Max Borders

Victory Swallowed Up by "Hope" and "Change"?

Joshua Trevino lays out a good review of Thomas Ricks's new book, as well as a case for the fact that the Iraq War has largely been won. A sliver:

Iraq today is not the Iraq of the 2006 nadir. American deaths are at their lowest level ever — roughly 16 a month since October — and 2008 saw the number of combat deaths drop to a third of the previous year’s level, and the lowest level since the war began. It is even possible for an oddball Italian tourist to show up unescorted in Fallujah, as one did last month, and live to tell the tale.

I don't imagine that David Petreaus is up for any Nobel peace prize. But perhaps no man on earth has done more to bring more people from terror to normalcy more quickly than he. And he didn't "do it" in the way of the technocrat, exactly. He used as much top down as bottom up.

One question remains: will history forget about the victory in Iraq as the MSM has? Why is no one willing to admit these gains? Report them? It's discusting how ADD the media have become after 6 years of if-it-bleeds-it-leads reporting. Now that victory doesn't match up with their ideologies, they're willing to move on to domestic matters. We the People and They the Soldiers have sacrificed so much to eliminate al Qaeda and to bootstrap stability in that part of the world -- which was, to be fair, the "neocon" agenda at the outset. People like Paul Wolfowitz - and even W. - might have been maligned by the press. A much of it they deserved (particularly on the question of how the war was executed.) But I think history will see them in a better light. Victory has not come without cost. But it has come. Will anyone notice?

Review Preview: Be the Solution

Most people think politics boils down to different answers to the question: how do we make the world a better place? According to idealist Michael Strong, the first step is to ditch the politics. The second step in making the world better – that is, progressing in areas like human happiness, environmental health and overall well-being – is to eliminate what can only be described as some of our cultural baggage.

Consider what we’ll call the “Zero-sum Three”:

1. Manichaeism—People are good or evil and the world is black and white;
2. Pessimism—The glass is half empty (and it’s usually somebody else’s fault); and
3. Statism—Government can and should solve all of our problems. It’s easier to hope and pray (to bureaucracies) than to “just do it”.

Be the Solution, a new book by FLOW co-founder Michael Strong, is as much about liberating entrepreneurship as it is a serious critique of the Zero-sum Three. And by Strong’s lights, entrepreneurship is more than just making money. Much more. Drucker and Hayek? Meet Maslow and the Mahatma.

Devalued [President] of a Devalued Government

Brilliant. I turn the words of MEP Daniel Hannan upon you, President Obama:

HT: Geoff Hawkins

Newspapers, Buggy Whips & Pravda

Now the newspapers want a bailout.

With many U.S. newspapers struggling to survive, a Democratic senator on Tuesday introduced a bill to help them by allowing newspaper companies to restructure as nonprofits with a variety of tax breaks.

"This may not be the optimal choice for some major newspapers or corporate media chains but it should be an option for many newspapers that are struggling to stay afloat," said Senator Benjamin Cardin.

A Cardin spokesman said the bill had yet to attract any co-sponsors, but had sparked plenty of interest within the media, which has seen plunging revenues and many journalist layoffs.

Cardin's Newspaper Revitalization Act would allow newspapers to operate as nonprofits for educational purposes under the U.S. tax code, giving them a similar status to public broadcasting companies.

Of course, I say let them die. And die hard. But if the party in power owes anyone anything, they owe the newspaper business. So the print MSM will probably get what it wants.

Why bother with some diatribe about creative destruction? This is just more ugly, corrupt, corporatism. And it shows no signs of going away any time soon. But a question lingers with me... Is this the NPR/BBC-ization of print? Is this a toe-hold for a government takeover of the print media?

Hopefully, creative destruction will continue to erode this power base before the government owns it and offers it to everyone as a "public good" similar to Pravda circa 1980.  

Weird Keynesian Symmetry

Over at The Next Right, I argue that the right is to political strategy as the left is to economic policy.

It's NOT the Economy, Stupid

(Update: fleshed this out over at TCS.)

Many economists are scratching their heads, wondering why the Obama Administration seems so keen on using such drastic (but economically unsound) measures. Crisis, apparently. This sort of economic zaniness can be seen both in the unprecedented redistribution bill passed last month and in the as-yet-unpassed Big Budget that's causing even some Democrats in Congress to say "WTF? "

Looking at the first 100 days, as Tom Hazlett does here, or Gary Becker warning us from the pages of the FT and WSJ here and here respectively, all seem to be under the illusion that the Obama Administration is simply acting with an alternative understanding of economics, but nevertheless in good faith, to do something about the economy. If that's what these commenters think (the more likely scenario is they're being charitable about the Obama Administration's intentions because they are academics with reputations and not Ann Coulter types), let me offer what I believe to be the real story.

All of this makes much more sense if you don't think of it in terms of economics at all, but solely in terms of political calculation and left ideology (one that does NOT include any wish to fix with what is being offered up as warmed over Keynesianism). I believe they really don't care one jot whether the economy turns around in two years or ten. If we have to have recession for ten years to achieve our objectives, they reason, so be it. They're simply using this economy as a pretext to do everything they've ever wanted to do under the sun--and calling it "stimulus." Why do we hear the words "crisis" uttered ad nauseam? They know they're stimulating the special interest groups and constituents getting something out of the deal, which will secure their power into the future.

Becker suggests he gets it:

That suggests that there is a risk to the U.S. system with more people relying on entitlements. "Well, they become an interest group," Mr. Becker says. "The more you have dependence on the government, the stronger the interest group of people who want to maintain it. That's one reason why it is so hard to get any major reform in reducing government spending in Scandinavia and it is increasingly so in the United States. The government is spending -- at the federal, state and local level -- a third of GDP, and that share will go up now. The higher it is the more people who are directly or indirectly dependent on the government. I am worried about that. The basic theory of interest-group politics says that they will have more influence and their influence will be to try to maintain this, and it will be hard to go back."

Perhaps that's why now, more than ever, the minority party that so quickly turned its back on founding principles, free-market capitalism, limited government and fiscal responsibility must find a way back to them -- even at the risk of not being taken seriously.

Peter Singer v. Tyler Cowen

This is a beautiful and frightening intellectual fileting. Enjoy, Dear Reader. (And yes I realize it's a couple of days old. I have a job, 'n'' stuff.)

Higgs on "Vulgar Keynesianism"

LIke a wraith that cannot be killed by wooden stakes or silver bullets:

We’ve been deluged by an enormous outpouring of diagnosis, prognosis, and prescription, at least ninety-five percent of which has been appallingly bad.

The bulk of it has been bad for the same reasons. Most of the people who purport to possess expertise about the economy rely on a common set of presuppositions and modes of thinking. I call this pseudo-intellectual mishmash vulgar Keynesianism. It’s the same claptrap that has passed for economic wisdom in this country for more than fifty years and seems to have originated in the first edition of Paul Samuelson’s Economics (1948), the best-selling economics textbook of all time and the one from which a plurality of several generations of college students acquired whatever they knew about economic analysis. Long ago, this view seeped into educated discourse and writing in the news media and in politics and established itself as an orthodoxy.

Read the six most egregious aspects of vulgar Keynesianism.

Free Will & Punishment: From Criminal to Clinical

I've been writing about the free will issue for a while and, by gum, I'm still a determinist libertarian. I may be the only one. Passing over the apparent paradoxes, I recently came across this piece thanks to Tom Clark of Naturalism.org. In it Sue Blackmore of The Guardian writes:

For example, our legal system is largely based on belief in free will, which leads us into all kinds of tangles. For example, we accept that people who are too young or mentally disturbed are not responsible for their actions and should not be punished, while everyone else is. But then along comes evidence that, for example, Mr G carries the "murderer gene", or Ms T's kleptomania was caused by pre-natal trauma, or that Mr F couldn't resist the advertisements for sweet foods that made him violent. What do we do? We try to protect the idea of free will, while the possible space for its operation shrinks. The combine harvester comes round again and the terrified field mice squeal "But you can't take away our consciousness and our free will! The world will fall apart, our legal system will be destroyed, all hell will break loose."

Like many naturalists, I say it won't, and it is high time we faced up to the changes we need to make. We can do this personally by practising not thinking in terms of free will. We can do it communally by realising that our legal system can punish wrongdoers not because they could have done otherwise and freely chose to be bad, but because some punishments are effective. Indeed, I believe this approach would be better. Instead of asking how much punishment someone deserves, we should ask what actions we can take to make this person behave better in the future, and others not follow this bad example. More constructive use of prison and other kinds of sentences might even result.

I largely agree. I might even take it further: I think it's high time we pass to a condition in which we moved away from the criminal and toward the clinical. That's not to say there won't be "tangles" here too, but it's to argue that if, in principle, there are physiological underpinnings (whether due to nature, nurture or a mix) to violent or harmful behaviors, then these are in some sense "curable." Just as not all diseases are curable in practice, not all criminal pathologies/congenital illnesses will be either. But they are in principle at least--which should should set us on a path to looking for remedies. Therefore, it's also time we moved ourselves closer to a research paradigm in which people are actually investigating these "illnesses." Whether we look at violent offenses as the result of moral failings or psycho-chemical compulsions, offenders should still be removed from society. So what does mens rea add in these instances? 

Lest I run afoul of any Szaszians, let me say that the relationship between neurochemistry and behavior is very close and this relationship offers us something more than folk psychology (cum the 1950s lobotomy) to justify treatment. Indeed, that's the whole idea. Science has come a long way and can go a lot further. Anyway, more on this later. I should admit I am somewhat uncomfortable with the idea of a board of appointed neuroscientists empowered to determine folks' fate outside the judicial system. I agree this presents problems of a legal and political nature. Though ones not insoluble, perhaps.

Note: I like seeing all these evangelical atheists like Blackmore and Hitchens in the press lately, though I'm not one. Spread your wings. My Christian friends and I prefer that we tolerate each other mutually, which is good for me being in an athiest minority. But I did squirm enough as a child being "witnessed to" and so forth by fundamentalists--enough to appreciate a little theological tit for tat in the press. In any case, Sue Blackmore, who has a great combine harvester metaphor in the piece cited above, would have much more fun writing in the States than in Britain. There's just so much more fodder here. Or should I say there are more "field mice"? Our free market in religion (separation of church and state) has ensured religious flourishing, for better or worse. In any case, trying to convince the deluded that they may also be delusional is much more important when it comes to those who worship Government. Those who worship God aren't really doing anyone any harm, these days.

Bailouts and Bullshit

Stossel, take your vitamins. We need you around for a long time.

Interesting how eerily similar the government rhetoric on bailouts and stimulus is to that of global warming chicken littling. "Crisis!" "Action!" This dynamic duo will be with us for a long time -- at least as long as it's working (Carry on Rahm).

(Find the whole series in 6 parts to the right on YouTube.)