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Current United States policy, let alone popular political thought, is very far from libertarian. Writing about a future election where libertarianism is the mainstream can only be an exercise in vision as of now.

Nevertheless, there are signs that libertarianism can serve as a durable political mainstream of a solid, universal-adult-suffrage republic. Despite the low poll numbers racked up by all libertarian candidates (in the broader sense), there are definite signs that a libertarian mainstream can be the basis of a thriving two-party state — a competitive two-party system, with frequent horse races.

Based upon what the libertarian movement is like now, the most likely split into two parties would be Objectivist-based versus Austro-libertarian-based. There’s already enough animosity between both groups’ "party faithful" to make for two competitive camps. According to hard-core Objectivists, what you’re reading here amounts to "The Perversion of Liberty." (See The Voice of Reason, pp. 311—333.) And, of course, the great Murray N. Rothbard had his own choice appellation about the inner core of the Objectivist movement. He isn’t the only libertarian to use that term, either.

Backing up this split are profound differences in political attitude, to the point that Objectivists would probably be "Red-State Randians" and the Austros would likely be "Blue-State Libertarians." Although the principles deduced from the Non-Aggression Axiom are exact, there’s sufficient vagueness in implementing them to make for an unending string of issue-driven campaigns. For example, there is a natural right to defend oneself against aggression. But how far should that right be farmed off to a minimal-government libertarian State? How minimal is u2018minimal’? Would it be better to put a lot of cops on the beat, to properly deter any would-be aggressors? Should there be minimal policing, because it’s better (and tax-cheaper) for aggresses to see to their own defense? Since a libertarian State is still a State, the same compromises would be necessary, and the same trade-offs would appear. There would be ample scope for two competing visions, as expressed in two different parties.

In fact, given the gulfs that already exist now, two hypothetical platforms of two different parties are straightforward to construct. Since big-L libertarianism basically is Austro-libertarianism (although sometimes errant), I’ll use the name "Libertarian" for the Austro-party and "Objectivist" for the Rand-driven party.

The Hypothetical Libertarian Future, Date Unknown

The Libertarian Party platform:

1. The Libertarian Party expresses its tolerance for anarcho-capitalist and other pro-liberty anarchist movements, as they help to lower our need for the State.
2. The Libertarian Party staunchly reiterates its opposition to any war, or any other foreign adventure, that does not begin with an explicit attack on United States soil.
3. The Libertarian Party, in solidarity with taxpayers and in harmony with the virtue of self-reliance, promises economy in funding of the police services, courts and military.
4. The Libertarian Party promises to take seriously any violations of private property rights not yet known to science, with appropriate legislation if called for.
5. The Libertarian Party, in consonance with common sense, reiterates its eternal opposition to any form of corporate welfare.
6. The Libertarian Party continues to express its opposition in principle to government-sanctioned patents, copyrights and trademarks, and promises to abolish U.S. governmental protection of the first of these three.
7. The Libertarian Party affirms its support of 100%-reserve banking, and promises continual scrutiny of any bank that claims to operate under a "consent-driven" fractional-reserve model.
8. The Libertarian Party reiterates its commitment to federalism. Violations of individual rights at the non-federal level, although deplorable, will not be formally redressed by a Libertarian administration except through oratory.
9. Further to the Libertarian Party’s commitment to federalism, the Libertarian Party pledges to introduce a Constitutional Amendment to reinforce Article of Amendment XXIX’s repeal of Article of Amendment XII. Said proposal will specify the conditions of secession for any state that desires to do so, and will be known as Article of Amendment XXXIII if ratified by sufficient States along with the House and Senate.
10. The Libertarian Party also pledges an exploratory committee to divest Congress of its power to "coin Money" and "regulate the Value thereof," and to examine the feasibility of devolving said Power to the several states.

The Objectivist Party platform:

1. The Objectivist Party denounces all forms of anarchism, as they encourage blood feuds, irrational diffidence when relying upon the objectivization of retaliation, and private, non-objective vengeance crusades.
2. The Objectivist Party reaffirms the right of the United States government, as a principled defender of man’s rights, to invade any slave state at the time of its choosing.
3. The Objectivist Party, in solidarity with victims and in harmony with the virtue of rational civility, promises adequate funding of the police services, courts and military.
4. The Objectivist Party promises to treat any alleged new kind of violation of property rights with appropriate judiciousness and restraint.
5. The Objectivist Party, in harmony with the virtue of productiveness, reiterates its eternal opposition to the pure dependency inculcated by "pure" welfare.
6. The Objectivist Party promises to maintain and defend intellectual property rights, rationally defined.
7. The Objectivist Party reiterates its support of free banking, and promises to place greater priority on retaliations against more direct and injurious rights violations.
8. The Objectivist Party also reiterates its commitment to individual rights. Violations of any of man’s rights at the non-federal level shall be met with official responses that will pass the scrutiny of the Supreme Court.
9. The Objectivist Party promises to enforce Article of Amendment XXXI with full rigor, through introducing a binding resolution in Congress that would necessitate it and any future Congress to require formal Supreme Court pre-vetting of any legislation that could affect trade.
10. The Objectivist Party also promises to introduce diamond "coins," of grade and weight specified by law, to make commerce in large denominations more convenient.

Liberty And The Two-Party State

Although not deducible from the Non-Aggression Axiom, the two-party State is a well-known buttress against totalitarian tyrannies, all of which feature one-party States. Those two hypothetical platforms just above, constructed from the "two libertarianisms" already extant, make it evident that a libertarian mainstream does not herald a future one-party State. Given the differences already referred to above, it would be an extraordinary claim to assert the opposite. There’s enough diversity within the small-l libertarian movement to make for full, competitive, voter-courting elections…within a libertarian mainstream. In fact, the libertarian movement could support full and competitive mock elections for a mock-Congress and -White House as of now.

They’d be "full" elections in another sense, too. "Oh boy — the Objectionist Party!" "Well, if it ain’t the Librarian Party!" "Did the other candidate lecture you on the irrational premises expressed by your front lawn?" "One thing we aren’t is the u2018Sally Ayn’ Party." "Watch it — if you defend yourself like that, the Sally Ayn Party will throw you into the hoosegow!" "Only a Libber-tear-ian would blame the victim for calling the police." And so on, and on, and on…

In fact there may be enough fur flying to make an entry point for alternate parties, including protest parties.

"Hello and thank you for listening. I’m with the Libertarian Monarchist Party. Are you as sick of the social immaturity of the u2018mainstream’ as I am? Well, if you are, then we have a third alternative that’s solidly based on sound political theory…"

Daniel M. Ryan [send him mail] is a Canadian with a past. Visit his website.

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I was the beneficiary of a bailout — a very private bailout. For about two weeks, I had gotten into day trading; naturally, given the current turmoil, I had sidled into trading busted-down financial stocks. I started off with the proceeds of shares in a junior gold-mining company, which I maladroitly sold near the bottom. Those proceeds were my stake, as it were. As is often the case with inexperienced newbie traders such as myself, I found that same mining stock rocketing up after I got rid of it.

Nevertheless, my frenetic trading had largely caught up with that mining stock — until I bought some Washington Mutual hours before the FDIC folded it. I had 2000 shares, bought at about $1.80/share, worth $1.69 each by the close of trading on Sept.25th. By the time Washington Mutual was suspended right after Sept. 26th’s opening, my shares had a market value of less than $400 for the entire 2000. To put it bluntly, I was wiped out.

This kind of story is often typical of day traders with a temporarily hot hand. Like so many others, I got decimated. While WaMu was still suspended, though, I was arranging a private bailout. Incredibly, it worked.

The Structure of the "Bailout"

By last Tuesday, I had secured enough funds to launch into what could politely be called "salvage trading." As part of my day-trading efforts, I had made some money off post-bankruptcy Lehman Brothers shares before WaMu’s final plummet. As of Tuesday, my plan was to do the same for the now-bankrupt Washington Mutual. The two trades I made consisted of one overnight trade, held from Tuesday morning to early Wednesday morning, and a day trade that lasted most of Wednesday’s trading session. I closed the second and final one just before regular trading ended Wednesday. After doing so, I found that I had not only preserved the bailout money, but had also made an additional $4000. Despite the slaughtering my portfolio had endured, I now had enough (over and above the bailout money) to buy back my original stake in that same junior-gold-mining company. I did so, and I also put the bailout money in an issue I don’t plan on selling anytime soon. Both of these purchases were made just before 4 PM Wednesday, ET.

I described this injection of new money as a "bailout" for a very good reason. In order to rate it, I’m obliged to give up day trading for a while. I started off as a speculator, bumped myself up to day trader, all-but-destroyed my stake as a result, and now am back down to a "mere" speculator. Since Wednesday’s close, I have not made another trade.

As to why it worked, luck had a lot to do with it, but I focused on what I did properly before blowing myself out of the water. More to the point: despite me recovering my original stake, I didn’t make the mistake of chalking up my WaMu disaster to an unlucky break. Instead of risking decimation of new money after old, I’ve benched myself.

State Aid

The above story is an example of how bailouts in general tend to work better when done through the voluntary sector. As Ludwig von Mises explained in Bureaucracy, a bureau has to be run on fixed rules administered impartially. What would be a bespoke bailout package in the private sector would be plain favoritism if done by the State. The need for bureaucrats to be procedure-bound and impartial means that my particular talents, and limitations, would have to be deemed irrelevant had I even had the hope of qualifying for any kind of government bailout. (I know; I’m merely fantasizing here.)

Bureaucracies can be considered good or bad, but that overall evaluation is typically based upon the overall rules administered. A bureaucracy charged with, say, welfare aid tends to be sized up as "well-meaning" in the whole. A bureaucracy administering evil rules leads straight to The Banality of Evil. What does not vary from bureaucracy to bureaucracy is the need to be procedure-bound and categorical. The duty of impartiality and the requirement of smooth running demand it. Bureaucracies that administer emergency aid programs are notorious for administrative nightmares, as this rundown clearly illustrates.

There’s no reason to expect the current financial-services bailout package to be a program that the GAO need not look closely at. The overall odds, as informed by the theory of bureaucracy, suggest that any hurried rescue plan will be administered sloppily. The originally-three-page bailout plan is now the size of a novel — and I’m sure you can find at least one D.C. insider who’s glad that it didn’t expand to the size of a Russian novel.

In addition, it will further habituate Wall Street and Banker’s Row to more "emergency money" from the taxpayer. As this habituation continues, the financial-services industry begins to resemble a college from the early 1960s — with the role of Mommy and Daddy being played by the always-mulctible United States taxpayer.

Inadaptable

Unfortunately, anecdotes such as mine tend to give rise to hopes that a bailout can work if it’s modified to be more bespokeish: to take account of the particular strengths and weaknesses of each foundered firm. Leaving aside the question of what each firm’s strengths and weaknesses are — my own implosion has inclined me towards grumblish notions about J.P. Morgan Chase’s "strengths" — bespokery might as well be a neologism for favoritism when the State enters the picture. State aid is inherently ridden with agency problems, which bureaucracy tries to keep a lid on. Those agency problems cannot help but be exacerbated by the fact that the root of said aid is tax funds, confiscated by law. "Johnny Tax Hike" knows it.

On the other hand, private bailouts tend to be goal-directed. They can be crafted to take account of individuality without blanketing an industry with regulations. They’re not hamstrung by the need to take precedents into account. They also tend to separate viable firms, which got themselves in a bad spot, from firms that are better left to bankruptcy. The most likely source of such bailouts would be people with the hard-won expertise to sift salvageable from unsalvageable, and the (perhaps fiduciary) duty to deploy funds shrewdly. Finally, private-sector bailouts use funds acquired voluntarily — not funds that have been confiscated.

If the bailout process is so needed at this time, plain citizens will see it and act on this need. Leaving aside donors, of whom the American people have a seemingly eternal supply, profit-seekers have a lot of incentive to seek to bail out firms at a discount. Warren Buffett, to take a single example, has already done so with Goldman, Sachs. He’s one of many sources of bailout capital — especially if bankruptcy investors are included.

In a way, it’s a pity that the rise of the American people against the Bush Administration’s bailout plan has proven to be a mere impediment to its passage. Had the U.S. government backed off instead, we would have seen how resourceful Americans really can be during a crisis…including American "money grubbers" (which, according to at least one recent news report, include U.S. government mandatories themselves).

Daniel M. Ryan [send him mail] is a Canadian with a past. Visit his website.

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Sometimes, even large markets can turn on a dime. We saw that recently in one of the largest markets in the world: the U.S. dollar. Less than two months ago, the trade-weighted U.S. dollar index was touching 70. As of last Friday, it got to almost 76. In about the same timeframe, the Euro has gone from about $1.60 US to about $1.41. Although the recent rally looks like a mere blip on the longest-range St. Louis Fed’s chart, it was still enough to knock gold and silver, as well as oil, right out of bull-market-recovery mode. According to post-mortems, the greenback reversal’s cause was co-ordinated central bank intervention — which included the central bank of China.

In a sense, this explanation is counter-intuitive. The U.S. dollar market nowadays is too large to control, even by a team of central banks. It’s much larger than the gold market was as the’70s opened, and the co-ordinated team effort of the London Gold Pool didn’t halt gold’s rise back then. Central banks can’t fight the fundamentals, as a certain government official found out in 1999.

Consequently, there’s only one way that the recent intervention could have succeeded in its aim: it was well-timed. The U.S. dollar must have been sorely undervalued at that point, or at least deeply oversold. There’s been a long learning process, but central bank officials are discovering that governmental force means little when compared with world supply and demand. They have to pay attention to fundamentals and timing just as any private-sector trading entity does, else their intervention is for naught.

This point is important, as it explains the most efficacious intervention undertook by a multi-government consortium in the last forty years. It’s one that’s remembered even to this day by Joe Average.

Freedom Hatred, And What To Do About It

The standard line as to the cause of 9/11 is President Bush’s: "they hate us for our freedoms." Rather than mention such impolite terms as blowback, I’m going to take it straight by assuming that there’s an evil genius called Useenhim bun Evil. He hates U.S. freedoms and has made it a holy cause to end what he considers to be the pernicious influence of the U.S. on the world. How would he go about hatching his plot? What strategy would he have?

Since Useenhim fears and loathes U.S. freedoms and their influence on the world, his obvious strategy is to bait the U.S. into ending them. A U.S. government that practices what it preaches makes bun Evil lose on the world stage. A U.S. government that continually acts hypocritically on the world stage makes bun Evil a winner. If the U.S. government abolishes at home those freedoms it ballyhoos abroad, then Useenhim wins. A pharisaical U.S. State is no threat to the kind of tyranny that bun Evil holds dear.

So, it’s obviously in bun Evil’s interest to goad the United States into becoming a police state, if not a military dictatorship. That’s how Useenhim would win. Who amongst the peoples Useenhim holds dear would regard the U.S. government as anything other than an ignorable fraud should those same freedoms be eroded in the U.S. itself? The continual U.S. campaign for "human rights" would turn into little more than hot air.

More to the point, a U.S. of that sort would not be seen as a liberator anymore. That would make a war of "liberation" almost impossible to win. Baiting the U.S. government into eroding freedoms in the U.S. itself is the perfect Fourth Generation Warfare strategy. In addition to rendering any claims of "liberation" hollow in the invaded nation, it also creates a group of U.S. sympathizers at home — who sympathize for their own reasons. Case in point: a group of thirteen rebellious colonies, whose grievances touched a common chord amongst citizens of the Empire to which they belonged. "What they’re doing to us, they’re doing to you" makes for the kind of strategic alliance that requires no entangling treaty. Wild tales to that effect gaining widespread credibility is a sign that bun Evil’s strategy is working for him.

Going On Offense

The above scenario is confined to defensive maneuvers. Within the confines of the "human rights" game, there is a way to go on offense — the "holier than thou" maneuver. We saw these offensive ploys during the Cold War: the U.S.S.R. became quite good at them. In the case of "radical Islam," the best tactic would be rigorous observance of certain civil liberties that haven’t exactly been in a bull market these last seven years. This strategy, and others like it, goes with the flow. It doesn’t create conditions; it works with already-existing conditions that have been "plausibly denied."

This go-with-the-flow aspect is also a feature of other means by which not-so-friendly foreign powers can get nasty with the U.S. That above-mentioned intervention, by a consortium of governments, was one of them. It was OPEC’s use of the "oil weapon" in 1973.

We now know that this bolt from the blue was the result of the oil price failing to catch up with U.S. inflationist policies, leaving a huge equilibrium gap that OPEC could exploit. The price of other commodities, most particularly gold, had leapt up by a comparable amount in the early’70s. The oil weapon only worked because the U.S. practice of "exporting inflation" caught up with Americans.

Nowadays, there’s no such inflation gap to be filled in the oil market. In addition, we’ve become inured to sharp rises in petroleum-product prices. These two changes suggest that, if the oil weapon is deployed nowadays, it would largely fizzle as a terror tactic. Another embargo would hurt, but it would not shock as it did back in 1973.

On the other hand, there is a continued equilibrium gap that would shock us if exploited. It’s the "debt weapon."

To be more specific, it would be an embargo on holding and refinancing U.S. treasury debt. What makes this debt weapon so packed with a punch is the extraordinarily low interest rates the U.S. has enjoyed, relative to U.S. inflation. If you believe the official statistics, the U.S. government has been enjoying a recent negative-real-rate ride for about a year now. If John Williams’ alternate measure is correct, then the U.S. government has been stiffing Treasury debtholders for at least three years. This gap can only go on for so long before it’s filled.

The Tiger In The Tank

Although the total amount of foreign holdings of U.S. government debt seems eye-boggling, it’s not overweening as compared with total U.S. treasury debt outstanding. What’s most noticeable about the foreign-holders list is that the nation with the most is a long-time U.S. ally, Japan. Close in second is the People’s Republic of China. The U.S. government, despite the continual China-bashing in the human-rights game, has little to fear from either of the two as of now. The nation that’s #3 on the list is the U.K., a second long-time ally.

Fourth on the list is "oil exporters," a category that not only includes many Islamic countries but also several Latin American nations and a few African ones. Russia, #8 on the list, has only $65.3 billion in U.S. treasury securities. The oil-exporting nations, collectively, have only $170.4 billion. These two sums are only small fractions of the whole: even current Federal Reserve holdings of U.S. treasury debt make them look small by comparison.

Breaking down the securities by maturity reduces the alarm rate even further. The total amount of U.S. Treasury bills held by all non-U.S. governments — including the above-mentioned Japan, China and the U.K. — is a mere $225.8 billion. Looking at this total suggests that the debt weapon will prove to be a wet firecracker.

Markets, though, are made at the margin. If the U.S. government is getting an after-inflation free ride on the debt market, then all holders of its debt are somewhat asleep at the switch with respect to real yield. Many of them may have other reasons for investing in U.S. treasury securities, such as safety or convenience, which make the after-inflation yield not that relevant to them as of now.

If safety is the reason for this lassitude, then the safety premium has hit quite a high. The average interest rate of the entire U.S. debt, as of August 31st, is 3.902% for marketable securities and 4.827% for non-marketable securities; the total average interest cost is 4.36%. All of these numbers are well below the 12-month trailing official inflation rate, 5.6%. In other words, if the CPI figure is an accurate gauge of purchasing-power depreciation, the U.S. government has been enjoying an after-inflation free ride for all of its borrowings. Historically, this is an unusual benefit that doesn’t last very long.

Fore-shadows

Given that the debt weapon would only carry a huge sting if the real rate of U.S. Treasury borrowings remains negative for quite some time, it’s realistic to assume that it wouldn’t be used for a few (if not several) years. The after-inflation free ride currently enjoyed by the U.S. treasury hasn’t lasted sufficiently long for general complacency to set in. That complacency won’t set in until the worried person who brings it up at parties becomes a well-known bore or laughingstock. We’re not at that point yet.

In addition, as noted above, foreign holdings aren’t that massive in comparison to the whole load. As also noted above, a mistimed use of the debt weapon will fizzle…just as the Gold Pool’s interventions did.

Nevertheless, even a relatively small intervention can start an avalanche if the timing’s right. It may only be a coincidence, a decision prompted solely by market fundamentals, but the Russian State has declined to renew most of its holdings in Fannie and Freddie debt. Despite official assurances that those shifts were not a dumping maneuver, it seems to have had the effect of one — although the Chinese State selling some of its own agency holdings seems to have been the final yell that started a pre-emption of an avalanche.

Despite its lack of imminence, though, the above-described "debt weapon" shows that the U.S. government has a lot to lose through throwing weight around on the world stage. What seems to be foreigners’ gullship may turn out to be a prudent investment in geopolitical stability. We won’t know until it’s too late.

Thanks to last weekend’s scramble, though, we do know that the People’s Republic of China has the most noticeable creditors’ clout. The PRC State has tended to be "businesslike" in its diplomacy so far…and not just with the United States.

Daniel M. Ryan [send him mail] is a Canadian with a past. Visit his website.

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We of the Medievalist Party (MP) invite you to consider a unique synthesis of the politics of our time. Neither capitalist nor socialist, the MP has dug deep into history to offer a genuine Third Way, which avoids the difficulties of previous Third Ways offered these past hundred years. Happily, a viable Third Way has no need for military dictatorship. It has no need for prison camps, or for mass exterminations. The Third Ways which did so were wrong, and are rightly condemned in our time. The true Third Way of the Medievalist Party is one where fanaticism cannot grow from a reinvigorated soil. The manorial system is one that metes out punishments to fanatics, as well as to other malcontents, that are relatively humane compared to the plain barbarity of other Third Ways.

Yes, it is true that certain implements of torture were used, but for reasons understandable in our post 9/11 world. Typically, the punishment for obstreperousness was expulsion — far better than mass shooting, mass gassing or mass starvation. Yes, there were prosecutions that fit the rather quaint term "miscarriage of justice," but said "victims" were brought closer to God in consequence. Certainly, the overall community was. In fact, said "miscarriages," because they did revivify the piety of the community as a result, could be justly termed a community right.

The manorial system, despite the bad repute it got from eighteenth-century minds, has in its heart the protection of its peasants. Peasants’ rights were far from the theoretical ones beloved by eighteenth-century minds: the rights in the merrie day of old were real. Every peasant had the right of the granary: the ruler(s) had the responsibility to keep every peasant alive, hearty and hale. Limitations of technique meant that there were deplorable shortfalls, but the underlying responsibilities were accepted as right and just.

Nowadays, peasants’ rights are far more elaborated due to a much higher level of general wealth. Every American peasant has the right to be clothed, housed and fed thanks to the increasing recognition of practical rights by the United States manor. In addition, every American peasant has the right of granary in other respects, such as compensation for the trials of unemployment and succor for the sunset years of life. Rights of feast, festival, and other means to drain dour exploitiveness have been implemented. It is truly a compliment to the American vote-wielding peasantry that it is mature enough, in its heart, to recognize that such rights do have bills associated with them. The bulk of the cost of said programs are met through what are heartily known as "voluntary contributions" to the granary, known officially as the treasury.

The American granary is full indeed, thanks to the hard work and shrewdness of the American peasant. Even the villeins of underground labour have access to the granary and its bounties. Surely, positive proof that the granary is full enough for rights of haleness as well as life.

Like all peasants, the American peasant is good at heart but sometime knows aught about his own good here on earth. It is a deplorable tendency of the human heart to shave one’s abilities and exaggerate one’s needs. The Medievalist Party understands that hard-hearted techniques are often means to assure the peasants remember their own good, long term, as well as the good of others. A well-run manor is, after all, one where the peasants are imbued with the hearthful virtue of group spirit, where selfishness is subordinated to the common good. The laws, regulations and sacred customs of said manor are vital to the upkeep of the communal spirit.

One necessary mechanism to this upkeep is the right of the meadow, which too has many elaborations in today’s America. How hollow the selfish cries of "private property" echo when such fee-simples evince titles to lands that are clearly "public spaces"! Yes indeed, the American peasantry (save for some nerve-grating churls) does claim the right of the meadow, the right to free access to public spaces. Look at how much good has been accomplished by overruling the querulous claims of the business class. "Private place of business" indeed! If so private, then why ask the public to come in? Why is public participation solicited so vigorously? Why more eager for the public to come in than the trustees of public parks are? Is this plaint not an emanation of…mere greed?

That baseness being exposed, we must sadly turn to the chore of asking for further responsibilities. We are practical enough to recognize the inherently irresponsible nature of "cost-free" blandishments. In addition, we recognize that the American peasant, raised up by the franchise, has enough maturity to recognize that a granary emptied must be filled.

The typical means of fillment is, of course, the corvée. The typical American peasant, being good-hearted, manfully shoulders his share of the corvée. In addition to payment in money, payment in kind is supplied by the more business-oriented American peasant. Think of all the free labour our doughty men of business, the ones who are the chief beneficiaries of the Federal Reserve money-granary, do for the manor! Record-keeping, forwarding of payment, tracking villeins. The next advancement of corvée is, of course, the subornment of informing to the constabulary. Valuable labour indeed, often supplied without monetary compensation.

And yet, corvée can go further. It brings us no delight to note this; neither initiative nor creativity is required to notice it. The cries across the land are all that suffices.

The infrastructure of America is falling apart. Roads are in disrepair; train tracks are rusted; alternatives to Musselman’s oil are largely unimplemented; the country is so vulnerable to siege. Despite the good-heartedness of the American peasant, the infrastructure issue clearly shows that his notions about his own happiness are willfully blind in spots.

Since the American peasant has been responsible enough to contribute corvée in other areas, why not infrastructure repair? What better way to forge national solidarity and unity than a good spell of lusty work that the nation badly needs? In addition, the moral fibre of the community will be rightly raised by such a national program. Laziness and jealousy would be consigned to the past. Short-termism and selfishness would be too. Each man who meets the obligation of corvée will enjoy the satisfaction of knowing that his labour has made his home, his hearth and his family less dependant upon the increasingly unpredictable Mohammedan. He will be proud to know that his sweat will make his, and his descendants’, future far more secure.

One common objection to the Medievalist Party philosophy is that it leaves a wide loophole open to those who cloak their selfishness in manor’s colours. Man is not only instructed by angels; he is also tempted by devils. Many a good-hearted soul has been bedeviled by the plague of our times, the State hypocrite.

There is no easy solution to this dilemma. A full and frank solution would have to await a certain constitutional amendment, to be unveiled later. This amendment, like the much-storied Sixteenth Amendment, would entail a small but necessary modification to the Constitution then extant. Part of it would, for the sake of fundamental equality, authorize Congress to mete out special punishments for a certain class of people to be defined in it. The overall principle of "With Greater Rights Come Greater Responsibilities" would be strictly observed.

America has come a long way through its life. A backward republic, with nary a government and a doctrine of so-called "natural" rights that fit the weaknesses of its authority, was its cradle. Since then, America has grown into a governing system that deploys the power of authority with both collective generosity and collective sobriety. The philosophy of the Medievalist Party is very much in line with this advancement…as there is no system more anti-theoretical than ye auld fief.

The above is intended as spoof and divertment — you can peg it as "making merrie" if you like. There is no Medievalist Party extent, so far as I know.

Daniel M. Ryan [send him mail] is a Canadian with a past. Visit his website.

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The two sides are already squaring off. The nationalization of the American health-care system is once again an issue in the forthcoming Presidential election. The pro-nationalization side has rolled out arguments rooted in "social justice;" the anti-side has settled upon cost considerations plus debunking of the pro-side’s statistics. Both sides have missed an important, if indirect, consequence of nationalizing the health-care system. In order to see what this blind spot is, it’s necessary to consider folkways that don’t appear much in antiseptic news studios or seminar rooms.

Before introducing it, allow me to tell a tale about a government-owned health care system of long standing. This system exacts no fees, although an informal rationing system does take place. In order to show up to a hospital, patients have to be sent there; they can’t just check in on their own. In the olden days, the treatment was brusque and subject to tighter rationing. Few complaints were made about the treatment level: every potential patient understood that the system had relatively few resources directed its way, and was subject to huge demand from time to time. The work ethic, as well as the working hours, of the attending physicians and surgeons made it clear that limited resources were the cause. In addition, the system was deliberately optimized for efficiency and speed. Anyone who objected to the downside was set straight, through a reminder that there were lots of others who needed the same services. Hogs tended to be discouraged.

As the past gets closer to today, a noticeable increase in the level of care is evident. Many more resources have been poured into the system. Some facilities have top-notch care, which may even be better than the finest available to Americans who can pay top dollar. Surprisingly, for a system that had attracted dark jokes and subtle complaints, there have been little to no outright complaints about the overall cost or effectiveness of it. Granted that the care is still somewhat spartan in many smaller outposts, but its drawbacks are nothing compared to the system extant about forty years ago. Any complaints have been confined to abuses in parallel branches of this system, not the system itself.

This system is well-known to many Americans, but relatively few Americans have experienced it as patients. It happens to be the medical system of the United States military, for soldiers.

The long-existing tie between "free" medical care and the military points to another side of the debate — one far removed from the "Hangnail Problem," or the moral hazard of a "free"-on-demand health care system. These analyses and criticism block out another, grittier, cost-benefit analysis. To put it bluntly, on-demand health care encourages physical aggressiveness.

Wounds gotten from fighting, as well as injuries from physical recklessness, are real. The ones that doctors examine tend to be severe, as a tough who enjoys fisticuffs is not likely to show up for a hangnail. In fact, such a tough may think of himself as a good citizen, well worthy of government-paid health care, because his pain threshold tends to be high. The same tough-guy ethic that mocks someone for crying, or running away, will heap scorn on anyone who shows up at the hospital for a minor cut, bruise, creakiness or pain. On the surface, a nation of toughs doesn’t look all that cost-bloating for a tax-paid health care system.

Look below the surface, however, and it becomes plain that tough guys can be squanderers of government-paid health care systems. Their injuries are largely volitional…and may even be seen as goods, not bads, in the hard-core fighting circuit. "Scars of honor," to put it one way. This custom is, of course, consistent with the conceit that a "real man" of this sort is jolly well entitled to full and free health care.

Consequently, government-provided health care contains a completely different moral hazard than the hangnail problem: the "bruiser" problem.

Naturally, the State can find real use for this type. A brawling bully fits quite neatly into the "spoiled and undisciplined" category beloved in recruiting stations.

Even if the State has no need of war at the time, the secondary growth of the State still continues as a result of State-controlled health care. There is already some recognition of this consequence in the area of health maintenance, which has given new encouragement to the usual prohibitionist factions. At the more basal level described above, though, new State encroachments on individual liberties are already manifest. More, and more aggressive, police forces; more government supervision of the public square; more laws and regulations (ironically) to avert initiations of physical force; more government intrusions upon previously State-free zones.

The end result is a kind of minor, low-level civil war — and the accompanying fears that such a state of un-nature calls forth. This fear, as Robert Higgs’ Crisis and Leviathan documents, is one that State agents are expert at turning to advantage. To sum it up in a slogan: "Government health care today means government monitor cameras tomorrow."

Daniel M. Ryan [send him mail] is a Canadian with a past. Visit his website.

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Audiophiles are sometimes considered an odd breed. Perhaps, they’re seen as obsessives or as ultra-competitives who lose all perspective when chasing a minute improvement in sound quality. There are several credible psychology-based explanations as to why a person would spend thousands of dollars to squeeze out a little better sound from his or her system.

Or so they seem to someone who hasn’t spent some time listening to classical music. I listen to it on the radio from time to time, and I have heard harmonies, played on strings, that sound like static or something close to. The overtones are close enough to static to make me wonder if something is wrong with the radio or the antenna. The uncertainty resulting from hearing a sound that may, or may not be, static is enough to make the purchase of a better radio tempting.

Once this bit of information is added, the behavior of the classics-loving audiophile, and avid classical music collector, makes sense. Without it, though, we have to resort to mythification in order to explain that supposedly irrational behavior. Although those myths are rationalistic in form, they still are myths, and are revealed as such once the crucial datum is seen (or heard).

The psychologizing myths used to "explain" the behavior of audiophiles seem homely, but the process involved is exactly the same with any myths that are used to cover up ignorance with certitude. One of the most pervasive in our society, itself pervaded by the actions of the State, is the explanation of why other people are not like us. Instead of humbly accepting the fact that one person cannot get into another person’s head, a fact that makes other people’s valuations, plans, intentions, etc. unknowable to us except through at-times-problematic inference, all-too-many people construct myths that usually posit an imaginary person, a corporation sole, that’s an agglomeration of everyone but acts on its own. This mythification underlies the six-pronged pitchfork that Professor Jack D. Douglas calls The Myth of the Welfare State.

His book opens up with a question that offers a blinding glimpse of the unassimilated obvious: the term "welfare state," as applied to the current set-up in the developed world, is a vacuous term. "What state has ever been presented by its rulers and other supporters as a u2018dyswelfare state’?" (p. 7; italics in the original). When this point is assimilated, the term "welfare state" begins to look a lot like "sleepless wakefulness" — or like an advertisement.

What is being advertised is, of course, the State as a means of solving individual problems. Since the substitution of force for persuasion doesn’t change the relevant facts, this hope is ultimately illusory. The Myth of the Welfare State is a comprehensive consumer-protection guide countering that oft-urged "miracle cure."

Prof. Douglas shows that, as society grows more complex, people rely more and more on situational planning, implemented iteratively, and more and more on mythification to substitute certitude for plain ignorance. The prime myth extant in Western civilization is the myth of modernism: the belief that the data of human behavior in the distant past are irrelevant to understanding and living in the present. Since we don’t use steam power anymore, so the pretext goes, we don’t need the wisdom of (say) Adam Smith anymore. The myth of modernism is a sort of seniority demand, projected over the span of the human race itself: since we have greater technological seniority over our great-grandparents, their views on human nature need not be taken seriously by us.

Like many myths, this one works by force of analogy. The typical analogy drawn is to hard science — another absurdity if studied closely, but prestigious enough to be largely unquestioned. Just as the pollen in the water moveth to the laws of the Brownian motion, so it is that the "statistical physics of society" bestoweth knowledge that only the foolish bother to question. Anyone who pushes the point finds out that doing so threatens the dominance needs of a lot of today’s worthies.

Prof. Douglas shows that dominance — the need for raw control over other living organisms of the same species as us — is the chief drive that leads to so much rationalistic mythologizing. The dominance drive is such that its intensity grows in a roughly exponential way (if you don’t mind me resorting to an analogy of my own). Satisfaction of dominance needs encourages a greater striving for more dominance over others. The difference between dominance and the sex drive in this respect can be seen in the focusedness of those at the top of each heap. The more sex-favored a person is, the more promiscuous (multi-focused) he or she tends to be. The more power-favored a person is, the more u2018faithful’ he or she is to the cause of further dominance-seeking. Just as the most notorious lovers tend to be deplorably scatter-goaled, so it is that the greatest power-seekers are terribly single-minded. Those rare societies where there is a balance of power between individuals leads to little dominance-driven activity in that corresponding society. It’s only when a stable imbalance of power arises that the former placidity of said individuals turns into overbearingness and servility, adjusting for cultural lag effects.

The fact that political power, or the use of the State by individuals seeking to impose values upon others, is the most complete form of dominance explains the otherwise paradoxical observation that partial dominance feels "less free" to the dominated than total dominance does. De Tocqueville’s law works in reverse: as conditions deteriorate, including deterioration in liberty, it becomes easier to become inured to further deteriorations. The supposedly rapacious businessperson, the figure that is the Great Satan of the post-capitalistic myth of political modernism, was galling because his or her dominance is full of holes. In a free economy, the supposedly rapacious businessperson can only make specific threats and wreak specific havoc upon his or her fellow citizens. In an unfree economy, the rapacious government official has far more scope to wreck other people’s lives. Given this logic of tyranny, it makes sense to rebel against the domineering of the businessperson — and to greet the more total domineerance of the government official with quiet compliance and a fixed smile. The reason why the trashing of the business class was so successful over the last hundred-or-so years is the fact that you can fight Commerce Hall, in ways that City Hall cannot be. Most people know it, giving any anti-capitalist movement added power through apparent feasibility.

The brute fact that political power is far more efficacious in dominating others than "market power" will ever be, not only explains why anti-libertarianism is so successful, but also explains why there are more than a few capitalists who are ready to leap on board an anti-capitalist crusade. Why be satisfied with a partial, loophole-ridden dominance through "market power" when you can get the real stuff by joining forces with the State? Dominance is addictive; like many an addiction, it takes on a supreme value that makes wealth and even comfort pale in comparison. History is full of "great men" who have tenaciously renounced wealth and even most creature comforts in order to clutch hold of the naked thrill of dominating their fellow human beings. The myth of modernism in political economy obscures the fact that many of them have either been poor or lived poor — that economic stoicism can be as useful as the more known variety as an aid to gaining and/or keeping power over one’s fellow human beings.

Once through The Myth of the Welfare State, you’ll be much wiser with respect to the process of dominance-seeking; I’ve barely offered a peek at its contents. I first read this book shortly after it came out in paperback in the early 1990s, and have returned to it many times since. If you like to measure the price of a book by the number of hours spent reading it per dollar spent on it, then you’ll conclude that Prof. Douglas’ magisterial tome is quite the bargain.

Daniel M. Ryan [send him mail] is a Canadian with a past. He’s currently adding value while adding pounds.

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The United States Attorney of the Northern District of Illinois may have wrested a conviction out of a jury in the trial of Conrad Black and three others, but at least two of the four successful charges contain a logical inconsistency with the entire basis for charging Conrad in the first place. Conrad was convicted of three fraud charges and one obstruction of justice charge. The only mens rea associated with the last charge was the presumed violation of a court order from an Ontario, Canada court. In May of 2005, the SEC sent Conrad Black’s lawyer advance warning of a forthcoming order for him not to remove any documents from his office. The next day, Conrad removed 13 boxes of papers, which he claimed were personal papers. According to the sworn testimony of his lawyer, Conrad had no knowledge of the SEC warning at the time he had removed those boxes and stored than at his assistant’s home. (He was being evicted from the office at the time; his assistant agreed to take them in.) So, going by plain facts, the U.S. State has successfully prosecuted a U.K. citizen for presumably violating a then-extent order, of which he had knowledge, of a Canadian court. The Canadian court, I need hardly add, was not asked about it.

At least two of the three fraud charges involved a company that Conrad Black had a partial ownership interest in: Horizon Publishing. (There was also another company partly owned by Conrad called Bradford, but it played an ancillary role in the case.) Those charges pertained to a non-compete payment which he received for a promise not to compete with Horizon. (Non-compete agreements and payments are common in the media industry.) At the time, Conrad was CEO of Hollinger International, of which American publishing was a wholly-owned subsidiary. The fact of the matter are: Conrad Black, as CEO, sold papers to a company that Conrad Black had a minority stake in. He did not have control of the company; his then-partner, David Radler, did. Horizon paid Conrad a non-compete fee, for which he agreed not to compete with Horizon for a certain period of time. Nevertheless, the prosecution, in its closing argument, sloganized this as Conrad "paying himself to not compete with himself." This slogan clearly implies that Conrad was the proprietor of both companies. Had he been treated as such consistently, he never would have been charged, as the entire point of the case was to administer a whack to CEOs of listed companies who acted as if they were the proprietors of the companies they headed up.

How is it possible for someone to be convicted in a manner both illogical and violative of international jurisdiction? Through a means called the "ostrich instruction" to a jury. It will surprise few to know that the use of the "ostrich instruction" has been one of the guns for deployment in the War on Drugs.

Put simply, the ostrich instruction allows a jury to convict on the basis of someone being "willfully blind" to an illegal activity. The standard example given is something like this: you’re a landlord, and some funny-looking stranger pays you a nice premium for you to rent your place to him. Once he’s in, he and some friends of his observe an unusual sleeping schedule; they seem to be up most of the night. They also behave in such a way that a nosy landlord would begin investigating; you don’t.

One day, though, you find out that the funny-acting tenant happens to be a drug dealer. You’re charged as an accessory because you rented a place to the fellow.

Common-sensically, you have an airtight defense: you didn’t know what he was up to, nor should you have been obliged to become a "Peeping stool" for the police. Thanks to the ostrich instruction, though, that defense is unlikely to wash in a court of law nowadays.

With respect to the obstruction-of-justice charge, Conrad shoulda known that an SEC order was floating his way, even if he wasn’t told by his lawyer. With respect to the non-compete payments, Conrad shoulda known that following customary practices and ranges, as a means of reining in any opportunity to take advantage through self-dealing, wasn’t enough. He shoulda known not to do it at all.

Conrad was a "bad girl." He went walking in the bad neighborhood, and was willfully blind to the "obvious" consequences.

Of course, Conrad Black is a known neo-conservative, and it is fun for many to watch another mighty neo being toppled from his high station. He has, through the media available to him, promoted the War on Terror, and has practically served as a press release distributor for the Bush Administration in this regard. In addition, in a move rare for him, he had ordered a Telegraph column that was skeptical of the War on terror changed to reflect a less anti-Bush stance. Adding to the glee potential is the fact that Patrick J. Fitzgerald, the closest thing that the U.S. prosecutorial system has to a hired-gun lawyer, is the same fellow that got both Conrad Black and "Scooter" Libby prosecuted. Anyone averse to neo-conservatism might very well see lawyer Fitzgerald as a kind of hero, in large part because the War of Drugs isn’t sexy at this time.

What’s done, pending appeal, is done. The above isn’t an attempt to re-fight the case, as it’s over. More useful would be a sketch-out of the implications: adding "defensive nosiness" to commerce; not being idiosyncratic with respect to asset shuffling; hiring experts in iffy situations where none used to be needed; hewing more closely to the just price.

The chief unintended consequence is going to be an even more tightly knit collaboration between CEOs of listed companies and Washington, D.C. There’s no quicker way to stop someone from "playing hardball," by threatening to run to the authorities, than to pull out a picture of you with said authorities and sneer back: "Which one you going to cry off to? Please tell me, as his name is probably in my Rolodex."

There’s no way that prosecutions of this sort will end corporate malfeasance or chicanery. The very ambiguity of the case, highlighted by the fact that the share price of Hollinger Int’l has fallen more under Conrad’s successors than under Conrad himself, means that the typical government-loving CEO is going to take steps to minimize risk — in other words, to nestle even more snugly into the D.C. octopus. Asking what the CEO of, say, Tyson Foods would do now that this precedent has been established should provide enough of an answer.

Daniel M. Ryan [send him mail] is a Canadian with a past. He’s currently keeping an eye on the trial of Conrad M. Black.

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The key to understanding the twentieth century is: an increase in the social rate of time preference, the aggregation of compensatory time-rates expected for foregoing present enjoyment of future goods, did take place in the developed economies. The other, more popular, characterizations of the twentieth century can be folded into this one.

We’re accustomed to thinking of the twentieth century as a century of socialism, but socialism as a political force was the implementation of an ideology that is at heart nineteenth-century. It was formed in the nineteenth century, and the heart of it, the labor theory of value, was refuted at the end of the nineteenth century. Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk’s Karl Marx and the Close of His System was published in 1898.

The same is true of social democracy. State policies from its ideological program were first implemented by Bismarck, and the early twentieth-century "reforms" put in place in the rest of the developed economies were largely adaptations of Bismarck’s. Both lost steam in the twentieth century, socialism in the early part of it and social democracy in the middle of it. Ludwig von Mises’ own refutation, Socialism, came out in 1922, and the heart of it has proven to be correct. Ever since 1920 or so for socialism, and 1949 or so for social democracy, "progress" has resulted only from military conquest, international bribes, or political inertia.

Socialism casts people as opportunists, who would violate moral standards in order to make a profit if they were free to. This economic amoralism, which socialism imputes to people, also includes hurting others, whether through recklessness or cruelty. In order to contain this dark side, the State needs to prohibit many, if not all, forms of economic activity to keep that dark side of ourselves from being unleashed. This element is contained, whether explicitly or implicitly, in every variant of socialism, including social democracy. The worker is deemed to be a cut above the entrepreneur because working people only earn wages; they are not profit-seekers. Because the workers are good-hearted and somewhat gullible, they need to be protected from a free marketplace through various kinds of social legislation. These include forced-savings plans run by the State, so that any profit which can be had from such plans winds up in the government’s hands. As can be seen from this description, socialism is an answer to the old-Tory categorization of the working class as "feckless by nature," but not a transcendence of it.

More characteristic of the twentieth century is Keynesianism. According to Keynes, the saver is a dead load on the economy; the borrower is what keeps the economy moving. Given a specified interest rate, borrowers have higher time preferences than savers, by definition. Because of the Keynesian mist, we are often accustomed to thinking of entrepreneurs as frenetic deal-cutters who ride tall when on the rise, and often fall on their face when their business outgrows them. At that point, they need to be rescued by a staff of professional managers and accountants. This impression is almost the opposite of the nineteenth-century view of entrepreneurship. A person from that time would remark that the low-time-preference attribute of the typical businessman has clearly been taken over by those managers and accountants. Because twentieth-century culture, especially late twentieth-century culture, has been a high-time-preference one, this insight has been largely lost to us.

This century’s predilection for war is very much part of this phenomenon. As Lew Rockwell observed back in 1997, soldiers tend to be present-centered, and are thus inclined to have a high-time preference. The glamour of war in the mid-twentieth century has helped spread a high-time-preference culture throughout society — during the last decade, it even reached the management circuit, in books such as Tom Peters’ Liberation Management.

Given these cultural trends, it’s surprising that real interest rates aren’t higher than they are. The mid-twentieth-century cultural block to a high-time-preference lifestyle, which saw it as an adolescent phase to be put aside when of job age, has been eroded, thanks to the debunking of its observers as "stuffed shirts." Had it not been for the institutionalization of low-time-preference habits in those big corporations, whose executives are poked fun at (if not demonized) in high-time-preference culture, real rates would have been higher than they are now.

High-time preference culture is, of course, one that the State thrives on. In addition to legitimating massive government borrowing, a high-time-preference culture also promotes the passage of a flurry of laws and regulations whenever a burning issue hits the headlines. The pace at which this is done brings up the question of whether or not the legislators have read what they’re voting on.

The most secure hook, though, comes from the vulnerabilities that come with habituation to a high-time-preference lifestyle. We face many long-term dangers that aren’t apparent in the short term. Before recent times, present-centered people were found predominantly in the lower classes, which were seldom listened to because they had little clout. As a result, a high-time-preference lifestyle, and fatalism with regard to the long-term consequences of it, traditionally went together, as explained in Edward C. Banfield’s The Unheavenly City. Once a high-time-preference lifestyle entered the middle class, though, the fatalism associated with it disappeared, as middle-class complaints tend to be taken seriously. Glancing though all the laws and regulations passed in the last forty years will show that there have been lots of complaints.

The trend towards high-time-preference behavior has begun to change, though. Financial planning is "in," and there are quite a few twentysomethings who are already taking steps to prepare for their eventual retirement. There is also more attention paid to the long-term consequences of the foods we eat and the activities we pursue. Environmentalism, despite its adherents’ fondness for scare stories, does have a low-time-preference mindset. It’s even becoming stylish to be cautious and careful, through using up-to-the-minute gadgets, as well as to be well-mannered.

Unsurprisingly, the State has its hand right in this trend, particularly in environmental policy but also in surveillance. It may seem that this return to future-oriented, low-time-preference habits is little more than a statist-promoted sham, yet another example of how the intrusive State has got us coming and going.

There’s more cause for optimism than surface appearances may indicate, though. People stuck in a high-time-preference lifestyle tend to become dependants upon the State and stay dependants. People who are more future-oriented have the inner resources to govern themselves, and thus to free themselves from State dependency.

Is the current spate of green legislation going to be the climax of twentieth-century statism? Will middle-class dependency upon the government self-reverse? The answer to both of these questions might very well be "yes." Mega-government may turn out to be a mighty oak that’s subtly hollowing out.

Daniel M. Ryan [send him mail] is a Canadian with a past. He’s currently keeping an eye on the trial of Conrad M. Black.

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Dinesh D’Souza has evidently landed himself in hot water. The resultant heat he’s enduring is saddening, but not really surprising, as he’s always been one of the braver neo-conservatives around. Had he matched the profile of the typical "chicken hawk," he never would have written Illiberal Education until long after the PC brouhaha was over. Instead of it being published in 1991, it would have probably hit the shelves in 1996 or so.

Presently, he is finding out that bravery carries risks. He’s even faced criticism from within his own ranks, which he has undertaken to rebut courtesy of National Review Online. His latest book, The Enemy At Home, has evidently trod on a lot of beliefs, or preconceptions, about al-Qai’da and the threat of Islamist extremism.

His current travails do parallel a kind of funk settling over the neo-conservative movement. They no longer have the "mo." It’s back to the bookworm slot for them, and away from the recent "General Staffer" slot that they have become accustomed to. Having stuck their necks out, they are discovering that exposed necks can be poked at, if not cut at. It’s only a matter of time before the neo-conservative spirit fades into the kind of anchor bias peculiar to nostalgia. The kind that’s good for reunion bashes, for smiling over old episodes of Alias or another show of its kin, and for brag stories for the kids.

The combination of Wilsonism and the "War on Terror" is clearly unraveling. On the one hand, the current bellicosity towards Iran is dissipating, because no casus belli ad hoc can be found that’s consistent with the Bush administration’s earlier justifications for the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. It is an easily found fact that Iran is essentially a democracy. (The Assembly of Experts is an elected body.) The Great Provocateur, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is the elected President there; Wilsonism cannot exactly be stretched to cover "the Iranians didn’t vote the right way." In addition, the Iranian State has made no provably aggressive moves against United States forces and shelters no known al-Qai’da bases. President Ahmadinejad has confined himself to verbal threats against America’s ally Israel, and hasn’t followed through militarily in the way that Saddam Hussein did. As far as the potentiality of nuclear weapons is concerned, recalling that there is already an extant "Islamic Bomb" in the Middle East should be enough to cool the blood-ardor amongst normal members of the U.S. citizenry. The country that unveiled it in 1998 was none other than Pakistan, a U.S. ally.

Speaking of Pakistan, that ally of the United States happens to be the most probable location for the training bases of a newly resurgent al-Qai’da. As you may expect, the Pakistani State, like all States, is subject to certain inefficiencies, through no fault of its officials’ own. They can’t help it if al-Qai’da is holed up in the badlands somewhere near the Afghani border. They’ve done their best. Can’t really fault them for it, etc., etc. It would take a lot of explaining from the U.S. government if it were to be decided in D.C. that Pakistan’s inefficiencies of government warranted a U.S. invasion of the place. Especially given the fact that Pakistan is a U.S. ally.

Better luck next "mo." The crystalline clarity of a world with an easily defined and isolable enemy is slowly clouding into the normal world. Terrorists who are smart enough to kill thousands of U.S. citizens are also smart enough to locate their bases under the jurisdiction — but not under the eye — of a State that is allied to the U.S. government. This geopolitical normality also includes bluffing, and scoring points on the world stage for getting the other players’ goats. A kind of world fit not for a king, but for the gray flannelites that habituate in Foggy Bottom, not to mention in non-affiliated but nevertheless associated bars and alky shops.

Some of the neo-conservatives seem to be aware of this fade-to-grey. As D’Souza has disclosed, there is hope that the liberals will jump on board the war effort. This initiative, clearly, is the end of ye olde "rope of hope." What can you say about a group of buckos who have forgotten the plainly obvious fact, one obvious even to a Canadian with a mere minor in history, that every time the liberals jump on board the War Party, part of the liberals’ war effort consists of stomping down on the conservatives? In modern times, the only period of American history when the liberal foot didn’t stomp on the conservative face, while liberals were prosecuting a war, was the time when the hippies were running rampant. Given Bush’s current approval ratings, and the result of the latest election, what canny Democrat would agree to such a compromise unless, or until, the Democratic Party is in the captain’s chair?

Yep, if those coalition-hopers get their wish, then the current divorce proceedings between conservatism and libertarianism will come to an abrupt end. What will replace it will be the same old fusionism, under different leadership. The same old Coalition of the Remnant.

Instead of helping the liberals to stick the sole-side of the boot in their face, conservatives have an easier option, even if it involves eating a little crow: reconsidering isolationism.

According to the introduction of The Enemy At Home, al-Qai’da, pre-9/11, was encouraged by what they considered to be U.S. "weakness" in the Middle East:

During the Clinton administration, liberal foreign policy conveyed to Bin Laden and his co-conspirators a strong impression of American vacillation, weakness, and even cowardice. When Al Qaeda attacked and killed a handful of Marines in Mogadishu in 1993, the Clinton administration withdrew American troops from that country. When Al Qaeda orchestrated the bombings of the American embassies in East Africa in 1998 and the attack on the U.S.S. Cole in 2000, President Clinton responded with a handful of desultory counterstrikes that did little harm to Al Qaeda. These American actions, Bin Laden has confessed, emboldened him to strike directly at America on September 11, 2001.

Given his underlying assumptions, D’Souza has a point. What, though, if this explanation is modified to, "Bin Laden and Al Qai’da was encouraged by the apparent weakness of U.S. troops that were sent to a place where they had no business being"? This does tend to make for the kind of hesitancy and ineffectuality that encourages enemies.

If foreign adventures are put a stop to, then the U.S. military will show none of that "vacillation, weakness and even cowardice" while abroad because troops won’t be sent abroad. Instead of clumsily lurching towards Empire, the U.S. military’s presence will be confined to defense of the U.S. itself, a task that American citizens have shown consistent strength and resolve in. Ordinary people understand very well what "our soil has been attacked, and we need to clobber the invaders" means, and requires. They don’t need to be put through a sell job to grasp the implications of that policy.

In addition, a strict policy of non-intervention will render American cultural exports geopolitically harmless. The rest of the world can rest easy, once it’s clear that American cultural norms, whether they be religious or secular, whether traditionalist or "progressive," will not be crammed down their throat through American geopolitical meddling. Because the rest of the world will interact with American culture as consumers, rather than as would-be subjects, they will have the choice of taking it or leaving it. With respect to liberal secularism, the world’s traditionalist faithful will have the option of discouraging it through withholding of dollars. As a result, American culture mavens, including the liberals amongst them, will get the message that some wares are wanted, while others just aren’t. Consequently, they’ll have a sense of what is really demanded by the rest of the world’s consumers.

Wouldn’t it be a more secure world if a would-be convert to radical Islamism turns away because it can offer him or her nothing that a simple boycott couldn’t? Especially if said potential recruit is already used to the lifestyle of the sovereign consumer?

Daniel M. Ryan [send him mail] is a Canadian with a past. He’s currently wearing out his thumb with pen and paper.

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Two gentlemen who write under the monikers "Mr. Radical" and "Mr. Right" have presented the case that peace activists want, at bottom, the United States to lose in a war. As of the time I write this, their piece is on the home page of their Website; by the time you read this, it may have been shifted to their archive, as the March 1 column ("Victory or Defeat.")

The argument they make is at heart a simple one. American peace activists tend to be explained away by their fellow Americans, to the detriment of the current war effort, largely through the efforts of the elitist media. It would be much more clear-cut to acknowledge the truth that the media elites simply want the United States military to have its clock cleaned. The reason why the media class desires this tragedy is because they despise the military, largely on moral grounds. This forms a large part of their class interest. Recognizing this underlying bias will clear away a hobbling domestic obstacle to the United States proceeding towards victory in Iraq.

Arguments of this sort have a certain innate plausibility, because everyone has a worldview of some sort, and it is easy to forget one’s own. So, the claim that the media class has a class interest does ring true. An economist could, with little effort, anchor this posited class interest into a material interest. A sociologist could add in a sociological profile of the typical media employee, a "Mr. Media" or "Ms. Media," and anchor the posited class interest into such a profile. Given the conservatives’ own worldview and biases, the sociological approach would more likely be of interest to them. The typical conservative is close enough to the world of money to see the trees instead of the forest, and realize that the "moneyed class" is too diffuse a category to provide much insight into moneyed people. After all, Grosse Point, Silicon Valley, downtown Manhattan and Beverly Hills all qualify as centers of the "moneyed elite," even if the general worldview prevailing in each locale is quite different from that of all the others. Sociology, which focuses upon common attitudes, lacks this diffuseness.

Unfortunately, like all "process arguments," the focus upon means leaves out the ends at stake. Formally, an analytic type could quibble with the imputation of an equivalency — namely, the matching of "peace activism" to "media [or, more broadly, "intellectual"] class interest" — by noting a mismatch between the two terms. Some peace activists do not have a media or intellectualist background, and there are quite a few intellectuals — specifically, the neoconservatives — who lack any kind of pacifist bias. Some of these neos are, of course, mainstream media pundits, and seem quite comfortable in that world.

This approach, though logical, does miss the question of ends. To assume that pacifism is simply an emanation of the "media class" is to assume away the desirability of peace, except as a product of a certain socio-economic class. Even if there is a rough match between one class and an argument, that match says nothing about the plausibility, or desirability, of the argument in question. If the argument by those two gentlemen is adapted to claim that any peace activist secretly desires the defeat of the U.S. military in war, it says nothing about the underlying reasons for such a wish. It could result from a latent hatred of the military. It could also result from a common-sensical realization that the U.S. government is biased towards waging wars, provided that any such war is quick and goes easy on the majority of voters. A string of victory after victory not only encourages this bias, it also inculcates a certain arrogance about the "next one" due to a reinforced anchoring bias: "We won the Big One, we keep winning, and this war’s just like all the others, including the Big One; hence, we’ll pulverize them." In addition, the tying in of patriotism to victory slowly crowds out the long-term costs of a War State being noticed.

In order to illustrate this, I’m going to use a counterfactual analysis for my own country of Canada, one that starts with wishing away a tragedy etched into Canadians’ memory: the 1942 Dieppe raid disaster. The result of this tragedy is the now-generally-accepted conclusion that Canadian soldiers were merely used as expendable cannon fodder for Britain’s wars, and has led to a general antiwar sentiment in Canada. What, though, would have happened had the Dieppe raid had been called off, and no other disaster had been visited upon Canadian troops during World War 2?

The True North Strong And Free

Had you asked a cosmopolite, back in 1925, whether Canada or the United States was more warlike, he or she would have answered, "Canada, definitely. Ever since 1867, Canadians have shown a real enthusiasm for the wars of the British Empire. This war enthusiasm not only includes the latest Great War, but also the Boer War. The citizens of the United States, despite the recent war hysteria there, have always been suspicious of wars and warmaking, and have never shown the spontaneous enthusiasm that Canadians have." The relevant facts and figures would have backed this argument up.

There was a lot of pride amongst Canadians concerning Canada’s war record back then. The "Peace" in Canada’s national motto, "Peace, Order and Good Government," was generally understood to mean "peace through strength" in wartime. The relevant anchoring bias would have been the "Miracle at Vimy Ridge," where Canadian soldiers won a reputation for doing the impossible in war. Had the Dieppe tragedy not occurred, this anchor would still be in the Canadian mindset; the 1942 Dieppe tragedy destroyed it.

The gradual pull-away of Canada from the U.K. orbit would have proceeded anyway, so Canadian war enthusiasm would have been slowly detached from the British Commonwealth and transferred, in part, to the United States’ battles. Canadian soldiers would have been sent to Korea in far greater numbers than was the case. The same would have occurred in Vietnam. In fact, the Vietnam War might very well have been "won," keeping South Vietnam intact, had Canadian troops enlisted in the proportion that they did for the Boer War. Another "Canadian Miracle" would have been added to the "Miracle of Vimy Ridge." (It might have been a more definitive rollback of the Tet Offensive.)

In fact, it may very well have been the "Third Canadian Miracle," had there not been a Vimy Ridge-style offensive during World War 2. Remember the Bay of Pigs?

Consider the consequences, for the United States, had history taken such a turn:

• Lyndon Johnson, a man whose boys were not averse to questioning the patriotism of his political opponents, would have ended up looking like something of a war hero. This would have made the Great Society as unquestionable as the New Deal. The unintended consequences of Johnsonian domestic policy, now widely known, would have been an underground secret, if not blanked out entirely. Johnson would have won handily in 1968 had the Canadian government authorized a massive roll-out of Canadian troops after Tet.
• The hesitancy to launch a war any larger than a skirmish, which prevailed in the 1970s and 1980s, would have not been there. The United States would be far more of a war economy than is the case now.
• In addition, there would have been no war weariness to help the case for ending conscription. The draft would not only be active, but also today’s American youth would have been inured to it. "Youth culture" would have been seen as a treat for the teens, before their induction. The culture would, of course, be more militaristic than it is now.
• Vietnam movies would have been entirely different; instead of tragedies or passion plays, they would have been updated WW2-type flicks. Americans would have seen a "Mr. Canada" figure, such as Benton Fraser of the show Due South, in the person of a comradely Canadian soldier, a down-to-earth version of Sir Alec Guinness’ character in Bridge on the River Kwai. ("Diefenbaker" might very well have been a Rottweiler.)
• Needless to say, President Kennedy, and his policies, would have been all-but-beyond question had Canadian soldiers been added en masse to the Bay of Pigs.
• Who amongst American would dare claim that the U.S. entry into the Korean conflict and the Vietnam War — not to mention the Bay of Pigs invasion, if massive Canadian military aid had been supplied — was unconstitutional?
• Take a moment to imaging what Republican "me-too’ing," from the ’60s to the ’80s, would have been had all of the above occurred.

Now, consider the consequences for an alternate Canada:

• There would have been no Canadian peace movement during the time of Vietnam. It’s all-but impossible that the infamous body-grab of Canadian Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson by Lyndon Johnson in 1965 would have taken place, as PM Pearson would not have called for a negotiated settlement in Vietnam at all.
• Thus, for any "draft dodgers," Canada would have been a cold and chilly place. The only "Underground Railroad" that would have existed would have been the ferrying of any American draft resistors to the American military police.
• What is now seen by Americans as Canadian diffidence would be interpreted as fatalism.
• Such "diffidence" that did exist would be less widespread amongst the Canadian public. The average Canadian might very well acquire a taste for claiming to the average American, "We got you into World War 2 [described in The Molson Saga]; we [would have] bailed you out in Cuba, and we saved your ass in Vietnam."
• This attitude would, of course, creep into negotiations between Canadians and Americans, as well as negotiations between the Canadian government and the U.S. government.
• Any latent anti-Americanism in Canada would not be of the "squishy Left" variety; it would instead have an undertone of bellicosity. "Creative re-interpretations" of the War of 1812 would likely insist that Canada won it, and that calling it a tie smacked of temporizing.
• It’s possible that Canada would be a Republic as of this time — but it would be one that would be profoundly unlike the real Canada of today. Most likely, it would be a garrison State. The best that a libertarian could hope for would be a "New Switzerland," but given the government of Canada’s "mainstream" predilection for interventionism, and the occasional resort to posse comitatus measures domestically (see here and here), a quasi-fascist State would be more likely. Concern for individual rights would be scoffed at as yearning for the "rights of Englishmen."

The Moral of the Story

The above scenario uses Canada, a well-known peace-loving nation, to show what bellicosity, rooted in victory after victory in war, can do to a nation’s culture. Few Canadians, in the real world, would like to see a Canada such as the one I illustrated above. The current peace-loving consensus — a genuinely patriotic one — in Canada is a result of the Dieppe tragedy.

Therefore, a military tragedy, such as the 1942 Dieppe one, can have compensatory consequences for a national culture, not all of them bad. If the peace movement in the United States "wishes" for such a tragedy to be suffered by the U.S. military, it could be inspired by hope that the United States will become as peace-loving as Canada is now, combined with despair over reaching that state through activism. Whether or not the United States would become a better nation as a result of that kind of tragedy is a value judgment, but combining patriotism and hope for an end to native (and official) bellicosity is not a self-contradictory mix. Thus, it is possible to be both a patriot and to expect, or fear, an eventual defeat to be suffered by the military of the nation. The simple maligning of the patriotism of a peace activist is thus a non sequitur.

Daniel M. Ryan [send him mail] is a Canadian with a past. He’s currently wearing out his thumb with pen and paper.

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Some arguments are easy to understand, and others are easy to misunderstand. The kind of argument that is most difficult to understand properly is what goes by the name of a "transcendental argument," a kind of logic check beneath the surface of everyday lines of reasoning. This kind of deduction is hard to assimilate because we often acquire knowledge through accretion, through collecting a pastiche of ad hockeries that serve as our knowledge bank. This knowledge-pastiche is hardly checked by us, except "at the margin" when either a falsity or a contradiction surfaces. A transcendental argument, on the other hand, impels us to take a systematic look at our thought processes, something that seems either odd or not very useful to do.

Objectivism’s "fallacy of the stolen concept," defined as affirming a proposition while denying its logical antecedent, is one of these. Ostensibly an elaboration of contradicting a valid inference, it is confined to moving between levels of abstraction. An example of this fallacy would be "All men are mortal, but Joe Fantastic will never die!" Because this statement contains a subtle logic-oxymoron, we would normally metaphorize it, as we do with a regular oxymoron such as "big small." Something or someone called a "big small," seriously, will prompt us to structure it as meaning, say, "for a u2018small,’ it/he/she is pretty big," unless we reject the term out of hand as nonsensical. Thanks to our ability to think in two levels of abstraction, we can parse an oxymoron through identifying one term as a genus and the other as a differentium. For "big small," I assumed that "small" was the genus and "big" was the differentium. Another kind of thinker, perhaps hailing from a different culture, might reverse that order, which would lead to the term being metaphorized as "for a biggie, he/she/it isn’t much." In the case of the statement about Joe Fantastic, the typical metaphorization, in our culture, is to assume that it means, "Joe Fantastic will always be remembered by the living as if he were still alive."

(As an aside, the standard Objectivist example of a proposition containing a stolen-concept fallacy, Proudhon’s "all property is theft," is sensibly metaphorized as meaning "all landed property in Europe, being acquired by conquest, thus has its origin in theft." The justification for this interpretation is that Proudhon implicitly meant "landed property" when he wrote "property.")

Another kind of transcendental argument is at the center of Hans-Herman Hoppe’s ultimate justification of the private property ethic (PDF file.) He concludes, after proving that argumentation logically presupposes self-ownership, that any denial of property rights is impugned by a "performative contradiction," in which one’s actions contradict one’s case. This kernel of his epistemologic theory of metaethics is easy to misunderstand, because a performative contradiction isn’t easy to find a referent for, outside of pure thought.

There are examples of performative contradictions in the more quotidian world, though. The most obvious one is "do as I say, not as I do." Performative contradictions of this sort, though, are easy to justify, or to sensibly metaphorize, as "you may as well learn from my mistakes instead of making your own," or "I’ve, unfortunately, picked up bad habits throughout my life that I can’t shake off, but what I say to you is the result of learning from them. You might as well learn the easy way from me." Note, though, that performative contradictions and authority tend to be associated with each other.

An even less intellectualized example of a performative contradiction can be found in bodybuilding. Bodybuilders are well acquainted with Nietzsche’s maxim "what does not kill me, makes me stronger;" it’s often translated to mean, "no pain, no gain." This statement identifies a cost-benefit relationship: in order to increase muscle mass, you have to tear your muscles up a little through exerting them, which often means suffering some pain while doing so. The pain is the cost of the gain in muscle mass. When interpreted this way, "no pain, no gain" means "if you don’t pay the pain-cost, you get no bulking-benefit."

Sometimes, though, that statement is interpreted to mean "if you feel pain, you’re gaining. Thus, you should learn to see pain as a gain." What makes the conclusion contain the seeds of a performative contradiction is the obvious function of pain: a warning signal of damage to the organism. Thus, a bodybuilder who claims that "pain is good" is ensnared in a performative contradiction, as will become evident when the pain that he (or she) experiences while working out becomes too much for him (or her) to stand.

This performative contradiction is, of course, metaphorized too. In modern culture, it tends to be interpreted as symptomatic of masochism. Cultures that are more oriented to physicality will metaphorize it differently, as meaning "you have to increase your level of pain-tolerance." Note, though, that performative contradictions involving pain do impress, sometimes mightily, as evidenced by Jim Morrison, in the movie The Doors, belting out the line "my old friend pain" when mad at his wife. In fact, living in a performative contradiction does convey a lot of prestige if doing so requires a lot of effort or willpower.

Thus, it should be of little surprise that the State and performative contradictions often nestle together. Government officials do not like being criticized, because criticism diminishes their authority. An impressive performative contradiction does tend to staunch logical thought, because metaphorization replaces reasoning, thus making critical thought more difficult and more ad hockish. The latter degradation makes it even harder to reason critically, and subtly circumscribes the range of critical thought.

It is possible to reach certain truths while laboring under a set of contradictory premises. An example of such would be the belief that all four arithmetical operations are commutative, with respect to both input numbers but not with respect to the output number. Since the output number for an addition and multiplication operation is, in fact, one of the input numbers for the corresponding subtraction or division operation, this belief contradicts itself.

Someone who believes it, though, and has the normal human habit of checking premises "at the margin," could get through life without ever realizing its contradictoriness — if that person never subtracts or divides, but only adds and multiplies. This example illustrates that it is possible to use a set of contradictory premises for gaining and using limited knowledge, without being aware of the limits therein. Thus, contradictory premises do not extinguish thought, but they do subtly limit thought, in ways unbeknownst to the holders of such premises. Since thought and mental effort are economized, these limits are often taken in stride as yet another example of "limited CPU power."

Accepted performative contradictions also self-limit thought. A person making an argument for universal enslavement can spin out a case through the avoidance of hypocrisy. ("Yes, I’d be a slave too.") It wouldn’t be long, though, before the performative contradiction would surface, thus necessitating recourse to some dogma, or to fallacies such as positing the determinist doctrine.

Interestingly enough, a wider thought-latitude exists in arguments for partial slavery, through positing categorical differences between human beings. "Some people are rulers, others are of the ruled, a third category of people is the misfits or the deviants, and this triple classification will always be true for any group of people." This template is the general framework for all justifications of statism. The conclusion of Professor Hoppe, though, enables any evaluator of them to see hidden flaws, non sequiturs and buried limits, ones unbeknownst to their propounders, in any of them.

Daniel M. Ryan [send him mail] is a Canadian with a past. He’s currently wearing out his thumb with pen and paper.

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One of the more common statist mischaracterizations of laissez-faire is the insistence that laissez-faire promotes income inequality. The only way in which this myth can be true is if laissez-faire is introduced into a polity where people were obliged to become rich, and/or obliged to stay poor. In either case, people are either forced, or obliged through State propaganda, to violate their own marginal utilities of wealth for the sake of conformity to State dictates. The release of that yoke not only releases people to become rich, but it also releases them to not become rich, if they so choose. Since interpersonal comparison of utilities is impossible, there’s no way to predict who will do what, once compulsion is removed.

To recapitulate: laissez-faire can increase income inequality only as a side effect of eliminating State-imposed income conformity. In a State where income conformity is not the prime policy goal, it’s impossible to say whether or not the introduction of laissez-faire would either increase or reduce income inequality. There is only one kind of State that the introduction of laissez-faire would definitely reduce income inequality in: one where legally-imposed income inequality exists. A State in which some people are artificially kept poor, and/or one where State largesse, and/or restrictions, make some people artificially rich, relative to consumer preferences. Historically, the American State has not been one of those.

The modern drive for greater income equality was supposed to be enforced by a highly graduated income tax system. Ostensibly, it was the highly "progressive" income tax that resulted in the "Golden Age of Income Equality" that prevailed in the United States from c. 1945 to 1973.

This simple picture of an equal society, though, has a blot on it — a very significant blot, one revealed by reading contemporaneous liberal complaints about "loopholes." That supposed dam against rising income inequality, when closely examined, offers about as much blockage as a beaver dam, minus the mud. Reading liberals’ complaints about loopholes, made from the late 1940s to the early 1970s, reveals that the cause of the Golden Age of Income Equality was not high marginal tax rates on high incomes.

There is, however, a case to be made that the relatively high level of income equality back then did result from the tax system, if the effect of those loopholes are added. Since high marginal tax rates penalize both investment and growth, any company seeking a loophole could point this out and ask for one, with the "jobs" rationale to make it politically plausible. Since a loophole granted can later be taken away, there was a certain incentive for any company so favored to "spread the gain" by jacking up wages, and by compensating executives non-monetarily — the infamous "three-martini lunch." Another way of compensating executives was granting leisure time, which is not subject to the income tax. An unusually productive executive could gain the privilege of showing up a little late, leaving a little early (especially on Fridays,) and be granted enough time for that three-martini lunch. The privilege of showing up for the afternoon shift while tipsy is also a kind of non-monetary bonus. What this all adds up to, is that income inequality was not reduced as much as advertised during those times. Perks and leisure partially substituted for increases in the pay envelope, at the cost of limiting compensation for productivity increases and therefore limiting productivity increases themselves.

So, economic inequality was in part hidden back then, but there was a reduction in it, as is evident nowadays. It should be noted that the Reagan-era lowering of marginal tax rates on the affluent, the policy widely blamed for increasing income inequality, also included closing a lot of loopholes, in large part through widening the scope of the Alternative Minimum Tax. As a result of both the AMT and loophole closures, it became much more difficult for an affluent person to duck out of paying income tax, though at lower marginal rates. Thus, both income inequality and U.S. government tax revenues have risen in tandem over the last twenty-or-so years.

Another, more politically potent, force for raising income inequality also came into play, one that reveals a fundamental weakness in the policy of reducing income inequality through the tax code. That policy depends upon the taxpayer being kept underfoot: once the question "who pays the government’s bills around here?" becomes politically potent, that policy is on its way out.

Instead, the use of the income tax as a revenue generator becomes a force for increasing income inequality. The person who decides to become rich now, without restraint, has a perfect justification for doing so: "I pay taxes, and the more income I get, the more taxes I pay. Doesn’t that mean I’m kind-of obliged to go for more money?" As a result, the tax-enforced attempt to lower income inequality reverses itself, once the affluent taxpayers wise up to the fact that they’re footing quite a few of the State’s bills — "helping people."

No need to wonder why, as Rep. Ron Paul recently noted, the average CEO salary is close to five hundred times the average worker’s pay. The re-monetization of compensation for increased executive productivity, and consequent release of more productivity, only explains part of the gap’s widening. The income tax system gives perfect justification to such pay disparities, as the State does get its cut. I’m sure that the average CEO would be glad to remind anyone of that fact if his or her pay level was challenged.

The inequality situation has actually gone beyond that self-reversal, though. State intervention in the economy, period, has resulted in unintended consequences. All of them open up the potential for gain. Rep. Paul discussed the massive gains that result from the Federal Reserve’s interventions. Such gains are not confined to "gaming" the Fed, although the most visible gains are had through that. As Hans Sennholz noted, gaming the U.S. Treasury also results in politically-generated profits, and has resulted in a specialist class of political speculators plying their trade. These two types of individuals, highly-paid CEOs and political speculators, do not explicitly include a third elite, also part of the present economy: rent-seekers. All three of these groups have one thing in common: they have gotten affluent, if not rich, through State intervention, and are well equipped to stay affluent, after tax, through influencing the State.

When compared with this new political class, and the current State-caused economic inequality that they thrive in, the old-style businessperson who bragged about paying no taxes on lots of income looks like quite the innocent. Even if his or her "outrageously high income" is compared with today’s figures in real terms.

Daniel M. Ryan [send him mail] is a Canadian with a past. He’s currently wearing out his thumb with pen and paper.

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The recent crack-up of the UN-pushed climate change models is, I am sure, going to prompt yet another spate of back-to-basics navel-gazing. The realization that one single, and rather cheaply-done, experiment has cast real doubt upon years of munificently-financed climatology research will probably cause the "re-evaluation process" to get rolling again. Only this time, higher education will be the focus.

To this end, I submit one of those high-school multiple-choice decision memos for your inspection. In order to play, you need to go through the following four models of higher education and try to pick one that will encourage the most scholarship, unless you think I’m pulling a trick and decide to abstain. Here they are:

The Elitist Model

This one is relatively easy to describe because our present educational system got implemented through elbowing it out a long time ago. The elitist model assumes that some people are inherently fit for scholarship, and the rest aren’t. Since only a small minority of citizens are going to wind up in scholarship anyhow, elitist models of higher education see no inherent difficulty in limiting the pool of qualified candidates to a small minority.

The most august kind of elitism is elitism by birth and/or social position. The ultimate justification for this system is the principle of specialization. Only certain kinds of people are fit for scholarship; bringing the rest in would simply waste their time and (perhaps others’) money. Since only a small minority of citizens will become professional scholars of any worth anyway, the restriction on entrant numbers to a small minority shouldn’t matter all that much.

The most creative justification of the arbitrary-disqualification element of such a system came from an eighteenth-century Prussian, Justus Möser. He argued that the arbitrary imposition of qualifications for scholarly positions will be good for the masses, because each member of the disqualified part of the citizenry can content him- or herself with the thought, "okay, so it’s unfair, but it doesn’t say anything about my own abilities. I just wasn’t born to be a scholar." (Ludwig von Mises discusses this argument in Section 1, subsection 4 of The Anti-Capitalistic Mentality.) Building on this justification, it could be argued that arbitrary criteria for admission will inculcate a sense of guilt and/or shame in the favored classes, which will impel them to work hard in order to justify their privileges to the rest of the citizenry.

Of course, the arbitrariness of the qualifications, with respect to scholarly merit, is precisely the drawback of the elitist model. This drawback does not exist for the second model of higher education.

The Hard-Democratic Model

The hard-democratic model of higher education uses a rigorous selection process too, but substitutes measures of individual accomplishment for collectivistic admission criteria. In contradistinction to the elitist model, anyone, no matter how modest their social rank or socio-economic status, can reach the top in the hard-democratic system — provided that the successful person in question gets top-notch grades and produces top-notch work.

One advantage to the hard-democratic model is that it provides a plausible way to achieve excellence in scholarship, in a democratic polity. To do so, all that is required is to ramp up the requirements for getting in. Grade cutoffs can be raised; entrance exams can be added; work pressures can be piled up to weed out the lackadaisical. In addition, character screenings can be added, too: if a science student "fudges" the data while in the lab, he or she can be expelled for cause. The same thing goes for cheating of any kind. Professors who "creatively adapt" someone else’s work can be sacked for cause. It can be argued that the character component is even more democratic than the performance component, because there is no such thing as a "character quotient" but there is such a thing as an intelligence quotient. Interestingly enough, rote memorization, as a performance metric, doesn’t favor the high-I.Q. type that much either. Nor does cold-decking a student for non-sequitur-ridden thinking.

Another general advantage of the hard-democratic model is that it doesn’t mandate excellence. If excellence in scholarship is not wanted, then the criteria can be relaxed a little. The issues that dominate scholarship at the top level are rarefied, after all; a more pragmatic age tends to see them as being of little use.

This model, though seemingly ideal for a democratic society, has one drawback, which is more well known now than it was forty years ago. The hard-democratic model relies upon merit criteria that may very well be too narrow, thus opening up the possibility of a third option.

The Soft-Democratic Model

The soft-democratic model of higher education discards rigor for the sake of pluralism. Multiple points of view are encouraged; optimization criteria are discarded as being too narrow-minded. Instead of output-based selection criteria, input-based criteria are used: credentials. You put in the time, and don’t goof off, you qualify.

The obvious disadvantage of this kind of system — tenured mediocrity — is dealt with by reliance upon the marketplace of ideas, and by "strength in numbers." It matters little if one scholar is a screw-up, as long as he or she has a needed knack that can contribute to the progress of the field. A more rigorous, but more narrow-minded, colleague can correct the errors of the former. The latter type of scholar derives a benefit from being inspired by the former. Thus, the soft-democratic model relies upon the principle of specialization, too — intra-group specialization.

If the whole field seems ridden by screw-ups, then a shift to critical thinking can set the ship of scholarship aright. In addition, many scholars with bad habits can set themselves aright through normal maturation. A screw-up will grow out of it.

The advantage of such a system is that it never drives away potential, whereas a more rigorous system might. Also, it brings the most scholars into the field. The disadvantage, of course, is credentialism becoming a substitute for competence.

The Regimentation Model

This last model differs profoundly from the first three, and is the most alien to us. All of the others rely upon initiative: the elitist model uses class pride; the hard-democratic model uses pride in individual accomplishment; the soft-democratic model uses career incentives. The regimentation model, on the other hand, uses punishment.

In this model, classes are run like a boot camp. Laxity in paying attention, and in homework, is met with a swift penalty, such as being yelled at, or "punishment drill," or going without break time. It’s hard to see an advantage in this kind of higher-education model, as it can only produce good epigones. The regimentation model is only considerable when epigonery is prized, and mistakes of any kind are anathema. Needless to say, the regimentation model is the most foreign to a free society, let alone a democratic society.

What should be clear about all of these models is that they have both strengths and drawbacks. It is impossible to prove, without smuggling in value judgments, which system of these four is the best one. None of them are objectively ideal.

Interestingly enough, though, all of them can be corrupted by the substitution of State financing for private (or self-)financing — all of them. Here’s how:

1. The elitist model can become a gravy train for a privileged class, thanks to the influx of tax dollars. This result goes by the name of a "Family Compact" in my home land of Canada.
2. The hard-democratic model is put at risk by "the few and the proud" making up a small pressure group. Thus, although the hard-democratic model seems to be better than the elitist model, it is more vulnerable to shifts in the political wind due to its successes not being born to any shade of impressive and therefore influential purple.
3. The soft-democratic model does have the advantage of a relatively large class of beneficiaries, which makes it less politically brittle than the hard-democratic model, but the credentialist nature of it does tend towards sinecure.
4. The regimentation model, dominated as it is by obedience, is easy for the State to corrupt into pseudo-scholarship.

And, of course, all of them will be bent out of shape by the fact that the State pays the piper, and thus calls the tune. The marketplace of ideas, like the marketplace period, exists to serve the consumer. When the consumer is the State, then the demand by the State, for a certain kind of scholarship, will call forth a corresponding supply.

It also introduces a corresponding disincentive as well. Governments do not like being embarrassed, after all, and can not only de-fund any obstreperous scholar, but can also go after any would-be private patron too, through changes in the laws. A private patron cannot go after the State; he or she can only plead to the State.

The American academy, as of now, is dominated by a largely soft-democratic model, with a residue of the hard-democratic model that used to be predominant when State financing was in its earlier stages. Present-day climatology has been developed in a contemporaneous soft-democratic milieu, with lavish State funding included; it is in conformance to this model that it lost its head for so many years. I note, in closing, that climatology has required the services of a Viscount to regain its bearings. Should there be any navel-gazing as a result of the breakdown of the "generally" accepted climate-change models, I humbly suggest the inclusion of this fact into any such effort.

Daniel M. Ryan [send him mail] is a Canadian with a past. He’s currently wearing out his thumb with pen and paper.

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One of the deductions that Hans-Herman Hoppe is known for is his conclusion that democracy differs from monarchy in the area of responsibility-continuity. As he elaborates in Democracy: The God That Failed, democracies are run by temporary custodians, who must maximize their advantage in a short-term manner because their position is only temporary. There is no incentive, beyond an "idealism" that is much easier to bully-pulpit than to seriously implement, to make permanent improvements to the nation’s economy. Such incentives that are subject to the influence of promoting a legacy (favorable mention in the history books) do not dovetail with economic improvements. They do dovetail with winning the respect, or awe, of the writers of the history books, which itself is subject to the credibilities of the general public. Thus, there is no logical connection between democracy and economic growth, even if there seems to be in the short term. Such short-term incentives, though, are confined to gaining credit for any growth trend, or assigning blame for any contraction trend, in whatever way is most expedient for gaining, or keeping, elected office.

Interestingly enough, democracy can coexist with a somewhat free and growing market, although not to the extent that the old democrats assumed. The trusteeship nature of democracy does apply to war, as Joseph Schumpeter discussed in the chapter "Imperialism As a Catch Phrase" in Imperialism and Social Classes. Just as the democratic politician has no incentive to add permanent improvements to a nation’s economy, so it is that a democratic politician has no incentive to launch, intentionally, a long-term war, one where the victory will not come until he or she is either retired or dead. This is the root of the notion that democracy and war are mutually exclusive. Note, though, that it says nothing about short-term wars, ones that can be declared, prosecuted, and "won" within the timeframe of a single career as political head honcho. The typical war fought by the United States — and there have been many of them — is prosecuted according to this plan. In terms of time, the longest "hot" war ever fought by the U.S. military has been the Vietnam War, which lasted approximately ten years. Both Presidents that were Commanders-in-Chief during its full prosecution left office in disgrace, essentially for hypocrisy. This provides, for the United States specifically, a lesson for any future President: long, drawn-out wars, ones that get stuck in the "Big Muddy," entail political suicide. The incentive for, and consequent expectation of, quick victory is evidently self-reinforcing. So, a bias towards high time preference in politics does have its advantages, as the obvious tendency of national "statesmen" to treat the nation’s goods and people as a War Treasury is limited by the short-term orientation of democratic politics.

Given the obvious disadvantages of a high-time-preference State, though, there does emerge a kind of tension, or clash, between economic maximization and maximization of political advantage. Economic growth under capitalism does rest upon capital accumulation, which requires general habituation to low time preferences. This habituation, though, is foreign to democracy. Thus, capitalists and democrats have a tendency to look askance upon each other. The grand compromise "democratic capitalism" tends to rest upon capitalists being amenable to politicians taking credit for the capitalists’ own accumulation, or to politicians ascribing credit for it to "the people" — the voters. When the latter course is taken, capitalist democracy enjoys a kind of stability, because the "people" being given credit do tend to be low-time-preference in habits. In this sense, the people’s flattery, although it paints with too broad a brush, is roughly accurate in a democracy with a low-time-preference culture.

Unfortunately, this coexistence is not a stable one. One of the disturbing conditions of such an arrangement is the rise of a class that is more capitalistically inclined than the general populace. This development does occur from time to time when a generally unrecognized competitive advantage in cultivating a low time preference arises, because the advantages of doing so are subtle, and are not easily assimilated. They are generally scoffed at during times when the advantage is generally unperceived. An unintended consequence of that competitive advantage emerging, though, is that it makes "the people’s flattery" more and more unrealistic. The politicians, who credit "the people" for the extent of capitalistic development in a nation in those times, appear as if they were assigning the name of the "people" to a low-time-preference elite. This practice, although rooted in capitalist democracy, appears undemocratic, and may very well be so at the time it is seen through. Thus, "inequality of wealth" is not a threat to capitalist democracy per se, but sustained inequality of time preference is.

It should therefore be of little surprise that the economics of Keynes, with its borrower-centric bias, took the democracies of the world by storm in his time. Keynesian politics does show a certain shrewdness in times when inequality of time preferences is jarring, as it ascribes credit for "economic growth" to the consumer, the borrower, and of course the government itself. (The only category that the low-time-preference sort can fit into is exporter.) Lord Keynes spoke very well to the biases of his time, even if, in so doing, he inclined democratic politicians to take credit for economic growth themselves, rather than discouraging them from doing so. It is in this way that a Keynesian democracy is inclined towards corporatism. Keynesian political economy takes hold during times when the high-time-preference class has an opportunity to wreak revenge (for being taken for granted) through democratic politics, at the long-term cost of hobbling the economy.

As democratic politicians grow in influence, so does the high-time-preference lifestyle gain in prestige. Any child raised to be obedient to the State, in such a democracy, will conclude that high-time-preference behavior is good. Don’t the best statesmen act short term? Don’t they demand results quickly? Don’t the best of them get results quickly? Don’t they brag about the generosity of a deficit-running government, and merely pay lip service to the idea of surpluses? Aren’t they somewhat fast and loose with respect to mere promises? If the electorate doesn’t mind that, why shouldn’t Our Leaders be that way? They serve the people, don’t they?

Thus, in a time of statolatry in a democracy, the high-time-preference example set by the political class results in high-time-preference behavior amongst the obedient young. They have indeed followed the example of their "betters" in this regard.

There are equilibrating trends in politics as well as economics. One means by which the low-time-preference sort can limit the resultant hobbling of the economy, as well as recurrent depredations of it, is to promote the idea that anyone living the high-time-preference lifestyle is a "winner" in some way. This makes the resultant inequalities of wealth less aggravating to the electorate.

Nevertheless, it tends to cleave incentives for social success apart from incentives for economic success. In addition, it fails to explain why low-time-preference people gain wealth and influence in everyday life. This latter clash tends to show up in the culture, as a supply of movies, etc., arises to satisfy the demand for explaining it. The typical plot line that fills this demand, in American culture, includes the wicked moneylenders, the wicked businessmen, or the wicked corporations that seem destined to enslave us all. This last American myth reconciles the clash between success in life and following behavioral cues from the political leadership, by encouraging the notion that the wicked corporation "forces" people to act in a low-time-preference manner.

The end result, in a statolatized democracy, is a kind of elitism developing, one where "overnight successes" compose the new elite. Anyone who succeeds, or who appears to have succeeded, in a high-time-preference manner, becomes a folk hero. Such people reinforce the popular stereotype of "Instant Wealth," which reconciles the popular desire for worldly success with popular deference to politicians. These ostensibly favored few, mostly celebrities, serve an important function in a statolatized democracy, as they show that it is possible to "have it all" in a clash-ridden democratic polity. (No need to wonder why they end up with political influence.) This reassures the electorate, who would otherwise have qualms about an existent clash between political success and economic success in a democracy where government is looked up to.

There’s only one way out of such a dilemma, for those who seek economic success in a democracy: rehabilitation of low time preference habits in the general populace. Since deference towards politicians inculcates the habits of high time preference, the restoration of general respect for the low-time-preference mode of life requires putting an end to the practice of revering politicians. They have to be seen as serviceable, and the ones who are good at it seen as rating a kind of cold esteem.

Daniel M. Ryan [send him mail] is a Canadian with a past. He’s currently wearing out his thumb with pen and paper.

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Imagining time travel is often useful as a thought-tool, to expose the effects of the "common sense of ignorance and prejudice." Imagine, la the Back To The Future trilogy, you went back to 1955 to discuss the consequences of legalizing gambling with ordinary, astute citizens of that time. If you asked what strategy the gaming industry would use to seek after profits, you would probably get an answer like this:

"Easy; they’d build upon what the illicit gambling houses do now. Maximize the house’s take, and lure people in by wild promises of effortless wealth. Hire muscle men to serve the drinks and run the tables, which’ll impel anyone who would otherwise skip out on a debt into paying up. Wear the wealth you scoop up as the owner of the place and pretend to be a patron, so as to mislead the customers into thinking that they’ll be u2018sure winners’ too. Set up a clearinghouse of vice inside the casino, so as to take back any winnings that the lucky might receive. That’s how any kind of legalized gambling outfit would clean up."

This response sounds so sensible, it would probably become the mainstream forecast in the entire room. If you responded by disclosing what the gaming industry is really like nowadays — promoting family-friendly vacations for the bricks-and-mortar gaming spots, and competing through keeping the house’s take low [2—10%] for the [Internet] casinos with no vacation spot attached to them — you would probably be met with scoffs of disbelief. "Can you believe this guy/gal? The next thing we’ll hear is that the Soviet Union will magically disappear by 2005!"

After finding out what Cassandra herself had to put up with, you then go back to 1925, only this time, you decide to wrest a bit of fun out of the opinion-finding trip by concocting a fast one, about what the alcohol industry "will" be like if Prohibition were repealed. Instead of disturbing people with the truth, you unveil this spiel, once you’ve gotten the ear of a group willing to speculate about alcohol being legalized:

"If Prohibition should end, the alcohol companies will have to build upon the bathtub gin by getting rid of the impurities in it; they would lack the impunity enjoyed by organized crime. But, organized crime has paved the way towards a future rationalization of any such industry. It seems evident that the alcohol industry of the future will sell near to 200-proof alcohol, which you can add to any drink you like. It’s the more efficient way of doing it, as 0.6 ounces of the pure stuff will equal what a mug of beer used to do. People will buy a bottle and dispense it themselves, much like the way you buy gasoline at the rail-head nowadays. Beer and even whisky will be obsolete."

Now you have the crowd on your side — as of now. Your tall tale is treated as hard-headed sense. Until you get to this point:

"It’s a lot like the cocaine industry would be like if cocaine is legalized, except the cocaine industry will be more prone to the efficiency strategy because there’s no taste barrier with respect to that powder whereas with alcohol — Yes, ma’am?" You stop, and let a dowager, who has something to say, speak up:

"I am sorry to interrupt your story, but that is not the way cocaine would be marketed if it should become legal — again. I remember when it was; the most salable way in which it was sold was the drink Coca-Cola, as it then was. They put in enough to give you a nice crank-up, but not enough to make you addled, as the substance in pure form would undoubtedly do. There is no way that cocaine would be sold, in the open marketplace, in the way that you have described. Free enterprise simply does not work the way you imagine it does."

Where’s The Volume?

A survey of any industry devoted to entertainment or leisure, which a legalized drug industry would probably be pegged as, reveals a certain paradox: the kinds of entertainment that are revered as "extreme" don’t generate that much sales volume, let alone profits. Look around in any kind of entertainment or leisure industry: the big dollars are pulled in by companies that offer moderate experiences. Yes, this includes alcohol too. It’s almost a certainty that you’ve heard of "Kentucky firewater," or some other triple-proof alcoholic drink, but it’s probable that you’ve never drunk any.

The same rule of thumb would apply to marijuana, cocaine, LSD, narcotics, and stimulants. The "hard core" segment of the market, where the pure stuff "rules," would undoubtedly be a dwarf when compared with the market for milder variants. People are quite capable of guessing what the consequences of a serious "bender," for any mind-altering substance, will be. The hard-core "druggie" is as much a walking deterrent as the hard-core "alkie" is.

"Have a toke and a smile." Hidden subtext: This product is mild enough to induce you to relax, without scrambling your brain in the process.

Sure Thing? I Don’t Think So

Because I was in the hospital for a seriously broken arm, I can attest to the effect that morphine has on me. While waiting for myself to be operated upon, I was able, for part of my stay there, to dispense morphine into my bloodstream whenever I wanted it. Since I was in some pain, I used it freely.

Until I experienced the psychological effect. Under its influence, I felt sulky, and I didn’t want to be bothered. Since I normally feel obliged to be sociable, this reaction bothered me.

Since I was wounded, in a hospital bed, I could cover that sulkiness up by pretending that I was too tired to talk, or to listen. Had I taken morphine at a party, though, I wouldn’t have had that excuse; instead, I would have had to "drag my hump" though it. This reaction of mine to morphine implies, for me, that I wouldn’t be any kind of regular customer for any legalized narcotic. In fact, the reminder of my own bad experience would make even socializing with a morphine user somewhat of a turn-off for me. This reaction of mine would reduce the demand for narcotics, except among people who would peg me as a "square" for acting that way.

This same limitation applies to any kind of mind-altering drug. The person who experiences a panic attack after smoking a marijuana cigarette is going to be a walking "anti-advertisement" for the substance. The person who is unhinged by a "hit" of LSD is going to be the same thing. So would the person deranged by a hit of cocaine. Any one of those people is going to contribute to demand reduction for any such substance. The potentiality for such is going to provide a real incentive, for any company that manufactures and sells a mind-altering substance, to cut down on the "high." Doing so cuts down the risk of adverse reactions, at least according to common sense.

This dilution strategy is most likely to occur for LSD, because of the effect of a full "trip." Not very many people can withdraw from the world for a 12-or-so hour stretch. The present age is more centered on intellectual capital, so more people nowadays than in the 1960s will be deterred by the risk of having their brain derailed by even one single "trip." On the other hand, a dose below approximately 100 mcg of the stuff does not induce a "trip," but instead makes the imbiber giggly, in a manner similar to Ecstasy. Given current lifestyles, it seems almost a certainty that a 200-mcg dose of LSD would be a slow mover, while a 50-mcg dose would be the mainstay of the market.

Ode To Joey Camel

Any company that moves into the selling of legalized mind-altering substances will be fully subject to the law. That body of law very much includes case law.

The cigarette companies — purveyors of legal products — have, whether rightly or wrongly, faced and lost huge class-action lawsuits, as a result of the long-term deleterious consequences of the use of their product. With the decisions against the tobacco companies serving as precedents, sufferers of any long-term deleterious effect resulting from the regular use of a mind-altering substance will have the right to launch a serious lawsuit. With case law with respect to recreational substances being what it is, any company that would step into the breach vacated by organized crime will have to watch its products very carefully. Given this legal hazard, it would not be surprising to see, say, a morphine or heroin manufacturer plow some of its profits into the discovery of pharmaceuticals that would make it easier to kick the habit. Companies selling other kinds of mind-altering drugs would be pursuing a similar course, out of fear of liability or boycott losses. They wouldn’t be hamstrung by denial, as the cigarette companies were and perhaps still are.

Such precautionary measures wouldn’t stop there, either. All it would take would be the reasonable fear of, say, an LSD user being blinded by the light, from staring into the sun for too long, to impel LSD purveyors to offer, say, dark glasses with welder-visor lenses with a dose of the drug as a package deal. Or, at the very least, to add a warning label, if a consumer-protection agency hasn’t already forced it to do so.

It should never be forgotten that legalization of mind-altering drugs will not only bring the protection of the law to the sellers and manufacturers of them, but also to the consumers of them. This fact alone makes the dark forecasts of a "society of drug addicts," much beloved by Drug Warriors, something akin to a collection of scare stories, not serious predictions.

Daniel M. Ryan [send him mail] is a Canadian whose reach has long exceeded his grasp. He’s currently wearing out his thumb with pen and paper.

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Present-day American mercantilists do rate a certain cold esteem. They’ve come up with a perfect means to fool old-style mercantilists, who seize upon a trade surplus as if it was the perfect indicator of national competitiveness. Those who think that the U.S. is the "accommodating loser" in the international trade game, simply on account of what seems to be the U.S.’s permanent trade deficit, are the real saps of the game.

Modern mercantilists do not use the government treasury to measure national competitiveness; they use the rate of change of measured national wealth, or economic growth. Using this perspective, and remembering that the United States government is not obligated to send a single gram of gold to any other government in the world, the modern mercantilist can easily conclude that a supposed trade deficit is a real advantage for the United States, because it is made up of fiat money. In fact, "losing" fiat dollars to "foreigners" makes for a good excuse to create more of them. Provided that the national worthies, and members of the public, are not riled by the sight of "foreigners" buying up "our assets," a continual trade deficit position looks like a rather sweet deal for a fiat-currency economy.

It’s made even sweeter by foreigners investing in U.S. government obligations, which is where the bulk of the capital inflows go. How can a nation foreclose on the government with the most powerful military in the world, one with the power (also) to cut off the world’s most reliable consumers from a "rogue trading partner?"

If a nation seems to be in the position of the sucker, but in fact is cleaning up, then it is clearly a hegemonic power. A state of hegemony exists when the hegemon "wins by losing" versus its competitors. Clearly, the position of winning through incurring a trade deficit is, by old-fashioned mercantilist standards, "winning by losing." The cause of this enviable position is inflation.

Some may be surprised at my conclusion that the United States is becoming an imperial power. To be charitable to the uppermost officials of the U.S. government, the United States government does confine its international aggression to the squelching of perceived direct threats, as well as to largely retaliatory measures. The characterization of the United States as "an aggressive imperial power" is not quite applicable to the United States government, as of now.

The definition of an imperial power, though, is a sovereign nation that takes away the sovereignty of other sovereign nations. The United States government is doing that now, although (as of now) the use of this power is confined to squelching the sovereignty of governments that are openly and actively hostile to the United States. The U.S. government isn’t at the point of full imperialist aggression, as yet.

But it’s clearly going that way.

If the United States government is turning into Caesar, then the role of Caesar’s wife is being taken up by the United Nations. In order to thrive, an empire has to have the might to take away the sovereignty of one or more sovereign nations. It also must bring some sort of benefit to those nations in order to quell unrest and incipient rebellion among the de-sovereignized. In the case of Rome, it was the benefit of Roman law and access to Roman civilization, as well as the regularization of exacted tribute. In the case of the United States, it’s democracy and access to U.S. aid and markets, as well as a guaranteed criterion for non-invasion of countries that are not active enemies of the American State. That criterion is a democratic State, now ratcheted up to one that holds "free and fair" elections.

Except for market access, these benefits to being a good hegemonee are bickered over and hashed out, for the most part, in the confines of the U.N. building, in downtown New York, New York. It’s obvious that, since the U.N. has no ability to tax and can only maintain a military that makes Canada’s look like a Great Power’s, it has next to no clout in the international arena. But, despite the occasional scandal, the U.N. is still good at the duty of being above reproach.

The United States is definitely becoming an empire of democracy; its analog to the Roman fasces is the ballot box. The self-sacrificial nature of the Wilsonian base is resulting in compensatory advantages being squeezed out of the "deals." One of them, a political squeeze, is currently hobbling the still-U.S.-led war effort in Afghanistan. Economic squeezes tend to add to the "national wealth" of the United States, through corporations that are still called "free enterprisers" by the yearners for yesterdays in the Left. Not since World War 2, luv; not since then.

And what makes this hegemonic state possible? Inflation — currency expansion.

As the old book Business And The Banking Cycle relates, on pp. 14—15, World War 1 was 75% financed by borrowing and currency expansion. Only 25% of the financing for it was done through taxes. Since the Federal Reserve System inflates through the credit market, and was already up and active as of 1917, there is no way to precisely gauge the amount of war financing done by inflation. The active support of the Fed in dishing out reserves to aid banks in financing loans for War Bond purchases, though, implies that the bulk of the borrowing was disguised currency expansion. As the authors relate throughout the rest of the book, this inflating bent the United States economy way out of shape, in a way that was completely unknown to every school of economics at that time except for the Austrian one. Even the laissez-faireists of the time (except for that perceptive few) seriously underestimated the extent of the prior damage, which explains why it was so easy for New Dealers to label "liquidationist" arguments as fatuities, as of 1932—3. Given what is now known about the Great Depression, though, the old laissez-faireists now seem plaintive, not risible.

The inflationists were definitely the victors, though. Even since the 1930s victory of inflationism over laissez-faire, inflation and war have always gone hand-in-hand in the G-8, with Keynesian neomercantilism issuing apologias for it all the way.

Is it possible to stop it? Unfortunately, it’s hard to be optimistic about that kind of "Rosy Scenario." The accumulated malinvestments in the present-day American economy are far more extensive now than in 1929. Thus, it’s reasonable to conclude that the liquidation option would be both longer and harder now than it was in the 1930s. In addition, the citizens of every "advanced" nation are used to an economy permeated by credit inflation. The living tradition of life with a gold standard, which would ease the behavioral transition to a 100% reserve gold-backed currency, has almost faded away. As producers and consumers, we’re flying astigmatic. Hence, there is little surprise in the unpopularity of gold as an alternate currency as of now; the less you can see, the more habit-bound you are.

It is true that the destiny of fiat currency is eventual worthlessness, but it is plausible that such a process could take a very long time. The reason why can be seen through drawing two parallels. The first one is succinct: quick hyperinflations tend to accompany defeat in war. The chance of that happening to the United States is remote. Hyperinflations in strong and pre-imperial, or imperial, States tend to be drawn out over generations. (Rome’s was.) The second parallel is more subtle, and easier to misunderstand.

The economy of the United States has been getting along fine enough, for decades, without gold money. The Bourbon monarchial State, though, got along fine enough without its traditional legislature for more than 150 years. (The last twenty-five-or-so years did see things getting rough.) I have little doubt that the pragmatic Louis XIII — not to mention Marie de Medici — saw the Estates-General as an unnecessary impediment to the progress of the French kingdom, as did Louis XIV, XV and XVI. I also have little doubt that, as France grew in power, glory and even pelf as the seventeenth century proceeded, the decision to live without the Estates-General was considered both wise and sagacious by the mainstream of France’s then-living intellectuals. It should be remembered that Louis XIII was generally known as "The Just," and his successor, Louis XIV, was loved. Both of them governed without the Estates-General, which didn’t hobble their popularity by any significant bit.

Of course, America is profoundly different in political character from Bourbon France. The "progressive principle" in modern America is not enlightened monarchy, but democracy, a completely different political system. And, of course, it may seem a real stretch to draw a parallel between gold money and a legislature. The only similarity is the brushing away of a tradition which secured a measure of independence from the dictates of the State, on the grounds that that tradition was merely obstructionary and therefore obsolete. This similarity seems only of interest to a political "process analyst," or political operator.

There is another parallel of interest, though. Getting rid of that tradition was not only politically successful at the time of retirement, but the popularity also endured for generations. If America’s 1933 is the same as France’s 1615, then the America of today is roughly at France’s 1689. Inflationary America is still on the high side of the ride, as was the State of late seventeenth-century France.

Both the domestic and foreign parallels drawn above indicate that America can keep going down the inflationary-Empire path for quite some time. Thankfully, this conclusion implies that we have a very long time to prepare for the eventual downfall. We may very well need it.

Daniel M. Ryan [send him mail] is a Canadian whose reach has long exceeded his grasp. He’s currently wearing out his thumb with pen and paper.

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It’s been more than twenty years since the War on Drugs has been commenced, at the official level. It’s been several decades since the white-washed absurdity of the earlier phase of the government’s war on this kind of freedom was seen through.

It’s also been more than twenty years since the cry of "prohibition" has been flung around by an eclectic group of people, all of whom want an end to the visible effect of the War on Drugs. Seizure of property, increasing government intrusion into privacy, raids that could have served as a real-world inspiration for the plots of 24, and other incursions of liberty, less publicized. If this goes on, the DEA might very well end up becoming a secret police force.

Canada has a different dynamic with respect to this issue. The most alarming incident relating to the War of Drugs consisted not of innocent citizens being rousted, or worse, but the murder of four RCMP officers, the most who have ever been killed in a single RCMP operation in Canada’s history, almost. So, any Canadian strategy would have to be profoundly different from one directed at the United States — perhaps.

Unfortunately, the strategies that have been pursued by the advocates of drug legalization haven’t exactly been the most efficacious.

Yes, There Is Truth On Both Sides, Thou Castigat

The old strategy, based upon the initial lies and hysteria surrounding illicit drugs, was rooted in the assumption that the Drug Warriors were at heart hypocrites. Despite the Menckenesque twist in it, its heart was Christian: the Drug Warriors are pharisaical.

The beginning of the end of this phase was roughly marked by an article and its sequel, which I still remember, from the beginning of the 1980s: "Marijuana Alert," a two-part series in the Reader’s Digest documenting the claimed risks of long-term marijuana use. Even if some of its claims have proved to be exaggerated, as well as shown to be deficient on methodological grounds, it was sufficiently credible to make the "thou hypocrite" strategy begin to fall apart.

Why? Because acting as Christ, in that way, only works when the truth is unambiguously on the side of the aspersion-caster. If the presumed Pharisees in the drama have solid ground to stand on, they can wiggle out of the "hypocrite" stigma very easily:

"Yes, I did do drugs when a youth. That’s because I was sufficiently foolhardy to need a lesson, administered the hard way." Bye-bye Pharisee; hello bandwagon. Those legalization advocates who had delighted in the sight of Drug Warriors’ children indulging in various illicit substances seem to have missed this angle. As long as there are any proven hazards to the use of illicit drugs, the "hypocrite" strategy will lead to nothing more than a Mexican standoff, thus perpetuating the War on Drugs, not ending it.

The Squeeze Play: "I Don’t Use Drugs, But…"

The reason why this strategy is politically proven to be ineffectual, after long political trials, is because the argument from disinterested principle is easy to wave away. Americans tend to trust self-interest in politics; such arguments always invite the question, "then why do you even bother?"

People who are motivated purely on principle tend to form cohesive movements; such is true. The reason why such a strategy was launched is easy to see: "addict" is a real insult to people who believe in free will. By taking it as a huge insult, though, the legalization advocates, including myself, have just made the insult far more potent. Fear of being labeled an "addict" is a large attribute of the legalization movement; the Drug Warriors know it. It says, to them, that the advocates of repeal are politically weak. Not only has the Weberite approach failed to stop even greater incursions into liberty, it’s also thrown the tobacco smokers to the wolves, too.

Something to remember: if the American colonists had decided to protest the British incursions into liberty by saying, "we have no interest in breaking the King’s law, but we protest most strongly the Stamp Act [or any other]," where would America be now?

A Better Approach: Factionalization

"The Drug Warrior faction." This is the ticket out of the trap. If it can be demonstrated to the average American that the proponents of crackdown on illicit drugs are a mere faction, with a factional interest, then their own air of disinterested service will begin to erode. There is a scientifically plausible way to do it — ironically, thanks to a crusty old British doctor, "Theodore Dalrymple." His own clinical experience has shown him that the danger of addiction to the supposedly most addictive drug class of them all — opiates — is far overstated. This implies that the Drug Warrior faction is composed of addictive personalities. They are like Franklin Gibbs, the foe of gambling and secret gambling addict himself, in the old Twilight Zone episode, "The Fever."

It’s clear from that episode that Rev. Gibbs’ hostility to gambling, period, is the consequence of his own addictive personality. We don’t know why some people are that way, but they are, and thus are part of the high-risk category for addiction to anything, whether legal or illegal. It’s just a personality attribute of the real analogs to Rev. Gibbs.

It is possible that many lawmakers possess addictive personalities, hence their continual rallying around the Drug Warrior flag. The Drug Warrior’s continual harping about "loss of potential" does suggest that the addictive personality is also a workaholic — that such a person is a work addict.

If so, then the best way towards repeal would be to promote the idea that workaholics are addictive personalities at heart. As such, they tend to believe even slanted stories about the risks of addictive drugs, because they themselves know about that side to them. The Drug Warriors among them use the laws to make life less troublesome, for the Drug Warriors themselves, their friends and their likesake.

To put it bluntly, the Drug Warrior has a special interest, rooted in his or her own psyche. Exposure of it will make the War on Drugs far less noble a cause.

Daniel M. Ryan [send him mail] is a Canadian whose reach has long exceeded his grasp. He’s currently wearing out his thumb with pen and paper.

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Have you ever wondered where all those freeware programs have come from? Thousands, if not tens or hundreds of thousands, of lines of code are in each of them. Some of them are "shareware," for which a payment is expected after a trial period, but others are free for the downloading. It’s almost a certainty that you have one or more of them performing a useful task in your computer.

The programmers that come up with such gizmos tend to have this attribute in common: they’re entrepreneurial, but not very businesslike. They tend to choke when it comes time to demanding a price for their work. Many of them are jobholders at heart, who have tried to go into trade while not holding down a programming job. Others do so for popularity reasons, or out of desire to kick back something after benefiting from prior freeware, or for the love of programming as an end in itself, or for a combination of the above three.

The programming culture is a hard-working culture, so my focusing upon them could be seen as me indulging in a bit of mother henning; they are the farthest group of people from the stereotype of the "unemployed bum" that comes to mind. And yet, some of them are on the welfare system.

Here is a real opportunity for an entrepreneurial sort in the charity circuit. Simply put, it’s the opportunity to privatize workfare.

"Workfare," as many of you know, is an attempt by government to create synthetic part-time jobs for welfare recipients who can work. Many of the proponents of such systems would admit that these synthetic jobs are not really productive, in and of themselves; make-work tends to be the order of the day. The hope behind these programs is to get, or keep, welfare recipients in a jobholder’s routine, so as to make it easier for them to get, and keep, a regular job. I’m sure that you’ve already guessed that such programs aren’t exactly shining successes in "ending welfare as we know it." The inherent obstacles that bureaucracy faces in "playing market" all but guarantee it. Look at the bind that workfare administrators face: if there are no useful government jobs to be found for the welfare recipients, as is likely because the government hasn’t exactly been chary as an employer, then it has to be make-work. Putting workfare participants on make-workfare encourages the notion among welfare recipients that all jobs are make-work, or are dead-end make-work. Supervision tends to be either minimal, as task-centered supervision requires a task, or else arbitrary — "makeorders" for makeworkers. The absurdity inherent in the latter approach quickly becomes evident, so supervision of the workfare chores soon becomes minimal.

The bureaucrat has no choice. There is no "El Trabajo" filled with useful jobs that mimic the real thing. In addition, the bureaucrat, being a real employee of a real government, has additional constraints that he or she must follow. No competing with union labor; no tasks that would make the workfare program look like a resuscitation of corvée; etc. ad populum. In a world full of rules, there is always room for one more. Ludwig von Mises was astute enough to foresee the tangles of the bureaucratic system ‘way back in 1944; Bureaucracy still speaks to today’s world — if anything, more loudly than it did during the time when it first rolled off the presses. No wonder why the typical workfare program veers towards training programs.

It should be kept in mind, though, that workfare is a step away from welfare destitution and towards productivity. It may inculcate the habit of make-work, but it also inculcates the habit of showing up somewhere on time. For many hard-core welfare recipients, acquiring this habit is a step up.

Government, though, has gone as far as it can go with respect to human reclamation. The performance pathologies are inherent in the system. There is, however, another step up…but one that can only be undertaken within the voluntary sector, which has the freedom of action that a government bureau simply cannot have.

Imagine a charitable endeavor, one wholly financed by tax-deductible donations, whose reason for being is to hire people to "work for free," in other charitable endeavors. This kind of organization would be to the voluntary sector what the middleman is to the free market: the matching of unemployed workers, who need a job of some sort, with people who need the product or service provided by the charity.

We’re already seeing something of the sort in real charities, in fundraising, which has provoked outcries from time to time. What I’m suggesting is extending this model to people who are actually doing the good works.

Of course, the pay offered by such institutes would be below the going rate in the free marketplace. A relative disincentive is, of course, needed to get the rescuees on the employment side back into the jobs market. It would, though, be paid work, work that is much closer to the regular jobs market than workfare can be.

When a teenager, I participated in a micro-scale endeavor of this sort, called "S.A.I.N.T.S.," where teenagers needing extra money did odd jobs for seniors needing help with them. So, this idea is far from new. It’s only a revival of the old benevolent society, with a less morals-driven format. It’s also been prefigured by volunteers donating their valuable time. Just imagine what would result from this kind of organization permeating general society:

• More freeware;
• Otherwise-unemployed tutors offering tutor services to kids whose parents can’t afford the upscale service;
• Skilled workers fixing up ruined people’s homes instead of their own;
• Tax and financial-planning help, beyond credit counseling, for those unable to afford the real thing;
• Etc.

All of it done under a tax-exempt umbrella. To make the charitable status of such organizations plain, all that’s needed would be to give away the product or service to the needy. As a side benefit, such an organization would be a quick and easy way for a company with a job offer to find someone who is unemployed but is also still connected to the world of service, rather than to the world of make-work.

The only downside to this endeavor is that it would encourage the government to revive Great-Society-era schemes. Government is the place where dreamers tend to go; such people tend to be resistant to failure analysis. This is why so many of them, sad to say, wind up embittered. In addition, government officialdom is still considered prestigious in the not-for-profit sector, so there will be some pressure on any charity entrepreneur to "trade up" by going into government.

In the 1980s, there was a young fellow by the name of Gerard Kennedy, whose claim to fame came through an achievement that many entrepreneurs will resonate to. He’s the person who "established" (as of 1986) the Daily Bread Food Bank in Toronto, Canada, an idea which has now spread all through the country. The food-bank idea, I am sure, seemed little more than a marginal, mostly harebrained scheme at the time Mr. Kennedy first got in on it, in Edmonton in 1983. "Why would a food bank be even necessary? Isn’t that what welfare is for? Why would anyone use it?"

Translated into for-profit terms, this is the kind of barrier than any visionary entrepreneur faces. "Why would X be even necessary? Doesn’t Y do the job?" Like any profit-driven entrepreneur, Mr. Kennedy saw a slice of the real world that was blocked out by the then-current paradigm. Instead of accepting that paradigm, or washing his hands of it and giving up (which would have involved a certain kind of embitterment for him,) he instead persisted, and wound up changing the Canadian voluntary sector forever.

It would be inaccurate to assume that Mr. Kennedy could have been a very rich man had he tried, or had he had an opportunity to do so. There are otherwise-entrepreneurial people who are genuinely uncomfortable with going into trade. These people do move to a different value-drum. Expecting them to be businesspeople assumes away their real value choices.

It is accurate, though, to assume that Mr. Kennedy would have achieved success, consonant with his own values, in a free-market society. He wouldn’t have made much money, ’tis true, but he would have earned a lot of respect, as he has in the world of today.

Unfortunately, though, the world of today is one where that risk of government inviting itself in is very real. Gerard Kennedy makes a good case study for this reason, too: at present, he’s a prominent member of the fundamentally statist Liberal Party of Canada. (He was close to becoming its leader recently.) As the old saying goes, "remember the risk."

Daniel M. Ryan [send him mail] is a Canadian whose reach has long exceeded his grasp. He’s currently wearing out his thumb with pen and paper.

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The following is a scenario, based upon Lew Rockwell’s point that libertarianism has successfully headed off a lot of potential statism.

!sent: JAN 03 07 1610 EST

Dear Mom and Dad,

This E-mail is to let you know that I’m coming home early. My vacation in the United States has been cut off, thanks to me being ejected. Thankfully, the guard in the Detroit impoundment centre is a fellow Catholic, so he let me inform you though this channel. I hope you read it before you see me back in Toronto.

Before either of you get upset, I want you to know that I was only ejected, not formally deported; they have a "three strikes and you’re out" policy. I have two more chances before I’m banned for life from entering the United States. The Domestic Tranquility officer who authorized my ejection informed me of that.

The funny thing is, it was all over a borrowed book, one I got from the university library. It didn’t look subversive; it didn’t even look deviant. It was an economics textbook — one bound in kelly green, and published by the Volcker Institute or something like that. It was called Man, Economy and State, and it veered from discussing a ham sandwich to Robinson Crusoe in its less theoretical moments. I have to say that there was no way I could have seen it coming.

To be fair, the border inspector agreed with me on that point. He told me to go to a Windsor post office and mail it back to home, and to remember to return it on or before the due date. He also showed me that its ISBN number was one listed in the registry of the Book Depository Act of 1964 as being under eminent domain, and subject to confiscation. Admittedly, I had forgotten that there was a later amendment to the Act that made possession of an extant copy a kind of quasi-crime, for which the penalty was abandoning it to the government. That wasn’t where I got stopped; it happened later.

I really don’t know what got me flagged. When I went back, after mailing the book, I had to go through the usual medical inspection. Like most smokers in our parts nowadays, I hardly indulge; chain smokers don’t get let in. Not since tobacco was made an illicit substance in the U.S. in 1994. I remember reading about how the United States government was cautious about it: denying federal funding to any institution that permitted smoking in the late ’70s; making smoking a court-marital offense a year or so after the Universal Selective Service Act of 1990; and, once the "target population" was weaned down, banning it entirely. I remember the U.S.S. Act because, shortly after I emerged into Detroit, someone asked me why I didn’t act booted. I should have worn a Canadian flag on my coat, perhaps, but the fellow who buttonholed me was satisfied with my verbal declaration. He even left me with this friendly advice: "You seem like a smart kid. If you ever want to relocate, remember this question: u2018if you’re so smart, why aren’t you in government?’ We can always use another Galbraith."

I didn’t smoke for several hours beforehand, so the breathalyzing equipment must have been sensitive enough to pick up a residuum of carbon monoxide in my lungs. There’s no way that the urine test would have picked up anything, and the idea that my DNA contained something suspicious is ludicrous. I never believed those commie rumors; they’re just propaganda put out by the U.S.S.R.

Of course, I wasn’t stupid enough to use the u2018f’-word. As we all know, it has been standard policy since the mid-1980s, when the United States is called u2018fascist’, for any loyal American to hit back: "so what if we are, commie?" I think the State Department came up with that one. Whoever did so was shrewd indeed, as the U.S.S.R is still confined to its turf behind the Iron Curtain. The seeds they planted in the Third World never really grew since about 1986 or so. Not for the last twenty years.

The United States really is at the forefront of the techno-modern revolution still, despite the Soviets’ claims to the contrary. Their personal terminal, all of it invented by salaried professionals, is the quickest one anywhere. The U.S. still leads the world in mainframe production, too. I can attest to the level of computerization, even if it is doleful testimony indeed. The U.S. has gotten Canada beat in genomics, too, and its concern for citizens’ health is obvious; they’re no longer mere drug-chasers.

"Professional:" that’s the best way to describe the average American. They are officious, but in a professional way. They sent the refractory hogs to Canada, I note wryly. There doesn’t seem to be a soul who merely minds his or her business. Didn’t that Rothbard fellow wind up in Toronto? I know that Ayn Rand’s followers sort-of split between Manitoba and the Greater Toronto Area after her death in 1966. Even this Canadian remembers that she was, or might as well have been, the one who pushed the U.S. government into enacting the Book Depository Act, through insisting that her 1964 offering be called The Fascist New Frontier. Of course, it did her no good. Officially, she died as a result of chain-smoking, amphetamine abuse, and apoplexy.

Believe it or not, even the welfare cases are professional, in their own way. I saw one, and noted his disinterest to the things of the world. He seemed like a Baptist, but these days, any fellow Christian is easy to identify with. He told me that life in the projects is subject to weekly apartment inspection, as done by the National Service contingent of the U.S.S. inductees. He amusedly noted that, if you fail to clean your rooms for two weeks, you get a "whitey Divine" in to clean them for you! Of course, this free service isn’t exactly either, as you’re noted down as irresponsible by a "college Tom" (his words.) Which is fair enough, I suppose; had the government not instituted that policy, Urban Renewal would have turned into a flat failure, not the success that it is.

[I've just been tapped on the shoulder by the guard, who told that I've apologized enough. He did let me finish with a brief note about how I got in here.]

The Domestic Tranquility officer who picked me up and brought me here was a big fellow — must have been 190 cm tall. He had one of those mouths with no width to it, and his blue eyes were small in his skull, but clear. He had an air about him that suggested he found it a big mystery why anyone would disobey the government, unless they were ignorant or stupid. He was good enough to peg me as an ignoramus; he was professional about it. He was, though, built like a mesomorph, and his legs were like tree trunks. Along the way, we passed one of Detroit’s insane asylums. I noted it myself; he didn’t point it out to me.

He told me that the ejection procedure, which he himself authorized, was merely administrative, and that no harm would come to me. So, except for that first strike, I have a clean slate. No need to send me off to the Winnipeg Commodity Exchange to become a gold trader yet! He also assured me that I wouldn’t be especially hassled at the border anymore; his selective service had been patrol duty on the "World’s Longest Defended Border." So, he knows what he’s talking about. Chances are, he pegged me as a young gold analyst type anyway, as someone not fit for the civil service, unlike my "Ottawa Uncle." I was adroit enough to give him a roughly accurate all-Canadian quote for the metal: $1020 or so an ounce.

I have to end this now. I’ll also spend some time dawdling in Windsor, and along the way, so as to make sure you read this before you see me. I need some time to soak up some Canadian laxity for man’s failings. Thank you for your patience.

Truly,

Your Not-Quite-Subversive Son.

Daniel M. Ryan [send him mail] is a Canadian whose reach has long exceeded his grasp. He’s currently wearing out his thumb with pen and paper.

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The title phrase is a common one in mathematical circles; it’s a polite way of saying "math is the best academic subject to make the clever person feel stupid." I’m surprised that it isn’t known as the "great equalizer" in other areas of the academy.

This moniker is apt, because an immersion in math is a real, if not proven, way for the intellectual, with a Mensan (or higher) level of aptitude, to empathize with the struggler back in the old high school. If you’re looking for a psychological reason why so many mathematicians are inclined towards socialism, this one will do it. Whether it be caused by acquired guilt or drained loneliness, the realization that you’ve bumped into a subject that is as hard, for you, as most of the courses were for the burly fellow who went off to trade school, makes identification with "the worker" a real temptation. Even if the commiserative overlap doesn’t reach very far, as many a mathie who has "seen the proletarian light" discovers when he takes his newfound insight to the sports bar.

The temptation to socialism is one of two that exist in the somewhat lonely math world. The other is the myth of the "math god." Just like the investment-field myth about the (usually apocryphal) fellow who bought near the bottom and sold near the top, the "math god" is a character who managed to construct a proof, sometimes from known mathematical techniques, that is not only true, but unprecedented as well. "How in blazes did he (sometimes "she") come up with that?" If said proof unlocks a great mystery, and/or provides a new tool to crack open previously uncrackable problems, then the gates of Math Immortality are truly open for the prover.

Like many myths, the "Myth of the Math God" tends to stabilize on a particular image, an archetype. The typical eponymous archetype, I suspect, looks a lot like a French aristocrat. There has been at least one in math annals, although I am sad to relate that the "mathematician" of highest rank in the ranks of the immortals was a mathematical physicist, the 7th Duc de Broglie. If it’s any consolation to mathies, though, Louis de Broglie’s title was only titular, due to France previously becoming a republic. Guillaume, the Marquis de l’Hôpital’s, was the real deal. Of course, for Anglophiles, there is the alternate eponym, but dreams of sitting at table, where one of the tablers is a noble Frenchman, is standard enough to make this gibe a useful deflater: "Wow! If you study hard enough, you may win the favor of the legitimate pretender to the throne of France!"

It is easy to make fun of people who seem motivated by social climbing, but that’s because the incentives offered to the social climber work reliably for the lonely, a group of people who are easy to make fun of anyway. Admittedly, social climbing is an incentive like any other, and tends to produce both intended and unintended consequences resulting from the effort it calls forth. This incentive is gradually being replaced by professional pride in the present-day math world. Increasingly, mathematics is becoming a standalone trade, a self-sustaining profession. Its place in modern society and economy is actually a supplier of intellectual capital goods.

That’s right; mathematicians supply intellectual capital goods — producers’ goods — that go into the making of products. The more abstract part of it, the most being number theory, exists for three reasons: as a standalone consumers’ good for people in, or interested in, the field for its own sake; as a retooler for more quotidian math fields; and, as a means to make teaching math easier. The mathematician whose life’s work is centered on creating a magnificent "Principles of All Math" actually aspires to be a supplier of teaching techniques for math pedagogues. The profession is slowly becoming self-aware of this status.

The professionalization of the field isn’t confined to the selection of winners of the Fields Medal. The emergence of the "gotcha" is a more humble means of remaking the discipline of math into a free-standing profession. The use of "gotchas" is an informal means of professional development. The aim of a particular gotcha is to scotch out a particular kind of stupid-think: being suckered by a plausible non sequitur.

Some of them are of old standing. The most known class of them slyly smuggle in division by zero, to "prove" that, for example, 1 = 2. Another one, of old standing, is: "what does (x — a)*(x — b)*…*(x — z) equal?" In this one, the devil is in the ellipsis; the 24th term is (x — x), equaling zero, which makes the entire expression equal to zero. I have yet to hear of someone who actually sat down and calculated this by hand — it’d be a monster — and prove, by hand calculation, that the answer is indeed zero. Most of the entrapped give up, as I did when I first encountered it.

A more sophisticated "gotcha" was recently published in The American Scientist Online. In the middle of the article, in the section "Who’s On First?", a mock dialogue between Socrates and a young boy is included. Unlike the real thing, though, Socrates winds up looking like somewhat of a fool. The specific non sequitur, which the poor fellow drifts into, is his inference that implies that there are more than 128 possible outcomes to a seven-game World Series where no ties are allowed. If you’re ignorant of, or have forgotten (as I did,) this (provably solid) conclusion, then you’ll fall right into a combinatorics "gotcha." Working out the possibilities that Socrates includes in his attempt to use the Binomal Theorem, to analyze what turns into a "meta-World-Series," will reveal that Socrates did indeed double-count along the way to his first odds computation. The boy’s correct answer is provable, by going through a count of all 128 possible outcomes and deriving an equation from them. This more "ideal" (formal) method is different from the one the kid used, but both give the same (correct) result.

As mathematics becomes fully professionalized, there’ll be more gotchas a’coming, like this one, an exchange between a bright kid and the teacher:

B.K.: "I’ve found a repeating fraction!"

Teacher: "Oh, a fraction that gives you a repeating decimal? Good! What is it?"

B.K.: "Expressed in normal fractional numbers, 1/5."

Teacher: "Uh-h-h…1/5 is 0.2." [Pause, as the youngster in questions seems unabashed.] "I suppose it is possible to say that it can be a repeating decimal, but you’d have to have all zeroes behind it. [He regains his confidence.] If you include that kind of decimal in the definition of repeating decimals, you drain the meaning from the term, as all decimal numbers are repeatable if you allow repeating zeroes. Do you understand what I mean?"

[B.K nods.]

Teacher: "What’s wrong?"

B.K.: "What’s wrong is that it’s possible for what we call u20181/5′ to repeat."

[Now, the teacher is wondering is one of them is unhinged, but a small part of him isn't sure which one.]

Teacher: "1/5 is 0.2. By the generally-accepted definition of u2018repeating decimal’ it isn’t one. Would you care to explain how you got yourself into denying that?"

[Now, B.K. is showing a somewhat winning smile.]

B.K.: "1/5 in base 2 is 1/101. In base 2, this equals 0.00110011…"

[As B.K. rattles on, the teacher is trying to recall the Board-accepted euphemism for "ARE YOU FINISHED BRAGGING YET!?"...]

Another kind of possible "gotcha" is one that flushes out a too-hasty quest for symmetry, the source of a lot of thoughtlessness in mathematics. One that tripped me up twice is the proven result that eiπ = —1. This famous result is only one single element of a whole slew of them, though: —1 = eiπ+2iπ*n, where n is an integer. Not realizing this got me two "brownoff" points, on two different occasions.

There are a quite a few "gotchas" in applied mathematics, too. Here’s one derived, courtesy of my own creaking brain, from Friedrich Hayek’s Pure Theory of Capital. It’s based upon the graph on p. 117 — figure 6.

"Money has time value. In order to get the value of a sum of money, therefore, you have to specify a time, relative to an arbitrary but fixed u2018time zero’ where present value is computed. If you graph the value of a fixed sum of money over time, you’ll see an inverse exponential curve, if the inflation rate exceeds the interest rate.

"Now, the paradoxical but neat thing about such a curve is that, because it’s an inverse exponential curve, integrating it will lead to the inverse exponential curve being inverted with respect to the x-axis. This means that the integrated value of money over time, as integrated by the t variable, is actually a negative amount! Now, an odd result such as this one, which is proven in today’s handout, has to, of course, be properly interpreted — Yes?"

"Uh — sir? If money has to have a time value, then isn’t integrating it over time sort-of detaching it from the time component? How is it possible for money to have a sort of meta-value over a time continuum when we already assumed that its value has to be pinpointed with respect to a specific time?"

No, the sir in question is not really glad that the fellow in the student’s desk asked the question. He’s just being polite.

Daniel M. Ryan [send him mail] is a Canadian whose reach has long exceeded his grasp. He’s currently wearing out his thumb with pen and paper.

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Americans are used to domestic mercantilism flying under liberal, or optimists’, colors. According to this kind of mercantilism, government subsidizing of business should be done in cases where there are talented and hard-working entrepreneurs who lack capital, due to short-sightedness on the part of capital suppliers. It is claimed by this kind of mercantilist that decisions on whether or not to lend money to, or invest money in, a fledgling business are made by an insular group of capital suppliers. Because of their insularity, they screen out unconventional but promising business ideas. Because of their mental limitations and clubbiness, they make the start-up sector economically inefficient. Thus, the government can, and should, step in and add value by providing funds that will bring forth new businesses. This intervention, so the liberal mercantilist claims, will thus add wealth, which would have never have been created in the absence of such promotions.

The fallacies in this argument are well-known, even to some of its proponents. It is never proven why a surface appearance of "clubbiness" implies that economically irrational decisions are made. It is never proven that the supposedly "hidebound" professional capital suppliers constitute the only source of capital. It is never proven that the supposedly "exclusionary" criteria exclude anyone other than the drawer to the inside straight. And, it is certainly never proven that the government is any better than already-established professional capital suppliers at spotting successful entrepreneurs, at picking winners.

Thus, liberal mercantilists usually resort to moralizing when making the case for such programs. Capital suppliers are never rationally ignorant, according to such a mercantilist; no, they’re benighted and bigoted. The would-be entrepreneur is always painted in the most favorable of lights. There’s never a dreamer, let alone a fantasizer, in the lot. None of the worthy recipients are in any way vain. Their reach never exceeds their grasp — not a one of them. Their innate level-headedness is so taken for granted, that it is not often asked why these worthy pragmatists aren’t resourceful enough to work their way around these supposedly iron constraints.

The fact is, we want to believe that the "kid with a big idea" is a magnate in the making. This is why the moralization usually works in business-friendly societies.

Also, a rebuttal of the claim that the government can pick ‘em better than the private sector can, is a hard one to make because of the taboos surrounding democracy. We find it hard to admit that every successful politician stays a success because he or she fears losing. Doing so implies that a part of politics involves wiping the noses of people who would otherwise cause the incumbent to lose, including plain malcontents. Even if this categorization of democracy does imply that the democratic system is always sensitive to citizens’ complaints, it is much more stirring to proclaim, "democracy’s virtue is that it always nips tumult in the bud" than to admit, "democracy is the system where even the cur has his day." Never mind that the first argument implies the second, because curs cause tumult too.

Liberal-style mercantilism is obviously well-suited for a culture where entrepreneurship is generally known and valued. But what about a culture where it isn’t, one where it is generally believed that entrepreneurship is full of sharpsters, crooks and the undeserving lucky, and where the true facts of entrepreneurship are known only to a generally despised few?

There is a kind of mercantilism that rings true in such a culture, only it’s the more cynical sort — the toryish sort. It’s a variant that is not often seen in America, but is somewhat popular in Europe. It claims that government intervention is necessary, not because government money is needed to help the worthy but struggling entrepreneur, but because government authority is needed. In order to succeed, the worthy start-off needs the stamp of the State on his or her new business in order for it to prosper and thrive.

In this kind of mercantilism, there is very little moralizing. What stands in its stead is cynicism, of an élitist kind. According to this kind of mercantilist, the general public is too besotted by greed and freeloading to understand what it takes to succeed in business, let alone to identify with any business success. Patience, calculation and foresight are not for them; nor is the broader view encompassed by value-for-value. The immediacy of win-lose; that is all they understand.

Because of this widespread surliness, it is further asserted, there is only one way for a worthy would-be entrepreneur to succeed in any kind of business: the State must step in. With the State in his or her corner, this deserving person can achieve the wealth that he or she merits. The authority of the State will make the wolves turn tail.

This argument may seem to be more realistic, as it is not full of roses, sunshine and boosterism. Nevertheless, it is just as unrealistic as the more optimistic kind of mercantilism, for broadly the same reasons.

If a person is generally disliked, then why would he or she have a chance at succeeding in business at all? It may seem flinty-hearted to bring this point up, but a person who succeeds in ticking off the locals, at least presumably, could tick off the customer base as well. Getting a business up and thriving is hard enough; how much harder is it for someone who has already acquired a thriving base of anti-customers? Why would it be reasonable to assume that the perhaps mythical customer in the distant city will believe the new businessman and not the people who knew him or her ‘way back when?

When both cases are examined, they turn out to be variants of the same complaint: only the State has the inner excellence to see the true worth of my hot idea! Only the State can rescue me from the greed and gouging of the benighted [bankers and investors/yokels and freeloaders] who would otherwise stifle my most promising plan!

It doesn’t take much street smarts to see that the above double plaint amounts to this secret hope: only the State can force people to see things my way. In the first case, the State makes the capital market bend to the petitioner’s will (through the tax system); in the second case, the State makes the locals do so (through an appeal to patriotism).

There’s another commonality, which shows who really benefits from State mercantilism — the inflexible. The first plea can be deflated by the question, "why can’t you show around a prototype you can afford to put together, at least to test whether or not the big boys will blow you out of the water if you go for it?" The second plea can be deflated by the question, "if the locals are so bad, then why aren’t you at least making plans to move to a place where the locals are more business-minded?" The commonality is: "if you face an insurmountable obstacle, why aren’t you trying to go around it?"

Mercantilism is mercantilism, whether it be packaged as humane or hard-headed. Interventions are interventions, regardless of the justification for one of them. State force is State force, whether or not you sympathize with or loathe whomever is at the wrong end of the club.

Daniel M. Ryan [send him mail] is a Canadian with a known aversion to theocracy, whether real or covert. He is currently burning his pretty pink thumb with pen and paper.

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Have you become convinced that the only way to improve the moral and/or physical status of your country is to get the State to whip everyone into line? Do the defenses of individual rights and individual freedoms leave you feeling both bored and resentful? Are you daring enough to contemplate a nation where no-one does anything except what he or she is told by government officials, and find it to your liking? Are you inclined to dismiss defenses of freedom as mere apologetics for license and/or anarchy?

If you got through the above series of questions with all "okay"s, then you may very well be a fascist. A fascist is someone who affirmatively believes what question three asks about. Given that the military is the only way to keep such a system together, it’s a short leap of practical logic to conclude that military dictatorship is the only way to keep the populace in line. There have been experiments in democratic fascism during most of the last century, but the historical record does indicate that there is something inherently contradictory between fascism and democracy. The State seems to run more smoothly, not to mention efficiently, when the people aren’t consulted in a substantive way. Show elections, of course, are an option, but the representatives have to have their wings clipped to keep them mere windbags. This last point is important to remember.

It’s a tricky process to bring fascism to a nation with a tradition of individual rights, and its concomitant, self-motivation. If you live in a nation that combines initiative with orneriness, you may as well save your secret dream for your grandkids. A people who balk when the government tells them what to do, when that "what" is genuinely good for them, leaves little hope for the fascist. Better luck next century.

If the people around you are becoming complaisantly obedient, however, things are looking ripe. There’s no more tractable whipped dog than one who asks for regularity in the whipping schedule. If you hear your neighbors seriously wonder who’s going to tell them how to vote, then you’re laughing.

What do you do once you’ve got the in-signal? Here, for your contemplation, is a quick guide on how to move your country’s government — whups, "your country" — to fascism:

1. Promote wholesale nationalization of industry while having no fallback plan for the resultant economic chaos that this spree will engender. This is the most reliable method to "go fascist." Because such nationalization leads to "planned chaos," it will quickly be discovered that the industries in question have to be de-nationalized pronto in order to keep the economy from collapsing. If you think that the economy’s collapse will be good for the moral fiber of the people, I’m afraid you’re reading the wrong sales pitch; you’ll have to wait for the one on socialism.

If you find it odd to bring fascism by promoting socialism, you evidently lack the cunning needed to be a successful political operative. Shame on you, and pay attention: by filling the heads of your fellow citizens with an impossible political dream that you yourself don’t believe in, you’ll shoot your competitors right down. Just make sure that you’re ready to plump for what you really believe in when the embarrassing backtrack is enacted.

Always remember: what makes socialism the most excellent running dog for fascism is not its end, but its means. People use even impossible ideals as guides to action; socialism, as a guide to action, entails hogtying every legitimate business that’s out there. What better way can you come up with to make the traditionally unruly business class grateful for the State’s leash? And the best part is: by letting the socialist do your sapping work for you, you can pose as being "pro-business" while it happens! You don’t even have to take off your white gloves!

Unfortunately, von Mises’ Socialism, despite its thoroughness and rigor, has acquired an unexpected popularity amongst the general public. Tragic this is, but the most sure-fire way to bring fascism to your State is unfortunately not do-able in our time. I’d better put this idea back on the table.

2. Promote "open-ended" guarantees of cold cash from the State to citizens. Believe it or not, this one works just as well as the first one; it just takes longer to work its magic. Open-ended commitments, like government-guaranteed health care, have a magnificent budget-busting potential. The bigger the mandated deficit spending, the better. Comprende, mi amigo?

Unfortunately, bills have to be paid, eventually. Eventually, the interest payments the government will have to make, to keep the guarantees a’flowing, will put a rather large crimp on the government’s budget. This is the point when the fascist option comes into its own. What better time to scoff at rationality when rationality implies "we have to pay for yesterday’s deficit-driven exuberance?"

More to the point: in order to keep the As We Go Marching fox-trot on a semi-even keel, impromptu financial fiddles will have to be relied upon. What better way to prepare the populace for the much simpler means of plunder-thy-neighbor for the remedy of budgetary embarrassments? Even better, any old-style conscientious citizen, who takes his or her civic duties seriously, is going to find it mind-numbingly confusing to figure out what got spent where, once these fiddles become normalized. This mind-numbing is almost as effective as the one that a citizen eager to abide by "the law," one who ends up plowing through the socialist-encouraged proliferation of regulations, has to endure in the regulatory state. And, as a bonus, such financial fiddles are just as unsupervised by the legislature as those proliferating regulations, if not more so! When you live in a country whose legislature is undercut to this degree, it’s only a short step to "Potemkin elections."

3. Passivity Is Your Noisy Friend. Unfortunately, many options that seem to be the magic solution have a notoriously vulnerable underbelly: they can be vitiated by citizens taking active steps to counteract them. A guarantee of health care forever loses its budget-wrecking potential if a bunch of yahoos decline the more expensive treatment and take their chances with the cheaper remedy. The trouble is, any such yahoo can justify taking this option through old-style patriotism, of the community-chest kind. Perhaps the same kind of yahoo can save for his or her retirement rather than depend upon the government’s retirement "fund." If the government pension plan is already in a crimp, said yahoo can squirrel money offshore and even justify it patriotically. There are, indeed, sneaky ways of being patriotic in this way: the fellow who’d rather starve on welfare than take a much more lucrative government grant is an underminer in his or her own way.

Yes indeed, this is the blind spot of all plans to bring fascism to your homeland. The general public may take matters into its own hands. This is why so many attempts to promote fascism through appeals to super-patriotism have fallen into ruin. Super-patriotism can also mean going out of one’s way to ease the burden on one’s fellow taxpayers, and upon one’s government. Taking this option leads to the cultivation of obstreperous habits, such as acting on one’s own recognizance.

Passivity works much better. In fact, it provably does. The kind of new Republic most vulnerable to fascism is one whose people have been freed by foreign conquest, rather than being freed through domestic exertions. The latter course of development means that the citizenry have already developed the habits of self-government. The former course means that they haven’t, and don’t quite know what they entail. It’s a useful fact that merely reading a diet book, no matter how rigorously, does nada for your weight. It’s an even more useful fact that reading "Get Active!" does nothing for your activity level. It won’t, until you get the gumption to make the inevitable mistakes that accompany getting active. You also need the necessary will-power to overcome the atrophy of your initiative, if the passive lifestyle has been for ye up to now. As long as the free will is lacking, "Get Active!" may as well mean "Do As I Tell You!"

4. Christian Peace Movements Are "Of The Devil." If fascism is your goal, remember this well. Any peace movement that goes out of its way to treat military personnel as if they were human beings too, is likely to result in reciprocal respect from the military. Mutual respect will result in an alarming number of veterans, and even of active-duty personnel, believing seriously that a state of peace is a better way to be than a state of war, even war for conquest and glory. Once the military is full of peace lovers, the fascist dream is dead, dead, dead. What good would it be to present promises of glory and conquest to a group of soldiers who have little use for either? Even if all the factors are in your favor, this one is the killer.

   Christian pacifists are most notorious for this kind of undermining, but don’t put it past the others.

There are many other details and tips that can be supplied, even by me, but these four are reliable enough to get you off to a good start.

Oh, that’s right, I forgot. Lest you be accused of rank hypocrisy, you will have to cultivate the same passivity that’s your "in." Sorry.

Daniel M. Ryan [send him mail] is a Canadian with a known aversion to theocracy, whether real or covert. He is currently burning his pretty pink thumb with pen and paper.

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Now that the Republican majorities in the House and Senate are in doubt, the sheen is likely to come off the neo-conservative movement. Like any faction that runs into a rock, their status as the "ultimate winners," or even their own conceit that they are the "new upper class," is going to come into doubt. The sword that you live by hurts a lot more when it’s stuck into you. (Remember the fate of J.P. Morgan, Jr.? Rightly or wrongly, it’s an unfair world.)

What do neo-conservatives want? What are their political goals? Are they compatible with liberty?

To put it bluntly, the typical neo-conservative wants little to do with liberty. The proper libertarian policy "mission statement" is: peace; individual rights, including civil rights that are not disguised claims on the State for pelf or positive services; freedom of enterprise. If the neo-conservatives had a mission statement of their own, it would be: war; restriction of individual rights for the taming of either foreign or domestic "deviancy"; good economic growth numbers, with little concern as to the source (although tax cuts are politically preferable). When it comes down to it, the neo-conservatives have a lot more in common with the new Religious Right than with libertarians.

By the "religious Right," I mean a movement who believes in: war against the wicked Muslim; subordination of individual rights to "Godly" behavior-modification laws; a better deal for the "Christian" citizen, with little concern as to how this "better deal" is to be arranged. A useful earmarking list of such a person is: rote praise for Bush; hostility to any (unknown) Bushian who counsels moderation in war policy and warns against stereotyping Islam; and, the general opinion that, if Bush erred, he erred by being too dovish.

The commonality between these folks and the neo-conservatives should be obvious. The genteel bellicosity of the neos and the more open bellicosity of the Religious Right make for a perfect match. The continual neo-conservative campaign to flush out the influence of the wicked hippies from American culture, and the Religious Right’s characterization of all things hippie as "dirty," make for a close glove-on-hand fit. The neos propose general policy directions, which the Religious Right are glad to dispose as specifics — right up to the re-criminalization of certain acts between consenting couples, and/or the decriminalization of certain acts done by one member of a married couple to another. Both movements have little more than lip service for free markets, and both define them in a similar way: "free enterprise" means "what’s good for me and for those whom I identify with."

When it comes down to it, though, the neo-conservative’s sense of his or her own glory is little more than bookworm pride. It’s true that they’ve come a long way, baby…a long way from what their fate would have been in the real 1950s, not the idealized 1950s that they continually promote.

Yes, back in the 1950s, there was a much lower crime rate than there is now. Streets were safer to walk on; children had less reason to fear. The culture was more wholesome. Science was respected; fluoridation skeptics were neatly categorized as yet another breed of "nut case." The top athletes actually aspired to clean living, and to high-minded thinking. Even the bohemians were polite and well-dressed.

Sounds like a real paradise to be regained, doesn’t it? Or does it? A look at the time shows a somewhat different picture.

Yes, it’s true the athletes tried seriously to expunge the groadier part of athletic tradition from their conduct. It was also true, though, that most everyone in the schooling system (homeschooling was, of course, nonexistent) wanted to be an athlete, or a cheerleader. Those who didn’t, were basically written off in the high school "rating and dating" game. Part of the reason why the typical neo-conservative has had such an easy ride underneath a "’50s man" is that the typical red-meat-eating, car-tinkering, drunk-driver-tolerating (until the crackdown, of course) ’50s man despises the neo-conservative type. It’s not that hard to characterize the typical neo-conservative as one of these six monikers: dweeb; prig; drip; pill; spaz; dork.

The respect for athletics went all the way up the corporation, too. Vance Packard, in The Pyramid Climbers, reported that there was one insurance company who had an informal but very definite criterion for its CEO. This informal earmark of merit was membership on Princeton’s football team — as a player on it. It was held generally that skill in team athletics — football, particularly — made for a good executive because the football field was the perfect arena for learning gut-level pragmatism. This cognitive skill was something which, it was seriously held, was unlearnable though books. Those "football smarts" are testable, too, and were tested, frequently. Anyone who claimed footballer status, while not having the skills that could only be picked up on the field, was quickly, if perhaps silently, pegged as a towel boy. There was also a certain respect for being "street tough," and that was sometimes informally tested for, too.

Clearly, the 1950s aren’t what a shrewd neo-conservative means by "the 1950s." A year match comes up with none other than this ten-year period: the end of 1957 to the end of 1966. The decade between the launching of Sputnik and the eruption of the hippie movement. The "good old days," when every scholar was a potential National Defense scholar and the raffish didn’t have the self-confidence to flaunt their odd ways. The period when the aspirant scholar could come into his or her own with a nice grant from the U.S. Air Force. The time when a figure such a Robert S. McNamara was thought of as something special.

That’s the truth. The neo-conservative movement came into its own thanks to the Pentagon. Had it not been for those publicity embarrassments in the later 1960s, the Vietnam War would have been the shining showcase of the neo-conservative mythos. There was so much hope for the current one…

Nostalgia aside, it has been the welcoming of the scholarly into the war ranks by the War Party that has given the current neo-conservative insiders their "in." Any neo-conservative with sense knows that the advent of peace is going to mean "back to the treehouse." Thus, the neo-conservative who wishes to maintain his or her social position, let alone improve it, cannot help but be pro-war.

As far as economic policy is concerned, the neo-conservatives are, of course, Friedmanite. An eclectic combination of monetarism and supply-side economics serves as their "enabling myth," to use a crucial concept in Jack D. Douglas‘s The Myth Of The Welfare State. An enabling myth is a narrative that explains why an old ruling class got befuddled, and why the new ruling class is supposedly needed to fend off the supposed terrors that would accompany the (re-)institution of the "System of Natural Liberty." The neo-conservatives’ enabling myth is "The Myth of No More Great Depressions." It goes something like this:

Back in the olden days, the Fed didn’t quite know what it was doing. This lack of policy adroitness led to the Great Depression being prolonged. Had it not been for the accidental discovery of the potency of open-market operations, the Fed would have never gotten its act together, and the U.S. would still be mired in sub-optimal use of resources. Now, though, thanks to good positive economics, the Fed does know what it is doing. The public can rest assured; no more Great Depression is on the horizon. The System is fine, provided that the right people are in charge of it. If those pesky libertarians were right about the causes of the Great Depression, then why have they been so wrong about the emergence of a new one? Were they not wrong in the late ’80s? Were they not wrong in the late ’90s? What more do you need to know about them?

As far as the old econometricians are concerned, they were faced with inadequate mathematical tools; they lacked both statistical econometrics and neural network theoretics — oh, yes; they lacked game theoretics too. Thus, their econometrics was inadequate to the task, as were they. Thanks, though, to the hot new econometrics of the University of Chicago, the theoretical tools needed to properly manage the economy are now available. The public need not worry; the economy is safe in the hands of good econometricians. As far as the risk of monetary breakdown is concerned — well, that’s merely a question of moral hazard. A matter best left to a details man.

And as far as the free market is concerned…didn’t Walter Wriston Himself note that the free market is universal and always asserts itself? Given this premise, it’s obvious that we already have a free market in the here and now! All those regulations are…mere constraints, nothing more. Free enterprise is muscular enough to surmount all. No worries.

[Besides, the stuff that the Tax Institute has come up with is fascinating. Did you know that if you...]

If the neo-conservatives are fated to be the new upper class, then this is what you can expect: policy seminars substituting for the country club.

More to the point, though: if the neo-conservatives are fated to be the new upper class, then they can expect the Religious Right to latch right onto them. As noted above, the two factions make natural allies: both want and even need war; both abhor "cultural anarchy;" both think that tinkering with economic policy is the cure for what ails the economy, including certain lines of work that could be deemed the economy’s linchpins. We have heard little, as of now, from the social-policy arm of neo-conservatism, beyond theoretics. One of the measures that neo-conservatives have pushed hard, though, is already recognized as a policy success: a crackdown on minor crimes as a deterrent to greater crime spilling out of control. This policy was implemented successfully, in terms of its goal, by "America’s Mayor," Rudy Giuliani, in the 1990s — pre-9/11.

What else is coming? Curfews? Rollback of Szasz-inspired de-institutionalization? Restoration of "blue laws?" Common cause with the friendly, neighborly public-health activist?…

Daniel M. Ryan [send him mail] is a Canadian with a known aversion to theocracy, whether real or covert. He is currently burning his pretty pink thumb with pen and paper.

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As I write this, the Religious Right is increasingly of a mind to just shove the libertarians out of the conservative movement. Never mind that there was a tie of decades’ standing; never mind the tradition of "Christian liberty" versus "pagan stateism [sic]"; never mind the fact that the writings of both Ludwig von Mises and Murray N. Rothbard used to be welcome in the journals of the old Christian Right. Presumably, this tie is too old-fashioned for the new Religious Rightist. Why should liberals have all the fun of junking vital principles on the grounds that they’re no longer in fashion?

Given the increasing hostility towards libertarianism in the Religious Right, I’ve prepared a kind of survival guide for libertarians to get through the "next wave," a warning sheet similar to the one I wish I had when I was a youth and liberalism was virulent:

1. "Anti-liberal" is not pro-liberty anymore

Granted that a hybrid such as myself had it soft in days gone by. The most aversion I have ever faced from a Canadian Tory about libertarianism was a contemptuous chuckle. I still remember it from the year I was a member of the old Progressive Conservative club at the University of Toronto. Given the care that was taken for party loyalty back then, it was clearly meant as a friendly dissuasion for me. I can’t claim to have had a social calendar which rated a line such as "you didn’t wind up in bed with one of their girls, did you?"

That’s all that I faced from the Tory back in the olden days. They didn’t characterize libertarians as evil, or traitorous, or libertine, or closet liberal. All I got from them was that libertarians were below the salt, and thus not worth bothering with. In Canada, this position underneath the radar was the one that libertarianism occupied. Formally, it can be expressed in this way: "Libertarianism is the political philosophy of the heath, of the badlands, where the law don’t reach and the laws aren’t read." I sometimes had the sense that a dabble in Marxism would be considered more face-saving.

Yes, times were soft back then for the libertarian. Evidently, more than a few religious righters think the likes of me have had it too soft. I have actually been called a liberal on a discussion board recently! Those of you who have endured the pasting that libertarians regularly endure from liberals will find this either hilarious or sickening.

It’s one thing to see both parties propagate statism. It’s another thing to experience it personally, to be treated as a liberal by supposed conservatives and as a conservative by liberals. (I’m not the only one; I know it.)

2. The underlying ethic behind the Religious Right is martial

Look carefully at what the Religious Right believes got us in the present mess. Is it aggrandizing government? Is it forced sacrifices demanded by the State? Is it the tie of welfare and warfare? Is it because government handouts have made us soft? No to all. The new Religious Right has been innovatory, in a sense: their answer is different from all these.

According to the Religious Right, society is decaying due to mass hedonism, which is fed and encouraged by prosperity. The wealth generated by the market economy is precisely what is unstringing the bows in our backs. The renaissance of freedom which is emerging from North American culture is making us too secularized. We’re becoming too used to wealth, too used to being served by businesses that court us, too used to having our demands met in a thriving marketplace.

A religious person of sterner stuff would treat the purveyors of "morally shoddy goods" as contemptible, and ignore them. It is true that a person who goes through that kind of self-imposed regimen opens him- or herself to being called a bunch of terrible names, all of which are unfair, and most of which are based upon mere prejudice. This kind of regimen, though, is evidently too modest for a growing number of Religious Righters. It’s not just the person who seeks God who has to undergo it; everyone has to raise the barn that "must" be built. Whether those others want it or not.

Enter commutarianism. The kind of commutarianism now emergent in the Religious Right goes like this: Us religious folks have been grievously put upon by both the State and the culture, and for that, "society" owes us.

Beggaring this may be, but the underlying ethic is more frightening than a line that Wimpy would have used to snaffle a hamburger. The idea that the higher man is one who sacrifices his "self-indulgence" for the common good has a natural home, and that home is a boot camp.

3. By Any Means Necessary?

Back in the civil old days, the relationship between democracy and Christianity was considered to be a creative tension. It was well known that the democracy of Athens was pagan; the same went for the semi-democratic Republic of Rome. It was also well known that Christianity hit its heights when aristocracy flourished. The connection between the two heroes of Christian culture, the saint and the knight-paladin, was well-known too: both were incredibly tough. Those were the days when people knew what it meant to "live in Christ:" it meant showing utter disdain for pain.

Heroic this does sound, of course, but the political consequence was a tolerance for State-sanctioned torture and barbaric means of questioning the accused. The person who believes that there is a net benefit to the tortured finding Christ is going to be a lot more tolerant to the old justification for trial by ordeal, to wit: "if he’s innocent, he’ll be sanctified anyway. We’ll go to confession if we’re wrong about him."

It was also known that Christianity was the progenitor not only of democracy, but also of human rights; both were deduced from the primacy of the individual soul. Many of the heretics pounced upon by Church and State in the olden days were collectivists. The nub of the "creative tension" was the recognition that the Christian doctrine of free will, and its political expression in the doctrine of Christian liberty, had the cost of putting up with the wayward. In tradition, wayward souls were seen as Prodigal Sons, whose erroneous ways would lead them to a bad end or back to a more righteous path. When compared with the old kind of Christian, the Religious Righters seem remarkably uninsightful. The former were better at guessing the inner cost of the life of the city mouse.

4. "So You Wanna Fight?"

Yes, it’s true that the new Religious Righter sees him- or herself as standing up for his or her aggrieved rights. It’s also true, though, that the labor unions were known for that too.

Those two factions have an obvious commonality: they tend to bristle when made fun of or snubbed. There is a less obvious commonality: seeing a crackdown on assault as constructively violative of their rights. Those who see Religious Righters as errant scions of the old libertarian-friendly Christian Right should look them over carefully, and dissociate themselves from the ones who believe that the rights of the individual encompass the right to smash the teeth of a deviant individual.

5. "Don’t Tell Me About Rules Of Evidence — I Know What Those People Are!"

   People who are tolerant of their punchy fellows show similar tolerance for wild accusations made against deviants, too. If the Religious Right has a libertine circuit of its own, it would be composed of those who think that violating the Ninth Commandment (the Eighth for Catholics and Lutherans) makes for a wild time.

   Few people nowadays realize that the FBI was lionized in the 1950s and 1960s because the "Fibbies" were rigorous when it came to the crank file during the McCarthy campaign. To his credit, J. Edgar Hoover had made it hard to commit "homicide by cop" before he reached his dotage.

   Not everyone is "anti-Washington" because they believe that the federal government is after their liberties. "State-haters" can have reasons very different from ours.

6. What Part Of The Bible Do Bible Believers Believe?

Someone whose favorite book in the Bible is Ecclesiastes is profoundly different from someone whose favorite book is Revelation.

There is an irony in the emergence of the supposedly anti-liberal Religious Right: they’re a perfect complement for the liberals themselves. Anyone who is conversant with the liberal castigations of "the Right" will find that the new, aggressive Religious Right matches those slurs roughly.

This irony, though, makes for a tragedy for the old Right. After many decades of both refuting and living down liberal stereotypes, such as the ones about "latent medievalism," "latent fascism," "war mongers," "authoritarian personalities," etc., etc., there is a new group of supposed conservatives who regard those stereotypes as fair-enough rules for the political game. There’s no better way to ruin an old conservative than to let him hear, "You conservatives were merely oppositional-defiant, now weren’t you?", and for him to see exactly that attitude in his newest followers.

Daniel M. Ryan [send him mail] is a Canadian with a known aversion to theocracy, whether real or covert. He is currently marking time with pen and paper.

Predicting depression is one of the hardest chores a financial analyst can ever undertake. People have an obvious economic incentive to avoid getting into a state of general impoverishment, and governments have an equally obvious incentive not to be tarred and feathered in the history books for allowing it. This incentive is so powerful that any popular book explaining the cause of a future depression, no matter how tightly reasoned and realistic it is, often euchres itself out as a predicative tool. Forewarnings are always forearmings, at least to some. Thus, a successful prediction of a depression is, to the financial analyst, as much a feather in the cap as an undefeated record is to a chess champion. People who achieve either are not just kudoed, but practically worshipped for doing so.

There is an unusual split in depression analysis, one whose sides play off each other. The mainstream theories focus upon what could trigger a depression: the simplest ones are all variants of confidence theory. The more sophisticated ones do attempt a causal analysis, but wind up becoming trigger theories by concluding that a government agency, or the public, brought ruin to paradise through certain mistakes. What all trigger theories have in common is the assumption that everything was fine in the pre-depression economy, or would have been if those mistakes had not been prefaced by immediately previous "irrationality."

A deeper analysis rejects that assumption, and substitutes a more long-range causal analysis for the short-termism in all mainstream explanations. According to causal theories, depressions expose a structural weakness in an economy that appears fine, but isn’t. The Austrian theory, as explained in Murray N. Rothbard’s America’s Great Depression, singles out the instability that is created by central bank creation of business credit out of thin air. Once it permeates the economy, thanks to the fungibility of credit, the stage for future decline is set. A depression is caused by the general realization that the supposed real wealth backing some of the credit simply isn’t there. Depression results from a large number of malinvestments, ones that are the result of central bank interference with the credit market, being exposed as such, quickly.

Forecasts of depression based upon the inflation-of-business-credit theory are apt to go wrong because government has an obvious reason to keep the credit bubble going. Keeping the show going keeps the governed from getting angry at the government. Letting the credit bubble get out of hand will induce anger of a different sort, even if the blame is sometimes displaceable onto parts of the private sector. Governments, therefore, also have the incentive to partially deflate the credit bubble from time to time, usually in response to general price rises becoming unacceptably rapid. (This rise in the price level results from the proceeds of the thin-air credit being spent.) The mainstream synthesis in economics is based squarely upon this call-it-as-you-see-it approach. So is the mainstream conclusion that the needed juggling act can be kept up forever if mistakes are avoided. Earlier forecasts of depression that have been wrong, or mistimed, are held up as evidence that causal theories, including the Austrian one itself, are wrong. The causalists respond that governments have simply pulled out new tricks to keep the bobble game going.

There is a hint of sense in the confidence theory. Credit is not foisted upon people; they have to agree to borrow. If enough businesses decide, voluntarily, that they have borrowed more than enough and it is time for them to focus on repayment, then further central bank credit inflation will result in the central bank "pushing on a string." Unfortunately, this glimmer of sense is obscured by attempts to blame any businesses that (possibly have to) retrench, for doing so. The end result is that businesspeople are held to blame for showing, at times, a needed prudence. The consequent restrictions on loans by banks are an effect of such revivification of prudence, as they cannot adjust their loan policies in defiance of their typical customer, the borrower.

It should always be remembered that mechanistic economic theories presuppose that economic agents act like robots. These theories make a kind of sense in times when sticking to habit is economically rational. When a wide-scale change in habits becomes economically rational, though, those previously accurate-enough mechanistic theories turn vacuous.

The collapse of the mainstream, with the consequent pinning of blame for depressions where it belongs by citizens, is a frightening prospect to its members. So, both they and the government itself have a large incentive to find, and reach for, any funds needed to keep the credit bubble from being punctured. Since the continuance of the business cycle depends upon habitual borrowing, with the only influencer of the amount of funds borrowed being the price of credit (the interest rate), government has a definite interest in ensuring both an ample supply of credit and a vibrant credit market. It is true that the much-forecasted Greater Depression in the 1990s never took place. What should be examined is why.

To put it bluntly, the American economy was saved from depression in the 1990s by its permanent trade deficit. This deficit, and the consequent accumulation of capital in foreign hands, has been diverted largely to increases in foreign holdings of U.S. securities, primarily the debt obligations of the U.S. government. This agreeableness of creditor nations, held in place by the underlying fear that refraining from this helpful rollover will trigger a trade war, is the patch job that has kept the debt-ridden U.S. economy from imploding into a deflationary depression.

This stopgap is the current reason why the forecast of depression made in an otherwise erudite and insightful book, The Great Reckoning by James Dale Davidson and William Lord Rees-Mogg, was one of the two main predictions in it that have not stood the test of subsequent events. The second was a forecast of the United States declining in power and influence. (The other predictions have fared better.) Both the continuance of U.S. prosperity and the emergence of a full-blown U.S. empire do feed off one another.

In terms of confidence, it is evident that dreams of empire are fed by this conclusion: "Every credible declinist in 1990 said we’d have a depression and all of ‘em were wrong. They all were nattering ninnies; economics’ answer to the peace creeps. So why shouldn’t the great United States keep growing and growing? The guys who have any plausibility of denial have been shown up, time and time again, by our strength and our might."

If this was all there was to the case for permanent U.S. ascension, then it would be time to roll out the predictions of depression again. There is, however, a new fallback this time, one that will keep feeding the aggrandizement of the State.

The crucial difference between the past hegemony of the U.K. and the present hegemony of the United States is that the British Empire’s was creditors’ hegemony, while the U.S.’s is debtors’ hegemony. The debtor nation is the one who’s doing the fighting for the creditors.

This position, geopolitically, is much more advantageous than it seems. One of the insights in The Great Reckoning worth remembering is that debtor nations suffer less from global depression than creditor ones do: the consequent implosion of financial assets all but ensures it. If a deflationary depression should visit the world as of soon, then America’s creditor nations will suffer more than America itself. It’s plausible to assume that the creditor nations are so agreeable because they know it, or have been made aware of it. This is what has kept the U.S. from being ruined by a debt implosion: "If I fall, I’ll break my leg; if you fall with me, you’ll break your spine — and it’s quite obvious that if one falls, we all do. So we’d all better do our part when it comes to staying up."

U.S. militarism fits neatly into this precipice if it is added to the United States government "doing its part." The bargain cut seems to be this: the U.S. citizenry does the bulk of the fighting, the killing, the dying, and the consuming. The others supply the preponderance of goods and credit, in part as matriel. This kind of reciprocity keeps an increasingly unstable global economy going.

Economically, the cobbling together of this international credit tie implies that there will be no depression soon, despite the increasing debt overhang that will trigger one eventually. The U.S. Keynesian system has kept itself running through putting pennies in the fuse box, and through shifting appliances from one circuit to another; there may very well be more fuses that can be replaced in an emergency. I can think of one right off the top of my head: the U.S. government does not demand recompense from its foreign creditors for doing the world’s fighting. If a serious economic crisis erupts, it might, perhaps through the United Nations. If so, then the next fuse-box penny, usable for a crisis in a more distant future, is demanding tribute.

The economic logic of Keynesianism all-but-implies a growing U.S. empire, with this rough double conditional becoming more and more relevant to its maintenance: "if you want to pull the curtain down, then take a look at what got the curtain back up for us back in the 1940s. If it worked last time, then it’ll work the next time."

Neo-conservative arrogance is, at least evidently, becoming politically costly for the Republican Party. There is, however, a new arrogance surfacing in neo ranks, one that is more geo-economically functional than it appears: advocacy of the use of nuclear weapons in war. Rather than it being dismissable as neoconservative howls to the moon, it does have a functional logic that would solidify the growth of the U.S. "Empire of Debt." Would you dun a debtor whose gross assets include the world’s biggest nuclear arsenal, and whose creatures of state are beginning to seriously contemplate its use?…

Daniel M. Ryan [send him mail] is a Canadian who is awfully glad he poked through Rothbard’s Man, Economy, And State and Power And Market as a youth. He is currently overworking on a book on Objectivism. Visit his website.

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One of the virtues of the old conservative movement was its sense of limits. This sense is fast disappearing among neo-conservative ranks, almost as fast as support for laissez-faire is amongst conservatives. Evidently, the old is making way for the young, an inevitable transition. What is worrisome, though, is what is being lost along the way as the guard changes.

The old modern conservatives continually complained about how they were shut out; this is true. These complaints, though, were explicitly or implicitly held up as exemplifying the dangerousness of putting too much power in the hands of the State. The careful reader of conservative apologetics written at the time when William F. Buckley was my age (36) will pick up a political seriousness that was not confined to intellectual matters. The now-Old Right still remembered what State power, even power which seems to benefit, can turn into when the wind shifts the other way, or when the wind had reaped the whirlwind. The chief character flaws of liberals, according to them, was not decadence or libertinism, but arrogance and present-centeredness. The conservative doctrine that human beings have limits, ones which they find easy to ignore, was linked tightly, if sometimes subtly, to conservative criticism of statists’ arrogance. The scary aspect of present-day neo-conservatism is the breaking of this link. It seems that the neo-conservative only remembers one thing about the life path of the old boys of the conservative movement: that some of them were put through hell thanks to big-government liberals.

It is admirable, in a way, to see a continuity of loyalty between old conservatives and young neo-conservatives. As Republican activists, the young ‘uns do their granddaddies proud. What is disturbing about their loyalty, though, is that it has become infected with the same kind of statist arrogance that their grandparents-in-spirit were warning about. As the neo-conservative movement has grown, the Buckleyite emphasis on tying conservative tracts to intellectual seriousness has transmogrified into "just put into play whatever’ll git the bastids. And don’t hit your own." Consequently, we now have a new breed on K Street: conservative statists, showing the same kind of arrogance that the 1960s liberals used to. Had these youngbloods not had the help of better economists than the old liberals had, their own adventurism would have gotten them in the same kind of trouble that the "Big Johnsons" got themselves, and the American economy, into. Since the neo-conservatives have learned their economics well, though, they do lack this particular blind spot. Their own weakness is for war.

I know through experience that it is hard to come to terms with a definite weak point in an area that you have a strength in. In my own case, I have a weak point in math, whose source is my insufficiently paying attention to the referents of equations when back in school. Once I was set straight with regard to answering questions step-by-step in grade nine, I did fall into exam-passing-machine mode, which has left a weak point which still dogs me today. I had learned to answer instead of to think carefully, and now I have to live with the consequence of that earlier stretch of lackadaisicalness. Fortunately, I am not a government official, so I have no intrinsic incentive to get stubborn when I’m wrong. I also have no fear of impugning the majesty of the State blocking or hobbling me from setting things right: I don’t have to mix any such effort up with the need for a photo op. The absence of the same two strictures would have applied had I been a professional mathematician in a private school or academy, and had had a different weak point, but not in a government-run one. As a member of the last kind of institution, I would have had to show a bit of stubborn because government always puts its own authority first. Every government official, or employee, knows that keeping the State strong is always Job One; the consequent effect on the citizenry is Job Two.

The same principle would apply had I had an overall talent for armchair generaling. Had I come up with today’s answer to the von Schlieffen Plan and missed something that a professional soldier would spot instantly, I’d be obliged to undertake the same self-assessment. It would be my responsibility to determine the cause, whether it be youthful lackadaisicalness coming back to haunt me or more immediate arrogance on my part, or a combination of the two. Had I been a government official in the State Department or in the Defense Department, though, I would be doing nothing of the sort unless I was told to. I would have the prime duty of making sure the department didn’t lose its effectiveness, and another, more political, duty to make sure whatever party I didn’t belong to didn’t find out. Both duties would impel me to be stubborn and silent (or evasive), to be a classic "dumb bureaucrat."

The above think-through should make clear why "the worst get on top" in the State. It certainly makes clear why the worst, or the most mediocre, stay on top. It also points out why the division-of-powers principle is not as protective as it seems, and consequently why it makes sense to speak of "the State" as a single entity. What official, from any branch (or level) of government, would take the risk of telling the people about mistakes made by government except in the comparatively rare instance of the other party, or the mainstream media, treating him or her as a hero for doing so? None who have any realistic expectation of lasting long in their job.

It is unsurprising, therefore, to see the current doleful outcome of the present Iraqi war being chalked up to either inaccurate and therefore bad press or poltroonery in the face of peace creeps, or both. Since the hard-core neo-conservative would be deaf to any lesson, no matter how logical or sensible, which used the current war as a tale of woe, the point can best be illustrated through the use of a suggestion from the pundit Spengler. His most recent column contains an insightful suggestion for a future war with Iran: America should deliberately trigger the use of the "oil weapon," suffer through six-dollar-a-gallon gas, and show the entire Middle East that the oil weapon doesn’t work the way it’s supposed to. This turn-into-the-skid tactic would make a lot of the aggressiveness towards the United States in the Middle East go away, even if the underlying hostility to America would only be hidden but still present.

Militarily, there’s a lot to be said for this idea. If a hostile region’s Big Bazooka can be shown to be as ineffective as a BB Gun would be, then they will end up desisting from aggressive action for a long time. In addition, one major fear of widening America’s military actions in the Middle East would melt away, making the case for peace less credible to the typical voter. There would also be a political benefit, too, for the neo-conservative with a war thirst: it would make the environmentalists, publicly, look and act like either pinkos or flapdoodles, or both. What pumped-up neo-conservatives would not delight in belting out "how do like your six-dollar-a-gallon gas now, u2018trail mix’?" to any green they came upon if a "righteous" war was the cause of it?

In addition, there is an indirect consequence that could be described, lyrically, as pro-business. The American public, finally getting fed up to the teeth with high gas prices, roar into Capitol Hill, demanding energy independence through reduction of drilling restrictions. The legislators quake. Alaska and the ocean shoals open up. Drills finally get sent. Cheap oil flows. The greens are obliterated. What Rosier Scenario could a neo-conservative think of?

Sending the Greens back to the Jimmy Carter peanut farm may seem worth chortling over, but consider what’s been lost in the excitement. First and foremost, the United States will have a major war on its hands. Secondly, getting American citizens used to "sacrifice for their country" again will lend added credence to the calls for the restoration of conscription. Thirdly, any civil libertarian who has called attention to the diminishing respect for individual rights that have been respected in the English-speaking countries since Magna Carta will be cast aside as yet another breed of traitor. Fourthly, one or more of those same civil libertarians may very well be one or more of the economists who kept George Bush, Jr. from becoming Lyndon Johnson, Jr. Fifthly…

…an eventual change in the governing party is inevitable. Let’s assume that Hillary gets whooped back to Arkansas and the Republicans just keep on winning, for a long time to come. Let’s further assume that the next Democratic President coming America’s way will be Ted Kennedy, Jr., and it takes place in 2024. All Republican, all the time, until then.

What Presidential powers would Teddy Junior have at his disposal?

What use would he make of signing statements? What civil liberties would he suspend? Whose civil liberties would he suspend? What if he smells war in the air and doesn’t bother to secure a Congressional declaration of war before deploying the troops, just as his uncle’s successor didn’t? What kind of side deals would he permit, or look the other way at, should such a war be undertaken? What if he saw the need to resurrect the draft? What if he saw an opportunity to resurrect a plan close to the heart of his uncle’s Secretary of Defense: using the draft for "national service," too? What if he saw the need for war propaganda in order to whip up the nation for a serious moral adventure, as six-dollar-a-gallon gas would? As far as the first three or four items are concerned, which President could he cite, in all seriousness, as the precedent setter for such actions?

It’s true that a power-hungry liberal would build volumes upon President Bush’s expansion of Executive power. The more that President Bush expands the Executive’s reach, though, the more of a base any such liberal will have to build upon — and the more "bipartisan" precedents he, or she, will have available to invoke.

Political equivalencing can only go so far before the resultant damage to liberty is lost in the scramble. Neo-conservatives may very well have a righteous grievance when they complain about liberal statists verbally tarring and feathering them as "Nazis," but the more substance there is to their case, the more it implies that those power-hungry liberals really mean it, still.

How would today’s crop of thirty-something neo-conservatives, once they reach retirement age, like to undertake the chore of explaining why the content for 2036′s answer to the good old National Review has to be smuggled out of Guantanamo Bay?…

Daniel M. Ryan [send him mail] is a Canadian, though not a resident of Montreal, who is seriously thinking of re-reading Sinclair Lewis’ It Can’t Happen Here. He is currently working on a book on Objectivism. Visit his website.

1. The Josephus Problem. 41 people agree to a suicide pact in which every third man is killed, until there’s no-one left who qualifies for death. Which two would be left standing? You reach for your favorite means of calculation only to see someone blurt out, "assuming that the first person killed is #3, then the sixteenth and the thirty-first man would be left standing." Everyone else who heard that someone looks goggle-eyed when the presenter announces that that is the correct solution.
2. The Bridge of Königsberg Problem. Is it possible for someone to draw a line that crosses all seven bridges in the supplied diagram? Out you bring your pen and paper. When they’re ready for deployment, someone buttonholes you and says, "no. The number of bridges has to be even." A few mental stabs and one attempt later, you concede that the buttonholer was right about the "no" and might as well be trusted with the rest.
3. The Bland Grid. This puzzle faces you:

You’re allowed to form the word "BLAND" through any five-letter sequence in the grid: the line connecting the letters may be straight or crooked, but the B-L-A-N-Ds which make up the word must be next to each other. You can use each letter in the grid more than once. How many BLANDs can you get out of this puzzle?

After beginning to dig in, a standoffish someone shambles up to you and says "sixty-four." His ease inclines you to work it out mentally, through breaking the problem down into subgroups. At the end of your workout, which ends with a feat of mental arithmetic that you’d be quite proud of in other circumstances, you say "right." It comes out in exactly the same tone that the professor of Britonomics did at the end of Thornton Melon’s cram-oral exam in the climax of Back To School.*

What enables someone with a genius-plus I.Q. range — for this paragraph’s purpose, about 170 or more — to solve problems like these so effortlessly? The best guess I can come up with is that they have a facility to deal with three levels of abstraction, whereas normal human beings are confined to two. Instead of intuitively classifying using genus and differentia, they classify using family, genus and differentia. To use an Aristotelian example: normal humans understand the objective-universe axiom as "existence exists," but someone with a genius-plus I.Q. score needs it in the form "existence exists existentially" to get its point. A few ostensibly garbled works of ontology tip their hand with respect to this mental knack.

I have to add that this hunch is only my own, as far as I know: it has no scientific backing. I got it from asking myself what could a facility with puzzles of this sort, and a writing habit of stringing together subordinate clauses as if they were single words, have in common. If you want to see examples of that style of writing, you’ll find some in the webbed back issues of the journal of the Mega Society, a club for those with I.Q.s of approximately 175 or greater.

Whatever their mental acumen is, it is sufficiently noticeable to make people in the 170-or-more I.Q. range extraordinarily susceptible to two beliefs: eugenics, in which the superior slot is (of course) filled by them, and group self-pity, which is sealed in through them being treated as freaks by the rest of humanity. The end result is an odd combination: Darwinistic pathos. A group of people, so the story goes, who can make the "best and the brightest" look plainly stupid have been shot out of the socio-political mainstream. They could be doing so much for humanity, if they were "socially" encouraged through government support, but they’re not, so we all lose. This is, so the story continues, one of the unfairnesses of life. Until the government steps in and remedies the posited "root inequity," the posited lose-lose situation will continue. The more politically hip in this circuit compare funding for gifted kids to funds disbursed to aid students with disabilities, which makes the former seem both "underfunded" and socially disabled. Examples of lobby efforts for the sake of intellectually gifted children can be found here.

It is a shame to see a bunch of academically gifted kids being used as beggars’ ‘swounds. Rather than being neglected, the gifted circuit has a certain freedom of action that the regular school network lacks. The trick in seeing why is to realize that government and passivity always go together, except in times of war. Thus beginneth the lesson unit:

Government attempts to outcompete the free part of the economy and society have been tried for as long as there has been government; for whatever fashionable rationale, the package of force and "protection" is often considered to be a better motivator than incentives and voluntarism. Unfortunately for such attempts, a comparison of government performance and private-sector performance has, when all relevant factors are journaled, proven to be embarrassing for government. Once the "failure analyses" have been performed, it is revealed that government, in order not to sully its prestige, had better find an area where the private sector can’t go. Such a shift is economically rational for proponents of government because it makes the big bad auditor-analyst go away. Thus, government and monopoly, and secrecy for both, have a natural affiliation.

In the United States, government "action," outside of war, is confined to two spheres. The first is an answer to a call of "need," as communicated by pressure groups; the second is attempts to "make America Number One again." If foreign ingenuity, whether in vivo or in Potemeko, reaches the major organs of the United States media and shocks "the public," the second sphere is rolled out. For government programs in the first category, the needy have a correspondent duty to stay needy, unless a "circular flow of need" exists. Otherwise, the nice government official will be obligated to pound the pavement and will end up discovering that bureaucrats are perceived to have a special need for marketable skills. This would make many of them feel bad. So, a socially astute need case is inclined to conclude that staying on the need rolls is the optimal solution. It helps both the relevant client group and the friendly bureaucrats who administer the funds and rules for their benefit. And so life goes until someone discovers the connection between need and passivity.

As far as the second category is concerned, it doesn’t require a group of passive petitioners, ones who are passive except for petitioning, to keep it functioning. Unfortunately it does require two factors to both start it up and keep it rolling: the United States being shown up by another country and a large segment of the United States public interpreting it as such. Sputnik fit both criteria; the current foreign space programs do not. Thus, the politically good times for the bright physicist back in the late 1950s and most of the 1960s are not around now. Since programs of this sort are both performance-based and have a definable end to them, placing your hopes for government money and prestige on this kind of program is as risky as finding and using an arbitrage-based moneymaking system for the stock market. These only get you what you want if the tide is flowing your way: once it shifts, even King Canute (or "King Fed") can’t bring back the profit flow. And, as far as the effectiveness of government challenge programs are concerned, there still is that pesky private sector, which has to be smacked down every now and then.

If both of these options are unsatisfying, then the only alternative is war preparedness. Being all that you can be through figuring out why the battlemetric models of the past weren’t good enough and how to improve them, or through finding an especially neat way of enabling the combat troops to kill people more efficaciously. If holding the beggar’s bowl is too much for your pride, and the need for challenge programs is just not there, then your only choice, if you want sinecure-quality government help, is to apply your fine mind to "Roads of Baghdad"-style puzzles. That’s the only permanent government-guaranteed use for the very bright, except for those who master the knack of whatever passes for collegiality in the academy without getting gulled or shafted (u2018"Go" to Gone’) in the process.

When all of the above factors are considered, being supposedly shut out of the supposed government cornucopia is not that much of a deficit after all — it can be quite liberating. Acceleration issues mean nada in the homeschooling circuit, where every child’s expected to be a self-starting child. There is a time-proven homeschooling kit which covers every grade level, from kindergarten to grade 12, at a price cheaper than a single unabridged copy of Whitehead and Russell’s Principia Mathematica (even a used one) costs. There are also lots of homeschoolers already, and they tend to be appreciative, not jealous or envious, of academic prize-winners from their ranks.

As far as wealth is concerned, there is one huge field — computer programming — with a lot of bright people who still admire mental acumen as well as earnings potential. The old-fashioned ones, at the very least, still admire mental fireworks of any sort, even of mastery of puzzles. As a result, there is a lot less pressure in the private-sector bright circuit to acquire a money-loving heart than you might assume. Bill Gates is still an embarrassment/joke in some computer-programmer social circles, but unlike the typical politico, whether Republican, Democrat, or intellectual, he just shrugs it off. There is a blessed easygoingness for the "severely gifted" in the private sector, which only evaporates when someone becomes severely competitive. All it takes to merit respect is a performance ethos, which is interpreted quite broadly: even cracking a math conjecture, or Internet peer tutoring, qualifies. The reputed "get-up-off-your-donkey" circuit, rumored to be prevalent, is actually quite scarce, and is confined to politicos who are easy to avoid in private-sector-land if you’re small. It’s easy to be liked, unless you yourself are pegged as a politico, or as a backtalker, or as both. The intersection between the two categories is something akin to "hypocrite."

If, unfortunately, this kind of life don’t satisfy because the prestige level is low, then there’s only one alternative to reclaiming "parity prestige": cultivating a martial mindset. This attitude was the base of the prestige of the "rocket scientist" u2018way back then. Here’s what it takes to win yer prestige: concentration upon the armory, the whole armory, and nothing but the armory. This implies that the heights are reached by figuring out better ways of killing or capturing people who your government has deemed to be the enemy — who sometimes are your fellow citizens. (A relevant study unit.) Diplomats, as well as non-combat analysts, very much have to live with this ethos too: both are seen by the war implementers as something akin to the towel boy. Any professional diplomat has to accept it as part of the job.

Thus, if you place your hopes for security in the hands of government, then it’s either the Sword or the Cross (or its secularized equivalent in this context). As noted above, mendicancy is part of the latter way. Thanks to that attribute, the academy is not the safe haven it might appear, although academic dependence does normally take the form of academic jealousy, not of academic beggary. There’s also a certain kind of tunnel vision required with respect to political issues, a burden that all pressure groups have to assume. Free is just another word for "then you’re washing the dishes instead. So get to it or it’s hustling taxi driver tips for you." You have to either adapt to this kind of pressure or learn to love "Kambodia Kill."

Far better to cogitate over the implications of an old puzzle cracked by none other than Murray N. Rothbard: Buridan’s Ass. It goes like so:

This is the fable of the ass who stands, hungry, equidistant from two equally attractive bales of hay, or, thirsty, equidistant from two water holes. Since the two bales or water holes are equally attractive in every way, the ass can choose neither one and must therefore starve. This example is supposed to prove the great relevance of indifference to action and to be an indication of the way that indifference is revealed in action. Compounding confusion, Schumpeter refers to this ass as "perfectly rational."

The answer?

[I]t is of course difficult to conceive of an ass or a person that could be less rational. He is confronted not with two choices, but with three, the third being to starve where he is. Even on the indifferentists’ own grounds, this third choice will be ranked lower than the other two on the actor’s value scale. He will not choose starvation.

Or so we "assume."

* The correct answer is 60.

Daniel M. Ryan [send him mail] is a Canadian whose reach sometimes exceeds his grasp. He is currently working on a book on Objectivism.

My parents also have a dog, a purebred Shetland sheepdog named Phil. As soon as he saw two of the raccoons on the fence, he leapt right at the nearest one and began barking his head off. They stayed on the fence and turned tail up a nearby tree. I had to content myself with the thought that I’m less brave than a thirty-pound dog, one who another dog in the same weight class finds fairly easy to shove around.

It seems like I’m somewhat of a milquetoast, right? That I’m scared of a small risk of rabies, or that I don’t have enough of an eye to tell a healthy raccoon from a diseased one? Or that I’m simply afraid of the risk of a little pain? Or that I simply don’t know what a trap is, or how to use one?

I’m glad to disclose that the answer to all of these questions is “no.” What got the dog looking braver than me is the existence of a municipal by-law, which makes any human who gets rid of one of those creatures, even through a trap, liable for a fine. If I take matters into my own hands, I become an outlaw.

This anecdote means little in and of itself. That family of raccoons, in and of itself, is not that much of a nuisance, and they do make the neighborhood somewhat picturesque. It isn’t that hard to live with them; the only real inconvenience is the need to put out the garbage early in the morning rather than late the previous night. It seems a bit of an imaginative stretch to tie a by-law that isn’t really hard to comply with to the much bigger embarrassment recently suffered by the Government of Canada when the logistics for a rescue plan to get Canadian citizens out of Lebanon went egregiously awry. It’s the closest government-co-ordinated incident Canada has to the FEMA-overseen mess in New Orleans last year. What kind of connection could there be between the two incidents?

A subtle one, but one very definite. It can be identified through the use of George Will’s maxim “Statecraft As Soulcraft,” the title of his 1983 book, one written while he was a professor at the university I later went to, the University of Toronto. A few details from the more rural-based part of my upbringing will help make the connection evident.

I was allowed some latitude for judgement as a lad, but at the cost of my having to suffer some embarrassment, and the occasional physical hurt, through my own lapses of judgement. There were those lapses on my part, perhaps more than most because I am most suited for intellectual work. As a result, I do have a recurring case of “scholar’s blindness” that does affect my performance more than my myopia, and the resultant lack of co-ordination between my glasses-corrected straight vision and my uncorrected peripheral vision, does. An earlier judgement lapse of mine resulted in a scar I still have. As the result of my too-enthusiastic attack on a branch pile with a suede saw, I managed to put a small slice on my left thumb’s knuckle at the age of ten. Rather than setting up a lobby group, though, my father took a much more common-sensical approach: since I was the accident-prone one, I wasn’t trusted with jobs with more responsibility than unskilled labor chores. My brother, being more sensible in his use of tools, got the skilled work.

This is character-building, as administered from father to son, in miniature: if Junior shows behavior that is less than sensible, then Junior is handed less responsibility. If Junior shows the requisite level of responsibility, then he gets the added responsibilities. So, if Junior wants a favored place, then Junior has to get on the ball; if Junior prefers not to get with it, or can’t, then Junior doesn’t get the favored place. This kind of easy, quick, and easy-to-justify style of rearing ties reward to performance. Almost instantaneously.

Lest anyone begin to think that I was raised in a manner consistent with seventeenth-century mores — being raised in a shop-home — there were some privileges which went with a sensible head, with the correspondent withdrawal of them being the “punishment” rated for not using one’s head. This kind of discipline ties performance to the Law of Causality.

The first time I ever drove a snowmobile, I was seven; it was on a frozen lake. The next time I drove one, I was eight; it was on our rural-length driveway. Due to my ineptness in steering and somewhat wish-prone character at the time, I drove the (bottom-of-the-line in terms of power) snowmobile into a small tree. Needless to say, the third time I drove one was when I was ten — and I drove it ve-r-r-y slowly the few times I did so that year. No-one needed to tell me to do the last.

This three-season do-si-do was the result of experiencing the effect of my own behavior. The more indirect result of it was a kind of physical caution whose effect was that I never had a broken limb until the age of thirty-five, with the possible exception of a greenstick in my left pinky — I say “possibly” because I didn’t bother to get it looked at. This reticence when it came to seeing the doctor, one which used to be known as being public-spirited with respect to public health care, is actually an aftereffect of having to pay for medical service back in the old private-care days. This kind of “public-spiritedness,” needless to say, is long gone, as its source-spring has vanished from memory.

My brother was always the one who was more physically dexterous. Unlike me, his first display of boyish exuberance came off well, except when our parents found out about it. Our family got a steel rowboat, first with an antique 10 hp. outboard with a stick throttle and later with a 20hp. outboard engine with the same kind of throttle, in the mid-to-late 1970s. At the age of eight or so, my brother decided to give it a try by tooling around the boathouse while sitting on the outboard itself, with me in the middle seat keeping an eye on him. This stunt of his went down all right; no-one got hurt. A neighbor spotted it, though, which got my brother a bit of a talking-to. Lest you think that getting a child’s boat implied that we were scions of privilege, I can relate, though experience, that it did double as a work boat. The rules of the lake were easy for me to learn thanks to a brochure of my father’s, and breaking them didn’t seem daring but stupid. Like the typical good rule, the consequences of breaking those were all-but self-evident. As a result, neither of us showed any resentment at learning to drive a car in accordance with driving regulations.

My brother and I were not at the top of the status-symbol pecking order in the locale; several kids around my age rated full-scale pleasure boats when I was about 11 or so. Any consequent shame, though, was easy to deal with, or to plan to deal with. There was the option of saving for a small pleasure boat of my own, made possible through me having a paper route since the age of ten, or there was the option of jazzing up what I had, which is what I pursued. An old car AM radio (a Blaupunkt hand-me-down) with a motorcycle battery was added to the old tub. Radios, after all, don’t run without electricity.

When it came to summer-weather gas-powered land machines smaller than cars, my brother and I were not the most advanced for our age in the neighborhood. Two neighbor boys, brothers and friends of ours, got a dirt bike between them at about the ages of twelve and ten or so. Since they handled it without the maladroitness I myself had showed with respect to the snowmobile, they got one small, and low-powered, motorcycle for each the next summer. The first gas-powered all-season land vehicle I myself got to drive was a three-wheel all-terrain’er which arrived not long after my own thirteenth birthday, but my brother was the first of us two to drive it, thanks to my own demonstrated inexpertness with machines. A four-wheeler was added in 1984 to both the three-wheeler and a hauling trailer which got regular, if seasonal, use. It made transferring dirt and logs more convenient than a wheelbarrow did, I must admit. It also served well for night transportation to and from the inevitable later experiments with alcohol. When it came to supply acquisition, I myself used brass (worked since the age of sixteen) but one of my brother’s close friends, the younger of the motorcycle brothers, showed a little more forethought in the matter.

The potential for humiliation did come with this style of rearing: just as there are physical risks, there are social risks, which sometimes resulted in embarrassment, enshamement, and occasionally tears. Having been molded to see rules as following from consequences, though, I found that these humiliations were relatively easy to get over, to shrug off.

I was raised in an age of transition. An older person would see that part of the rearing I had, given my later avocation for matters intellectual and my (younger) brother’s demonstrated competence in matters physical relative to what I could muster, as making for a sad and mope-prone kid. The average person much younger than me would only see two born risk-takers.

Those of you in the latter category should know why your own assessment would jar so profoundly with those of your typical elders. It is the result of statist liberals’ answer to the statist conservatives’ War on Drugs: the War Against Risk-Taking, or the War on Risks. This “moral equivalent of war” was waged against activities that carried the hazard of injury, whether or not such hazards could be self-regulated through the exercise of good judgement. As a result, this “war” resulted in a lot of collateral damage, damage which was subtle and not easily seen, but which makes itself very evident when disasters, such as the Katrina hurricane (and, for Canada, the somewhat botched boat-lift in Lebanon) visit the human race. Through molding the soul to be rule-following but passive, through enactment of laws which refuse to allow scope for development of initiative, this kind of liberal, as a group, has tied law-abidingness to wreckage, or atrophy, of everyday initiative. As a corollary, cultivation of initiative is tied with living under the shadow of laws, with the effect of making such cultivation tied to a third kind of risk, over and above physical and social risk: legal risk.

It should be of little surprise that laws which have made most of the character-forming experiences I’ve disclosed above illegal will be treated by those, who want their kids to be raised with the same kind of sound sense they themselves have, as if those laws were speed limits and nothing more — as more of a tax than an infraction. This is the inevitable result of a certain kind of statecraft whose goal is a certain kind of soulcraft: to put the passive on an “equal footing” with the initiative-prone. The result is a dearth of initiative and surfeits of passivity, which both of the above emergencies have made very plain to the TV-watching eye.

Remember well those good, passive souls in (though not necessarily of) New Orleans. Look long upon the disorganized rescue attempt by the Government of Canada in Lebanon with a hapless Prime Minister trying to make things right through doing what he can alone. They are the logical products of the War on Risks. They are the analog to the “clean and sober” person who is the product of the War on Drugs. Since the War-on-Risks liberal is as stubborn a fellow as the War-on-Drugs conservative, those two kinds of people are the future, at least that part of the future that is available to outside view.

Remember too that the ones who will be expected to pick up the burden of risk-taking will have to develop that skill somehow. How else but in the back woods, out of the sight of the law and of “the public”? The War on Risks leaves them no other choice — no other choice than to develop practical smarts in tandem with the skill of dodging the cops. Better get used to it, and to the indirect consequences of it.

And, for those of you who have found risky excitement in skateboarding, roller-blading, dirtbiking, etc., enjoy it as much as you can…for as long as the legality of them lasts. Logic informs me that your activities are on the way out. (Did you remember your safety equipment?…)

Daniel M. Ryan [send him mail] lives in Canada — is a Canadian who is living in the same city that the shadows of his four ancestral predecessors live in. He is currently working on a book on Objectivism and is occasionally helping out his father.

There is, I am happy to disclose, a side benefit to this policy if such criticism is done through principle. When another country slips into the same mud which your own has, there is a real delight in taking them to task for it. Thanks to the LewRockwell.com blog, I happened upon an item which would bring pure joy, if of a somewhat shameful kind, to any citizen of a former colony of the British Empire: mediocrity in the U.K. A supposedly distinguished professor of psychology in Scotland has diagnosed-from-a-distance two corpses, both of famous people. These corpses are the ones of two famous British Conservative politicians, Sir Keith Joseph and Enoch Powell, who, this professor related in a fancy dinner in Glasgow (still part of the United Kingdom), supposedly suffered from a mental affliction known as Asperger’s Syndrome.

This condition has been described as a social disability. According to WebMd.com, the symptoms of it are revealed when someone behaves so as to:

• Not pick up on social cues and lack inborn social skills, such as being able to read others’ body language, start or maintain a conversation, and take turns talking.
• Dislike any changes in routines.
• [Appear, possibly,] to lack empathy.
• Be unable to recognize subtle differences in speech tone, pitch, and accent that alter the meaning of others’ speech. Thus, your child may not understand a joke or may take a sarcastic comment literally. Likewise, his or her speech may be flat and difficult to understand because it lacks tone, pitch, and accent.
• Have a formal style of speaking that is advanced for his or her age. For example, the child may use the term “beckon” instead of “call,” or “return” instead of “come back.”
• Avoid eye contact.
• Have unusual facial expressions or postures.
• Be preoccupied with one or only few interests, which he or she may be very knowledgeable about. Many children with Asperger’s syndrome are overly interested in parts of a whole or in unusual activities, such as doing intricate jigsaw puzzles, designing houses, drawing highly detailed scenes, or astronomy.
• Talk a lot, usually about a favorite subject. One-sided conversations are common. Internal thoughts are often verbalized.
• Have delayed motor development. Your child may be late in learning to use a fork or spoon, ride a bike, or catch a ball. He or she may have an awkward walk. Handwriting is often poor.
• May have heightened sensitivity and get overstimulated by loud noises, lights, or strong tastes or textures….
• Have advanced rote memorization and math skills. Your child may be able to memorize dates, formulas, and phone numbers in unusually accurate detail

Briefing-book summary: a preponderance not only to noticeably eccentric behavior which is difficult for the sufferer to control, but also to being disturbed by changes, especially those caused by the actions of other people, whether friend, foe or neither, to the point where the sufferer’s own people skills are impaired, with respect to the norm. A few special cognitive skills are sometimes evident too.

How electable is a person with this debility? How electable would such a person be before this condition was recognized as an official disability, never mind after it? How is it even possible for two people who climbed up to almost the top of the notoriously greasy pole in Whitehall to have even a hint of that kind of social maladroitness that would very obviously be pounced on by the Labor party the first time they stood for office period? Why is it that, in the supposed land of excellence, a professor can rate a fancy dinner courtesy of a Royal Society of Psychiatrists for proclaiming that — not two, but three — successful politicians, masters of a field notoriously demanding of superior people skills, have a disability in the same skill which even the local alderman must be good at?

Thankfully, citizens of the United States and residents of Canada still have enough common sense to see the obvious inanity of speculations such as that one. We haven’t lost touch with everyday political life to the extent of being oblivious to the effect of competition for office. The next-of-kin of Sir Keith and Mr Powell might be very interested to know that Barry Goldwater took a magazine to court for libeling him in such a manner and won. Here’s the case name to slip to the respective solicitor(s): Goldwater v. Ginzberg et al., 396 U.S. [yes, it is a decision by the United States Supreme Court] 1049. It will, at the least, test, at the trial-balloon level, the level of cosmopolitism in U.K. courts of law. (Source of case name: “The Psychology of Psychologizing” in The Voice of Reason, by Ayn Rand et. al., p. 26.)

There’s a certain indecisiveness that is elicited by news items of this sort. On the one hand, people living in nations who have had to endure British snootiness with regard to the state of their own nation’s intellectuals, on the basis that Her Majesty the Queen and the British aristocracy all-but guarantee excellence in British scholarship, may very well grasp this item eagerly and use it to deliver a mighty comeuppance to that kind of Brit. On the other hand, though, the excellence displayed in the scholarship of fêted Britons in the olden days, along with the U.K.’s traditional rôle of serving as safe haven for great scholars in exile like Friedrich Hayek, does give cause to worry about a degradation of this sort. How is it possible for a plain mediocrity to win such favor in today’s U.K.?

If you believe the traditional legend of mediocrity, it is puzzling indeed. This legend claims that mediocrity in scholarship is the fate of new nations. Since nations that are new need the best brains in practical pursuits, the academy is the place where the also-rans in life are put, because there’s no pressing use for them. There is, however, pressing need for the better people to stick to the more urgent task of nation-building. This arrangement reinforces a certain cultural bias because it is easy to claim in a new nation that “all book boys are stipend-eaters — all of ‘em. No exceptions.” This shames the smarter people into development, at the price of inculcating a little yokelism.

This legend would be accepted as fact by a determinist, but what makes it merely a legend is the fact that it is deterministic in its base. The person who is placed in the scholarship field, whether sinecured there or not, has a choice once there to either take it easy or to drive him- or herself hard. Levels of developments and social dynamics may influence such a person’s choice one way or the other — not necessarily towards one specific choice or another — but they cannot determine the choice made. What about the person who, when hearing that he or she is thought of as a mere welfare case in disguise, gets steamed enough to buckle down extra hard?

There is also the question of professional standards, too, which do not come from a degree but from one’s own conscience. A person who, upon habitually making obviously careless mistakes in a field he or she is supposedly brilliant at, has the option of hanging up the book bag and retiring from the field he or she is in. He or she also has the option of wishing away any intellectual decay displayed by him or her and clinging to his or her position despite it. The same kind of choice applies to the scholar who dirties his or her hands with academic dishonesty. These choices — the choice of how hard to work, how deep to study, how long to stay in the field and why one should get out of it — make any deterministic theory of national mediocrity mythical, and little more than that. (Note the custom of self-exemption in determinist ranks.)

The eruption of “professional” mediocrity in the U.K. has a more sensible explanation, one tied to human responses to incentives. Government financing in a field politicizes it, as the kind of people skills which the typical politician has in superior supply, combined with the well-known insularity of the political class, gives the edge in the grant-hustling game to those who have “got game” too. When government is the patron, and politicians, with the aid of the bureaucrats they promote and demote, are the dispensers of taxpayers’ patronage, then academics have an incentive to “write to the patron” through adopting the intellectual and ethical standards of politicians. It is a commonplace that people like saying “yes” to other people who are like them more than to those who are not like them. The only exception to this rule of thumb is pity cases. When government holds the purse strings, therefore, political scholars eventually come to the fore. The resultant mediocratization of standards, as Rand noted in “The Establishing Of An Establishment” (Philosophy: Who Needs It, pp. 168—70) proceeds through not only fear of displeasing the grant-dispensing (and grant-receiving) authorities, but also through inferring that the predominant greybeards in the field no longer care about truth and truth alone — an inference that is conveyed by the workings of a normal person’s people sense to him or her. The decay happens slowly because of the overhang of better traditions, but it proceeds nonetheless. It gradually whittles scholarship down to the few, whose endurance can overcome the painful need to act irascibly (“anti-socially”) for the sake of advancing truth, and the many, who go along to get along and who thus descend into comfortable mediocrity. Given knowledge of this dynamic, it’s simple to conclude that the legend of British excellence as girded by British aristocracy is the result of the aristocrat class rescuing long-suffering geniuses from being martyred by their mediocre colleagues largely out of pity for them. Since bravery of this sort is not a natural birthright of those who have inherited a title of nobility, there is no monopoly on any such rescue efforts held by any aristocracy. The entitled are not needed to set things straight in the academy: as the success of green-skeptic authors has shown, mediocrity can be fought from outside thanks to a still-existing free market in books. A vibrant freedom does suffice as a necessary.

I have to admit that, thanks to government patronage, Canada is mediocrity-ridden also, just as the United States is. Shoddy science does rear its head in Canada too, as do shoddy arts thanks to the growing government swill tills for each. Canada does have an answer to the National Endowment of the Arts, known somewhat derisively as the “CanCon” circuit. The same rudimentary-Hegelian cover-up which American mercantilists are fond of using is also used by Canadian mercantilists to lump in the victims of mediocrity with the mediocre themselves. So, a Canadian like myself does find it hard to point the accusing finger across the border and remain blind to the domestic variant of mediocrity.

With respect to this issue, we’re all in it together, folks. The ruinous effect of bad policy works on any nation whose government enacts them, without fear or favor to any specific nation. Traditions only slow down or guide the process of degradation.

Daniel M. Ryan [send him mail] lives in Canada — is a Canadian who is living in the same city that the shadows of his four ancestral predecessors live in. He is currently working on a book on Objectivism and is occasionally helping out his father.

I will never forget an incident that took place in 1988 when I and the rest of my family were taking a road trip through the United States. The highway, which had a side road running alongside it, was blocked for a reason I can’t remember. What I do remember, vividly, was the sight of American drivers carving out an impromptu detour through the packed dirt in order to reach that access road. Somewhat bemusedly, my father complied with the rest of traffic. My eyes just goggled — it was as much of a cultural shock as a shirtsleeve-weather December was a physical shock. I was easily impressed by American liberty, I have to admit: even the sight of a local Floridian electronics store openly selling radar detectors in 1987 was surprising to me — just as surprising, I am sure, as a (physically) big Canadian man dithering his words, out of fear of giving offense to his fellow Canadians, is to an American. (Sgt. Preston, after all, lacks X-ray goggles.) There are quite a few Canadians who are afraid of belting out the Canadian analog to "America The Beautiful," a song called "The Maple Leaf Forever."

Traditionally, Canada is known for exporting raw materials to the world, especially to the United States. Now, Canada is beginning to trade up. I wish I could enumerate and relate a large list of high-tech innovations that are replacing Canada’s traditional export staples, such as agricultural products, metals and minerals (largely starved out through green regulations), lumber products (ditto), and oil (not yet strangled, thanks largely to the province of Alberta’s blessed orneriness), but there aren’t many. You can look at a list of large Canadian corporate campaign donors to get an idea of which companies are at least trying to do so.

The government official always feels excluded in Canada, unless he or she is included. Once you understand this, you understand why Canada seems to be on the slowish track with respect to development of initiative and enterprise. You will also understand why one of Canada’s more successful export products happens to be government policy.

Take bilingualism, for those of you Americans whose state hasn’t already. Official bilingualism has been official government policy in Canada for longer than I’ve been alive. Ostensibly, it is merely the provision of government services in either official language over all of Canada and the promotion of Canadian unity in two-tongued diversity. In reality, though, it has financed a bilingual elite who, ostensibly, are selected by merit but are really held together by a common frame of reference, bureaucratism. I could write a 900-word piece entirely in French explaining why I’m not considered qualified for a bilingual position, with no restaurateur or Berlitz fillips in it.

Has bilingualism worked out for Canada? With respect to its ostensible aim, no. Only a small minority of Canadians are bilingual; a large majority prefer to stay with the language of their birth, their mother tongue, whether it be English or French. Bilingualism has not only spawned a host of government-fed pressure groups, it has also nurtured the dream of many a Quebecker of founding an independent Quebec State, which of course would be unilingual French. There have been two referendums on the separation question in Quebec — one in 1980, the other in 1995 — with approximately 40% in favor of "sovereignty-association" in the first, and 49% in favor for the second. The next one will, probably, return a majority in favor of Quebec leaving Canada.

Are average Canadians angry about it? No, except for a sporadic drunken kind of outrage which is inevitably followed by a guilt-hangover (hence the two attempts and present plans for a third). The only exception is a small, stigmatized minority in English Canada. Since the regular Canadian isn’t exactly enamored at the chance of being identified with Outcast Central, it should be of little surprise that normal Canadians are so passive with respect to Canada’s blooming secession crisis. Ostensibly passive, that is.

Many Americans may wonder why us Canadians put up with so much from our government, especially given the wide-open spaces which Canada’s police couldn’t even hope to cover thoroughly. It would seem that Queen Elizabeth II, who is still Canada’s Sovereign, should be blamed for this state of affairs, but her formal power is little more than residual nowadays. Canada no longer has British aristocrats in the Governor-General’s mansion; instead, we have either retired politicians or pleasing personalities. There is barely a trace of a landed aristocracy in Canada. It couldn’t be servility to King and Baron that’s the cause.

No, it’s because Canada now has a professional guiltmongering class latched right on to the rest of us. Its original prototype consists of opportunists who found out that beggaring works in a country where people are expected to help each other out during emergencies without question, which do occur regularly thanks to Canada’s cold climate. Back in the olden days, such guiltmongerers mostly confined themselves to trade — which has left a cultural residue of suspicion of entrepreneurship that still exists in Canada — but nowadays the ones who have that skill go right into government. It’s the perfect toadstool, as guilted people tend to explode in resentment over being held to account for faults not their own, and then regret it. Just consider what a valuable export this is to officials of other governments.

In order to keep the guilt game going, Canada’s political class has foisted upon Canada something called "multiculturalism." This is a policy of encouraging ethnic groups to stick together, and to keep them from comparing notes with members of other groups. It’s gotten so pervasive that all-too-many Canadians wax resentful of tax-exemption privileges enjoyed by aboriginal vendors instead of taking advantage of the resultant tax breaks as customers. Multiculturalism has been official government policy for almost all of my lifetime.

The way the multiculturalism game works is simple in conception: divide and rule. Bribery from the public treasury is the usual means by which garrison mentalities are financed, but sometimes threats are used, too. The usual technique is to combine the two, in the order that I listed, with regular use of the "Irish switch" to deflect largely resentment-based hostility away from the fomenters of it. As with any technique with a simple method, though, there are subtle variations that are deftly deployed by the masters of this particular game. The result is that the old government boys, the ones who tied Canadian statism to pragmatism, have been elbowed out almost without knowing it. They still are waiting for the current crop of politicos to come to their senses and get back to the old public-works framework.

The same causal forces are, of course, at work in the present United States. A government huge enough to grow its own governing class will eventually find it filled with people who are very skilled at keeping the government dollars flowing. Hysteria amongst the disadvantaged is encouraged to keep the guilt racket going. Enclaving is also encouraged to keep the hysteria levels buoyant. Guilting is tied to increasingly subtle levels of ludicrousness in order to keep the taxpayers pacified. A demand for victims calls forth a supply of new ones. Enclave conformity encourages real victims to stick with professional pleaders. An increasingly aggressive moralizing begins to crowd out what used to be the "impractical idealist" circuit, who also wait for the new crop of governors to come to their senses.

Sound familiar? Not as familiar as it is to a Canadian. Canada is America’s pilot plant for government by hogwash, whose soap is guilt-by-association — a lathering whose spread is surprisingly egalitarian.

Daniel M. Ryan [send him mail] lives in Canada — a nation which had no bank runs during the Great Depression, and got a central bank in 1937 as a “reward” for it. He is currently working on a book on Objectivism. Visit his website.