seemed a bit violent, in a virtual way, much like the Internet itself.  People will and do say anything online because they can.  Thrax and Emile were unperturbed, barely registering the curse words flowing at us through the screen, since this was the way the Internet was.  …  Like the boys in their rooms in distant states, we were safe here five floors above Palo Alto, connected by wires and to worlds we would never see.

“Later that afternoon, I walked the few blocks to my apartment.  As I was cooking dinner, with my laptop open on the kitchen table, my screen was still tuned in to the game room in the office, the boys were still playing, and the watchers were still watching, throwing insults and questions at the screen as Rock Band songs started and stopped, chords scrolling endlessly to infinity.  I closed the laptop and drove to San Francisco to meet friends and go out, in real life.”

Craving real life eventually led Losse to sell her highly leveraged Facebook stock options and settle down as a writer in Marfa, Texas, with peace of mind and a clear conscience.  Since then, this establishment-connected firm has been exposed as something of an adjunct of the National Security Agency, making many wonder what trade-offs Zuckerberg made in exchange for his billionaire status.

Not bad for an English major, I’d say.

Picture a mono-racial New York metropolitan area with a fraction of the murders, if you can. Add in unreadable signs and buildings and infrastructure completed in 1960 or later. Then you might have a picture of Seoul, the capital of the Republic of Korea and, quite possibly, the new center of global capitalism. At least, that is my conclusion after spending several days there on academic and professional pursuits.

Seoul lacks the boroughs and neighborhoods of the Northeast in favor of apartment living, and one gasps at the many hundreds of high rises spread throughout the city. Living in a house with a garage to clean and lawn to care for is as foreign to the average Korean as it is for the average Manhattan-ite. In Seoul’s case, this reflects cultural and historical choices similar to the reasons why people clustered together in Italian city-states in an earlier time. There is safety in numbers, and Seoul-ians – who have been the target of expanding empires for centuries – prefer urban closeness to suburban expanse.

From this perspective, there is something downright libertarian about Seoul and Korea in general. For centuries Korea held isolation from the world a virtue considering the various attempts at invasion and colonization by outsiders, particularly the Japanese and the Manchurians. Like Italy, Korea has preserved a culture and language that is unique and maintained a decentralized political system that made its becoming a colonizer practically unthinkable, while producing a military culture historically defensive in a “Don’t Tread On Me” sense. Korea has been called the Hermit Kingdom, content to be closed to the world and hard to find on a map.

By the late 19th century, it became obvious that this isolation couldn’t last and would bring suffering to the people. Thus the Joseon Dynasty (1392-1897) opened Korea up to the world with full-fledged trade and diplomatic relations.

It didn’t go well. Korea was the victim of a brutal occupation by Japan that lasted until 1945, after which the country became a Cold War pawn, and was divided into North and South. The Korean War itself resulted in almost 375,000 civilians killed in the South alone, which would be equivalent to losing about 10 million Americans today. The war didn’t end until President-elect Eisenhower visited Korea in December 1952, decided the conflict would not be won without resorting to nuclear weapons, and pushed for a ceasefire that persists to this day.

The role of the United States in repelling the communists is not lost on the South Koreans. Many Americans today wonder if it wouldn’t have been wiser to have stayed out of the conflict. The issue is not just the 45,000 dead or missing Americans. By involving America in an unpopular war without seeking permission of Congress, as required by the Constitution, President Truman was incredibly unpopular and worthy of impeachment. By orchestrating a ceasefire, Eisenhower was primarily concerned with thwarting a popular revolt against an American empire that would prove to be the death of an American republic.

Some wonder whether the military-industrial complex has run U.S. foreign policy ever since.

Regardless, South Korea’s progress in the second half of the 20th century is nothing less than astonishing. Seoul was devastated and starving and had to be almost completely rebuilt following the Armistice, as was most of the rest of the country. In 1960, per capita GDP in South Korea stood at $79, ranking it among the poorest countries in the world. In 1970, vast areas of Seoul had yet to be electrified. Yet, from the 1960s through the 1980s, the South Korean economy grew at an average rate of 8 percent a year, and today per capita GDP is about $32,400. What did it do right that persistently struggling economies do wrong?

The short answer is it saved. Korea is part of a broader Asian culture that encourages saving, resulting in low Asian time preferences developed over centuries in order to survive on rice-based diets and fluctuating fresh water sources. Furthermore, the generation that emerged from post-war South Korea is similar to the generation that emerged from the Great Depression in the United States in that both survived by valuing thrift and an efficient use of resources. Institutional development over this time rewarded saving that would be transformed into the capital structure necessary for wealth creation in the future. The resulting low interest rates brought about sustainable economic growth marked by output that individuals had saved to purchase.

Notwithstanding the persistent threat of war with the North, which hindered investment (and still does), South Korea protected property rights in ways both purposefully and by accident. Since capital always flows, over time, to those regions of the world in which it is most secure, capital flows into South Korea financed economic development that even Koreans today call a miracle. But the creation of future wealth from saving and the protection of property is hardly surprising. Economically stagnant regions in Latin America, Greece, and even Illinois and California can learn from South Korea’s example of better long-term living through low taxation and regulation and the protection of property rights institutions.

None of this is meant to paint South Korea as a capitalist paradise. Its post-war governments have a record of corruption and dictatorship that threatened its economic success. Certain sectors of the economy have been protected from competition and otherwise benefited from government favor. This form of crony capitalism has resulted in an economy dominated by few large conglomerates such as Samsung, Hyundai, and LG – firms that were targeted as being too big to fail decades before the term was known in the United States.

If the Korean cultural bias for saving thwarted the ability of Korean governments to pursue Keynesian policies favored in the West, the Bank of Korea has surely compensated by inflating the won such that the dollar-won exchange rate is well beyond a one-to-one relationship and ranges to one-to-one thousand today. This is a remarkable accomplishment given massive dollar inflation since 1971. As in the United States today, and as predicted by Austrian School theory, the new money favors those parties that receive it first, meaning those economic interests most closely associated with the government.

While its inflation surely causes malinvestments, Korea has thus far avoided the excesses of China, preferring to direct funds to infrastructure and education as opposed to shopping malls and skyscrapers. Korean banks avoided exposure to collateralized securities backed by the sub-prime mortgage securities issued by U.S. banks, nor did it have a substantial shadow banking sector of its own offering pooled and tranched securities to investors, indicating that crony-like relationships that exist in the West with the financial industry have not yet materialized. In other words, one suspects Goldman Sachs yields less influence at the Bank of Korea than it does at the Bank of Japan.

Notwithstanding the Bank of Korea’s inflation, South Korea experienced only a small housing bubble due to cultural differences in how Koreans access their apartments (they often put down a single large payment and allow the apartment owner to earn interest off it in lieu of rent), as well as a capital gains tax on housing that, no doubt inadvertently, placed downward pressures on housing demand. Therefore, the Korean economy was not fueled by credit expansions as in the West in which homeowners were encouraged to borrow and spend based on the inflated values of the homes.

The end result is a protection of property rights complemented by lower taxes (the highest marginal rate in Korea is 34 percent and unlike the U.S. today, there is no effort to raise it) and less costly regulations – both based in the context of a cultural homogeneity that often results in less crime and more trust pervading the society. Its murder rate is less than half of New York’s, and while I have been told Seoul’s violent crime rate is high compared to that of U.S. cities, most would agree that a “CSI Seoul” would be a pretty boring show.

Summing it all together while walking Seoul’s Teheran Road, one gets the impression that this is the place to be. Like New York in happier times, Seoul is a capital magnet, and as the traditional western economies implode and become less free, capital flows to East Asia will only increase. Its Gangnam shopping district, though not terribly large, combines the aura of Times Square and Fifth Avenue. Ubiquitous taxis offer telephone interpreters in English so that drivers and their fares can converse – a service some wish New York cabbies would offer. Upscale Paris-themed bakeries compete for business clientele with local restaurants featuring buckwheat noodles, while the pop music genius PSY’s picture is everywhere, testing the limits of overexposure while selling Korean beer and hipness to visitors who did not know Korea had both.

Meanwhile, multinationals and entrepreneurial startups wanting access to the Asian market are finding Korea a safe and friendly environment to base their operations. While previous generations of Korea’s college graduates flocked for job opportunities in the West, many of today’s best and brightest are finding that their best job opportunities are now found in Seoul itself.

Someone told me before my trip that Koreans are more American than America, and its economic success sure looks like an America of some decades past. Nonetheless, there is a sense that it might not last – that the North Koreans may finally decide to follow up on their bluster, or that the global demand for Korean exports may decline. However, my sense, as well as that of most of the educated Koreans I met, is that the fundamental institutions characterizing Korean society are strong, and that notwithstanding what the future may bring, the country will persevere, and prosper.

Seoul provides evidence of how protecting property and expanding access to the division of labor is the key to ending poverty as we know it. Governments restrict it at our own expense.

Picture a mono-racial New York metropolitan area with a fraction of the murders, if you can. Add in unreadable signs and buildings and infrastructure completed in 1960 or later. Then you might have a picture of Seoul, the capital of the Republic of Korea and, quite possibly, the new center of global capitalism. At least, that is my conclusion after spending several days there on academic and professional pursuits.

Seoul lacks the boroughs and neighborhoods of the Northeast in favor of apartment living, and one gasps at the many hundreds of high rises spread throughout the city. Living in a house with a garage to clean and lawn to care for is as foreign to the average Korean as it is for the average Manhattan-ite. In Seoul’s case, this reflects cultural and historical choices similar to the reasons why people clustered together in Italian city-states in an earlier time. There is safety in numbers, and Seoul-ians – who have been the target of expanding empires for centuries – prefer urban closeness to suburban expanse.

From this perspective, there is something downright libertarian about Seoul and Korea in general. For centuries Korea held isolation from the world a virtue considering the various attempts at invasion and colonization by outsiders, particularly the Japanese and the Manchurians. Like Italy, Korea has preserved a culture and language that is unique and maintained a decentralized political system that made its becoming a colonizer practically unthinkable, while producing a military culture historically defensive in a “Don’t Tread On Me” sense. Korea has been called the Hermit Kingdom, content to be closed to the world and hard to find on a map.

By the late 19th century, it became obvious that this isolation couldn’t last and would bring suffering to the people. Thus the Joseon Dynasty (1392-1897) opened Korea up to the world with full-fledged trade and diplomatic relations.

It didn’t go well. Korea was the victim of a brutal occupation by Japan that lasted until 1945, after which the country became a Cold War pawn, and was divided into North and South. The Korean War itself resulted in almost 375,000 civilians killed in the South alone, which would be equivalent to losing about 10 million Americans today. The war didn’t end until President-elect Eisenhower visited Korea in December 1952, decided the conflict would not be won without resorting to nuclear weapons, and pushed for a ceasefire that persists to this day.

The role of the United States in repelling the communists is not lost on the South Koreans. Many Americans today wonder if it wouldn’t have been wiser to have stayed out of the conflict. The issue is not just the 45,000 dead or missing Americans. By involving America in an unpopular war without seeking permission of Congress, as required by the Constitution, President Truman was incredibly unpopular and worthy of impeachment. By orchestrating a ceasefire, Eisenhower was primarily concerned with thwarting a popular revolt against an American empire that would prove to be the death of an American republic.

Some wonder whether the military-industrial complex has run U.S. foreign policy ever since.

Regardless, South Korea’s progress in the second half of the 20th century is nothing less than astonishing. Seoul was devastated and starving and had to be almost completely rebuilt following the Armistice, as was most of the rest of the country. In 1960, per capita GDP in South Korea stood at $79, ranking it among the poorest countries in the world. In 1970, vast areas of Seoul had yet to be electrified. Yet, from the 1960s through the 1980s, the South Korean economy grew at an average rate of 8 percent a year, and today per capita GDP is about $32,400. What did it do right that persistently struggling economies do wrong?

The short answer is it saved. Korea is part of a broader Asian culture that encourages saving, resulting in low Asian time preferences developed over centuries in order to survive on rice-based diets and fluctuating fresh water sources. Furthermore, the generation that emerged from post-war South Korea is similar to the generation that emerged from the Great Depression in the United States in that both survived by valuing thrift and an efficient use of resources. Institutional development over this time rewarded saving that would be transformed into the capital structure necessary for wealth creation in the future. The resulting low interest rates brought about sustainable economic growth marked by output that individuals had saved to purchase.

Notwithstanding the persistent threat of war with the North, which hindered investment (and still does), South Korea protected property rights in ways both purposefully and by accident. Since capital always flows, over time, to those regions of the world in which it is most secure, capital flows into South Korea financed economic development that even Koreans today call a miracle. But the creation of future wealth from saving and the protection of property is hardly surprising. Economically stagnant regions in Latin America, Greece, and even Illinois and California can learn from South Korea’s example of better long-term living through low taxation and regulation and the protection of property rights institutions.

None of this is meant to paint South Korea as a capitalist paradise. Its post-war governments have a record of corruption and dictatorship that threatened its economic success. Certain sectors of the economy have been protected from competition and otherwise benefited from government favor. This form of crony capitalism has resulted in an economy dominated by few large conglomerates such as Samsung, Hyundai, and LG – firms that were targeted as being too big to fail decades before the term was known in the United States.

If the Korean cultural bias for saving thwarted the ability of Korean governments to pursue Keynesian policies favored in the West, the Bank of Korea has surely compensated by inflating the won such that the dollar-won exchange rate is well beyond a one-to-one relationship and ranges to one-to-one thousand today. This is a remarkable accomplishment given massive dollar inflation since 1971. As in the United States today, and as predicted by Austrian School theory, the new money favors those parties that receive it first, meaning those economic interests most closely associated with the government.

While its inflation surely causes malinvestments, Korea has thus far avoided the excesses of China, preferring to direct funds to infrastructure and education as opposed to shopping malls and skyscrapers. Korean banks avoided exposure to collateralized securities backed by the sub-prime mortgage securities issued by U.S. banks, nor did it have a substantial shadow banking sector of its own offering pooled and tranched securities to investors, indicating that crony-like relationships that exist in the West with the financial industry have not yet materialized. In other words, one suspects Goldman Sachs yields less influence at the Bank of Korea than it does at the Bank of Japan.

Notwithstanding the Bank of Korea’s inflation, South Korea experienced only a small housing bubble due to cultural differences in how Koreans access their apartments (they often put down a single large payment and allow the apartment owner to earn interest off it in lieu of rent), as well as a capital gains tax on housing that, no doubt inadvertently, placed downward pressures on housing demand. Therefore, the Korean economy was not fueled by credit expansions as in the West in which homeowners were encouraged to borrow and spend based on the inflated values of the homes.

The end result is a protection of property rights complemented by lower taxes (the highest marginal rate in Korea is 34 percent and unlike the U.S. today, there is no effort to raise it) and less costly regulations – both based in the context of a cultural homogeneity that often results in less crime and more trust pervading the society. Its murder rate is less than half of New York’s, and while I have been told Seoul’s violent crime rate is high compared to that of U.S. cities, most would agree that a “CSI Seoul” would be a pretty boring show.

Summing it all together while walking Seoul’s Teheran Road, one gets the impression that this is the place to be. Like New York in happier times, Seoul is a capital magnet, and as the traditional western economies implode and become less free, capital flows to East Asia will only increase. Its Gangnam shopping district, though not terribly large, combines the aura of Times Square and Fifth Avenue. Ubiquitous taxis offer telephone interpreters in English so that drivers and their fares can converse – a service some wish New York cabbies would offer. Upscale Paris-themed bakeries compete for business clientele with local restaurants featuring buckwheat noodles, while the pop music genius PSY’s picture is everywhere, testing the limits of overexposure while selling Korean beer and hipness to visitors who did not know Korea had both.

Meanwhile, multinationals and entrepreneurial startups wanting access to the Asian market are finding Korea a safe and friendly environment to base their operations. While previous generations of Korea’s college graduates flocked for job opportunities in the West, many of today’s best and brightest are finding that their best job opportunities are now found in Seoul itself.

Someone told me before my trip that Koreans are more American than America, and its economic success sure looks like an America of some decades past. Nonetheless, there is a sense that it might not last – that the North Koreans may finally decide to follow up on their bluster, or that the global demand for Korean exports may decline. However, my sense, as well as that of most of the educated Koreans I met, is that the fundamental institutions characterizing Korean society are strong, and that notwithstanding what the future may bring, the country will persevere, and prosper.

Seoul provides evidence of how protecting property and expanding access to the division of labor is the key to ending poverty as we know it. Governments restrict it at our own expense.

Christopher Westley [send him mail] is an adjunct scholar at the Ludwig von Mises Institute. He teaches in the College of Commerce and Business Administration at Jacksonville State University.

The Best of Christopher Westley

No one remembers the Beastie Boys anymore, but the group’s misunderstanding of rights theory lives today, especially in the current health care debate. Take, for instance, the claim made by St. Vincent’s Health System Chief Executive John O’Neil to the Hoover (Alabama) Chamber of Commerce last week that uninsured Americans deserve 100 percent coverage of health care and that society’s inability to provide it creates monetary and human costs.

"The uninsured," he said, "are driving up our health care costs because they oftentimes don’t seek care before it’s too late, or it’s so far into their disease process that it costs thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars." He added that, in 2006, more than 18,000 Americans died "purely because they didn’t have health insurance."

In responding to such arguments, it is hard to know where to start. Let’s first consider Mr. O’Neil’s concept of rights, which seems to be informed more by the Beastie Boys than a natural rights tradition developed over the centuries largely by the Church that sponsors St. Vincent’s. This tradition identifies two categories of rights, one that is consistent with a free and virtuous society, and another that sows division that, taken to the extreme, threatens civilization itself. The first of these identifies rights that are inherent in the human person and therefore precede governments. Governments cannot grant them. They can only take them away. Sometimes referred to as negative rights, they are only partially enumerated in the U.S. Constitution and especially in its first 10 amendments. These include your rights to your life, liberty, and property.

Then there are other rights that no one is born with. In order to exercise these rights, individuals become claimants to the wealth and labor of others. Sometimes referred to as positive rights, these rights were not spelled out in the Constitution, which is silent on issues pertaining to education, housing, or even digital television. Nonetheless, the legitimization of these types of rights in the 20th century has contributed to the centralized and overweening welfare and warfare state that the federal government has become today.

Mr. O’Neil proclaims such positive rights in the realm of health care, and it is not a new argument. Indeed, previous arguments along these lines justified government interventions that have increased costs and hindered a free market in health care so that, today, 75 percent of all health care spending in the United States comes from government. Note well: Individuals like Mr. O’Neil will gain personally if they are successful in extending this argument, even if this requires further threatening the well-being of those others who are forced to finance it.

That’s what happens when a right demanded by Peter requires positive action by Paul.

Consider as well the claim that 18,000 people died in 2006 "purely because they did not have health insurance." Really? It had nothing to do with (say) lifestyle choices, or a choice freely taken to spend money on goods other than insurance? This is a purely ridiculous statistic. It is sad state of affairs that it gets bandied about without the benefit of being fact-checked by a watchdog media.

But much of the media, as well as health care systems, insurance companies, and federal government, have an incentive to frame the health care debate in ways that benefit them, and in this case it means whether the health care bill should incorporate a little socialism, or a lot. Left out are the economists — at least those disconnected from special interests — who have much to offer that would improve the health care system. These involve eliminating (i) all government licensing of the medical profession that exist primarily to restrict the supply of medical personnel (ii) insurance companies’ antitrust exemptions and allowing interstate coverage, and (iii) the deadly Food and Drug Administration that serves the interests of Big Pharma over those of the sick.

None of these recommendations are likely in a political environment in which special interests receive the loot while the costs are socialized. From that perspective, what is considered health care "reform" today is nothing new. It will continue until citizens once again appreciate one of the natural rights listed in the Magna Carta — the right to be left alone.

October 24, 2009

Christopher Westley [send him mail] teaches economics at Jacksonville State University.

Christopher Westley Archives

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When the bailout passed last week, no one was surprised. In fact, what looked like a principled opposition to massive legal theft on Monday was transformed into a done backroom deal by Friday once the bill ballooned from three to 400-plus pages, filled with crumbs that congressmen could throw to their districts. It may be that, 25 years from now, economic historians will note socialized credit markets came to America in exchange for production credits for “marine renewables” and new regulations for “residential top-load clothes washers,” which were among many of the riders added to the bailout legislation as the infamous week wore on.

Personally, I am still a long-term optimist, but as a student of the Depression I know that Congress and the executive can do much damage before the long term gets here, and indeed, they can delay its arrival indefinitely. Will the conservatives who supported this legislation lay into a President Obama two or three years hence, in the event that the economy devolves into a repeat of the 1970s, thanks in large part to government’s attempt to forestall market forces over the last two weeks? This seems likely. Our current problems resulted from the infusion of credit in the past. To think that infusion today will not have the same effect in the future is to challenge pesky things like natural and economic laws.

Since societies that challenge them risk peril, I thought it may be helpful to at least identify some of the people whose actions and ideas helped turn the tide last week. Their numbers are many, and any list will by necessity be abridged. Still, if the health of a society and culture is related to the quality of the theories that are accepted, then knowing some of the sources of bad theories is key for turning the tide back again.

Besides, blame games can be fun. My own version involves taking a swig of Victory Gin whenever the following names pop up in bailout analyses.

Karl Marx

He predicted this, sort of, in the fifth plank of the Communist Manifesto, which discusses the inevitability of socialized capital markets in the capitalist countries. The problem is that he believed this would happen because of inherent characteristics in the market system, whereas in truth there is nothing within capitalism per se that motivated Messrs. Bush, Paulson, and Bernanke. In terms of understanding capital, Marx fails in comparison to the Austrian Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk, while those who want to understand the underlying forces explaining government growth would best avoid Marx and read Böhm-Bawerk’s student, Ludwig von Mises, on economic interventionism. Nonetheless, there is great irony in the fact that, 17 years after the fall of the Soviet Union, the United States decided that market forces fail when it comes to capital. Somewhere, this slovenly German malcontent must be smiling.

FDR Memorial, National Mall

Lawrence Halprin

You may not know this name or how it relates to our current mess, but rest assured, it is closely tied to it. This is because Halprin designed the pretentious and misleading memorial to Franklin Roosevelt that is on the National Mall in Washington, DC. Passersby learn how fear is a great justification for government expansion, which helps inform how the promulgation of unfounded fear was key to the bailout’s success last week. They also learn how Roosevelt’s “bold” actions, in the midst of the Depression helped combat it. This is also a myth. As my Mises Institute colleague Bob Murphy noted in an email last week, the facts are that Roosevelt’s bold interventions prolonged the Depression, turning it into the only market correction that is associated with an entire decade. (The Depression actually lasted 16 years.) Yet somehow, today, questioning the Roosevelt Myth is like pointing out that the emperor has no clothes. Halprin’s contribution in promoting this myth was poignant last week. Are there similar shrines dedicated to Stalin (to whom FDR referred warmly as his Uncle Joe) somewhere on the outskirts of Moscow, replete with the man in grandfatherly pose and pet dog nearby?

Joseph Bristow

One cannot discuss the centralization of power in the 20th century without noting the contribution of this senator from Kansas who spearheaded the 17th Amendment into the Constitution. Before Bristow, senators were selected by state legislators, but after him, senators were selected through popular election. The result has been the nationalization of senate elections, irrelevance of state legislatures, weakening of states’ constitutional check on the executive branch, and diminution of states’ rights. Given the bailout’s overwhelming political opposition, it is hard to believe that a senate that had to answer to state legislatures would have supported this bill. Murray Rothbard once wrote about repealing the 20th century. If this isn’t possible, then we should settle for repealing the Progressive Era instead.

George W. Bush

He ran as a compassionate conservative and promised a humble foreign policy, but governed as the reincarnation of Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, and Lyndon Johnson all tied into one. (One could argue, along with Bill Kauffman in his highly recommended book, Ain’t My America, that the Johnson and Bush presidencies illustrate what a bad deal Texas’s annexation has turned out to be for republican government.) Although Bush inherited a recession, this more severe one can be explained by his expansions of bureaucracy and debt, which have occurred at such record levels that his likely successors, though men of the Left, are welcomed because they could be viewed as being to Bush’s right. Furthermore, the doubling of the national debt in seven years (and increasing it by a half trillion dollars in the last two weeks alone) is one of the primary unstated reasons for credit problems today, which explains the political desire to blame Wall Street.

"Charging Bull" by Arturo di Modica

Wall Street

This does not refer to a single person, of course, but rather to people like Hank Paulson, John Mack, Chuck Prince, Stan O’Neal, and others who fed the housing bubble in the 2000s and have been successful in forcing taxpayers — the poor and working classes especially — to assume risks investment banks could have assumed with their own resources (according to financial analyst Peter Boockvar). Will anyone view Arturo di Modica’s Charging Bull bronze statue on Wall Street, which once symbolized “the strength and power of the American people,” to mean anything else than, well, bull? It should be melted down, and used as a competing commodity money to the dollar.

My Congressman

My guy may be much like your guy, in that he is of his district’s dominant political party and faces weak opposition in next month’s election. He emphasizes the social issues that are important to his constituency, and this allows him the freedom to vote against its wishes when he can thereby accrue political and economic rents in Washington. My guy claimed that his calls against the bailout ran at 300 to 1, but since he is strongly pro-life, he knows he can deviate from his district’s wishes. Hence, he is an arch-redistributionist and logroller extraordinaire. Congress never was an institution that protected human freedom, but this was less relevant in a constitutional republic. But it isn’t today, and for that we can thank (in part) …

Herb Stein

By demeanor, Herb Stein was a lovable and funny man, and very smart. (I worked a few steps from his office once, as a college intern.) But in terms of his professional contribution as Richard Nixon’s chief economic advisor, Stein played the role of buffer between Nixon’s desire to socialize and the market’s desire to correct, and in the process he set the standard for many DC-based economists who advocated the bailout last week. The early 1970s were similar to today in that they followed years of political manipulation of the economy, leading to a major correction, which led to a crisis for the political class and the need to socialize in order to avoid it. In Stein’s case, it was his reputation as an economist working behind the scenes that enabled Nixon to close the gold window and establish the dollar as a fiat currency and therefore enable the largest wealth redistributions in history. Stein’s example reminds one of the full cost of public financing of intellectual activity. Let’s add the bailout to this cost.

Save $10

Milton Friedman

Since we are discussing intellectuals, why not this important contributor to the free society who nonetheless argued that noncommodity money could exist? However faulty the institutions were that contributed to the crisis and the ensuing bailout, their damage was surely exacerbated by the endless supply of liquidity that is justified when money is misdefined.

Franklin Raines

He came from a working-class family in Seattle and through political connections he became chairman of Fannie Mae in the 1990s. His expansion of the political misuse of his GSE greatly contributed to the housing bubble and the consequent downward pressure on housing prices today. Though he left Fannie in disgrace, he was given a compensation package worth tens of millions of dollars. Should we take solace in the fact that this money will be worth much less in upcoming years, in inflation-adjusted terms, thanks to the bailout?

Barney Frank

Frank is the Massachusetts congressman who muscled this bailout through the House, first when it failed and later when it passed. In his public statements last week, his message, over and over again, was that the economy is sick and dying, and needs the life support that only looting the taxpayers can provide. As Sheldon Richman noted in his excellent economics blog, Frank (and his confederates) “were choking the American people and while doing so, they picked the people’s pockets and handed their money to Wall Street.”

So that’s my list, incomplete as it is. There are others who deserve mention. I’d be interested in hearing readers’ additions to it, either through email or the link to this article at the Mises Institute’s blog.

October 9, 2008

Chris Westley [send him mail] is an adjunct scholar at the Ludwig von Mises Institute.

Christopher Westley Archives

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William Buckley seemed to relish writing obituaries.

In fact, the death of a Milton Friedman or a Strom Thurmond or even of an obscure Manhattan socialite would provide a forum for Buckley to write about, well, himself — about how witty he once was in that person’s company, or how important he came to be in that person’s life.

So when news arrived today that Buckley himself had died, I wondered how he would like his own obituaries to be written. He’d no doubt take great pride in his death being noted on the front page of his beloved New York Times. He’d be glad that his death coincided with a Republican in the White House, practically guaranteeing an official statement from a sitting president.

For someone who reproduced his Who’s Who citation in one of his books, the validation that mattered came from the secular establishment.

But he’d surely know that some elements of the conservative movement would remember his life’s work with great regret. These would be the elements of the Old Right that (thanks to the Internet) animate much American political discourse today, characterized by conservatives and classical liberals and libertarians who believe that a free society demands that government be either severely limited or nonexistent.

These are the people who agreed with the social critic Albert Jay Nock that the enemy of civilization was the State itself. They knew that large, centralized governments — whether in the East or the West — can only nurture dependency and division, and that their very existence threatens an order defined by private institutions and property, voluntary interactions, mutual interdependencies, and social betterment. The Old Right knew that war was the health of the state, and that this reason alone justified opposition to Wilson’s and FDR’s wars as events worth avoiding because they would, in the end, grow the government and make us less free.

But after World War II, and during the height of President Truman’s unpopularity emanating from the U.S. government’s first undeclared war, there was serious concern among the State’s partisans that a freedom movement would reassert itself politically, squelching the justification for government growth that the nascent Cold War brought about. A trumped-up international confrontation with the Soviets may have provided meaning and jobs to many, but it also required dismantling constitutional constraints on power necessary for a free republic.

Indeed, it was such a threat to liberty that occasioned President Eisenhower’s 1961 Farewell Address.

It was a threat that Buckley defended by serving to pacify the Old Right movement so as to allow the State to grow. (Ronald Reagan served this role in 1980s, and talk radio does today.) The former CIA agent proclaimed himself the leading conservative spokesmen, urging conservatives to embrace totalitarianism as a necessary strategy to defeat the Soviets, demanding that they embrace "[b]ig government for the duration" of the Cold War. Curiously, he never called for a return to a constitutional republic once the Cold War ended.

Members of the Old Right — truly great thinkers like John T. Flynn and Murray Rothbard — who pointed out the absurdity of fighting totalitarianism by becoming totalitarian would be disparaged by Buckley, who was paid well for his efforts to drum these people and their classical liberal ideas out of the public square.

Thankfully, he wasn’t successful. One needs to observe Ron Paul’s fantastic presidential campaign today and the growing importance of Old Right publications such as The American Conservative compared to the sad state of Buckley’s own National Review (which is virtually unknown to anyone under 40). The rise of the Internet and its decentralizing effect on information disbursement has allowed Old Right ideas to break out again. Young people are reading Rothbard’s histories of economic thought and monetary treatises; they hardly know of Buckley’s God and Man at Yale, and much less of his sex novels.

Which is not to say that Buckley has not been influential. That voters are choosing presidential candidates promising more war and security is a testament to his defense of the Leviathan State. But the future belongs to the young, and the young, who are inheriting both tens of trillions of dollars of debt and dangerous blowback resulting from decades of bad foreign policy interventions, are rejecting Buckley-ism in favor of policies that promote peace and freedom.

Few obituaries written will note Buckley as someone who labored to make the nation-state among T.S. Elliot’s Permanent Things by standing athwart those who opposed it, its wars, and its redistribution. Still, one doesn’t relish writing that he died this week, alone, at his home in Stamford, Connecticut. May he rest in peace.

February 28, 2008

Chris Westley [send him mail] teaches economics at Jacksonville State University, Alabama.

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It was a November evening in 2002 and I couldn’t avoid making my first trip to our local VFW post. My son was beginning his first year as a Tiger Cub — which is a sort of junior Boy Scout — and all the boys were meeting there for a flag retirement ceremony. I was not sure what to expect, although I remembered from my own Boy Scout days that a flag retirement involved a sort of burnt offering of old and discarded flags. Parental participation was required, even though in this queer age the Scouts required that we refer to ourselves as our children’s "adult partners". Apparently, the terms "Mom" and "Dad" are out of fashion.

It was my first time at the VFW, but it was easy to find. It is the only place in town with a Vietnam-era helicopter sitting in the front. Supposedly this is to remind passersby of past sacrifices to defend freedom. To me, it symbolized several million dollars of conscripted capital wasted in the military’s effort to spend its budget some fiscal year, a long time ago. Several veterans were already at the VFW before the ceremony began, and it was obvious that they took this event very seriously. They stood around the perimeter of the yard where the ceremony would take place, and smoked, their longish hair blowing in crisp winds. Parents and children were invited to sit on folding chairs set out for the occasion.

We did, and then the ceremony began with a gruesome slideshow of the events of September 11th. I immediately wanted to leave, thinking that such pictures were inappropriate for a six-year old. My son had a scant idea of what happened on that day, and I did not appreciate this effort to circumvent my authority. But this was part of the ceremony, and my son’s friends were all there, so what could I do? I now know that the images of September 11 have been impaled on the brains of every public school student from kindergarten and up — a government-funded attack on innocence.

Then we began the first of many prayers. I wondered how many of the vets there realized that the government they were defending opposed public prayer such as the ones they were reciting. The entire ceremony reeked of confusion between God and Country. Both were considered objects worthy of our worship. I learned that, in the new millennium, war prayers no longer ask for God’s blessings on our armed forces. We now add emergency medical technicians, police, and firefighters, as if to underscore these individuals’ modern role as an adjunct military force required for future episodes of domestic terrorism.

The vets also prayed for success in our next war in Iraq, which was then considered by many to be a done deal. I recall these prayers raising other questions in my head. Was it realistic to still hope that the war could be averted? Why do veterans think that God will bless them with success in killing innocents? Have any of these men ever pondered that the symbiotic relationship between the welfare and warfare states fuels this war far more than any foreign leader’s trumped up belligerence? And for that matter, was I the only one there who noticed the less-than-subtle switch from the World Trade Center attacks to the war in Iraq, as though these events were somehow related?

Next came the guest speaker, a retired NYPD policeman, to offer his thoughts on terrorism and the upcoming war. He spoke about a friend of his who died in Tower 1 on the Fateful Day and how ironic it was that he was to die in the WTC because they first met in Oklahoma City cleaning up the rubble as a part of the FEMA cleanup project. The economist in me objects to this self-congratulatory emphasis on supposedly selfless public service. These people are paid well for what they do, and indeed in some cases, they earn well into the six figures. Besides, unlike the Vietnam veterans standing there, New York’s municipal police, firefighters, and EMTs were not conscripted into service. While I am occasionally grateful for their sacrifices, they became public employees voluntarily, in the process claiming the wealth of others they decided to serve whether we wanted them to or not. This sacrifice cannot compare to the poor draftee who lost his life in a Vietnamese jungle.

Finally, the holocaust of flags began, and with more prayer. My son squirmed when he realized that these men were going to burn that pile of flags up on the makeshift funeral pyre, and I took heart that he must be subconsciously grasping a surreal quality in the night’s events. He wanted to leave but was too embarrassed to try in front of his little friends. As the old flags burned, "Amazing Grace" was played, first on a flute, then on bagpipes, as if to emphasize this secularized version of a sacrificial death of a cloth deity.

The closing hymn, Lee Greenwood’s "Proud to be an American" was sung by all, the words known by heart (to my surprise). I looked up. One of the older and grizzled Vietnam-era vets removed his glasses and wiped tears from his eyes. Another man grabbed the microphone to remind the crowd (and to quell any doubts) that America is still a free country. I grabbed my car keys and remembered that the federal government only took 20 percent of our incomes the year the Vietnam War ended, and that taxes in the early 1970s didn’t fund any programs similar to today’s Citizen Corp, a program that trains neighbors to spy on each other. Is this what the veterans fought for?

The event was attended primarily by enlisted men — draftees who did the brunt of the dirty work in Vietnam, and who felt the most pain, loss and tragedy. I don’t blame them for participating in such ceremonies, but I noticed that none of my several friends who are retired military officers took the time to attend. For these men, the war was the basis for a career and a cushy retirement marked by golf club memberships and travel.

I was asked a couple of times (by students) during that Veterans Day how I thought veterans should be honored. I think they should, although I think that those who were forced into service, via conscription, deserve more honor than those who served in the volunteer army. In either case, I do not think that we honor them by supporting the government every time it sends men in harm’s way in the name of unconstitutional empire.

Instead, we honor them by increasing trade ties with countries, knowing that economically isolated countries are easier to bomb. We honor them by defending our own freedoms in post-9/11 America. We honor them by remembering that while war is the health of the State, it is also death to the Republic, thus making even successful military operations self-defeating in the long run.

In short, we honor those who fought fascism abroad by opposing fascism at home. It seemed to me that that is the more fitting way, when compared to propagandizing veterans to justify enhancing the power of the nation-state, maintaining political support for otherwise unpopular leaders, increasing already-bloated military budgets, and the diminution of freedom.

On Veterans Day 2002, I was sad to learn that such ideas would be considered heresy at most of the VFW posts around the country. Not much has changed over the last five years. This is truly a pity, if only because it insures that the future membership rolls of VFW posts are secure.

November 13, 2007

Chris Westley [send him mail] teaches economics at Jacksonville State University, Alabama.

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Dear Mr. Buckley,

So I receive your letter in the mail today — the one in which you tell me you are "forlorn" by my lack of renewal of my National Review subscription — and find myself feeling…impressed. With me, that is. To think William F. Buckley took time to think of me and then even become forlorn as a result means that I might be an influential man.

You can bet that my wife will hear about this the next time she asks me to help her with the kitty litter.

You are, after all, a Big Man in political circles. Practically every column you write reminds me of where you go (that I don’t) and whom you know (whom I don’t). You even use words, like méchanceté, that you know (and I don’t). That my non-renewal would make you forlorn makes me think that when you count your blessings, it might go something like this: "Lessee, um. First there’s my health. Then there’s my family. I live in Connecticut. And then there’s that professor-guy in Alabama that subscribes to NR."

As that guy in Alabama, I think it’s only fair that you know that you have made me forlorn as well. The first reason is not that important, but you should know that I never actually subscribed to NR. Someone else subscribed me, as a member benefit for some organization to which I belong (although the name escapes me). Surely you must have known this! Still, I did subscribe in the Eighties, and you may have remembered me from your letters back then, when you’d remind me of our friendship and then ask me for money. I never sent any because those were my poor college years, and believe me, if I had any excess slush, it would have been saved to prepare for the future taxation that that decade’s deficits produced. But who needs money when you have the love of friends?

This is a small matter, in terms of gloom-inducing activity, compared to my larger complaint. And that’s with National Review itself. If it has produced any good in the world, then we should acknowledge it, but if it hasn’t, then after 50 years and some change, it is time to print a farewell issue, and say good night.

Your magazine was started, ostensibly, to foment a political opposition to communism from the Right at a time when many knew your program would threaten whatever republican virtues survived two decades of New Deals and foreign wars. And so you would write in 1952 that in order to defeat the Soviets, the U.S. must become like them, saying that Americans will have to "support large armies and air forces, atomic energy, central intelligence, war production boards, and the attendant centralization of power in Washington." The argument must have some strength, since we now hear it in response to the threat du jour, terrorism.

But who benefited from it? Well, it was any group that benefits from the existence of a large, centralized nation-state. It is no mistake that many major lobbying interests (from the military-industrial complex and the agricultural and oil industries) purchase those full-page ads that keep NR in the black. It’s safe to say they aren’t purchasing copies of Our Enemy the State with their spoils — quite the opposite, in fact. And it’s safe to say that for NR, anticommunism was always a means for the "attendant centralization" of the federal government, and never an end.

So it is fair to ask, how successful has NR been in standing athwart history and all that? I mean, in the Fifties, you must have thought history loved the Taft wing of the Republican Party and the Old Right in general, since you used NR to athwart them both. In the Sixties and Seventies, NR proved to be such an impotent force against the welfare state that today forced income redistribution is at record levels. Thanks! And while NR was a non-factor in the ending of the Cold War (unless you had embarked on some hellish 40-year plan), you did provide much of the intellectual support for undeclared and therefore unconstitutional hot wars that cost hundreds of thousands of lives and have gone far to militarize our culture today. Although the Soviet Union finally imploded (because socialism never works), it happened much later than predicted by the Austrian economists, thanks of a nuclear confrontation inflamed by the latter day Curtis LeMays pounding at NR’s typewriters.

Based on that record, one might conclude that history actually triumphed peace, market order, and freedom, since NR thwarted it so much.

And it thwarts it today, after seven years of apologizing for George W. Bushism, government growth not seen since the New Deal, and today’s cheap substitute for the Cold War. One wonders if NR editors feel a connection to Belloc’s Matilda as they trot out cover picture after cover picture of the potential Republican candidates that are acceptable to partisans of Big Government, knowing all along that the public hates them. What does it mean about the pertinence of your magazine that after seven years of a conservative administration, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are seen as legitimate successors by endorsing platforms that emphasize a kinder, gentler statism?

It means that the gig might be up for National Review, whose appeal is now generational, being rejected by younger people who note the level of freedom that existed at its founding and the level today. That is the only relevant yardstick. Based on it, you have good reason to be forlorn. It has much more to do with one person’s missing renewal notice.

Nonetheless, thanks for writing, Mr. B. If you still need a few bucks, feel free to ring me up. Until then, I am,

Yours,
Chris Westley

June 26, 2007

Chris Westley [send him mail] teaches economics at Jacksonville State University, Alabama.

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My mind keeps going back to the students in those engineering classrooms and the incredulousness mixed with fear that they must have felt. And anger, based on the idea that some incredible and unknown creep was in the process of cutting their lives short.

Hey buddy (I’d think to myself), do you know how much I sacrificed to get into this engineering program? And my parents? I was up all night studying for a test! Please just go into the men’s room and shoot yourself now. I have too many plans for my life for this to happen.

The police are getting much criticism, and much is warranted. They do seem to follow a predictable script when bad things happen. Secure the perimeter. Don’t let anyone in or out, and when the victims finally do get out, make them hold their hands over their heads as though they are the threats. And while preparations are taking place outside, the shooter’s rampage continues unabated. It isn’t until he kills himself that the police seem to decide on an entry plan. Just like Columbine. Is there a better argument for private, decentralized security?

There are questions that the police need to answer. They claim they had good reason to believe that after the initial shootings that took two lives, the gunman had left the campus and was leaving the state. I’d like to know why they concluded that, and whether it was based on nothing more than case studies. It sounds like a story that they evolved after it was clear that their treating the first crime scene as an isolated, one-time event proved deadly.

But still. These are campus police for whom an average busy night involves making sure drunk fraternity members keep their parties inside. That’s the way it should be. Frankly, if my son was considering a school that trained its police to respond to mass murderers, I’d convince him to apply elsewhere. There is a point at which a lack of preparation is a badge of honor for civilization, simply because it reflects a lack of miscreants that need addressing. So the deer-in-the-headlights response we saw at the press conferences on the day of the shootings is (in some ways) to be preferred.

I have less sympathy for Virginia Tech’s administration, which (after all) sets much of the rules and policy under which the police and student body must comply. Shortly after the shootings were made public, a news story surfaced on the Internet about how the Virginia legislature recently killed a bill that would have allowed university students and employees to carry concealed weapons on campus.

The Roanoke Times story included a quote from "Virginia Tech spokesman" Larry Hinker saying that "I’m sure the university community is appreciative of the General Assembly’s actions because this will help parents, students, faculty, and visitors feel safe on our campus." Why do I think that Mr. Hinker’s 15 minutes of fame is not going to be terribly enjoyable?

It shouldn’t be. Gun control policies violate our natural right to self-defense. Would the killer have even ventured out of bed that morning had he thought that one or two people in those classrooms would have shot back? Nonetheless, ABCNews.com posted a story on Monday afternoon asking whether stricter gun control laws should now be called for, thus trying the frame the ensuing political debate and squelch criticism of existing gun control laws at the same time. A reevaluation of anti-depression drugs seems more appropriate. Or perhaps on federal dollar-fueled college admissions policies that reward the quantity of students, at the expense of quality.

Besides, some perspective is in order. A recent Surgeon General study found school-related homicides comprise less than one percent of all homicides involving students, and that the number of school homicides has been falling. Kids are safer on college campuses than they are at most other public venues. This reflects that bourgeois values still persist and the triumph of society’s institutions that promote them. The political class (and the political media) should refrain from using this event to bolster their agendas.

It dishonors those hopeful students who woke up Monday morning but whose lives ended before noon. It is to them, and their grieving families, that my mind keeps returning. Rest in peace.

April 19, 2007

Chris Westley [send him mail] teaches economics at Jacksonville State University, Alabama.

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Libertarians can be too doctrinaire, and when they are, they are shut out of policy debates. It is far better to recognize that government is here to stay and therefore it is more realistic to devise middle-way positions that grant it an active role. Otherwise, no one will listen to the libertarians and they become irrelevant.

Or so says George Mason University economist Tyler Cowen in an odd review essay of Brian Doherty’s new book on the history of the libertarian movement.

Cowen’s argument comes down to one of strategy. He writes, "The major libertarian response to modernity is simply to wish that the package deal we face isn’t a package deal. But it is, and that is why libertarians are becoming intellectually less important compared to, say, the 1970s or 1980s. So much of libertarianism has become a series of complaints about voter ignorance, or against the motives of special interest groups. The complaints are largely true, but many of the battles are losing ones. No, we should not be extreme fatalists, but the welfare state is here to stay, whether we like it or not."

In other words, freedom and less freedom are a "package deal." And if you have a problem with that, then you have a problem with modernity.

It’s not a new argument. Indeed, many self-proclaimed libertarians (especially in the D.C.-area) have been making it since 9/11, and they display a lack of understanding of libertarian intellectual history. They ignore that the policy successes of libertarianism in the 1970s and 1980s, though far from perfect, resulted from decades-long intellectual battles in which libertarians, classical liberals, and members of the Old Right eschewed middle-way thinking about the State. The point is that the contributions of people like Albert Jay Nock, Garrett Garrett, John T. Flynn, Henry Hazlitt, Rose Wilder Lane, H.L. Mencken, Frank Chodorov, Ludwig von Mises, Leonard Read, Murray Rothbard, and a host of others allowed libertarian ideas to peak in the 1970s and 1980s, and that if they are to peak again in the future, we need thinkers of the same intellectual caliber who can think clearly about the nature of state and freedom today.

What all these thinkers had in common (to quote Mises in his 1950 essay "The Middle-of-the-Road Policy Leads to Socialism") was "an open positive endorsement of that system to which we owe all the wealth that distinguishes our age from the comparatively straitened conditions of ages gone by."

What’s included in this system? There are many aspects, but I believe two are essential. The first is a general belief in traditional metaphysics and natural law as a way to understand the truth about the human person, in marked contradiction to the modern utilitarian belief that truth is anything that cannot be proven false, thus catering the study of the human person to the standards of the hard sciences.

The second is a recognition that states are violent agents of redistribution that destroy those private institutions that have advanced human civilization for centuries. This implies that many of the problems that libertarians address have their roots in previous encroachments by the State and suggests that by coming to terms with government, we simply invite other problems (and promote violence) by introducing more statism.

It is the misunderstanding of one or both of these points that explains the tendency for many libertarians to make intellectual compromises with the State. But it is often more than a misunderstanding, because since there is no little prestige and money for intellectuals who include a positive role for the federal government in their work — even when doing so requires adopting a more-benign-than-realistic view of what government is all about — they are often willfully ignored.

Cowen may disagree, but he does like food, so perhaps a food analogy is appropriate to illustrate this point. Assume a friend presents you with a plate of brownies fresh from the oven and tells you they were made by the hand of a leading chef using a prize-winning recipe and the freshest domestic and imported ingredients available. Your friend places them on the table with a glass of milk and perhaps a bowl of vanilla ice cream, and as the aroma causes you to salivate with anticipation of a rare treat, your friend adds one more tidbit to the mix. She tells you that in order to produce the brownies it was required to include in the batter a smidgen of dog poop. This was required, alas, to assemble all of the other ingredients necessary to produce the brownies. In fact, you might call it a package deal.

Would you eat it? Cowen apparently would, call it the paradox of brownie production, and then he’d reassure us that the marginal benefit of eating the brownies exceeds the cost. And if you refuse, well, you must have a problem with modernity.

The real problem is that some package deals are not worth it, especially when the cost is human freedom. What’s paradoxical is that some people compromise on this point and still call themselves libertarians.

March 16, 2007

Chris Westley [send him mail] teaches economics at Jacksonville State University, Alabama.

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Is 2007 shaping into a bizarro year?

These are years when contradictions abound — when down is up, when black is white, and when results seem to be the exact opposite of what conventional wisdom expects.

I first thought 2007 might be shaping into a bizarro year following the college football championship game between Ohio State University and the University of Florida. For a month, the smart money wasn’t just on Ohio State. Rather, it was aghast that such a great team had to be bothered with playing such a pathetic opponent in Florida. Why not just cancel the game and hand the trophy to that team from Columbus, and to a school named for a poisonous nut?

The problem was, they had to play the game — money, contracts, and all that — and the result wasn’t just a surprise upset, with the underrated team eking out a last minute victory. Florida destroyed Ohio State like a dervish in a tearoom.

No one subscribing to conventional opinion anticipated such an outcome. Reading about the game in the paper the next day, I thought that the result wasn’t just bizarre. It was bizarro.

There are other contradictions promising to define this year. Nancy Pelosi becomes Speaker of the House (yawn — this was expected) and at her swearing in ceremony she surrounds herself with grandchildren (burp — this wasn’t). Her confederates in the House follow suit, and the Capitol is overrun with children and grandchildren of Democratic representatives being sworn in. These were the children who, unbeknownst to them, survived the abortion culture sanctified by the Pelosi’s Democratic Party for over three decades. One wonders if Pelosi, holding a grandchild in the Speaker’s rostrum, whispers in his ear, "I sure love you, Timmy. Good thing you were conceived after Mommy finished law school."

But wait. There is more bizarro-ness. Barbara Boxer, a Democratic senator from California — probably the best senator ever named for a mastiff dog — suggests that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s support of an escalation of forces in Iraq can be explained because Rice is single and childless. In a Senate hearing last week, Boxer told Rice, "Who pays the price? I’m not going to pay a personal price. My kids are too old and my grandchild is too young. You’re not going to pay a particular price, as I understand it, with an immediate family. So who pays the price? The American military and their families. And I just want to bring us back to that fact."

Rice — certainly the best Secretary of State ever named for a heavily-subsidized agricultural staple — fights back by expressing shock that her exercising of her right as a modern Republican woman to embrace a lifestyle celebrated by Mary Tyler Moore in the 1970s should affect her support of war escalation. "I thought it was OK to be single," Rice told the New York Times. "I thought it was OK not to have children," she said, signaling a rift between herself and Mary Cheney, the vice president’s daughter and soon-to-be mom.

Is it a bizarro world when the Democrats try to out-family the Republicans, and do so credibly? Someone check the dictionary.

Finally, the aforementioned escalation in Iraq is itself out of Alice in Wonderland. After the GOP suffered losses in the recent midyear elections, causing it to lose control of both houses of Congress, a contrite Bush took to the hinterlands admitting that he got the message regarding the unpopularity of the Iraq War. Would the U.S. government’s involvement in Iraq be greatly reduced next year as a result?

Apparently not. The message the president received seems to be to increase troop strength in Iraq, a policy that not only reflects an escalation called for by his rejected 2004 primary opponent, but is reminiscent of another Texas president’s response to alter the direction of another pointless war that also wasn’t going as planned. We know how that one turned out.

2007 also has brought news that Cong. Ron Paul, a Republican from Texas, is considering a run for the White House in 2008. Dr. Paul’s popularity is largely based on his efforts, as a libertarian representative, to eschew political solutions while demanding that government operate within its constitutional constraints.

This is surely an antidote for much of the bizarro that has shaped our still-new year. His candidacy will doubtlessly be ignored by a political class that is confident that someone else from a select group of Republicans and Democrats is guaranteed to win, because they always do.

Just like Ohio State?

January 16, 2007

Chris Westley [send him mail] teaches economics at Jacksonville State University, Alabama.

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From The Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics 8, no. 4 (Winter 2005): 95—97

The Church And The Market: A Catholic Defense Of The Free Economy. By Thomas E. Woods, Jr. Lanham, Maryland: Rowan And Littlefield, 2005.

When studying the origins of the Austrian School, one is often struck by the influence played by Catholic thinkers and culture during the centuries leading up to the publication of Menger’s Principles. Much recent scholarship, from the likes of Murray N. Rothbard, Barry Smith, and Alejandro A. Chafuen, presents a convincing case that the Austrian School is the logical extension of economic theory as it developed on the European continent from the time of Aquinas through the scholastic writers of the late Middle Ages, to the tracts of Cantillon, Turgot, and J.B. Say, on down to late nineteenth century Vienna.

As a result, the free market theorist is often puzzled by the many important Catholic thinkers who, since the last decade of the nineteenth century, diverge on economic issues from this tradition in favor of the theories of the New Economics (to use the preferred term of journalist Henry Hazlitt for Keynesian theory) and other economic ideas the origin of which can often be traced to Calvinist-influenced British classicism. Indeed, classical and neoclassical economics themselves result from a secular schism in the development of economic thought that began with Adam Smith and lead to Mill, Marx, Marshall, and Keynes. That the modern Catholic moral theologian is so heavily influenced by this branch is understandable given its current dominance in the economics profession. What is less understandable is the apparent ignorance these otherwise learned men and women display toward the Catholic intellectual tradition that so contradicts the thrust of their pronouncements in the area of economics.

This disparity is addressed, and mended, by Thomas E. Woods, Jr., in The Church and the Market: A Catholic Defense of the Free Economy. At 237 pages, this book is remarkable in its overwhelming reliance on Austrian thinking from past generations and the present — from Hostiensis to Hülsmann and scores of others in-between — as the antidote to some of the trendy government-friendly ideas promoted over the decades by various popes, prelates, and members of the laity.

One important argument that Woods deals with in his opening chapter is that just because the pope says it, Catholics are not bound to believe it — if "it" is not in the area of faith and morals. In other words, teachings on wage policy do not carry the same weight (for Catholics) as teachings on the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, whatever the actual merits of either. Woods writes,

I]t is perfectly unobjectionable for churchmen to say that churches should be built with the sturdiest materials in order that they might remain standing for as long as possible. But they go beyond their competence as churchmen and their ability to bind the faithful on pain of mortal sin as soon as they say, "The best building materials are A, B, and C, and the wisest techniques to use are X, Y, and Z." A churchman qua churchman has been vouchsafed no particular insight into such a question. (p. 6; italics in original)

In subsequent chapters, Woods analyzes some of the major areas where economic policy and Church teaching intersect, including prices and wages, money and banking, foreign aid, and welfare. In each instance, he utilizes Austrian theory to argue against some of the wisdom of various ecclesial recommendations for economic policy. These are free-market arguments that neoclassical economists would be unable to make given their utilitarian biases. Austrian arguments, however, based on natural law and a priori, noninductive logic, especially appeal to the Catholic mind.

But any intelligent layman would benefit from hearing Woods’s praxeological justification for market-determined wages that reflect the worker’s discounted marginal value product, and how this has increased over time due to the general increase in labor productivity that markets encourage — the opposite of what would result if papal calls for "just wage" legislation were embraced more fully. He writes,

[The papal encyclicals] Rerum Novarum, Quadragesimo Anno, and other pertinent documents simply take for granted that wage rates are determined by the more or less arbitrary fiat of employers (a statement of fact on which men of good will may disagree). . . . Likewise, in Laborem Exercens Pope John Paul II suggests that wage rate determination is more or less arbitrary when he remarks that during the early days of industrialization, entrepreneurs, following "the principle of maximum profit," attempted "to establish the lowest possible wages for the work done by the employees."

Little or no acknowledgment is made of the enormous increase in living standards that became evident among the great mass of the population from the Industrial Revolution to the present, or the substantial increase in the purchasing power of wages that occurred throughout the nineteenth century, the century of laissez-faire. This is surely one of the most outstanding features of modern European economic history, yet for some reason it features not at all in the social encyclicals. To the contrary, the social encyclicals routinely speak as if the workers’ condition had actually stagnated or even deteriorated (as indeed popular opinion continues to believe). William Luckey writes that it is "hard to excuse Leo XIII" for his statements to this effect. "Using life expectancy figures, which ought to have been available to Leo, it is clear that at the dawn of the nineteenth century life expectancy in England was about 37 years, but after 1871—5, about 20 years prior to Rerum Novarum, there is an acceleration in life expectancy with no setbacks, so that by 1900 English life expectancy is about 50. Real per capita income begins to soar immediately after 1800 in all of Europe." (p. 72)

In a similar manner, Woods invokes the arguments of Hans-Hermann Hoppe to criticize welfare’s deleterious effects on the family which shred any argument for the welfare state endorsed by Catholic Charities, the Campaign for Human Development, or any other group that draws redistributive conclusions from Catholic social teaching. Notes Woods:

If the state (at any level) takes on these tasks, though, it effectively subsidizes the breakup and dispersal of these extended family units. If the state is prepared to provide the services that until now had to be provided primarily by members of the family (or by neighbors that people had known for years), then it is much easier for one of its nuclear families to take that job in Spokane. Should times get tough, the state will always subsidize their child care, unemployment insurance, health care, and so on. The extended family is, in large part, almost the only community left in America, and it is scarcely to be believed that some Catholics, in the name of "social justice," would want to subsidize its breakup. But that is precisely what the welfare state does, trite blandishments to the contrary notwithstanding. (pp. 148—49)

There is much more of importance in The Church and the Market. Woods cites Martin de Azpilcueta (Doctor Navarrus) on price fixing, Juan de Mariana on monetary debasement, George Reisman on wages, Giles Lessines and Roger Garrison on time preferences, Shawn Ritenour on Wertfreiheit (value freedom), Joseph Salerno on economic calculation under socilaism, Sam Bostaph on the Methodenstreit, David Gordon on Mises, Wilhelm Röpke on the welfare state, Eric Schansburg on rent dissipation, Tomás de Mercado on fractional reserve banking, David Beito on fraternal organizations, James Sadowsky on so-called "wage slaves," Morgan Reynolds on unions, Gottfried Harberler on international trade, Luís Saravia de la Calle Veroñese on just prices, Bertrand de Jouvenel on monarchical centralization, Richard Vedder and Lowell Gallaway on the New Deal, Raymond de Roover on guild systems, Don Boudreaux on quality-of-life improvements, Luis de Molina on just wage theory, Joseph Schumpeter on the critics of capitalism, A.M.C. Waterman on the economically confused Vicomte Alban de Villeneuve-Bargemont, Gabriel Zanotti on choice, Domingo de Soto on usury, and more. This list barely scratches the surface of Woods’s research.

In many ways, Woods’s effort reminds me of an abridged version of Murray Rothbard’s monumental history of economic thought volumes, applied narrowly to Catholic social teaching. Readers can absorb as much about the history of economics and Austrian and (proto-Austrian) theory as they will about the state of Catholic social teaching. If so, they will get two books for the price of one — for a highly readable book that reflects much effort by a serious and gentlemanly scholar.

August 31, 2006

Chris Westley [send him mail] teaches economics at Jacksonville State University, Alabama.

DIGG THIS

One proof of Woods’s Law — that someone will eventually call to curb or abolish any market innovation that benefits the poor — can be seen by studying Wal-Mart. Here is a company that unquestionably increases the purchasing power of the poor, thus improving the poor’s standard of living and while helping the poor live more independent, autonomous, and (I would argue) virtuous lives. It’s heroic. So, following Woods’s Law, it is predictable that Wal-Mart is attacked by disparate and disgruntled — but well-funded — groups to force it to unionize its labor force and provide benefits to its workers above and beyond whatever benefits the firm and its employees would agree to voluntarily.

That these groups are funded by unions who extract money from members under the threat of force raises moral questions that are not my focus today. Still, I wonder how much more effective Wal-Mart could be, and by extension how much better off the poor would be, if it didn’t have to divert resources to combat their efforts.

A report issued by the research firm Global Insight last November identifies another economic benefit that occurs when Wal-Mart opens a new store in a community. In a broad study of the economic impact of Wal-Mart on the U.S. economy, researchers found that on the county level, Wal-Mart "serves to stimulate the overall development of the retail sector that leads to an overall positive impact (in terms of retail employment) for the counties in which Wal-Mart has expanded." (You can download the 64-page report here. It discusses many more areas than retail employment.) In other words, just as Southwest Airlines forces competition to become more efficient in those markets it enters (this known as the Southwest Effect), so does Wal-Mart affect the structure of county-level retail employment (the Wal-Mart Effect). Again, as a result of this activity, the poor benefit.

Wal-Mart’s economic effects on the U.S. economy, in the aggregate, support this point. According to the report, in 2004, Wal-Mart was

responsible for 210,000 net jobs, a level of total factor productivity (general economic efficiency of the economy) that is 0.75% higher … than it would have been. Nominal wages are 2.2% lower, but given that consumer prices are 3.1% lower, real disposable income is 0.9% higher than it would have been in a world without Wal-Mart.

It seems contradictory, in light of this, that today’s world with Wal-Mart includes the establishment of a Communist Party committee in two of its Chinese stores, a concession the firm probably thinks is necessary if it is to be allowed by the Chinese government to establish a larger market presence there. (It currently has 60 stores in China.) This news, followed a week after it was announced that Wal-Mart would recognize trade unions in China, has been called a double-standard by a spokesman for Wal-Mart Watch, one of the firm’s union-funded detractors. "Wal-Mart’s applying a complete double standard here," said Nu Wexler. "Why are they [sic] comfortable with it in one country and fighting it in another?"

Wexler is right. It is a double-standard, but one forced on it by the State. Because economic laws are universal, this policy will have the same harmful economic effects that unions have in the U.S. People will go unemployed because they can’t find work at the union wages. Many of them will then become dependent on, and supporters of, the party in power. Unskilled workers will remain unskilled because they will be denied the opportunity to develop the skills plus the work ethics and values that are only learned in the workplace. Prices will exhibit upward pressures as the firm tries to recoup costs incurred both complying with union regulations and proving that it is complying with union regulations.

By fighting unionization in the United States, Wal-Mart does have a double-standard being forced upon it. All this proves, however, is that for groups like Wal-Mart Watch to force the unionization of Wal-Mart’s labor force, they must agitate for the U.S. government to be a little more like the Chinese government than it already is.

It also proves that the effects of Woods’s Law are relatively harmless, except when governments get involved on the side of those calling for the repeal of market innovations. When that happens, violence is introduced where it previously did not exist, and as always, the poor suffer more than they otherwise would.

August 28, 2006

Chris Westley [send him mail] teaches economics at Jacksonville State University, Alabama.

~ Gideon Levy in Haaretz, Tuesday, July 18, 2006

Is the Middle East cursed?

Up until last week, one might have thought not, because there had been relative calm there — relative, of course, to the situation that existed in 1948, 1956, 1967, and 1973, when many thought that confrontations in that unhappy region had the potential of becoming nuclear.

Today, it seems that those who consider that time of relative peace a mere break in the bloodshed are having their way, now that fighting has broken out between Israel and Hamas and Hizbollah, in response to provocations from both groups. The results, in terms of the loss of human life and increase of human suffering, are nothing less than diabolical.

But why now? Israel didn’t have to respond to abductions and killings of Israeli soldiers by Hizbollah one week later (two events which, however uncalled for, also didn’t happen in a vacuum) by dropping bombs in Beirut and Gaza.

Peaceful options were still available — and morally required.

If you disagree with this, then you must also disagree with the consensus (however weak) regarding the conflagration by the leaders of the G8 summit that just ended. You must disagree with the moral sense of the pope. And you must consider the lives of the abducted employees of the Israeli state to be of greater worth than the hundreds of innocent civilians that have been killed by Israel’s bombs since then.

Whenever such fighting breaks out, I am reminded of a conversation I had with a Palestinian student several years ago. A Christian, he told me stories (told to him by his grandfather) about life in Palestine before 1948, when atrocities were rarer and it seemed like Christians, Jews, and Muslims coexisted in relative peace. He was mystified as to why this era had to end.

Having recently read Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s Democracy: The God That Failed, I remember telling him that the creation of a state by any of these groups would naturally foment instability by introducing the legal use of force to the area. I’m sure that a Christian or a Muslim state would also have created the volatility that has characterized the area over the last six decades.

It has nothing to do with religion. Rather, it has to do with the nature of the state itself.

From this perspective, the Middle East is cursed, because the existence of a state overrides whatever mutually beneficial arrangements that might otherwise promote civilization. To argue this has nothing to do with love or hate for Israel. You can, after all, love your country and dislike your government, and in the same way, you can love Israel without equating it with the Israeli state. And it is the existence of the state that causes conflicts such as the one we are witnessing in the Holy Land today — conflicts that have been the rule, rather than the exception, since 1948.

With apologies to those who support the creation of a Palestinian state, what the Middle East needs is less government. This is because as statism recedes from the public square, trade and the interdependencies that it creates flourish, making war difficult. With trade, armaments and inflation are not the only costs that war planners take into consideration. When they must also consider loss in gains from trade, belligerents are more likely to find peaceful means of conflict resolution.

This is why Middle East peace requires, if not the abolition of government, then at least less socialist ones, with decentralized power structures and unhindered avenues for voluntary human interaction. Otherwise, war is as likely as night follows day. War, as noted Ludwig von Mises in Human Action (The Scholars Edition, pp. 680—681), rather than being the result of capitalism (which creates those interdependencies necessary for peace), is actually the result of "anticapitalist policies designed to check the functioning of capitalism. [War is] an outgrowth of the various governments’ interference with business, of trade and migration barriers and discrimination against foreign labor, foreign products, and foreign capital."

To deny this requires loads of hypocrisy. So we see the United States government denounce the violence while ignoring its role as the chief arms supplier to the region. We see it bemoan the deaths of innocent civilians in Lebanon when as many as 100,000 innocent civilians have been killed in Iraq since 2003. We see governments, which claim to exist to protect and serve, engage in terrible actions that ensure a less secure future.

This applies not only to Israel, whose citizens must know that governments cannot kill and dismember the innocent without creating blowback later. It also applies to the U.S., which funds Israel’s military. Many survivors in southern Beirut know that bombs that destroy their families and infrastructure have "Made in the USA" stamped on them. One of the costs of this stamp must be the threat of retaliation at home, as well as the loss of liberty that results when the federal government expands in the name of homeland security.

Such are the consequences of rejecting peace and prosperity for the language of force. Until the state’s influence in the Middle East is removed or significantly reduced, its will continue to curse it in deadly cycles.

July 20, 2006

Chris Westley [send him mail] teaches economics at Jacksonville State University, Alabama.

I rank our disposing of the national pacifier among our most important joint decisions, right up there with deciding to get married or where to raise our children.

Our problems with television would be familiar for many. Watching the tube was time consuming, taking us away from other activities. We knew we’d receive much more long-term benefit, in terms of living a fuller life, from reading books, being engaged with others socially, and bonding with our kids. Also, we found it quite controlling. We’d catch ourselves being interested in television characters who in real life we would consider morons. While there was often programming we found worthwhile — movies on American Movie Classics and the occasional Letterman monologue, for instance — such programming was rare.

But we’d still watch.

I remembered an incident when I lived in an apartment complex in San Antonio. Walking from the parking lot to our apartment involved passing over 20 identical living rooms, and one evening, after taking out the garbage during one of Clinton’s televised addresses, I noticed that every one of these living rooms had the president’s happy mug on a television screen. Every one. Having read Orwell in a high school English class — something that was common before the federalization of public education — I found this development appalling. Was this Texas or Oceana?

Also, our decision to out TV came from wanting to make a conscious choice not to live out lives watching other people live. Life is vicarious enough. Why add to it?

So I called our cable company and asked to have our service disconnected. The cable lady thought I was joking. She then reacted as though we were on life support and asking to have the oxygen tube removed. "Darlin’," she said, "you can’t live life without TV."

Nonetheless, we sold our 19-inch television and put the proceeds toward a 13-inch combination TV/VCR that we kept in a closet. (This has since been replaced with a similar TV/DVD player combo.) While we watch occasional movies and other offerings available on DVDs, we often watch television when staying in hotel rooms or relatives’ houses, events that occur two or three times a year. Nonetheless, over the last decade, we have been oblivious to several popular (or notorious) shows that have since come and gone. I have never seen a reality show (because these came about after we quit television), and only recently figured out what Bill O’Reilly looked like. My son was 6years old when he realized that television had uses that didn’t involve removable media.

This arrangement allows us to use television on our terms. We use it. It doesn’t use us. But that cable lady had a point. She knew that we were consigning ourselves to a life of not getting the conversation at many dinner parties or of cutting away from a common bond that connects many people in society.

She was also right given the pervasiveness of television in the public square. They are in bathrooms, restaurants, cars, sporting events, waiting rooms, airplanes, barber shops, and even Wal-Marts. I don’t know if they are in some churches, but I wouldn’t be surprised, given how many modern churches have taken on the appearance of television studios. No one escapes television completely.

And she was right in terms of public discussion. The small talk at most social gatherings center on what people are currently watching. (Hint: If you ever want some bore to leave you alone at a party, simply tell him you don’t watch TV.) My college students often support classroom arguments by referencing something they saw on CNN or the History Channel.

This is a particular area in which television’s costs are great. Becoming informed takes some work. This traditionally involved reading books, newspapers, and magazines to develop opinions about what you believed (or didn’t). Unfortunately, some of the most uninformed people I meet each day receive their news solely from television, which reduces complex social problems into emotional, highly manipulative one- or two-minute segments.

And these people vote.

The Framers of the Constitution created a decentralized republic, and explicitly not a democracy, because they knew that the latter tended toward centralization and tyranny. Even Jefferson believed that the small role actual voting would play in the new country would only be tolerable with an educated electorate. Not only would he hate television, he’d despair over a culture that promotes democracy and television as goods that must be universally available. What does it mean for freedom when so many voters are only informed to the extent possible through CNN and Fox News?

To take one example, consider some recent poll data. Forty-seven per cent of Americans believed that Saddam Hussein helped plan 9/11 and 44 per cent believed that the hijackers were Iraqi; 61 per cent thought that Saddam had been a serious threat to the U.S., and 76 per cent said the Iraqis are now better off. None of this is true, but it is understandable when so many in the electorate depend on television to be informed.

Don’t think that the political class does not appreciate this development, because voters — whom the political class ostensibly serves — are much easier to manipulate when they develop opinions from what they see on TV. No wonder the federal government plans to spend billions of dollars subsidizing the transfer from analog transmissions to digital ones. Digital television has become the latest civil right, and a convenient one for holders of political power.

We chuckle when we hear friends rail against typical television fare, because we used to do that. The same people often complain about there not being enough hours in the day to accomplish all that they want. We chuckle at that too. But when we suggest dropping the one or two hours each day spent in front of the tube, we’re the ones to get chuckled at. For many, going without television really is like going without oxygen.

My graceful wife gave up the tube easily. Not me. I remember doing things that my dad does when he gives up smoking. (My dad quits smoking several times a year. It’s his hobby.) I’d become irritable and my mind would be on the corner of our house where that magnetic box used to be, sort of like how my dad thinks about the drawers where he stores his Terryton’s. Over time, however, that corner became smaller in my mind as the benefits that came from dropping television grew.

For me, the benefits are much greater than simply being more productive during the day, although that certainly is a plus. On many weeknights, my 5-year-old daughter and I play board games and go for walks. After she goes to bed, my 9-year-old son reads books while my wife and I sit down and engage in an activity called "talking." I think our family is closer than it would otherwise be, although I can never know for sure. I am sure our kids are less aware of the material world than their television-watching peers — and they seem more innocent. Surely this has something to do with the fact that they are not exposed, on a daily basis, to sex as a mere consumption good or to the sports-worshiping culture that pervades much television.

So every Lent, which begins next month, I remember that time in 1995 when my family decided to enter through the narrow gate that brought us into a world without television. Giving up pacifiers is never easy. In our case, it was important for our living a more purposeful and happy life.

February 4, 2006

Chris Westley [send him mail] teaches economics at Jacksonville State University, Alabama.

Chambers of commerce, take note: The initial impression of most any city visited for the first time is given by the man who drives you from the airport to the hotel. In my experience, he’s an immigrant who loves his job and his adopted city, even when job and city are in New England, where the temperature is 70 degrees lower that it is in the land he left.

It probably compensates these men that New Englanders seem every bit as friendly as Southerners. This was a pleasant surprise, but it shouldn’t have been. Markets place politeness and respect in the individual’s self interest, and Boston, which is surely the capital of modern American liberalism, still has a private sector that perseveres in spite of the Bostonian embrace of various levels of government. If the American South is friendlier than the North (as the stereotype says), it is only because the public sector has not yet made as strong of a foothold in that region, allowing bourgeois values (like politeness and respect) to persist.

But not everything that persists is a good thing. For instance, whenever I am in a northern city, I am struck by the homeless men who dot the downtown. It’s not that such men aren’t found in cities in the South, but they are less widespread, suggesting that this problem is dealt with better in places below the Mason-Dixon Line. In Boston, homelessness is in-your-face, and those who devote their lives to alleviating it are true saints. This includes the soup kitchen workers, shelter providers, counselors, social workers — and even (and perhaps especially) free market economists who better understand the relationship between homelessness and rent controls, housing ordinances, and tax rates, as well as the deleterious effects of policies that destroy family bonds. Ludwig von Mises wrote that there cannot be too much of a correct theory. Homelessness is but one example of the destructive effects of policies based on incorrect ones.

I saw some homeless men warming up in the upscale Copley Square Mall, where — wonder of wonders — a Catholic church rubs shoulders with Saks Fifth Avenue and Sharper Image. (The mall was connected to my hotel.) Its priests, members of the Oblates of the Virgin Mary, offer Mass and provide sacraments to shoppers and visitors. What struck me was how well the church fit in with otherwise materialistic surroundings, symbolizing the natural relationship between faith and markets.

But what have become natural to Massachusetts are taxes, which are so high that if Sam Adams were still alive he would have long since moved to Alabama or some other place where government officials are kept in check (at least in relative terms). So a ninety cent cup of coffee back home costs a dollar forty here, and the hotels charge for services that would be comped elsewhere — because people, not firms, pay taxes. The results of such massive and coerced wealth transfers are that (i) corrupt local officials are often in the news because of the predictably corrupting influence of all that money, (ii) there are higher prices for almost everything, and as a result (iii) the poor suffer. Interestingly, one of the local papers I read editorialized whether Massachusetts would lose congressional districts following the next census, noting that it dodged a bullet by not losing any following the last one. But guess what? Congressional districts go where the people go, and the people generally go to places where they are less pilfered.

Finally, downtown Boston seems to have been invaded, not only by Starbucks (which was expected), but by Dunkin’ Donuts (which wasn’t). Is it the destiny of Bostonians to be overweight but wide awake?

Much of Beantown is charming, the remnants of an earlier, less-planned era, and well worth the visit.

January 10 , 2006

Chris Westley [send him mail] teaches economics at Jacksonville State University, Alabama.

What if you knew for sure that the cute little baby burbling and smiling at you from his stroller in the park was going to grow up to be another Hitler, responsible for a global cataclysm and millions of deaths? Would you be justified in picking up a rock and bashing his adorable head in? Wouldn’t you be morally depraved if you didn’t?

Or what if a mad scientist developed a poison so strong that two drops in the water supply would kill everyone in Chicago? And you could destroy the poison, but only by killing the scientist and 10 innocent family members? Should you do it?

Or what if an international terrorist planted a nuclear bomb somewhere in Manhattan, set to go off in an hour and kill a million people. You’ve got him in custody, but he won’t say where the bomb is. Is it moral to torture him until he gives up the information?

Kinsley, to his credit, answers no to each of these cases, in a response to a pro-torture argument made in — where else — the Weekly Standard, by neoconservative writer Charles Krauthammer. Kinsley’s response, though based on basic morality, strives to differentiate between the point at which such acts of torture would be justified. (Surprise: Krauthammer would use torture before Kinsley.)

But there are other objections to these justifications of torture. The first is based on efficiency grounds. It is well established that information extracted via torture is not reliable. Let’s say some high level terrorist is tortured, he spills some information, agents of the U.S. government act on that information, and nothing happens. So what? Maybe nothing was going to happen in the first place. Torture advocates must claim otherwise — how else can they look themselves in the mirror? Economists call such outcomes credence goods: goods for which, once purchased, the consumer can never know whether he or she actually received it.

Second, is it ever possible to look at any baby and know it will be a Hitler? Of course not, so while the argument may be fun to think through, it doesn’t have any practical applications and it justifies nothing. If it did, it would imply that it can be moral to torture or kill many in the hope of catching the one threat in the group, a position embraced by Herod. (Maybe we should call the torture advocates the neo-Herodians.)

Third, the torture debate obfuscates the real issue. Should we allow torture to stop bad things — worse things — from happening? This is simply Bentham-ite utilitarianism, and it is an old controversy drawing attention from the question — that neither Kinsley nor Krauthammer asks — of why is there is today a heightened threat of terrorism. Would the threat be moot if the U.S. empire were rolled back, if most of our overseas military bases were shuttered, if we stopped fighting the Israeli government’s wars and supporting its military to the tune of several billions of dollars each year? If we focused more on fostering commerce between nations, rather than military alliances, as urged by George Washington in his Farewell Address? All this torture talk draws attention away from other more relevant issues that make the threat of terrorism exist in the first place.

Of course, there is another theme here as well. The State claims the right to bring life in the world, to end it, to control the weather — to do anything. To deny its right to torture is to deny its omnipotence. Some people argue that the medieval scholastics’ development of Just War theory actually served to provide the king with the moral justification to engage in war. Maybe today’s torture debate is serving a similar purpose: to provide justification for the State to engage in torture. One could argue, after all, that people like Kinsley and Krauthammer are this generation’s version of Francisco Suarez and Hugo Grotius.

But unlike the great Scholastics thinkers — who debated everything — the neoliberals and neoconservatives of today consider some areas of inquiry off-limits, at least when they might conclude with moral constraints on government. They will wring their hands about torture while they debate Sen. John McCain’s desire to regulate it, but let’s not fool ourselves that such a debate ever comes close to the heart of the matter.

So I’d like to propose a counter thought experiment, one that is close to the heart of the matter and therefore avoided by D.C.’s favorite media pundits. Assume that it is recognized that large, centralized nation-states threaten liberty and foment both war and terror, relative to nations characterized with more decentralized power structures. Surely this is the lesson of the 20th century, as well as this first decade of the 21st. Would it be moral to dismantle them?

December 19 , 2005

Chris Westley [send him mail] is an assistant professor of economics at Jacksonville State University, Alabama.

This culture is necessary for soldiers to shoot and kill their fellow man, and sometimes their families, without conscience. The armed forces, therefore, place much effort on training soldiers to follow simple abstract "rules of engagement" and to think of their targets as something less than human, and a threat.

If successful, such training convinces soldiers that the enemies of the state are not people, but subhuman Krauts or Gooks or (like in Star Wars) simply clones.

These thoughts came to mind recently when a colleague and I discussed a local man who recently returned from Iraq. A member of the Special Forces, his job, as he saw it, was to kill as many "bad guys" as possible, a job he evidently carried out with relish. To hear him talk, he has killed hundreds of Iraqis since 2003, many of them in houses and mosques that military intelligence believed hid so-called insurgents — a blanket term for anyone who dared rebel against a foreign occupying army.

In many cases, the rules called for killing every adult male found in a targeted house or mosque, as well as any women and children perceived as threatening. The overriding, yet implicit, rule was to do your job, protect your buddies, and return alive. One gets the impression that he wasn’t very discriminating about whom he pointed his gun at when he barged into houses in the various non-green zones that characterize most of Iraq.

Perhaps his blunt-talk was his way of obtaining the redemption one normally receives in the confessional, but he gave no indication that he cared. His job (as he put it) was "to kill as many of them over there before they kill us over here." In other words: It’s not murder if it’s self-defense.

Based on what one hears on talk radio nowadays, his comments seem pretty mainstream. But they deserve criticism.

First, they presuppose an agreement with the policies of the U.S. government in Iraq, granting them a sort of democratic imprimatur and absolving him of his actions. One problem with this type of reasoning is that whether he agrees with policies or not is irrelevant. He is just another form of federal employee, albeit one with a decent pay grade, and like any federal employee, he is simply carrying out politicians’ policies. The difference between him, on the ground in Iraq, and a civil servant working in the Social Security System, is one of degree. Does anyone care if they agree with policies? In both cases, they are paid to follow orders.

Second, the idea that freedom requires such killing does not stand up to critical analysis. Actions such as his, multiplied across a region as a matter of policy, feed terrorism and cause blowback that make us less safe. Such policies create long-standing hatreds and acts of vengeance, so that a defense of freedom today results in actions that require more defense of freedom in the future. It is a deadly circle — a circle with the same end as those described by Dante.

What’s more, what good is fighting for freedom abroad if doing so results in less freedom at home? The great irony of our time is that the expansion of the warfare state, even when justified for the defense of freedom, has the effect of expanding the welfare state. It is no mistake that the growth of government since 2001 has been compared to that of the 1930s. That is the trade-off, and it explains why military empire and socialism go hand in hand. Spare us such defenses of freedom.

Finally, his comments reminded me of Hitler’s words from almost 70 years ago, on the Nazis’ need "to bring up a violently active, intrepid and brutal youth." Military empires nurture people who can kill with no conscience. Their very existence, deployed in over 100 countries around the world, should make freedom-loving Americans stop and take notice how far we have moved from republic to empire, a transition much feared by the Founding Fathers.

They might start by reading the words of Allan Carlson, from his essay in the 1997 book, The Costs of War:

[I]t is time for persons of the political right to cast off lingering delusions about the "conservative traditions" of the military — traditions such as cultivation of the "arts of war," a sense of duty, and manhood, or defense of one’s family and inherited way of life. Over the last 50 years, these principles have had ever-diminishing influence. Rather, we face in America at the end of the 20th century something closer to Cromwell’s "New Model Army," one being used to re-engineer our society to serve the total state, which in turn engages in a perpetual social and moral revolution.

Carlson echoes the concerns of Ludwig von Mises in his 1944 book Omnipotent Government. Offensive war is good for little more than the spread of the total state. And as that grows, civilization itself is corrupted.

Chris Westley [send him mail] is an assistant professor of economics at Jacksonville State University, Alabama.

You know Hunter Thompson? He was the irascible writer who invented his own genre of journalism back in the early 1970s and had been living off of the reputation forged at that time ever since. Angry and drug-crazed, the author of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas was the nightmare you hoped your daughter never brought home. His gonzo writing was great to the extent that it spoke truth to a corrupt establishment, but wanting to the extent that it embraced 20th century nihilism.

To understand this nihilism, the absence of hope, is to understand the life, and the death, of Hunter S. Thompson.

Thompson wrote in such a way that didn’t recognize any reality outside of himself. His very style of writing, whether it was about the Hell’s Angels or the 1972 presidential election, drew as much, if not more, attention to the person behind the typewriter as to the subjects under consideration. This approach was a novelty 30 years ago, but today, an age of celebrity reporters and Internet bloggers, it seems hardly path-breaking.

Thompson represented that small segment of the baby boom generation that associated getting old with everything bad. For these people, life is nothing more than one big consumption good, with the consuming being best during the physical prime. When Abbie Hoffman said that no one over 30 should be trusted, everyone under 30 recognized that sentiment and smiled in amusement. When his generation passed the age of 30, they had long since figured out there was more to life than the personal and the political. But when Hoffman killed himself at age 53, they knew that they had lost a man that took himself a little too seriously, and who, for all his passion, never really got the hang of how to live.

The same could be said for Hunter Thompson, who, in a macabre fashion, planned his death as if it were just another book promotion, complete with having his ashes blown out of a cannon on his Colorado property. At 67, the pains of old age were catching up to him. He had an artificial hip, a bad back, a limp, and a drinking problem, while the newest generation of writers knew him, if they new him at all, as a columnist for the ESPN web site. Why go on living if doing so requires pain? Why grow old in darkness when sticking a .45 in your mouth means you might become another Hemingway or Kerouac?

His wife of less-than-two years seems to think so. "… I know he is much more powerful and alive now than ever before," Anita Beymuk Thompson told the Denver Post following his death. "He is in all of our hearts. His death was a triumph of his own human spirit because this is what he wanted. He lived and died like a champion."

Grieving widows can say silly things, but it is hard to imagine Priscilla Presley making such a statement about her husband after he was found, disgraced, in that Memphis bathroom. People that go out like champions don’t have their blood and brains sponged up by county health workers following self-inflicted gunshots. Champions know that suffering is an essential element in living happy and accomplished lives. They know growing old is a gift that allows a fuller appreciation for better times and for the inherent goodness of life.

Thank goodness most baby boomers don’t think this way, but for those that do — for those who are just starting to qualify for Social Security and who only know the kind of intimacy that is Viagra-induced — Thompson provided a heck of an example of an exit strategy. Is suicide now hip? Will it now be considered a good career move? If it wasn’t for this, Thompson’s death would simply be pathetic. Instead, it is tragic.

Contrast Thompson’s life example with that of John Paul II. The 84-year-old pontiff, whose hospital visits made front-page news the week of Thompson’s suicide, has Parkinson’s disease and severe arthritis. His hardships last week are the most recent manifestations of his difficulties. As long ago as 1998, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger would write about him: "The pain is written on his face. His figure is bent, and he needs to support himself on his pastoral staff. He leans on the cross, on the crucifix…." By all accounts, he has embraced his suffering in ways that would baffle Thompson and his followers.

And yet, the Holy Father is revered because most people know, if only implicitly, that men and women need the examples of those who persevere through suffering if only to provide hope — a divine mystery seemingly absent from Hunter S. Thompson’s life — that life is worth living.

Living without hope, after all, is the hardest life of all. It is a life that ends with fear and loathing.

Writer and journalist Hunter S. Thompson died on Sunday afternoon, February 20th, in the kitchen of his home in Woody Creek, Colorado. He stuck a .45 caliber handgun in his mouth while his wife listened on the phone and his son and daughter-in-law were in another room of his house. May he rest in peace.

Chris Westley [send him mail] teaches economics at Jacksonville State University, Alabama.

But until then, now might be a good time to consider who were the winners and losers of Tuesday’s election.

Winner: George W. Bush. Bush beat a Massachusetts liberal who shared the initials of John F. Kennedy but who actually was the second coming of Michael Dukakis. That qualifies as a victory, but only in the same sense as when the University of Oklahoma football team beats Tulsa Community College.

Losers: John F. Kerry and the Democratic Party. Kerry can now return to being an ignored and irrelevant northeastern liberal and the Democratic Party can now resume its lurch towards to minority party status. A cursory glance at the election map shows where the Democrats maintain popularity: the entire West Coast, pockets of the Midwest along the Great Lakes, and the Northeast.

This distribution corresponds with the geographic distribution of State-friendly economic schools of thought originally noted by Murray Rothbard in a 1989 Forbes article. The sharply divided America of 2000 is now gone; it is mostly red, although much of the Republicans’ support is based on a redistributionist appeal made possible by concerns milked after 9/11. This is nothing to be proud of.

Winner: Hillary Clinton. Let’s not forget that John Kerry was the clear choice of the Clinton wing of the Democratic Party precisely because he was not seen as being as strong of a candidate as Howard Dean. A Democratic victory on Tuesday would have spelled doom for Clinton’s chances of making a credible run for the White House. The next election will be her only shot. Look for Hillary to start making the rounds expected of a 2008 frontrunner later this spring.

Losers: The people of Falluja. The siege of Falluja, long on hold out of concern for the electoral costs of the assault, can now begin. While this is too bad for the many innocent women and children who will be murdered in the name of American Empire, it underscores the extent to which the Iraqi conflict exists primarily for the career advancement of politicians desperate for another Cold War (and the power, prestige, and funding that goes with it).

But who will cry for the innocents that are killed in the process? Those who access al-Jazeera for news will, if only because they are the ones most likely to know about it. The accompanying anger, and the terror it foments, will make losers of us all.

Winners: The American Catholic bishops. The bishops were apoplectic about the possibility of a pro-abortion Catholic in the White House. After all, Kerry’s Catholic modernism, the product of the hip post-Vatican II Catholic culture, would have bitten the hands the fed it, both literally and spiritually, by legitimizing those who dissent from Church doctrine.

The bishops created "Kerry Catholicism" with the self-centered spirituality epitomized by the destructive imposition of a horizontal Mass and its sappy music, loose dress, and worldly priests. His loss on Tuesday allows the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops to avoid dealing with the ramifications of its leadership, even if it forced it into an uneasy alignment with the War Party. Such uneasiness is bound to continue as long as the American Catholic church resumes trying to define the culture and stops trying to bend to it.

Loser: The state of Massachusetts. From its earliest days as a colony, the Bay State has been a dependable exponent of the government’s role in solving every problem, and today, it is so far removed from the mainstream of American culture that it has now provided two pieces of fodder for the Bush family cause. The Curse didn’t end with the Red Sox.

Take heart, Bay Staters. Bush is likely to continue expanding government at a pace that would never have happened under gridlock. But also take note that for every dollar you send to the federal government, you receive a mere $.78 back (according to the latest computations of the Northeast-Midwest Institute). If you were to secede, you could fund your current level of government spending at all levels and have money left over. Imagine a free and independent state of Massachusetts. Not only could you then have a President Kerry, your college basketball teams could win your national championship every year.

Winners: Everyone who knows that living a full life does not require a devotion to politics. We were sick of the election by the summer and are grateful that this quadrennial national nightmare is again over. In a free society, whoever is president is truly irrelevant, so urgent, angst-driven presidential elections only remind us of how far removed we have become from republican ideals. Those who strive to ignore sick DC culture can do so again much more easily now that this latest advanced auction of stolen goods is behind us.

Chris Westley [send him mail] teaches economics at Jacksonville State University, Alabama.

The emperor was Karl I, the last Hapsburg monarch, and in a ceremony at the Vatican presided over by Pope John Paul II, he was declared blessed. To many, including myself, Karl of Austria was a man of holy virtue who happened to be one of the last symbols of the dying European order that existed before the ascendancy of mass democracy. To others, he was old-fashioned and anachronistic man obsessed with prolonging the monarchy.

Tell me which side you are on and I will tell you your politics. If you are Catholic, I will tell you whether you lean toward orthodoxy or toward modernism.

Being declared blessed by the Catholic Church is the last step before canonization as a saint. The Church claims no monopoly power on the saint creation process. When one is declared blessed or is canonized, the Church formally acknowledges a previously determined fact. Not all saints are declared explicitly by the Church. Francis of Assisi was a saint well before the Church stated so; likewise, my grandmother could easily be a saint whether or not the Church declares her so after she dies.

It is a complicated process involving the office of an advocatus diaboli, requiring at least two proven miracles. The standard of evidence is weighted against approval. Having one declared a saint is not as simple as a perfunctory submittal of names of some dearly departed for honor roll. While sometimes the process appears to be on a fast-track — see the upcoming canonization of Blessed Mother Theresa of Calcutta, the first bona fide saint of post-Vatican II Catholic culture — others take centuries. The great Edmund Campion was declared a saint over four centuries following his martyrdom.

Since there are, at any given time, many saintly people among the deceased among whom the Church can choose to consider for canonization, there are sometimes questions about ulterior motives. While there is little doubt of the correctness of Karl’s cause, there may be other good reasons for the Church to promote it at this point in history.

First, Karl was a man of enormous personal piety and courage who stood athwart the rise of the nation-states and their perpetual wars for perpetual peace — wars which we can date with the opening skirmishes of the First World War up to this week’s bombing of Samarra in Iraq. During World War I, when the carnage reached 6000 lives per day, only two figures were seen as providing serious peace plans capable of ending it: Pope Benedict XV and Karl I.

Karl’s efforts to promote peace were more than noblesse oblige, but a Christian obligation — what he called a "solemn duty before God, towards the peoples of his Empire and all the belligerents." The French writer Anatole France wrote that "[t]he Emperor Karl has offered to make peace; here is the only decent man who has appeared in the course of this war — they didn’t listen to him. . . he sincerely wants peace, so everyone detests him." Having the right people detest you is a sign that you are imitating Christ.

Upholding the belief that governments should be bound by higher moral law, a profoundly Catholic (and anti-neoconservative) idea at least since St. Augustine’s City of God, he refused to go along with the new rules of war that applied to the treatment of prisoners and to the care of civilians. He banned, for example, the Sherman-esque practice of bombing of cities. As noted by the National Catholic Reporter’s John Allen, Karl "forbade his troops … to plunder, to engage in wanton destruction, or to use mustard gas. He also banned dueling."

We live today in a similar era when new rules of warfare are urged by the reigning secular powers. Pre-emptive war and fourth generation warfare, the dispersion of nuclear weaponry, the rise of public and private terrorism, and a hated U.S. military empire so vast that it makes the Britain’s empire-builders look like amateurs — all call for the emergence of leaders like Karl. With his beatification, the Vatican may be suggesting a new role model for the political class of today.

Second, the beatification of Karl can be seen as a shot in the arm for Christian central Europe. These were the countries of the last stages of the Hapsburg Empire that suffered much during the 20th century. They first acquired socialist governments, thanks to the efforts of the arch-democrat (and G.W. Bush foreign policy forerunner) Woodrow Wilson. Later, they were among the spoils of World War II that Franklin Roosevelt cheerfully handed over to his friend Stalin during the closing days of World War II like poker chips in a card game.

Military subjugation and various levels of police state rule were established, where the only acceptable worship was State worship and the only legal shrines were those to the Great Leader. Roosevelt’s poor judgment and Soviet favoritism would turn Catholic and Protestant churches in former Hapsburg countries into martyr factories for the next 50 years. Today, these countries are finally free of destructive communist rule and faced with the task of rebuilding their civilization and culture. Rome may be saying that they can look to the Hapsburg family as they start to reclaim their roots.

These roots surely defined Austria. It is hard not to wonder whether another motive for the advancement of Karl’s cause at the present time is for the Catholic Church in Austria, which is currently mired in scandal and, after eight decades of dependence on the Austrian government, with church membership rolls at record low levels. Clearly, the Catholic Austria of 1900 no longer exists, thanks in part to needless compromises with modernism that it made over the subsequent 100 years.

But the Austrian Church is not the only arm of the Catholic Church to deserve such blame, and this is perhaps the most important aspect of Karl I’s cause. The European society that he represented was vertical, from the steeples in its ancient churches, to the Latin Mass that fed Christendom since the days of the early Church, to the civic life that placed the man on the street answerable to a king who answered to the Pope, who, as Vicar of Christ, answered to God.

This order, which had been deteriorating for centuries before Karl’s birth, established and nurtured western civilization, and the Church abandons elements of it at great peril to itself and the culture. The social order that produced men like Karl I created many saints. It is hard to think of similar saints emerging from today’s horizontal society (summed up so well in Louisiana’s everyman Huey Long’s phrase, "every man’s a king") — unless they are created through red and white martyrdom.

Many of the problems facing the Church today are self-inflicted, resulting from similar compromises with 20th-century secularism and epitomized in the Second Vatican Council and its damaging aftermath. They stem from prelates lacking the courage and holy optimism of men like Karl I. One can only hope that his example and his intercession will help the Church reclaim its roots as well.

An aside: The Hapsburg family has maintained a special relationship with the Austrian school of economics in many ways — for instance, the Crown Prince Rudolph funded the academic career of Carl Menger, while Karl I’s oldest son Otto and Ludwig von Mises were close friends until Mises’s death in 1973. Today, Otto von Hapsburg is a 91-year-old retired member of the European Parliament, and his son, Karl Ludwig, was the keynote speaker at the Mises Institute’s 15th anniversary dinner in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1997. Mises’ intellectual disciple Murray Rothbard, very much a man of Catholic sensibilities if not the Catholic faith, once remarked that the 20th century should be repealed. Karl I died four years before Rothbard’s birth. One hopes that they have had the chance to meet.

The feast day of Blessed Karl I is October 21, the anniversary of his marriage to Princess Zita in 1911. He proposed to her in front of the Blessed Sacrament at the Marian Shrine of Mariazell, when the tragic murder of his uncle, the Hapsburg Archduke of Austria Franz Ferdinand, was still three years away. Blessed Karl of Austria, ora pro nobis.

Chris Westley [send him mail] teaches economics at Jacksonville State University, Alabama.

One can hear Rush and Sean and O’Reilly clucking in approval at the poll results. Ronald the Great compares well with Bill the Pill! They knew it all along.

But there seems to be something amiss with this poll. What, after all, was the purpose of conducting it on June 18-20, so soon following that highly-rated Reagan Funeral miniseries on the Nostalgia Channel? Could it be that suspect timing created desired results?

Of course it could. The fact that the results are being trumpeted at all tells us much about the public relations concerns of the federal government during a time when its wealth-transferring and debt-creating activity is at an all-time high and when undeclared and unconstitutional pre-emptive wars are the order of the day.

To those in power, Reagan will always be deemed as a more important historical figure than the pathetic Clinton. Reagan will be remembered for his smile, grandfatherly countenance, and Cold War rhetoric that coincided with the Soviets’ inevitable collapse — a collapse that had long been predicted by thinkers as disparate at Ludwig von Mises and Winston Churchill.

Clinton, on the other hand, will be remembered as the arch-nihilist who wondered what the meaning if the word "is" is. He will be seen as the accidental president who presided during an era sandwiched between the Cold War and the War on Terrorism. His administration will be judged as one robbed of moral authority that can only be achieved during times of international crisis.

While both men were equal masters of televised media, Reagan’s persona was that of a man you would like to have as a neighbor. Clinton’s was that of the charming huckster who is always after your wallet (or your sister). According to syndicated columnist Debra Saunders, his "genius has been in getting the public to root for him even when everyone knew he probably was lying." By his second term, many who were on to his shtick were beginning to wonder if perhaps all successful presidents were simply effective liars.

This explains much of this year’s dose of Reagan worship, planned soon after the former president’s fall into the depths of Alzheimer’s. Reagan’s memory is something the federal government of today craves because it offers a gloss that masks the growth of the transfer state. To veil domestic policies that could have been written by Aldous Huxley or the Democratic National Committee, it is a gloss that George W. Bush sorely needs.

Despite his best efforts, Clinton’s memory lacks that gloss, and as a result, he left a much needed and unintended legacy. Clinton brought back an element of distrust toward the presidency that is essential to a free society where individuals, families, and communities operate autonomously to would-be overseers in Washington, D.C.

Ironically, to those concerned about the state of liberty and its relationship to a growing federal government, the seedy Lewinsky scandal was a critical affair. It effectively sidelined any designs that Clinton may have had in expanding the State. The government became even more blessedly divided and restrained.

It is no coincidence that this resulted in a growing economy, because a restrained government makes for more secure capital and greater return on labor. We can thank Clinton’s girlfriend and her bizarre amorous appeal (noticed only by Clinton) for thwarting policies that would have squelched much of that economic growth. Good things sometimes come in blue dresses.

Of course, from today’s vantage point, all of that seems dated. Today, the G.O.P. controls both houses of Congress and the White House, and the government is growing at a pace not approached since the 1960s. The fruit of divided government is long gone, while a yawn of a presidential contest between two near-indistinguishable partisans of big government is underway. A backlash, until now restrained by the war in Iraq, is long overdue.

The memory of Reagan provides something of an antidote to that backlash. After all, his 1980 election provided a similar antidote to a backlash that fomented throughout the 1970s. This is the great irony of Reagan. His memory keeps those who would otherwise agitate against overweening government at bay, and it therefore plays an important role in the growth of a Republican welfare state.

In contrast, Clinton’s memory reminds us of the federal government’s proper irrelevance, and in so doing, it serves a greater libertarian purpose. Until 9/11, George W. Bush upheld this legacy well, but after that time, it has been hiding in a bunker. Part of the popularity of Clinton’s new book (which has the number one sales ranking at Amazon.com at the time of this writing) suggests that many feel nostalgic for that 1990s-era irrelevance and resent the return of the imperial presidency.

To those who benefit from its return, well-timed presidential polls serve important purposes. In the battle of the Gipper vs. the Stripper, these polls indicate that the Gipper is winning. It appears, however, that he is winning for the wrong reasons.

Chris Westley [send him mail] teaches economics at Jacksonville State University, Alabama.

But it was not always thus. Back in the 1980s, the heyday of what author Steven F. Hayward called the Age of Reagan, mass conservatism meant opposition to communism abroad and to big government at home. Conservatives seemed to accept the idea that fighting the former required embracing the latter, although a few honest ones admitted that the process required that they hold their noses. That is why Reagan could propose budgets with what were then record deficits and, contrary to his rhetoric, expand the size and scope of the State.

It was much later in the 1990s that a light bulb went off in my dense head — a light bulb that probably illuminated Murray Rothbard when he was in the womb — that this strategy was self-defeating, because by fighting Leviathans abroad we had created one at home. Rothbard referred to the process when he noted that the warfare and welfare states are one and the same, and that you can’t feed the former without feeding the latter.

Feeding either requires a serious departure from constitutional strictures on the separation of powers — a process that began in earnest with the rise of Reagan’s beloved Republican Party in the latter half of the 19th century and was soon joined by the Democratic Party during the height of the Progressive Era.

Perhaps the high water mark of this departure in the U.S. can be traced to the months leading up to World War II, when the Roosevelt Administration was trying frantically to push the U.S. into the war in Europe — a war that was all but over in 1940 after the Nazis lost the Battle of Britain. It was a few months later, in April 1941, when arch-New Dealer Harry Hopkins wrote an essay with the brash title "The New Deal of Mr. Roosevelt is the Designate and Invincible Adversary of the New Order of Hitler."

Hopkins and the New Dealers embraced the possibility of war in the crassest of terms — as an instrument necessary to revive their discredited and demoralized ranks. Hopkins tried to rally them to support war mobilization, oppose the widely popular America First movement, and extend the New Deal to the rest of the world. To paraphrase Randolph Bourne, war would be the health of the New Deal.

Hopkins urged a fight with Nazi Germany at a time when many on both sides of the Atlantic believed that that country’s national socialist experiment had, like the New Deal, run its course. But Hopkins provided a curious strategy for victory over fascism abroad: America must adopt fascism at home. So he argued that democracy "must wage total war against totalitarian war. It must exceed the Nazi in fury, ruthlessness and efficiency."

The theme of becoming your enemy in order to defeat him continued eight years (and two wars) later when a craven William F. Buckley called for the creation of "a totalitarian bureaucracy within our shores" to fight communism in Commonweal magazine (January 5, 1952). Buckley added that "if [Americans] deem Soviet power a menace to our freedom (as I happen to), they will have to support large armies and air forces, atomic energy, central intelligence, war production boards, and the attendant centralization of power in Washington." In other words, to fight the Soviets, the U.S. must become like them.

It was the Hopkins argument redux. Needless to say, neither Hopkins nor Buckley could be described as people with an abundance of faith in republican institutions. But it was an argument that came to define conservatism during the Cold War, and it clearly influenced Reagan, whose anticommunist credentials defined his political life and whose "peace through strength" doctrine helped him win the White House. Ideas really do have consequences.

But a funny thing happened along Reagan’s path to that shining city on a hill. The Cold War ended, but the vast nation state that was created to supposedly defend that shining city became its greatest threat. As a result, today the federal government often seems as entrenched and as encompassing as did the Soviet state — a gigantic, wasteful, divisive, and warmongering edifice that had become a joke from around the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall but which has been resurgent following that fateful day in September 2001.

It is run today by conservatives, and if they are to run it successfully, then conservatism can never imply small government. As a result, in this first decade of the 21st century, conservatism apparently means support for preemptive wars too important to risk asking Congress to declare (effectively transforming the armed forces into the sitting president’s private army), accompanied by the advancement of a Republican welfare state at home that grows at a faster rate than the Great Society. While at one time conservatives at least paid lip service to the idea of abolishing the Department of Education, today they expand it with ominous sounding programs such as No Child Left Behind. While at one time conservatives bemoaned the destruction of the Ninth and Tenth amendments to the Constitution, today they celebrate a federal definition of marriage. While at one time conservatives were united against the Clinton Administration’s brazen attempt to impose Canadian-style medical socialism, today they implement the same policies piecemeal.

Buckley’s counsel — that the U.S. must become like Soviets — may not seem like it was such a good idea today. By adopting the policies and rhetoric of Cold War anticommunism, and the deification of the central State that this required, Reagan helped bring this about.

The irony is that Reagan was the first United States president since the 1920s to show any appreciation for or understanding of the Old Right. He was a former economics major before Keynes who read The Freeman and quoted Bastiat. He derived much of his popular appeal from his willingness to joke about the federal State. He should have known better.

But then again, he would probably never have been invited to the national stage had he not adopted arguments that were originally made by Hopkins and Buckley. If this is so, then the Great Communicator should also be known as the Great Compromiser, and for this we pay a price today, when the specter of international terrorism offers to embolden the State in the same way that National Socialism and communism did in the past. No wonder a massive federal building and airport in Washington — symbols of the bloated government that was so often the target of his rhetoric — have been named after him. No wonder he is so often compared to FDR.

Reagan’s smile provided a happy face to the federal government of the 1980s — a smile the bankrupt neoconservatives and left-liberals of today dearly wish to extend to our time. This is why his legacy is being extolled today. It is up to the paleoconservatives and paleolibertarians — members of the ascending Old Right — to take up Reagan’s anti-government cudgels and use them against those who would consolidate and centralize power today. It is the least we should do.

In today’s political environment, this would mean using Reagan’s words against many of the Republicans in power. May he rest in peace.

Chris Westley [send him mail] teaches economics at Jacksonville State University, Alabama.

Hey boss. Here’s my monthly report on selling the war down here in Dixie. You might think maintaining support for Operation Enduring Freedom, or Operation Iraqi Freedom, or Operation Freedom Liberation, or Operation Trotsky Idealism — what’s it being called now? — would be easy in the South, where the states are redder than a pit barbeque in June.

But it isn’t that easy. Some of our comrades down here care more for the races in Talladega than the races for military contracts around Baghdad. Who knows why? No one’s died at Talladega in years, while in Iraq dying has become commoner than a cicada in Savannah. Why watch the NASCAR channel when your dish gets CNN?

The problem is, the Abu Graib prison pictures are not going too well down here. Scandals rarely do in the South. The last two University of Alabama football coaches were caught in scandals as naked as an Iraqi prisoner, only with women with longer hair and less leashes than some female G.I.s, and their explanations sounded about as believable as yours last week before Congress. Bama’s scandals were real scandals, and people were honorable enough to resign because of them. They set back the school’s recruiting efforts by several years. It makes me wonder how the Army’s recruiting has been going lately. (The evidence is not positive.)

I’m wondering because lots of those volunteers have been from the South. After all, military money puts okra on tables down here. That support might get weaker if people get to thinking that we’re doing more harm than good, or if it looks like some of our good old boys are dying for a vision of freedom that allows governments to define marriage or draft boards to take our boys and girls.

If that support goes the way of Coke’s stock, then you might as well join Halliburton’s board come December. Without support for the war, then people will judge Bush on a domestic record that makes that Arkansas boy Billy Clinton look as fiscally responsible as your local Wal-Mart.

That’s why I’ve been sweating so much for you in the Confederacy, and not at Hilton Head. Lots of people, and not just Southerners, are beginning to reckon that if it wasn’t for Iraq, then Bush would be exposed as the biggest spender since that New Yorker FDR, and with none of Huey Long’s charm. If it wasn’t for Iraq, Southerners might even choose a Massachusetts Democrat this November on the basis that he would govern closer to the Right.

If it wasn’t for Iraq, some of our comrades in the red states could turn absolutely blue.

We can’t let that happen, and the first step is in making Southerners believe that you mean to do right, even if you never do. The way to do that is to maintain a contrite heart, or at least the appearance of one. Billy Clinton understood this. You should too. One key step in this direction would be in supporting reparations of confiscated wealth.

Giving back money taken from others is the moral thing to do, and if you have ever read Flannery O’Connor, you know that Southerners will always support the moral thing. This is where you come in. Reports are that 20 percent of Bush’s recent $25 billion request to fund the war for the rest of the year will be going into your own personal slush fund. This $5 billion must be given back to southern taxpayers as a show of goodwill.

We can call it Operation Reparation, and it may backfire worse than the General Lee. Some may realize that much more has been taken from them over the years and want that back to. But Southerners will see it as a nice gesture — like a televangelist crying after committing a sin or a gambler in Biloxi leaving a big tip at the Cracker Barrel.

Really, it would just be giving back what was taken from others, like when LSU gives back a touchdown after it was found out that the team committed a foul. The only difference is that with Operation Reparation, you’d be giving back loot taken after violation of natural law.

Such a gesture might keep southern support for the war going, at least through November. Then you can go ahead and preemptively invade Syria and Iran and whatever other country you want to that doesn’t have nukes.

It’ll be bowl season then.

Chris Westley [send him mail] teaches economics at Jacksonville State University, Alabama.

These events are unrelated, but their timing is highly ironic.

Christianity is presently basking in the rare glow of affirmation
from a popular culture that usually mocks it. Thanks to a remarkable
film, there seems to be a renewed interest in meditation on the
Passion and in the religion stemming from it. The Faith is discussed
again in the public square. In the midst of this, California's state
supreme court justices – much like the Roman satraps in the movie – surface
to remind everyone who is boss.

Whether or not you agree with the Catholic Church's teaching on
artificial birth control, a practice that nearly all Christians
recognized as a moral evil as recently as 80 years ago, you should
be very concerned with this near unanimous decision that the government
can tell any private organization how it must allocate its resources.
This is always and everywhere a violation of property rights, but
it is especially bad when applied to religious institutions which
today are often the last sanctuaries from the encroachments of an
overweening public sector.

To these sanctuaries, the California Supreme Court is sending two
messages. The first is that if you receive government funds then
you must conform with the correct side of the culture wars – in this
case, with the belief that government should make contraception
as widely available as Hershey's Kisses – with the understanding that
the threat of force exists if you disagree. The second is that the
separation of Church and State is held as sacred by the religious
and secular left precisely because it runs in one direction.

School voucher conservatives, as well as anyone who supports President
Bush's "faith-based initiatives" should find this development
sobering. Anywhere public money flows, public control soon follows.
Consider the neutering effect public money has done to Catholic
education in the United States. Consider what state-support has
done to the Faith in Europe. This is a long-term cost of accepting
tax dollars for any purpose.

This is a cost that has long corrupted Catholic Charities USA.
Indeed, calling it a charity stretches the truth, given the extent
to which it has grown dependent on taxpayer-conscripted capital
to support its social services. (Sixty-seven percent of its $2.3
billion budget was derived from government in 2000.) Today it is
little more than a nominally Catholic branch of Housing and Urban
Development – a shadow welfare system that grants a degree
of ecclesial legitimacy to socially destructive wealth redistribution
schemes.

But the destruction runs in both ways. As the Court noted in its
opinion, if Catholic Charities of California had not eschewed even
the smallest of proselytizing functions in its official activities,
it would not have ruled against it. Instead, it apologetically remarked
that Catholic Charities did not meet any of the criteria defining
a religious employer under a 1999 law that justified the Court's
action. "Under that definition," commented the New
York Times, "an employer must be primarily engaged in spreading
religious values, employ mostly people who hold the religious beliefs
of the organization, serve largely people with the same religious
beliefs, and be a nonprofit religious organization as defined under
the federal tax code."

One of the messages of the Gospels – highlighted in Mel Gibson's
new movie – is of the shameful consequences that can befall religious
authorities that become too close to government. By ruling against
Catholic Charities, the Court simply confirmed a statement made
by a Catholic Charities priest several years ago, recounted by U.S.
Sen. Rick Santorum: "We get government funds, so we're not
Catholic."

Whether this continues to be the case will depend in large part
on its reaction to the Court's ruling. If it complies with the Court's
order and distributes abortifacients, then it should change its
first name. But if as a result of this incident it shuns public
money, it can become a charity again.

Given
Catholic Charities' socialist sympathies, this choice won't be easy.
But no passion ever is.

March
4, 2004

Chris
Westley
[send him mail] teaches
economics at Jacksonville State University, Alabama.

There
was a strong basis for agreement among the two groups, and there
still is today, although while the Old Right is still surging, thanks
largely to the foundation laid by Rothbard, the New Left has never
regained the cultural and intellectual status it enjoyed during
the glory days of 30 years ago.

I
was reminded recently, however, that just as the New Left and Old
Right could find common ground when a unique set of circumstances
came together, so can the neoconservatives and neoliberals of today.
Consider, for instance, the comments made by Peggy Noonan on the
Wall Street Journal's opinion web site and Jim Wallis, a
writer for modernist Catholicism's Sojourners
magazine, regarding the Janet Jackson episode at the Smarmy
Bowl. Writes
Noonan,

Our
culture has been on a boil for years. Then it cooled a bit.
The other night at the Super Bowl they put the flame higher
and the water began to boil. The frog – that would be us – is still
alive. And may, in his shock, jump out of the water. But the
question is: How? How to turn it around. I wonder if all the
sane adult liberals and conservatives couldn't make progress
here.

Noonan's
comments sound an awful lot like Wallis':

Some
people think that only right-wing conservatives care about such
moral pollution. Wrong. Most parents I know, liberal or conservative,
care a great deal about it, as do most self-respecting women
and men. It defies stereotypes to suggest that a healthy moral
consistency applies to personal and sexual ethics as well as
to social and political values. It's time to break out of those
old ideological shibboleths and forge a unified front against
the amoral corporate greed that violates all our ethics – personal
and social – creating a system that sells beer and breasts in
the same advertising plans just to make a buck.

Both
neocon Noonan and neoliberal Wallis believe that morality can be
legislated – Noonan with her support of Bush's moralist legislation
and Wallis with his support for State intervention in corporate
affairs (a long-running theme at Sojourners, based on the magazine's
definition of something called "social justice"). Maybe
they have never been as ideologically opposite as one may think?
One could easily imagine both supporting increased funding for the
Federal Communications Commission with the false expectation that
a War on Breasts will be as successful as the War on Drugs.

One
seriously doubts that either Noonan or Wallis would consider abolishing
the FCC for its many and obvious failures, end anachronistic regulation
of the public airways (how 20th century!), and support the formation
of private regulatory institutions to set standards that more closely
reflect those of the body politic (an Underwriters' Labs for broadcasting).
One wonders if it has ever dawned on them that liberal or conservative
attempts to curb future Janet Jacksons with State power will simply
result in more of them?

For
me, this incident reminded me of why my family homeschools. There
is no doubt that I would have had to explain Janet Jackson to my
second grade son if he were stranded in the local public school
for six-plus hours a day. (It was hard enough, but more morally
fruitful, explaining Homer's Odyssey.)
The same would apply to the local Catholic school, thanks to the
American Church's wrecking of Catholic education by embracing tacky
ideology that has become a staple in publications like Sojourners.

We
should pity the kids who cannot be left behind from the kind of
socialization that robs them of their innocence – which, by
the way, occurs during practically every commercial break of every
NFL game of the year, with nary a word from the likes of Michael
Powell, Peggy Noonan, or Jim Wallis. The griping of those three
(and many others) over the last few days reminded me of one of the
truly original characters of American literature, Ignatius J. Reilly
in A
Confederacy of Dunces, who yells at his TV in protest of
gyrating bodies on American Bandstand, while at the same time incapable
of turning the TV off.

Murray
Rothbard was right that there can be common ground between left
and right. When it serves to expand liberty, it can be a good thing.
We should beware when neocons and neoliberals find common ground.
The results can be more perverting than a Janet Jackson dance.

February
6, 2004

Chris
Westley
[send him mail] teaches
economics at Jacksonville State University, Alabama.

Re:
How to Be President

Well
Mr. Governor-elect, I hope you are enjoying your honeymoon. They
say it is not going to last very long and will end when you confront
the kingpins in the state assembly. They say that is when politics
as usual will begin again and the gloss will fade from your star.

"They"
say many things. But we both know that "they" are often
wrong. (Of course, if you cared about conventional opinion, you'd
probably be an unknown civil service worker today back home in Graz.)

Take
that popular canard about how you can never be president. They say
that despite your obvious charisma, optimism, drive, and seemingly
unlimited campaign funds, you have risen as far as a foreign-born
American can in politics by becoming governor of the most populous
state. According to James Madison's silly Constitutional provision,
the hated Gray Davis can still make a run for the White House, while
the ceiling to your ambitions leave you stuck in Sacramento. The
irony!

There
are ways around this problem. Some
are recommending, apparently with a straight face, an Arnold
amendment to the Constitution allowing the foreign born to run for
president. The odds of such an amendment happening are extremely
low, and even if it did come about, it would likely exempt current
officeholders. Such is the straw-grasping of delusional neoconservatives
convinced that the inexorable movement of history is to replace
the dominance of big government Democrats with that of big government
Republicans, and that a pesky little thing like the Constitution
should not stand in the way.

A
more realistic way around this problem would involve embracing a
reform recognized and endorsed by the framers of the Constitution
itself, one that has proven to be a legitimate trend in Europe over
the last two decades. This solution, of course, is the secession
of the state of California from the United States, clearing the
way for you to become president of a free and independent republic.

And
why not? Such a development would surely reflect the spirit of our
times. The states that used to be part of the former Soviet Union
are much better off today for splitting from Moscow, while Czechs
and Slovaks coexist peacefully. Closer to home, the break of the
San Fernando Valley from the city of Los Angeles is progressing
without a hitch, very much to the chagrin of the political establishment
but also very much in the same fruitful way that other local secessions
have progressed in several other localities around the U.S.

You
yourself touched upon secession's logic during the recall campaign
when you observed that for every dollar the feds take in income
tax they give back only 77 cents in the form of federal spending.
This means that besides subsidizing special interests in your own
state, California taxpayers also subsidize special interests in
the rest of the country, especially in the 33 states that pay out
less in federal income taxes than they get back (according
to data from the Northeast-Midwest Institute).

What
a great selling point this would be in those Bush-hating and vote-rich
centers of Chico, Berkeley, and Santa Monica. If California seceded,
then no longer could its wealth be doled out to important swing
states to bolster the Republican takeover of federal politics at
home or neocon wars abroad.

What's
more, if it is true that Californians prefer large government at
all levels, then they could have it if they seceded. The current
levels of federal, state, and local spending could be maintained
following secession with millions of dollars left over. All those
who currently depend on other people's money for their income, whether
military officers or California Highway Patrol cops, med school
doctors or public school principals, and even social workers or
garbage collectors, could continue to benefit from wealth transfers
in a California Republic.

Whether
they should is another matter entirely. In a truly free California – one
that does not mimic the socialist Austria from which you escaped – such
people would be set free to ply their trade in the private sector,
using capital that flowed to them on a voluntary basis, and not
as a result of conscription. The fact that their immediate jobs
would be secure makes selling secession much easier.

But
once these selling points are made to the net tax consumers, selling
secession to the rest of the state – to the net taxpayers – would be
much easier. They would easily see the benefits that would result
when California became an independent entity, as clearly as residents
in the San Fernando Valley saw in independence from the city of
Los Angeles. Private property in California is already made insecure
by the machinations of both the state Franchise Tax Board and of
the federal IRS, and secession would mean that overnight one of
these overweening and illegitimate bureaucracies would be out of
taxpayers' lives. While secession would often transfer the source
of many ill-effects from Washington to Sacramento, it would at least
make the agents of government easier to observe.

Being
separated from California would clearly benefit the remaining 49
states as well. Fences can make for good neighbors, and secession
would effectively fence in California's regulatory burden from the
rest of the country. Such a barrier is sorely needed.

Surely
you know that the primary opposition to the European Union in Europe
lies on the assumption that some regions can benefit in relative
terms when they can impose regulations on others. The same reasoning
applies within the United States today, where high regulatory states
like California weaken the property rights within their borders
and face a drain of capital and labor to lower regulatory states
such as Nevada and Arizona. To stop this outflow, a state can either
repeal onerous regulations or force them on its neighbors.

Regrettably,
California's connection to Washington too often causes it to resort
to the latter solution. Secession would cut Sacramento's cord with
Washington and keep California-style collectivism at bay. The resulting
inability to export bad policies would increase the likelihood that
such policies are short-lived. Such an outcome would be good for
California business that would otherwise exit the state, and good
for businesses in the remaining 49 states that would otherwise confront
a better-funded and more activist federal Leviathan.

Mr.
Governor-elect, let's face it: When you came to the Golden State
in the late sixties, you didn't plan on trading one socialist state
for another. California doesn't have to be like Austria, Sweden,
or Massachusetts. By breaking from the 20th century trend toward
centralizing power among large nation-states, it can be a prosperous
republic, free of the threats that accompany global empire while
a beacon of liberty to an increasingly divided and dangerous world.

And
no matter what they say, you could be its president.

October
14, 2003

Chris
Westley
[send him mail] teaches
economics at Jacksonville State University, Alabama.

After
all, Tuesday's revolt was against the political establishment that
is so epitomized by Clinton but that is comprised of members of
both parties. We can only hope that these men and women, who practice
the art of legal plunder so well and who gladly reduce our freedoms
in exchange for increases in their own power, perks, and prestige,
felt uneasy watching the news coming out of the Left Coast. This
was as much of a revolt against them as it was against the heartless
and calculating Davis. If this revolt catches on like so many other
trends foisted on the nation from California, they could be next.

We
can be sure that Davis' fellow governors took notice of the political
landscape of California this year. How many breathed sighs of relief,
knowing that their state constitutions do not include recall provisions
similar to California's? If no other state constitution has such
a provision, I'd guess that number is about 49.

Gubernatorial
politics is crasser in California, where governors from both parties
take turn milking their pet special interests to remain in power
as long as possible before the support fizzles out, a time period
of about two terms. So it went for Pat Brown, and then for Reagan,
and then for Jerry Brown, and for Deukmejian and Wilson. It was
bound to go that way for Davis, and it eventually did, only a little
sooner than normal.

But
the recall was more than a revolt against politics as usual, as
members of the establishment keep repeating. This was a revolt against
government, even in California where it had even grown too large
for its median voter, who is arguably the most left-leaning state
median voter west of Vermont. He understood, whoever he is, that
your state is doomed when the number of producers who are escaping
it is offset by a greater number of immigrants attracted to it by
generous welfare benefits. He understood that California's brand
of socialism was having the devastating effect of sacrificing capital
formation for increased dependency wealth transfers, as did the
California Democrats who gave Arnold Schwarzenegger his plurality.

But
not everyone gets it. It seems that everyone but the politicians
have noticed that in several important elections and referenda over
the last several years, voters are opting for whatever side that
appears to more likely to reduce government's waste and pilfering
and busybodies from their lives. California didn't start this trend.

Consider
that an up-or-down referendum in Massachusetts to repeal that state's
income tax barely lost last November with over 45 percent of the
vote. A reasonable person might conclude when events like that start
happening in that People's Republic, that we may be living in the
End Times.

And
we very well may be, at least from a political perspective. The
California Recall illustrates the truism that Clinton taught to
the country so well in 1992: At the end of the day, it is the economy,
and only the economy, that matters. Shoring up your base, throwing
money at special interests, expressing fears of dangerous extremism
and manufacturing last minute tales of crass womanizing – none of
this matters to a jaded populace that has lost faith that the incumbent’s
policies have any likelihood of turning an economy plagued by recession
on a path to sustainable economic growth.

This
applies just as much in California in 2003 between a tired governor
and a Hollywood actor as it might in 2004 between a tired president
and a former Vermont pol, and therein lies one of the important
messages of the recall. If a superficial but rich political neophyte
can claim the governorship of the most populous state, then certainly
a likeable but unknown former governor of a state whose population
is smaller than Dade County, Florida, can claim the presidency.

And
such a result, though devastating to a political class that craves
the stability that results from an obedient electorate, would be
welcomed by those who value liberty, who are tired of the ever-increasing
levels of wealth transfers that occur at all levels of government,
and who understand that a little revolution, now and then, is a
good thing.

October
9, 2003

Chris
Westley
[send him mail] teaches
economics at Jacksonville State University, Alabama.

The
news coverage is intense. By contemporary PC standards, Rudolph
has become this year’s Face of Evil, replacing Saddam from last
year, Osama from the year before, and McVeigh from the year before
that.  The story dominates the press. Even the insufferable
Paul Finebaum – a local sports columnist – conducted an interview with
the widow of the slain police officer on his sports talk show, replete
with the obligatory crocodile tears and saccharine. (Listen to the
interview here.)

If
guilty, Rudolph should pay for his actions. (He pleaded not guilty
in initial court hearings earlier this week.) He violated a precept
long enshrined in common law later codified by positive law. This
precept states that one cannot commit evil in order to achieve what
one considers to be the greater good. Abortion is a practice that
should be of concern to all libertarians because it represents another
legal attack on the human person – pre-born babies, in this
case. However, efforts to stop this bloody practice are not legitimate
when they violate others' property rights or when they inflict violence
on third parties.

That
one cannot do evil to achieve good is a principle central to Western
civilization. Its roots go back at least as far as Aristotle and
are a central theme of the Gospels (cf. Matthew 26:51–54).
It underlies much of the Christian just-war theory as explained
by Aquinas, and it buttressed much of the intellectual opposition
to the recent war in Iraq by libertarian thinkers.

It
is also a precept that is routinely violated by the state when it
conducts any activity, including the imposition of taxes, the enforcement
of regulations, or the dropping of bombs. Each activity involves
the infliction of violence on others in order to achieve what the
state considers to be the greater good. The results of Rudolph's
alleged actions are no different from that of the state's, except
that the destruction resulting from the state's actions occurs on
a vastly larger scale. Indeed, the loss of innocent human life in
Iraq makes the "collateral damage" that occurred in Birmingham
pale in comparison. Both actions violate the precept that one cannot
do evil to bring about good. The difference is one of degree, not
one of kind.

It
should be obvious that such results would never be tolerated in
the private sector, where property rights are respected and where
activities based on voluntary exchange create the interdependencies
that form the basis for civilization itself. Why is the state routinely
exempted from the standards demanded of market participants?

Rudolph
is today's Face of Evil not because he violated this precept, because
it is violated regularly. His biggest infraction was violating the
state's monopoly power over its violation. For that he must pay,
if only to be made an example of, because of the bad precedent it
sets.

June
5, 2003

Chris
Westley
[send him mail] teaches
economics at Jacksonville State University, Alabama.

by Christopher Westley

CLEVELAND (APS) — FBI agents scoured the city of Cleveland yesterday after receiving tips that Osama bin Laden incited an uprising at last week's Cleveland Browns football game against the Jacksonville Jaguars.

"We are asking all Clevelanders to shave and to cease wearing headgear in order to help agents narrow the search," Detective Mike Reynolds of the FBI's Northeastern Ohio office said.

Rumors that bin Laden was in the Cleveland area surfaced soon after the uncharacteristic outburst of emotion by fans at Cleveland's December 16 football game against Jacksonville, during which a riot among the fans caused officials to lose control of the game, which was cancelled with 48 seconds remaining. Play was eventually resumed when NFL Commissioner Paul Tagliabue intervened and required the two teams to finish out the game, which Jacksonville won 15-10.

Thousands of suspicious citizens, watching video of the fan riot on ESPN, phoned FBI offices to report sighting a bare-chested man resembling the ousted Al Qaeda leader screaming at officials, throwing plastic bottles on the field, while waving a sign that said, "I am Osama bin Laden" at the camera.

The riot started in an area of the stadium known as the "Dog Pound," where animal rights activists have gathered for Brown football games for years. Dog Pound members frequently arrive early for bowls of strawberries and cream and to discuss Sartre before games.

Longtime Dog Pound member Anthony Kowalski is among those who are confident that bin Laden, along with high-level Al Qaeda officials, was sitting in his block at the Jacksonville game. "I thought I saw bin Laden a few seats down from me," said the tool and die worker from Youngstown. "I was sipping a Chardonnay when I first noticed him, but I didn't say anything because it is impolite to make value judgments based on other people's appearances.

"Besides, we take pride in the fact that international fugitives rarely attend Browns games, much less sit in the Dog Pound," Kowalski added. "Criminals meet frequently at Redskins games in Washington, but they are elected officials." In contrast, Cleveland Stadium rarely attracts such deranged characters, he said, quoting Shakespeare in The Tempest. "There's nothing ill can dwell in such a temple: If the ill spirit have so fair a house, Good things will strive to dwell with 't.' "

Attorney General John Ashcroft declined to comment when asked if any members of terrorist cells found operating in the United States since September 11th were known to be Cleveland Brown season ticket holders. Nonetheless, under new powers granted to him by Congress, Ashcroft ordered all Cleveland Brown ticket holders to be held without trial until military tribunals can be organized. "Habeas Corpus must be revoked in Cleveland in order to protect our freedom," he said.

Officials with the Cleveland Browns reported that three season ticket holders are listed with the names O. bin Laden are listed as season ticket holders, one of which has a billing address in Kabul, Afghanistan. However, Lori Snipes, assistant manager for the Cleveland Brown ticket office, refused to speculate about whether the Al Qaeda leader provoked the riot at the Jacksonville game.

"Bin Laden is a very common name," Snipes said. "If it turns out that one of our ticket holders is wanted for international war crimes trials, then he would likely lose many of the privileges that go with season ticket holder status."

FBI officials, refusing to comment on the record, expressed surprise that bin Laden might have been able to escape the intricate cave system in the Afghan mountains and attend an NFL football game without notice. "Given his anti-Christian bias, we had heightened security at all [New Orleans] Saints and [Arizona] Cardinals games," said one official. "That he might have shown up in Cleveland reflects the success of the new federal airline safety precautions."

Chris Westley [send him mail] teaches economics at Jacksonville State University.

© 2001 LewRockwell.com

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