Strategies for anti-prohibitionists, pt. 1: The neo-Puritans
Posted: 2012/02/22 Filed under: Prohibition Leave a comment »People advocating the legalization of some or all drugs are really fighting more than one kind of opponent. Clarifying this may help with strategy. Some audiences need one line of reasoning, and some need another.
Before we dive in, there is one very, very important point to get out of the way: drugs are everywhere. Everywhere. People even become addicted to drugs inside federal prisons. I’m sure that drugs would be more prevalent without prohibition, but this would not mean cities would have to start dealing with drug problems that previously had not.
Another more obligatory point is that drug abuse is a bad thing, and we’d all like to see less of it. I’m not advocating people waste their lives, health, and financial resources away. Aside from the fact that this already happens, I believe that it would happen less under a legal drug system. This is an empirical point about which I could turn out to be wrong, but I think those odds are pretty slim.
So who are these different categories of prohibitionist? The first is the neo-Puritans. Many people feel that drug use is a moral evil that the state is obligated to oppose, no matter how badly the effort goes. I would guess that the vast majority of these are Christians, but the two groups are not identical.
As I mentioned in an earlier post, the way that Jesus was supposed to have revealed his powers, and thereby his identity as the Messiah, was turning water into wine. Clearly the consumption of alcohol is not strictly forbidden by the Christian faith.
You might object: we’re talking about different substances here. Jesus did not turn water into heroin. And you’re right about that. But the point is that some amount of pleasant intoxication, even if small, is sanctioned in the Gospel of John. Again: intoxication is not categorically bad, at least according to John’s version of Jesus.
There are others who hold a similar position to the one just mentioned, only without the Christian basis. They’re a much smaller group and ultimately I think even their positions usually derive from the Christian one, so duking it out with them is probably not necessary. If it becomes necessary in ten or twenty years I’ll revisit this paragraph.
Alcohol and other intoxicants are different in degree, not in kind. Other people are aware of this fact. Many people who oppose drug use also oppose alcohol use, and it seems that the only reason they don’t push for prohibition of alcohol is that the US already tried that and gave it up. It’s a dead issue. So instead they hold the line where it is now, even though this is not a philosophically consistent position.
Part of the neo-Puritan view is that all use is abuse, that there is simply no way to use some drugs responsibly. Once the mystic patina is taken away from intoxicating substances, this too seems ridiculous. Clearly a glass of wine does not make one a raging alcoholic who abuses his family. Many prominent politicians sheepishly admit (or otherwise let on) to having used marijuana or cocaine or both in their youth, and yet there they are in high positions anyway. Some of them are even abusers of alcohol, such as the late Charlie Wilson. While this certainly harmed him in the long run nobody could deny he got pretty far in life as an alcoholic.
What is the strategy with this group? Delegitimizing their argument using more sophisticated expositions of what I’ve written above. There are too many true believers out there to convince them all, but around this core is a much larger group of people who accept the argument but could be convinced otherwise. The core group has so much influence because the outer group follows them, but deprived of this outer group they would become much less powerful.
There’s another way to delegitimize that position as well: even if something is categorically bad it does not necessarily follow that the state needs to prohibit it and try to enforce this prohibition. In questions of morality, if you’re not able to do wrong you earn no credit by doing right. In questions of living in the real world, you need to evaluate policies at least partially in terms of consequences. The consequences in this case are a rapid erosion of the very rights and freedoms that made America so iconic in the first place, a legal system that imprisons people at more than the rates of Russia and China put together, leading to further degradation of the economic and social culture, and, oh yeah, widespread availability of drugs anyway. There’s no shame in admitting that prohibition failed once and it is failing again. In fact, there’s only shame in refusing to admit it.
You might say that there are better arguments to use against them. I don’t doubt that. I’m only pointing out the arguments that seem to me to address their objections with the most bang for the buck. And only taking the arguments as far as needed to change the political landscape, not to convert everybody over to my position. There is almost a critical mass of legalization advocates, and all that is needed to win in the ten-to-twenty year term is a little more mass and ever so slightly less resistance to that mass.
Part 2 will continue this discussion by looking at another group.
Libertarian scholarship vs. statist mythology
Posted: 2012/02/13 Filed under: History, War & Peace Leave a comment »Because of our own mythical political history, Americans are especially disposed to thinking of governments as ideologically motivated. There’s some truth to that: it’s easy to pick regimes in history that had a central organizing ideology. Most of these I would place in the 20th century, but not all. The Nazi regime comes to mind: although in the middle and lower levels one could easily pick out mere political opportunists, the leadership was made up of true believers. The Soviet Union is similar, although subjectively it seems like it had a smaller percentage of true believers domestically (and a higher percentage of true believers abroad).
Citizens of the United States are taught in their impressionable years how the foundation of the US was a total break from history. This idea comes from the Yankee Puritans, although the Puritans intending to found a new society that would be a light on a hill for the rest of the world to imitate would have balked at other American regions with different customs, laws, and especially religious practices being part of it, or its being a secular light in any way.
What are the effects of seeing governments this way? One ought to be a tendency to guard liberties jealously from overreach, maintaining the supposed moral purity of the system. Each new government power would be not just a small practical increase, but a symbolic leap into citizens’ private sphere and away from a sacred purpose. Early on this seems to have been what happened.* Yet as the power of the government grew slowly over time**, resistance itself become largely symbolic. (Witness the recent fury over Catholic employers having to cover birth control through their health plans. Without denying the importance of the issue to many people, what is being argued here is just crumbs compared to what could be debated.)
Once that blurry line was crossed long enough and defense of the continuity of the system was a defense of government power, we’d expect that this would make Americans more ready for war. Still maintaining that our government was in principle correct as a matter of course, foreign governments must be wrong when in opposition to ours. In any sustained conflict, foreign governments must be wrong in principle.
As I began by pointing out, there were ideologically motivated governments, and most of them were what we could objectively describe as “bad”. But the conduct of our own government hardly makes it seem ideologically motivated in a way radically different from other governments historically and currently. Nazi scientists with potentially no political motivations were used by the victorious Allies after World War II, but spies with overt political motivations were also used. One day they were enemies, and the next day they were valuable assets to be protected. It was argued that this was in the service of a greater good, but that greater good was pretty nebulous and ambiguously served. The conduct of other governments, Nazi and Soviet and otherwise, also makes this point clear. Various currents in Imperial German and Russian foreign policy continued to be major components of Nazi and Soviet foreign policy, even if the vocabulary of their articulation changed.
The point of a lot of libertarian scholarship has been to point out that the US government is not fundamentally different from other governments. It does not matter if that was the stated purpose of the scholars; viewed from above, this is the theme. True, we have a written constitution that sets us apart, but this constitution hardly has any real power in setting limits to government action. The usual rules and analytical tools are far more useful for understanding the US government than any appeal to myth. The proximate purpose of new and continuing scholarship is to convince the not-yet-convinced of this truth. The ultimate purpose is to know and generally agree on what we’re dealing with to help us deal with it better.
* I’m sure I hardly need to point out that the liberty to own slaves is not a real liberty, conflicting with and negating the valid ones. But that contradiction does not bear on this discussion.
** This is what government powers tend to do. There are exceptions, though it is an empirical question whether the most common exception is restriction of government power or large increase of government power.
Posted: 2012/02/08 Filed under: Uncategorized Leave a comment »
From Theory and History, p. 61, by Ludwig von Mises:
The characteristic feature of a free society is that it can function in spite of the fact that its members disagree in many judgments of value.
Clint Eastwood’s Super Bowl ad
Posted: 2012/02/07 Filed under: Uncategorized 1 Comment »Clint Eastwood’s Super Bowl commercial is blowing up the libertarian internet sphere. We were upset to see the ad proclaiming Detroit a real American success story. It’s not just the bailouts; persistent government meddling has favored malinvestment in Detroit for more than half a century to the detriment of everybody else. (It’s ironic to hear Republicans accusing him of an implicit pro-bailout position when by and large they were explicitly pro-bailout and voted that way. However, internal Republican struggles are not my issue.)
We libertarians have to remember that Clint Eastwood is an incidental libertarian. He’s primarily a more or less neutral artist, and this is how he interacts with the world. Politics aside—which dedicated libertarians are rarely ever able to do, myself included—it’s a nice little story. It would be one thing if he were quoting Mises in interviews and then making this ad, but expressing libertarian sentiments here and there while still making non-libertarian movies and ads is not really that surprising.
Basically, if you feel betrayed you need to check your premises, as the saying goes.
Posted: 2012/02/02 Filed under: Uncategorized Leave a comment »
Eugene Rice, in the introduction to Frederick W. Mote’s Intellectual Foundations of China:
To learn, for example, that the Chinese have no real creation myth is to perceive more clearly the extent to which the Old Testament conception of a creative God has shaped Western thought.
Posted: 2012/01/29 Filed under: History Leave a comment »
From page 298 of Jack Weatherford’s Indian Givers: How Native Americans Transformed the World:
In the 1975 excavation on the White House lawn for the presidential swimming pool, builders found Indian relics that pointed to the commercial prosperity of a former Indian group. Only a few blocks away from the White House, the Indians had operated one of the largest Indian quarries for steatite or soapstone. Numerous manufacturing sites surrounded it where Indian craftsman made dishes, pipes, and implements from the soft stone. From here the Indians traded the manufactured goods all along the eastern coast in what may have been the last productive enterprise practiced by humans along this stretch of the Potomac.
I recommend the book. Very few people have an appreciation of how much of our modern lives was shaped by the indigenous peoples of the Western Hemisphere.
“Storm socialism” and other failures of imagination
Posted: 2012/01/26 Filed under: Uncategorized Leave a comment »This recent article by Christian Parenti at first seems to make a good point, considering what other people failed to consider. In times of weather disaster, it seems that the government can live up to its wildest dreams and really save the day. In any one instance, this may be so. When the National Guard airlifts people supplies that wouldn’t have been airlifted otherwise, good for them.
It then follows, for Parenti, that government is a categorically Good Thing. This may be so, but attempts to get to that result by examining one level deep are surely not the ticket. It may be that government intervention before the fact created conditions in which disaster was just a matter of time. Let’s take flood insurance.
As for flood insurance, the federal government is pretty much the only place to get it. The National Flood Insurance Program has written 5.5 million policies in more than 21,000 communities covering $1.2 trillion worth of property. As for the vaunted private market, for-profit insurance companies write between 180,000 and 200,000 policies in a given year. In other words, that is less than 5 percent of all flood insurance in the United States. This federally subsidized program underwrites the other 95 percent. Without such insurance, it’s not complicated: many waterlogged victims of 2011, whether from record Midwestern floods or Hurricane Irene, would simply have no money to rebuild.
At this level of reasoning, sure, federal flood insurance is a great thing. But let’s go one level further: why won’t private insurers write policies for so many of these places?
I’ll quote from John Stossel here, one of the beneficiaries of federal flood insurance:
In 1980 I built a wonderful beach house. Four bedrooms — every room with a view of the Atlantic Ocean.
It was an absurd place to build, right on the edge of the ocean. All that stood between my house and ruin was a hundred feet of sand. My father told me: “Don’t do it; it’s too risky. No one should build so close to an ocean.”
But I built anyway.
Why? As my eager-for-the-business architect said, “Why not? If the ocean destroys your house, the government will pay for a new one.”
What? Why would the government do that? Why would it encourage people to build in such risky places? That would be insane.
But the architect was right. If the ocean took my house, Uncle Sam would pay to replace it under the National Flood Insurance Program. Since private insurers weren’t dumb enough to sell cheap insurance to people who built on the edges of oceans or rivers, Congress decided the government should step in and do it. So if the ocean ate what I built, I could rebuild and rebuild again and again — there was no limit to the number of claims on the same property in the same location — up to a maximum of $250,000 per house per flood. And you taxpayers would pay for it.
Surely some of the people getting flood insurance were among the poor and downtrodden, but by and large this program is a way to let rich people make bad decisions and charge everybody else for them. The same kinds of commentators who in one article complain that the government unduly favors rich and powerful people over everybody else (think of the item about Warren Buffett’s secretary) can in the next article write that without federal flood insurance “we’d” be in trouble.
This is not to mention that the private market for flood insurance is distorted by the overwhelming presence in that sector of federal flood insurance. If that were removed or cut back, it would be distorted less. Since flood insurance is something that people in flood-prone areas demand, I would expect to see a lot more of it. Yes, private flood insurers would not insure or would charge more to insure risky places, but what is a compelling argument that the “heads I win, tails you lose” strategy is a good, just, or efficient one when it comes to building houses?
How about wildfires? Do these fires tend to happen on or near federally managed land? Are we not subtly making a case against federal management of land? There will always be wildfires, this we will have to deal with. It may be that we can minimize them with a different structure of property ownership, one in which there is some person or group of people with a direct, personal interest in better fire management strategies. That’s a conjecture, but it follows economic reasoning better than the current strategy does.
I could make similar remarks about each point Parenti has in his article, but I’ll spare you the reading. It’s the same each time.
At its heart, this piece commits the same error as a hundred million other pieces on related topics: the failure of imagination. If we could not have gotten to our current state of affairs without government intervention, that isn’t necessarily an argument in favor of government intervention. In some cases it could be, but why is it that societal conditions that obtain right now are the optimal ones? If society were permitted to develop more organically, why would that be a bad thing? Sure, it would be different, but it might be different in good ways.
One example is how much people complain about cars, sprawl, suburbs, and pollution. It just so happens that the federal government (and smaller-scale ones too) persistently intervened in the structure of society to support more roads, more cars, and more sprawl. Find me almost any city in America that has a vibrant downtown area where people can walk to and enjoy walking around in, and I’ll show you a city that had this downtown area before World War II. Many cities lost this kind of neighborhood, but very few cities—if any—developed this kind of neighborhood.
Government has a lot of power now and has had a lot of power in the past. That’s a poor argument for why it should have a lot in the future.
Politics as tribal affiliation
Posted: 2012/01/24 Filed under: Politics, War & Peace 2 Comments »There’s a very strong argument, mostly from economists, that the Republican and Democratic parties are more like different teams than political opponents, and that support for one is more like a tribal identity than a meaningful expression of values. If values were really that important, the two parties would have radically different policies. Partisans of each camp routinely cherry-pick examples and hold these up as counterexamples, and I’m not saying this has zero validity. Surely ideology exists among the voter base and has some influence. I just don’t think it’s the main thing that animates policy.
As exhibit A, let’s take the antiwar movement. This was a very big and increasingly organized movement that, in this incarnation, got going early in George W. Bush’s reign and died out with Barack Obama’s candidacy for president. Although it helped Obama win the election, his record on war and peace issues has been the same as or worse than Bush’s. For people who were truly antiwar, not simply opposed to Republican wars, their inspiration should have only gotten stronger. They ought to be a constant thorn in Obama’s side. These people are still around, but the other 99.5% of the movement turns out not to have cared so much about war.
They did care about opposing George W. Bush, and most of them cared about supporting Barack Obama. But not for reasons that have to do with an ideological preference for peace over war, unless they all had a change of heart once Obama was in office.
The JFK assassination, pt. 8: Bonnie Ray Williams and the elevators in the TSBD
Posted: 2012/01/23 Filed under: JFK Assassination Leave a comment »Continuing the theme from part 6, I want to speculate on the TSBD shooter(s). A handful of witnesses in Dealey Plaza stated that they saw two men on the sixth floor around the time of the assassination. This has been challenged, and frankly I’m not expert enough to really have a good opinion about it.
However, there’s still a question. Somebody fired a rifle from the sixth floor. Victoria Adams testified that when she and a colleague went down the stairs immediately after the shooting there was nobody else using them. The elevators were not working at this point. Officer Marion Baker encountered Lee Oswald on the second floor in a composed condition—not at all in the kind of condition somebody would be after shooting the president, running around stacks of boxes, hiding the weapon, and fleeing downstairs.
The shooter (or shooters, though I will just say shooter for now) left the sixth floor somehow and was not apprehended at the TSBD. Bonnie Ray Williams testified to the Warren Commission that at least just before the shooting, the elevators were stopped on the fifth floor. After running to a window on the west side of the building, Williams, James Jarman Jr., and Harold Norman went down the stairs. Williams testifies that although they heard shots directly above them, and although Harold Norman said he could hear shells hitting the floor, they did not hear any movement above them after that. As they were running to the west side of the building, they made quite a lot of noise themselves.
Victoria Adams would have been on the way down the stairs then, and almost immediately afterwards Marion Baker would have arrived. Oswald would already be downstairs at this point in the timeline. Also, the elevators would have resumed working but then stopped working again, as Luke Mooney testified.
What I am getting at is that it’s highly unlikely the shooter could have gotten off of the sixth floor a) by the stairs and b) before law enforcement officers arrived in the building. The Marion Baker situation makes it unlikely that Oswald was even the shooter, although it is still possible. Are we then dealing with a shooter hiding in the building, or taking the elevator out when the law is on the stairs? The TSBD’s elevators were the cargo type that do not hide the inside from view, making this risky. The various agencies combed the building in what I’m sure was a thorough enough way that hiding would be extremely difficult.
This leaves me in an uncomfortable position, and I don’t as yet know a reasonable solution.
The JFK Assassination, pt. 7: The secrets of speech
Posted: 2012/01/19 Filed under: JFK Assassination Leave a comment »One of the reasons I find the Kennedy assassination so interesting is that it’s one of the greatest mental puzzles ever. We have the official story, but it’s so full of holes that it obviously conceals more than it tells. Then what is the real story? Occam’s Razor tells us not to assume complexity unless we have to, and in this case we have to. It becomes almost a game of how many parts we can mentally juggle until we can fit them all together just so.
I swear I wasn’t going to post about the Kennedy assassination. I was just going to watch the documentary “Secrets of Body Language” for kicks now that I have some free time. It’s about, well, the secrets of body language and speech, and it mostly focuses on politicians. If you’re interested in that sort of thing, it’s definitely worth a watch.
And then, right there at the end (beginning around 1:24:40), they had some voice analysis done on the Lee Oswald press conference. They use some kind of sophisticated software to determine if someone is stressed, telling the truth, saying something probably false, etc., with numbers indicating the degree. Clearly, Oswald was highly stressed during the whole interview, and this shows. His statement “I know nothing more than that.” is indicated as false. I don’t doubt this.
My impression of Lee Oswald during that interview is that he knows he’s in over his head. Even if he were one of the shooters—but why would he be?—he could not have acted alone either in the act itself or in the planning beforehand. His intelligence connections are shrouded in (possibly intentional) mystery. It requires a too much suspension of disbelief to think that he had no knowledge at all about the plot, so what we’re left with is his being unwilling or unable to say all that he knew. This fits perfectly well 1) with his behavior during the interview and 2) with the voice analysis in this documentary.
I wish they would have focused more on that voice analysis instead of simply assuming the Warren Commission narrative, but that would have been outside their scope.
