Category Archives: Articles

Execution Without Trial

October 3, 2011 – 12:44 pm

Anwar al-Awlaki is dead. Good news? Bad news? It’s complicated.

Al-Awlaki was a major figure in Al Qaeda in Yemen, where he was killed on Friday by a missile fired from an American drone aircraft. But he was also born in America and still held American citizenship.

He was a radical Muslim cleric whose followers might have included Major Nidal Malik Hassan (who killed 13 people in the Fort Hood Massacre of 2009) and Faisal Shahzad (who unsuccessfully planted a car bomb in Times Square in 2010). Maybe. At least, we know Major Hassan regularly corresponded with al-Awlaki and Shahzad found his writings inspiring.

And that points to the second complication: Al-Awlaki was an idea guy, a religious leader whose teachings inspired and justified the violent actions of others. An anonymous American official said, “We’ve been looking at his important operational role.” But looking is not exactly finding, much less proving. Glenn Greenwald comments:

Despite substantial doubt among Yemen experts about whether he even has any operational role in Al Qaeda, no evidence (as opposed to unverified government accusations) was presented of his guilt. When Awlaki’s father sought a court order barring Obama from killing his son, the DOJ argued, among other things, that such decisions were “state secrets” and thus beyond the scrutiny of the courts.

In short: Al-Awlaki is dead because the President signed a piece of paper saying that he was a bad man. I suspect he probably was a bad man, so it’s hard to be all that broken up about his death. But in theory, the President (or some future president) could sign a piece of paper saying that I’m a bad man too. Wouldn’t it be nice to have some due process about that?

Because drone-fired missiles are a crude way to kill people, we also killed some of al-Awlaki’s bodyguards, plus Samir Khan, described by the NYT as “an American citizen of Pakistani origin who was the editor of Inspire, Al Qaeda’s English-language Internet magazine.” Was Khan a bad guy? Maybe. Did he have an operational role too, or did he just Inspire the wrong people?

Rachel Maddow, in a piece Wednesday about the death penalty and prisoner abuse in American jails, summed up the political problem like this (around the 7 minute mark):

This is why it’s hard for anybody to make political hay, to get political traction, out of alleged bad treatment of allegedly bad guys. … The political defense against claims that you are badly treating criminals or suspects or protesters or prisoners has always been to point at those people and say: “You’re taking these guys’ side? These are the bad guys. You’re going to take their side?”

If that’s true for domestic criminals, how much more does it apply to suspected terrorists? If they really did what they’re suspected of doing, then yes, they are the bad guys. If al-Awlaki really was trying to figure out how to park car bombs in Times Square, then who can be sad that he isn’t doing it any more?

I think I’ll let Thomas Paine answer that one. He concluded his Dissertations on First Principles of Government (1795) with this:

He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself.

If Anwar al-Awlaki can be executed without trial, in a place nowhere near a battlefield, in a country with which we are not at war, then so can I and so can you. It’s that simple.

“But President Obama would never do that to you or me,” I imagine you thinking. And you’re almost certainly right. But I don’t want my life to depend on the President being a nice guy or believing that I’m a nice guy. I want to have rights that are defined by law rather than by the good will of government officials.

I don’t see how to claim those rights without granting that Anwar al-Awlaki has them too.

Or at least he did until Friday.

By weeklysift | Tagged , | Comments (7)

Talking About Killing

September 26, 2011 – 11:51 am

The execution of Troy Davis on Wednesday unleashed a wave of anti-death-penalty articles (I’ll link to the best ones I found as they become relevant), and a few defenses of capital punishment (or at least of the process that found Troy Davis guilty). Some even suggested that this case would be a turning point in Americans’ support for the death penalty.

I’ve got my doubts about that, because the two sides are still talking past each other — arguing with straw men rather than saying anything that might turn an opponent around. The real issues remain in a visceral realm where they can’t be discussed because they aren’t fully verbalized.

You can tell that people are talking past each other when they affirm the same principles, but imagine that the other side is denying those principles. A productive discussion can’t even get started until those agreements are recognized. Then the real disagreements stand out rather than remaining unspoken in the background.

Here are some principles held by death-penalty advocates and opponents alike:

  • Innocent life should be protected.
  • The state should affirm the value and dignity of life, not undermine it.
  • Actions should have consequences, and similar actions should have similar consequences.
  • Murder is a horrific crime in general, and many specific murders are acts of incredible inhumanity.
  • The people who loved the victim deserve our compassion.

On either side, if the bulk of your argument emphasizes one of these general claims, you’re probably just talking to yourself. No one disagrees with you. The disagreement is about where those principles lead.

Some of the surface-level disagreements concern questions that could be resolved by evidence, if anybody could gather and evaluate the evidence fairly. The biggest ones are to what extent the death penalty deters future murders, how many innocent people get convicted, and the roles that race and class play in determining who gets executed.

But the root disagreements, the ones that cause everyone to misrepresent evidence and project straw men onto each other, are very basic:

  • We disagree on the continuing worth of an ancient principle of justice: Suffering pays for suffering and blood pays for blood. 
  • We disagree on how to weigh the risk of punishing the innocent against the risk of insufficiently punishing the guilty.

Our arguments go round and round because these questions are not amenable to logic or evidence, no matter how much both sides wish they were.

Recognizing the agreements. A great deal of pro-death-penalty energy is devoted to horror stories about murders, as if death-penalty opponents believe that murderers are basically decent people who deserve our sympathy. (If somebody somewhere believes that, I haven’t met them.)

Similarly, death penalty advocates agree in principle that innocent people should not be convicted and that execution should not depend on the race or class of either the murderer or the victim. But they disagree about how perfectible the process is and how to balance those risks against the risk that the guilty will be insufficiently punished.

The real difficulties come with the principles that pull both ways. How should the state affirm the dignity and value of life? Those who believe blood-pays-for-blood think that not killing the murderer devalues the life of the victim. (And they project that devaluation onto DP-opponents).

But DP-opponents believe that life is affirmed at the extremes: Even the murderer should not be intentionally killed by the state; that’s how valuable life is.

Similarly, how should we protect the innocent? By deterring future murderers with the threat of death, DP-advocates say. By not executing any innocent people, DP-opponents counter.

A hidden agreement. One false assumption — that death is the worst punishment we can inflict — sneaks into the discussion and hides an area of agreement by producing a false either/or: We either should or shouldn’t inflict the worst possible punishment on murderers.

In fact, no current execution method approaches the worst possible. We could flay the murderer alive, for example, or let him be eaten slowly by rats.

Many of the same arguments would apply: The murder-victim’s family might take satisfaction in a more gruesome execution, and it might be a better deterrent than, say, lethal injection. But who advocates these more extreme punishments? Overwhelmingly, both sides agree that we should not inflict the worst punishment possible.

Evidence-based disagreements. Because we all want to be provably right, both sides exaggerate their evidence-based points. It would help if we could all admit two things:

  • Truly innocent people are a very small fraction of those executed. Even in the Davis case, we don’t know he was innocent; we’re just not sure he was guilty.
  • If the death penalty has a deterrent effect, it’s tiny. If deterrence worked, Texas wouldn’t lead the nation in executions year after year.

If you want to see a real deterrence effect, look at interceptions in football. It’s been 29 years since the same player led the NFL in interceptions two years in a row, and I don’t think three years in a row has ever been done. After you intercept a few passes, quarterbacks stop throwing in your direction. But Texans never stop committing murders.

Deep disagreement: weighing our mistakes. Every human process will make mistakes. (Andrew Cohen’s Atlantic article shows just how fallibly human our capital-punishment process is. Repeated attempts to fix it led Justice Harry Blackmun to write, “From this day forward, I shall no longer tinker with the machinery of death.”) One of the most basic liberal/conservative differences is whether you want to err on the side of mercy or strictness. A liberal would rather feed ten moochers than turn away someone genuinely in need. A conservative would do the reverse.

This issue shows up all over: unemployment payments to people who might be able to find jobs, torturing those who are probably terrorists, the number of civilian deaths that are acceptable “collateral damage” in war, and so on. The proper balance is a deep intuition, not a conclusion based on logic or evidence.

This is why the Davis case will not turn be a turning point. It may be obvious to DP-opponents that a single execution of an innocent man invalidates the whole capital-punishment process. But DP-advocates can look squarely at that possibility and remain unconvinced.

Deep disagreement: Only blood pays for blood. Scales became a symbol of justice from crimes of property: If a measure of grain was taken from you, you got the same measure back; that was justice. Metaphorically, this got extended to crimes of violence — an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. Justice means balancing the scales.

This principle is so old that many people don’t realize it’s a metaphor. Killing the killer does not balance anything literal. Nonetheless, many Americans feel deep down that justice has been circumvented if a murderer lives. He got off cheap, or perhaps the victim’s life was valued cheaply. Any talk about “victim’s rights” (or the rights of the family, which stand proxy for the victim) or any comparison between the murderer and his victim (“how much compassion did he have for my daughter?”) is implicitly invoking the scales-of-justice metaphor.

This issue is complicated by the dogmatic needs of fundamentalist Christianity. If blood isn’t a necessary payment, then what was the crucifixion about? Deep down, fundamentalists know that if they give in on the death penalty, their whole religion is undermined.

Strategy. When a disagreement is not amenable to evidence or logic, evidence and logic become distractions. So there’s no point arguing about the statistics of deterrence or racial imbalance if the root disagreement is whether blood is necessary to pay for blood.

When you reach that point, a DP-opponent really has only two options. If you are comfortable with the religious or mythological language the other person thinks in, you can sometimes get your point across that way. (Example: Even though God told Cain “The voice of thy brother’s blood crieth unto me from the ground“, God did not answer that cry by killing Cain. Quite the opposite, God put a mark on Cain to prevent anyone else from killing him. It was the original example of executive clemency.)

But there is an alternative: Simply being in the presence of an alternate moral vision can change a person, particularly someone who has never taken seriously that another view is possible. To employ this strategy, you have to shed the projections DP-advocates throw at you, and refuse to be distracted by issues-of-fact that won’t change anybody’s mind. Eventually you need to make clear that you see what the other person sees, but you just don’t make the same judgment: Blood does not pay for blood. The scales of justice are a metaphor; we have a choice about whether to apply it.

Letting someone else see the example of your alternative moral vision may not be as satisfying as crushing them in an argument about facts or logic. But in the long run it may be more effective.

By weeklysift | Tagged | Comments (10)

Economics Works Backwards Now

September 12, 2011 – 12:24 pm

Do you ever think about how strange it is to worry about “creating jobs”? Wednesday, Douglas Rushkoff observed this:

Our problem is not that we don’t have enough stuff — it’s that we don’t have enough ways for people to work and prove that they deserve this stuff.

Originally, economics was supposed to be about scarcity. People didn’t have enough food, clothing, housing, or tools. So you worked to make some, and then traded your surplus for somebody else’s surplus of the things you needed.

Today it’s all backwards. We produce plenty of goods, and if necessary we could dial the process up and produce more. What’s scarce now is work.

Try to imagine that on a personal level: It’s dinnertime. You’re hungry. There’s so much good food in the frig that you worry about it spoiling. But you haven’t justified your meal yet and you can’t think how you’re going to do it. So you have to sit there and be hungry until you can create a task for yourself.

Or on a family level: The kids each had jobs to do to help with dinner. But then we got a dishwasher, so now Jenny doesn’t get to eat dinner because we haven’t found a new job for her yet.

Crazy, isn’t it?

This week the big news was President Obama’s jobs speech, the Republican reaction, and the various economists who mostly told us that these were pretty good ideas.

But think about that speech’s focus. Not that we need to grow more food or make more cars or build more houses because those things are needed, but that we need to produce more of something so that people can be employed producing it. He tried to justify the needfulness of the jobs, but all the same it would miss the point if Obama could accomplish the same things by snapping his fingers instead of hiring people.

Rushkoff again:

it seems to me there’s something backwards in that logic. I find myself wondering if we may be accepting a premise that deserves to be questioned.

I am afraid to even ask this, but since when is unemployment really a problem? I understand we all want paychecks — or at least money. We want food, shelter, clothing, and all the things that money buys us. But do we all really want jobs?

John Kenneth Galbraith was making similar observations half a century ago. In The Affluent Society he described the following paradox: We judge our nation’s economic success by how much it produces, and we justify production because it satisfies demand. But demand has to be created by advertising, because without constant hectoring people would not want all the things we produce.

After a certain point, Galbraith said, “Production only fills a void that it has itself created.”

So why are we doing all this? In theory, our society could work less, produce less, advertise less, and we’d have no more unmet desires than we have now. But then there wouldn’t be as many jobs.

If production is a paradox, productivity as an even bigger one. On the one hand, productivity is our best friend. The reason the standard of living today is so much higher than in the Middle Ages is that an hour of work now (with the assistance of machinery, electronics, fossil fuels, and a better-organized society) produces so much more than an hour of work did then. Beyond an occasional hobbyist project, why would you choose to work all week making something that you could buy for 20 minutes worth of your salary?

But productivity and new technology kills jobs. Rushkoff begins his essay talking about the Post Office, which faces massive layoffs because email and electronic bill payments don’t require human sorters and couriers.

Again, that’s not a new idea. The French economist Sismondi satirized the pure productivity-is-good view in 1819 in New Principles of Political Economy:

In truth then, there is nothing more to wish for than that the king, remaining alone on the island, by constantly turning a crank, might produce, through automata, all the output of England.

That fantasy gets closer and closer to reality. In his 1995 book The End of Work, Jeremy Rifkin wrote:

The quickening pace of automation is fast moving the global economy to the day of the workerless factory.

Sismondi’s image of the king turning a crank captures the social problem of the workerless factory: The only reason to care whether it is in Topeka, Taipei, or Timbuktu is who owns it and who gets to tax it. Wherever it is, it will make goods, but it won’t provide jobs.

So even if “the output of England” stays the same, all the value of it now belongs to the crank-turning king (or maybe to the Workless Factory Corporation). No matter how plentiful those goods are, what can the people of England trade in order to get them?

In 1930, at the depths of the Depression, John Maynard Keynes wrote the hopeful essay “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren“:

We are being afflicted with a new disease of which some readers may not yet have heard the name, but of which they will hear a great deal in the years to come — namely, technological unemployment. This means unemployment due to our discovery of means of economising the use of labour outrunning the pace at which we can find new uses for labour.

But this is only a temporary phase of maladjustment. All this means in the long run that mankind is solving its economic problem.

Imagine if humanity really did “solve its economic problem”. Suppose we got off the hamster wheel of ever-increasing desires, and kept improving our productivity until we could comfortably supply everything people really wanted.

Now imagine that we could do all that with only a few people working. The way we’re currently organized, that would be Hell. Whoever owned the machines and the natural resources would have the whip hand over the rest of us, who would scratch and claw to get the few remaining jobs.

So I want to suggest this: Yes, in the short-to-medium term we really do need to create jobs. But maybe our economic problems seem so intractable because we’re using economic tools to attack what is really a social problem. Currently (because in centuries past scarcity seemed eternal and the production system needed as many workers as possible) jobs organize our lives, give us our identities, and (most of all) allow us to prove that we deserve to eat.

But unless we either outlaw progress or keep inflating our desires until we consume the planet, eventually we’re going to have to rethink our lives, our identities, and the system that distributes goods. Otherwise we’re headed for Cornucopian Hell.

By weeklysift | Tagged , , | Comments (13)

Six True Things Politicians Can’t Say

September 12, 2011 – 12:16 pm

Remember how things were in high school? If a truth was unpopular, you’d be ridiculed for saying it, no matter how obvious it was. Even people who knew you were right wouldn’t defend you, because then they’d be ridiculed too. They might even think they had to speak against you, just to be safe.

Politics is like that, but mostly just on one side. The rich and powerful can emphasize the effect when it works for them (by hiring professional ridiculers) or minimize it when it works against them (via spokesmen and front groups who absorb ridicule until things are safe for conservative politicians). If the PR professionals do their jobs well, the pro-wealth politicians don’t have to offer evidence or answer opposing arguments, they can just laugh and scoff — like the cool kids used to.

But a popular lie that damages the poor or even the middle class can go unchallenged for a long, long time. If we want to hear the corresponding truths, we’ll have to start saying them ourselves.

1. Most government money is well spent. The opposite idea — that government pours money down a rat hole — is broadcast every day. But strangely, anybody who sets out to find this wasteful spending and eliminate it ends up firing teachers, getting rid of food inspectors, letting bridges fall down, or cutting off somebody’s medical care.

I’m sure the people in the path of Texas’ wildfires appreciate the “waste” Gov. Perry managed to cut from the budgets of volunteer fire departments and the Texas Forest Service. When the antibiotic-resistant plague gets rolling, I’m sure we’ll be similarly grateful to House Republicans for the “waste” they’re finding at the CDC.

Speaking this truth in public takes courage, because the ridiculers can point to famous anecdotes of government waste — bridges to nowhere, $600 toilet seats — and nearly everyone knows some story of a mismanaged local project, an acquaintance who scammed disability, or a lazy civil servant who can’t be fired.

But the private sector has its own examples of spectacular waste. How many welfare cheats would it take to equal the $300-500 million CEO Dick Fuld “earned” by managing Lehman Brothers into extinction and touching off the 2008 financial collapse? I can find waste in my own apartment — things I didn’t need, never used, or paid too much for. A certain amount of waste is the natural friction you’ll find in any human activity.

Government is a human project, so it has waste in it and always will. Except for unnecessary wars, is it more wasteful than the private sector? Does its inevitable waste cancel out the vital services it performs? Could we get those services without waste? No.

2. Regulations save money and lives. Corporations can often make a short-term profit doing something that eventually costs the public far more than the corporation makes. (The guy at Hooker Chemical who suggested burying toxic waste at Love Canal saved the company a bundle. He probably got a raise.) Stopping those bad deals is what government regulation is all about.

We hear every day how much companies spend complying with regulations, as if that were the whole story. What we gain from that spending is far more valuable. In the 60s and 70s, the auto companies fought tooth and nail against making cars safer. A car with seat belts used to cost extra. Air bags weren’t even an option, much less standard equipment. Hard, unpadded, and sometimes even sharp steering wheels killed thousands.

Traffic deaths in the U.S. peaked in the late 70s, even though the number of people, cars, and miles driven keeps going up. That’s government regulation for you.

Or consider this: Taking the lead out of gasoline has made American children measurably smarter. What’s that worth to our future economy? What’s that worth personally, to them and to us?

3. The rich are job destroyers, not job creators. You can’t have a mass-production economy if the masses can’t afford the products they make. So when the rich get too rich, growth suffers.

The last time the rich captured this much of our nation’s income was 1929 — the last time the economy crashed this badly. It’s not a coincidence.

4. Rich heirs are parasites. In political rhetoric, rich people are all hard-working, risk-taking entrepreneurs. Because politicians need contributions from the rich, they can’t point out just how useless most second-and-third-generation millionaires and billionaires are.

We are encouraged to resent the unemployed worker who doesn’t try hard enough to find a new job, but not the heir who never works. We’re encouraged to resent the black or Hispanic who gets into Harvard through affirmative action, but not the “legacy” Ivy Leaguer whose test scores are even worse.

Our plunging inheritance tax has increased inequality in the worst possible way, and makes us more like the hereditary aristocracies of 18th-century Europe. In spite of the pop-culture vampire revival, we’re still missing the underlying social metaphor of the original Dracula: Those exotically beguiling aristocrats are sucking our blood.

5. The U.S. government can’t go bankrupt (unless it decides to). Even President Obama has been invoking the spectre of government bankruptcy, but it can’t happen in any literal sense.

Why? The overwhelming majority of federal government’s expenses are in dollars. Its debt is in dollars. So what are dollars? Whatever the Federal Reserve says they are.

The Fed creates dollars the way that Delta creates frequent flier miles: It enters them on a spreadsheet. The U.S. Treasury has an account at the Fed, which the Fed can replenish by creating dollars to buy government bonds. Or it could just let the Treasury’s balance go negative. No sparks would fly out of the Fed’s computers. Negative numbers work just fine.

The only way the U. S. government can go bankrupt is if it creates a crisis for itself, like the recent debt-ceiling debacle. As long as Congress is willing to authorize the government to pay its debts, the government can pay its debts.

Though it can’t go bankrupt, the government could pay a penalty for running a big deficit in two ways: The markets could drive up interest rates (which isn’t happening), or the Fed creating dollars could increase inflation (which isn’t happening, but should).

6. Some inflation right now would be a good thing. The official mandate of the Federal Reserve is to balance inflation against unemployment. It doesn’t. The Fed goes on red-alert at every hint of inflation, but the current unemployment is not inspiring similar alarm.

An easier money policy would lower unemployment at the “cost” of inflation — which would actually be a benefit. Anybody who lived through the 70s remembers the mindset inflation brings: You don’t sit on piles of cash. You buy or invest now, because stuff is only going to cost more later.

Corporations are sitting on a trillion dollars of cash. Rich people are probably sitting on even more. A little fear of inflation would get that money moving again.

7. Fill in your own unspoken truth. …

By weeklysift | Tagged , | Comments (68)

Rootworms, Monsanto, and the Unity of Existence

September 5, 2011 – 11:35 am

You know what I envy most about the Right? They’re holistic.

I know that sounds crazy. Conservatives are individualists, liberals are the ones who understand that everything is connected. And yet … liberals get involved in labor issues (if they belong to a union), education (if they have children), race and gender (if they’re black or female), and so on. Otherwise, life is short and energy is finite. We can’t all be into everything.

But conservatives happily take on a wide range of issues, because they’ve got an ideology that pulls it all together.

This week there was a news story about rootworms in corn fields in Iowa. Probably you’re not an Iowan, a corn-farmer, or a rootworm, so your eyes are glazing over. But bear with me. Everything is connected.

Bt and Monsanto. The rootworms are newsworthy because they’re not supposed to be there. The fields were planted with a corn seed that Monsanto genetically modified to kill rootworms. It contains a gene from bacillus thuringiensis, a naturally occurring insect-killing bacteria. Apparently the Iowa fields have evolved a rootworm resistant to Bt, or at least to this particular expression of Bt.

That’s bad — and not just for Monsanto.

This possibility was considered when the Monsanto corn was approved by the EPA in 2003. The remedy was for farmers to plant 20% of their fields with non-Bt corn. Basically, you want to prevent insects with low-level resistance from mating with each other and producing high-level resistance. The 20% “refuge” area keeps non-resistant rootworms in the evolutionary picture, so that the species as a whole doesn’t become resistant.

Now it looks like 20% wasn’t enough. That’s what independent scientists told the EPA in 2003. They wanted 50% non-Bt corn, but Monsanto lobbied the EPA down to 20%. Now it looks like their lobbying screwed up their own product.

Everything-is-connected Lesson 1. Smart government regulations aren’t job-killing or money-wasting. Corporations are short-sighted. In the long run everybody — even industry — does better if government doesn’t let industry do whatever it wants.

Monsanto vs. the farmers who buy its seed. Since the dawn of agriculture, farmers have saved some of their crop to plant the following year. Since the dawn of the seed industry that has been a problem, because seed companies always want to sell farmers new seed.

So the 20th-century seed industry developed high-yielding hybrids that were either sterile or would regress in subsequent generations. You could save your seed, but if you wanted the 100-bushel-an-acre corn, you had to buy new.

When it couldn’t figure out how to make that tactic work for genetically modified seeds, Monsanto changed its retailing model to be more like Microsoft’s. Like Windows 7 DVDs, Monsanto’s seeds are just media. What farmers are really buying is a one-year license to use the patented genetic information in the seed. Farmers who replant the descendants of their purchased seeds risk being bankrupted by Monsanto’s patent-infringement lawsuits.

A lot of law had to be changed or re-interpreted to make this scheme work. For one thing, the whole idea that naturally occurring genes can be patented is not obvious, and may even be a little bizarre. Property law could just as easily have settled out the way that seemed like common sense to one unintentional patent-infringer: “I assumed that after I paid the tech fee [the seeds] were mine.”

Everything-is-connected Lesson 2. Conservatives talk about property rights as if they had been sacrosanct since God evicted his tenants from Eden. But in the real world property is whatever corporations want it to be. If centuries-old notions of property get in the way of corporate profits, the rules will be changed.

Everything-is-connected Lesson 3. The term judicial activism is hardly ever applied to cases that expand corporate rights. But patenting life-forms stems from Diamond v. Chakrabarty (1980), where it is the liberal dissent of Justice Brennan that invokes judicial restraint: “We must be careful to extend patent protection no further than Congress has provided.” He lost.

Monsanto vs. the farmers who don’t buy its seed. Some farmers who never bought Monsanto seed are growing patented plants because birds drop seeds on their property or pollen blows in from a neighbor’s field. Other farmers who stopped using Monsanto seed nonetheless see “volunteer” seeds from last year’s crop sprout in their fields.

Occasionally such a farmer loses a patent infringement suit. And no one knows how many innocent farmers — less determined than this family profiled by CBS — just pay up when confronted with evidence of patented plants in their fields and the threat of Monsanto’s expensive legal team. (Sixty different organic-farming organizations have preemptively filed suit against Monsanto to avoid being sued later for inadvertent patent infringement.)

Farmers who hope to export to countries that ban genetically modified crops are harmed if the wind blows Monsanto pollen onto their fields. But Monsanto’s licensing agreement puts this responsibility on the farmer who plants its seeds. So you can sue your neighbor, but not Monsanto.

Everything-is-connected Lesson 4. Corporatist political rhetoric often emphasizes freedom and responsibility. But it’s all one-way. The corporation has the freedom and you have the responsibility.

Organic insect control and the genetic commons. Being a naturally occurring bacterium, Bt is one of the few insect-control treatments available to organic farmers. They typically use it sparingly. Their first line of defense against insects is to rotate crops (as all farmers used to do). That way, eggs of corn-eating insects will hatch in a field of soybeans, and vice versa. When organic farmers use Bt, it is applied only to the insect-infested field, and it soon washes away.

Monsanto’s Bt seeds, by contrast, expose the entire field, all season long. And one of the seed’s touted advantages is that you don’t have to rotate. The Iowa fields where resistance developed had been planted in corn for many years in a row.

So, used as directed, Monsanto’s seeds are breeding Bt-resistant rootworms. (It’s not clear yet if the Iowa worms are universally Bt-resistant or just resistant to the particular protein Monsanto engineered its seeds to produce. In any case, they are a step in the direction of Bt-resistant rootworms.)

Once they exist, these rootworms are unlikely to respect property lines. They’ll be a problem for everybody, including the organic farms. So Monsanto has profited by using up a common resource that could have lasted for centuries otherwise.

Everything-is-connected Lesson 5. By their insatiable nature, corporations make all tragedy-of-the-commons problems much, much worse. Antibiotic-resistant disease is a similar story, as the meat industry uses massive quantities of antibiotics without concern for the consequences. Ditto for air quality, water rights, and any other common asset that a corporation can profit from. If there’s a horse in the common stable, a corporation will ride it to death.

How do we connect everything? Urban or suburban liberals may find such farm-based issues uninteresting, but conservatives of all stripes jump into opposition if anyone tries to fix the problem. Why? Because government is evil and industry is good. It’s that simple to them.

If liberals are going to unite efficiently, we need to develop a few reality-based but easy-to-apply lenses of our own, so that we have a common view of many diverse situations.

I propose this one: Corporate rights are driving out human rights.

Even if an issue seems to have nothing to do with you, check whether this lens brings it into focus. Because the battle for dominance between corporations and humans is everybody’s battle, and we need to fight it on all fronts.

By weeklysift | Tagged , | Comments (4)

Blowing Smoke About Clouds

September 5, 2011 – 11:35 am

Last week an International Business Times article stopped me short: “Alarmists Got it Wrong, Humans Not Responsible for Climate Change: CERN“.

“Wow,” I thought. “CERN. Not some Exxon/Koch-funded stooge. CERN, where the real scientists are. There’s the CERN logo right in the article. I’d better read this and rethink my opinion on climate change.”

I read the article and I learned a lot. But not about science, about propaganda.

Occasionally you need to know some science to spot the BS in a newspaper science article, but most of the time you just need some common sense. Start with: Does the content of the article justify the headline?

Not this time. The article discusses new research about cloud formation that CERN scientists recently published in Nature (another one of the biggest names in science). But nobody at CERN is quoted saying, “Humans aren’t responsible for climate change.”

In fact, the article doesn’t quote anybody from CERN (or Nature). Who are their sources, then? Lawrence Solomon, David Whitehouse, and Nigel Calder. If you’re just skimming, you might assume at least one of them represents CERN, but they don’t.

Who are they? In the Age of Google, that’s an easy question.

So a more accurate headline would be: “Global-Warming Skeptics Claim New CERN Research Vindicates Them”.

Well, of course they claim that. But then any real journalist would have to ask: Does it?

Journalism — even journalism about rocket science — is not rocket science: Punch “CERN cloud experiment results” into Google, and in seconds you’ll be looking at the CERN press release and its supporting press briefing. Spend a few minutes chasing links, and you’ll see the lead author of the Nature article (Jasper Kirkby) quoted in Scientific Computing, Live Science, and — oh, look at this! — Nature News, which is put out by the same people who publish Nature.

So it isn’t hard to find sources closer to the action than Solomon, Whitehouse, and Calder. Do any of them say “Humans are not responsible for climate change”?

No.

So what is this experiment and what does it really show?

CERN made a cloud chamber that simulates Earth’s atmosphere, and tried to figure out where atmospheric aerosols — tiny particles that cloud droplets form around — come from. They discovered that previous theories only accounted for a small fraction of the aerosols observed in the atmosphere. They could account for more when they added cosmic rays to their simulation, but they still couldn’t form a complete theory.

The CERN press release quotes Kirkby:

It was a big surprise to find that aerosol formation in the lower atmosphere isn’t due to sulphuric acid, water and ammonia alone. Now it’s vitally important to discover which additional vapours are involved, whether they are largely natural or of human origin, and how they influence clouds.

The press briefing concludes:

This 
result 
leaves 
open
 the 
possibility 
that 
cosmic 
rays
 could 
also
 influence
 climate. 
However, 
it 
is 
premature 
to
 conclude 
that cosmic
 rays 
have 
a
 significant 
influence
 on
 climate 
until 
the additional 
nucleating
 vapours 
have 
been 
identified, 
their
 ion
 enhancement 
measured, 
and 
the 
ultimate
 effects
 on
 clouds 
have 
been confirmed.

Nothing in the press release quantifies this possibility. Kirkby told Nature News: “At the moment, [our research] actually says nothing about a possible cosmic-ray effect on clouds and climate, but it’s a very important first step.”

Live Science also talked to Kirkby:

The research doesn’t call into question the basic science of greenhouse gas warming, Kirkby emphasized, but rather refines one facet of the research. … “It’s part of the jigsaw puzzle, and you could say it adds to the understanding of the big picture,” he said. “But it in no way disproves the other pieces.”

None of that stops Solomon from claiming (in the Financial Post — again published with no comment from the actual researchers) that

The science is now all-but-settled on global warming, convincing new evidence demonstrates, but Al Gore, the IPCC and other global warming doomsayers won’t be celebrating. The new findings point to cosmic rays and the sun — not human activities — as the dominant controller of climate on Earth.

Discover’s Bad Astronomy blog responds:

There’s only one problem: that’s completely wrong. In reality the study shows nothing of the sort.

BA goes on to explain why you shouldn’t expect any future research to support Solomon either:

The problem here is two fold: there doesn’t appear to be a large variation in Earth’s temperatures with solar activity, and also that temperatures are rising extremely rapidly in the past 100 years, when solar activity has been relatively normal.

So, who do you think the conservative media outlets go with: science publications that have done the legwork and talked to the CERN researchers, or a long-time global-warming denier who makes unsupported claims in an opinion piece in a financial newspaper?

Do you have to ask?

Fox Business Channel’s Tobin Smith:

We can report tonight the science of climate change is now all but settled. Yes friends and neighbors, and the global warming alarmists have been dealt a wee bit of a blow, right? CERN, C-E-R-N, one of the world’s largest and most prestigious centers for scientific research, has concluded that it’s the sun’s rays, not human activity, which controls the earth’s climate. Now, that, of course, is horrible news for the greenies who’ve used, you know, for years questionable science to justify more and more regulations against fossil fuels like coal and oil, all the while arguing for more and more for the renewable energy sources they just love so dearly. So are the greens prepared to back down now that the science has proved them wrong?

Media Matters collects similar statements from CBN, the Washington Times, and Investor’s Business Daily — all clearly repeating Solomon’s interpretation rather than CERN’s.

So this is what you need to hijack the well-deserved prestige of a research organization like CERN and a journal like Nature:

  • three zero-credibility cranks to “interpret” the research by making stuff up,
  • two newspapers willing to ignore anybody connected to the research, and instead source their articles to the cranks,
  • an echo chamber of news outlets willing to accept the first two papers as reliable sources, do no independent checking, and instead let false claims grow in the telling,
  • opinion leaders in the echo chamber who shift the onus away from the cranks onto their opponents: What’s wrong with those greenies, that they still hold out now that they’ve been proven wrong?

Result? Rank-and-file conservatives hear the same message from multiple directions. When they confidently tell their friends and  co-workers that CERN has proved Al Gore wrong, people who get their news from the New York Times know nothing about it — because an accurate assessment of these tentative results was not deemed sufficiently newsworthy.

And the conservative nods knowingly: It’s that liberal media, constantly suppressing anything that doesn’t fit its biased worldview.


By weeklysift | Tagged , , | Comments (5)

Barack, Can We Talk?

August 29, 2011 – 9:51 am

It’s me. I’m here in the Democratic base. It’s been a little testy between your people and my people lately, and I’m concerned that things might get out of hand. Worse, I worry that you don’t understand why.

It’s not that we don’t understand how government works, or that democracy runs on compromise. And it’s not that we thought you were some kind of messiah, who could turn the country around just by pointing in a new direction. (That slam on us was originally a Republican talking point, remember?)

Let me try to explain how it looks from our point of view.

You know I wouldn’t use George W. Bush as an example unless I were desperate, right? Well, in 2005 Bush went all out promoting his Social Security privatization plan. Bankruptcy, personal accounts, blah, blah, blah.

The country hated it. So what did Bush do next? He could have decided that (having put so much effort into raising the issue) he had to “get something done”. That would require Democratic support, so he could have adopted a Democratic idea, like extending Social Security taxes to all wages rather than just the first $100K or so.

And then he could have sold the “compromise” package to the public by adopting Democratic rhetoric — maybe by pointing out how well the wealthiest Americans had done over the past 20 years, and how this bill was just asking them to “give something back” for all the benefits the American economy had given them.

Can’t picture it, can you? Me either — and that’s the point. Dumb as he was, President Bush understood two important things:

  • The Republican Party stands for something. You can’t take any old idea and call it “Republican” without screwing up the brand.
  • The political struggle isn’t just about writing laws, it’s about defining reality. Republican success rests on a collection of public misconceptions and faulty frames. As long as the public believes that stuff, they win.

Brands. Every Republican candidate starts every campaign with an advantage: All he has to do is say “Joe Shmoe, conservative Republican” and everybody knows who he is and what he stands for. Low taxes, less regulation, militarism, traditional social values — love that image or hate it, we all recognize it.

Democrats, on the other hand, have to establish themselves. That takes time and money, and it makes us vulnerable to mud-slinging and swift-boating.

Branding has to start at the top, and Democratic leaders haven’t been up to the job for decades now. Every time a Democratic president sounds like he’s making up his mind on the fly, we’re that much further away from having an effective Democratic brand.

Reality. Listen to the Republican presidential candidates: Global warming isn’t real. Spending cuts create jobs. Rich people are job creators. The unemployed are lazy. Unions hurt working people. Government can’t create jobs. All government spending is waste. The minimum wage is too high. The stimulus failed. Protecting the environment is a luxury we can’t afford. Roads, schools, and parks are luxuries we can’t afford. Medical care for the old and poor is a luxury we can’t afford.

That’s the sound of reality being defined. When we take on issues one at a time, we fight on a terrain Republicans have been shaping for decades. That’s why Bush never adopted Democratic rhetoric, and why it kills us when Republican rhetoric comes out of your mouth.

What we need from our Democratic president isn’t just a few more dollars for infrastructure or the unemployed, we need a defense of reality.

Compromising without fighting. Sure, Congress needs to pass budgets, and you have to compromise with Republicans to do that. But again and again, the Republicans remain faithful to their vision and you come out of the compromise owning the package. If the result turns out to be inadequate in some way, the public thinks the alternative is to do what the Republicans wanted.

Look at health care: Every real Democrat knows that the right answer is single-payer. It works in Europe. It’s cheaper and delivers better care. Sure, you couldn’t have gotten that through Congress. I know. I understand. But because you never proposed it, Democrats had no platform for talking about it. The compromise that came out of Congress is now ObamaCare (even though it’s based on the Mitt Romney/Heritage Foundation plan in Massachusetts), and the only alternative the public knows about is the Republican do-nothing plan.

Look at the stimulus. Liberal economists said it needed to be bigger and have less tax cuts. But because you never proposed that, the compromise that came out of Congress is the Obama stimulus. Here’s what Paul Krugman predicted in March, 2009:

It’s September 2009, the unemployment rate has passed 9 percent, and despite the early round of stimulus spending it’s still headed up. Mr. Obama finally concedes that a bigger stimulus is needed.

But he can’t get his new plan through Congress because approval for his economic policies has plummeted, partly because his policies are seen to have failed, partly because job-creation policies are conflated in the public mind with deeply unpopular bank bailouts. And as a result, the recession rages on, unchecked.

The problem is not that you compromise, it’s that you compromise without fighting. The public never sees the liberal alternative, so whatever passes becomes the leftmost edge of the possible.

Repeating false rhetoric. The reality-battlefield that we’re losing worst on is economics.

To you and me, it’s obvious that the economy has a demand problem: Businesses aren’t hiring because they have no customers. Give them a tax break, let them endanger their workers or dump more chemicals in the groundwater — and they still won’t have any customers, so they still won’t hire.

In these situations, government needs to create demand by spending. We have unemployed people, work that needs doing (bridges to rebuild, an electric grid that badly needs an upgrade), and investors willing to lend the government money at interest rates lower than inflation. It’s a no-brainer: Borrow the money to hire the people to do the work.

You know why we can’t mobilize public support behind that program? Because conservatives have convinced large chunks of the public to frame the problem wrong. The worst frame out there is the government/family analogy: Families have to cut back in hard times, so government should have to cut back too.

You know that’s nutty. Just like Joseph told Pharaoh, government has to save when everyone else is spending and spend when everyone else is saving. So why do you say things like this?

Families across this country understand what it takes to manage a budget. Well, it’s time Washington acted as responsibly as our families do.

And why did you frame the debt-ceiling negotiations purely in deficit-reduction terms, as if job-creation wasn’t an issue?

Another false Republican frame is that businesses aren’t hiring because they lack “confidence”. They then link doubt to debt, and so justify the crazy idea that we can create jobs by cutting spending. This kind of nonsense needs to be called out at every turn.

Instead, a White House spokesman

repeatedly said that deficit-reduction was crucial in generating economic confidence. Confidence—he repeated this word many times.

What Democrats need from you. We need you to be a reality warrior. We need you and your whole administration to resist false Republican frames and never to lose sight of Democratic ideals, even when there is no clear path to implementing them.

If you have to compromise for the good of the country, compromise. But Republicans can’t make you adopt their rhetoric, no matter how many seats they have in Congress. Hold them responsible for their part of every compromise — by refusing to stop talking about what you would do if they would let you.

Don’t embrace the compromises, because that lets Republicans make their trade-offs for free: Every bit of deficit reduction costs jobs. Make them own that.

Talk about this: Full employment. Single-payer health care. Clean energy. Racial justice. Carbon reduction. Smart electric grid. Efficient mass transit. Education and opportunity for everyone.

Maybe we don’t see how to implement it all right now, but we should never lose sight of it. If not this year, next year. If not this decade, next decade. Don’t tell us we can’t.

Yes we can.

By weeklysift | Tagged , , | Comments (15)

A Primary Issues Guide

August 29, 2011 – 9:50 am

The old conventional wisdom was that competitive primaries are bad for the party. The best strategy was to unite early around a single candidate, so that a long negative campaign wouldn’t turn your nominee into damaged goods before the other party even took a shot.

2008 blew that up. The Obama/Clinton battle went on forever, but it did a lot of good things: registered voters, held the spotlight, and got John McCain out of the headlines from February to June. Any idea Obama and Clinton shared started to sound obvious.

There’s still a chance that the Republican 2012 candidates will tear each other to shreds, but it could also play out the other way: A long primary campaign could make their shared misinformation sound like common sense.

So here are some issues that are already coming up and being distorted. The Republican candidates are unlikely to vet each other on this stuff, so it’s important that Democrats not lose sight of the real story.

The South Carolina Boeing plant. South Carolina is an early primary state, so we’re going to hear a lot about his issue. The National Labor Relations Board is blocking Boeing from opening a 3,800-worker plant in SC. This Rick Perry quote is the standard Republican-candidate spin:

[President Obama] stacked the National Labor Relations Board with anti-business cronies who want to dictate to a private company, Boeing, where they can build a plant. No president, no president should kill jobs in South Carolina

Two facts are in danger of getting lost: First, this isn’t about creating jobs, it’s about moving jobs from one state to another, as states race to the bottom in worker protection. The Boeing jobs would otherwise be at their existing plant in Puget Sound, Washington.

Second, this is a rule-of-law issue. It’s illegal to move jobs purely to punish your current workers for unionizing or striking. Normally this is a hard rule to enforce, because businesses can fabricate hundreds of reasons why they want to manufacture here rather than there.

Unfortunately for Boeing, though, it is managed by idiots who admitted what they were doing in public. The NLRB’s complaint says Boeing CEO Jim McNerney:

made an extended statement regarding … moving the 787 Dreamliner work to South Carolina due to “strikes happening every three to four years in Puget Sound.”

and another Boeing official told a Seattle Times reporter:

The overriding factor was not the business climate. And it was not the wages we’re paying today. It was that we cannot afford to have a work stoppage, you know, every three years.

A lawyer for the International Association of Machinists writes:

In a case where, as here, the employer has admitted its unlawful motive, the failure of the NLRB to issue a complaint would raise serious questions about the continued right of America’s workers to engage in collective activity.

Regulation moratorium. Perry’s “moratorium on regulations” is one of those ideas that sounds unobjectionable, but is actually a disaster. Why? Start at the beginning: Fundamentally, the government regulates business to prevent it from doing bad things — killings its workers or customers, poisoning waterways, adulterating the food supply, and so on.

Naturally — or at least it seems natural if you’re a sociopath — business resists this narrowing of its options. So it takes advantage of any loophole it can find (or its lobbyists can create) to keep doing profitable damage. The government then tries to plug those loopholes, business finds new ones, and they go round and round. That’s why regulations get so complicated.

A moratorium on regulations means that government surrenders this fight. Any loopholes business finds, it keeps. Good news for them. Bad news for workers, customers, the people downstream, and anybody who eats.

RomneyCare. The model for the Affordable Care Act (i.e., ObamaCare) was RomneyCare in Massachusetts. The basic structure — private health insurance that the government subsidizes and mandates — is a Republican idea that goes back the Heritage Foundation in the 90s.

Romney tries not to talk about his own greatest accomplishment, but all the other Republican candidates insist that RomneyCare has been a disaster. In fact, a recent poll showed 63% in Massachusetts support the law. When Scott Brown won his surprise Senate victory in 2009, he supported the law. You can’t get anywhere in Massachusetts by telling people you’re going to repeal RomneyCare.

Global warming. Mitt Romney used to take the side of science in this issue (even if he dragged his heels about doing anything), but even he is backing down, leaving Jon Huntsman as the only pro-science Republican candidate.

The rest compete to be the most vigorous climate-change denier. So far Rick Perry is winning with his McCarthy-like charge that “a substantial number of scientists” have “manipulated data”. (Name one, Rick.)

Fortunately, fact-checkers are showing some backbone here. (The Washington Post awarded Perry its lowest truth-rating of four pinocchios.) Even Fox News’ Clayon Morris admitted that Fox fact-checkers had found “Perry’s comments don’t seem to hold a lot of water” before going on to say “but it doesn’t matter.”

The stimulus. Republican candidates unite around the idea that the stimulus failed. But check out this chart of private-sector employment.

Bush-Obama-Jobs-Chart

What’s killing job growth is that we’ve lost government jobs: The federal stimulus was never big enough to counter-act job cuts by the states.

I’m sure I left a few issues out. If you think of them, add a comment.

By weeklysift | Tagged , , , | Comments (2)

Irene and Uncle Sam, and other short notes

August 29, 2011 – 9:49 am

Natural disasters like Hurricane Irene demonstrate the usefulness of government. Where would we be without the National Weather Service, the Coast Guard, FEMA, the National Guard, and local first responders?

Everybody pays taxes and everybody gets services — that’s the efficient way when everything hits the fan. If you’re sitting on your roof or hanging onto a piece of floating debris, you don’t have to keep your Rescue Services Corporation membership card handy or remember the PIN they gave you. Just wave at the helicopter.

Of course, there are free-market alternatives, like the one ancient Rome had. The real estate mogul Crassus, trained his slaves to put out the kinds of fires that were common in the Roman inner city, where multi-family wooden structures leaned against each other.

When Crassus saw smoke, he and his slaves came running, just like fire engines do now.

And then they stopped — until Crassus found the owners of the nearest buildings that hadn’t caught fire yet and made well-below-market-rate offers to buy their properties. After they accepted, his slaves put out the fire.

It was a great system, and it made Crassus the richest man in Rome.

Some people would like to go back there — the Crassus wannabees, of course, and also the Competitive Enterprise Institute, which authored this call to eliminate the National Weather Service.

And Ron Paul, who picked this moment to reaffirm his position that FEMA should be eliminated. It’s fascinating to dig into the comments section of articles like this one and watch how Paul’s fans defend his point: by pointing to how badly FEMA handled Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans.

Let’s review: FEMA was doing fine under President Clinton. Then President Bush screwed it up by appointing inexperienced cronies to run it. And the subsequent failure of FEMA to handle Katrina is now proof that government doesn’t work.

The real lesson is: Don’t let people run an agency if they don’t believe in its mission. And people who don’t believe in any government mission shouldn’t be in the government at all.

Yet another investigation into the ClimateGate emails has concluded with no finding of wrong-doing, least of all anything that would justify Rick Perry’s allegation (discussed last week) blaming the global-warming theory on a “substantial number of scientists who have manipulated data”.

The NSF’s Inspector General’s office concludes:

Finding no research misconduct or other matter raised by the various regulations and laws discussed above, this case is closed.

Why do I believe we haven’t heard the end of this? Because powerful fossil-fuel corporations want to keep the data-manipulation charge alive, and they have lots of money to do it.

Ahh, freedom! New Hampshirites are now free to work for less money. The repeal of our minimum wage took effect Sunday. The federal minimum wage ($7.25) still applies, but (like Michele Bachmann) repeal-sponsor Rep. Carol McGuire would like to eliminate all minimum wage laws so that the market could set wages “particularly for young people. They’re not worth the minimum.”

Jay Rosen is my favorite journalism critic. In this talk in Australia, he says that political coverage should try to separate appearance from reality and arguments from facts.

That sounds so obvious it makes you wonder: What are they doing now? Rosen sees three destructive ideas dominating current coverage:

  • Politics as an inside game. Rather than try to educate the public, journalists cover political insiders’ strategies for manipulating an ignorant public.
  • The cult of savviness. “This is what’s so odd about savviness as a political style performed for the public. It tries to split the attentive public off from the rest of the electorate, and get us to join up with the insiders.”
  • The production of innocence. Journalists are supposed to be nonpartisan and agenda-free. But what if an established fact becomes part of the dispute? “He said, she said journalism … is neutral on where the reality is, but reality is not something journalists can afford to be neutral about!”

If you’re tired of the country being run by and for big corporations, and you want to promote yourself from disgruntled citizen to activist, AlterNet’s Bruce Levine has a reading list for you.

Now you or your corporation can make unlimited contributions to a political action committee pledged to support a single presidential candidate. Thanks, Supreme Court!

Grist’s David Roberts examines why the environmentalist movement isn’t more powerful:

the decline of the left’s power is closely connected to the decline of institutions that used to create leftists and give them a sense of common purpose. I’d put two in particular foremost among them: unions and liberal churches.

The only institutional source of liberals he (or I) can think of is academia, which is a poor place to generate a populist message.

By weeklysift | Comments (3)

Why I Am Not a Libertarian

August 22, 2011 – 12:15 pm

Of all the political movements out there, the Libertarians have the coolest rhetoric. No matter what the issue is, they get to talk about Freedom vs. Tyranny and quote all that rousing stuff the Founders said about King George.

It’s also the perfect belief system for a young male (and maybe, by now, young females too). You don’t need knowledge or experience of any specific situations, you just need to understand the One Big Idea That Solves Everything: Other than a small and appropriately humbled military and judicial establishment, government is bad. Protect life, protect property, enforce contracts — and leave everything else to the market.

I should know. Thirty-five years ago, I was a 19-year-old libertarian, and I learned all the arguments. Now I’m a progressive — a liberal, whatever — and these days even I have to shake my head at how often I’m tempted to quote Marx.

What happened? Well, I suppose I could stroke my white beard and pontificate vaguely about the benefits of 35 years of experience. But I’m thinking that a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires me to be a little more specific.

When you escape a sweeping worldview like Libertarianism, you usually don’t find an equally sweeping critique right away. A broad reframing may come later, but the transformation starts with a few things that stick in your craw and refuse to let themselves be swallowed.

For example, when I was leaving fundamentalist Christianity, one of the first things that bothered me was the genealogy of Jesus. The Bible contains two irreconcilable ones (in Matthew and Luke); they can’t both be the “gospel Truth”. Now, decades later, that issue is nowhere near the top of my why-I’m-not-a-fundamentalist list.

So let me start with some specific, simple things before I launch into more abstract philosophy.

Plague. I recommend that anyone thinking about becoming a Libertarian read The Great Influenza by John Barry. It doesn’t say a word about political philosophy, but it does compare how various American cities handled the Spanish Flu of 1918, which globally killed more people than World War I. The cities that did best were the ones that aggressively quarantined, shut down public meeting places, imposed hygiene standards, and in general behaved like tyrants.

As you read, try to imagine a Libertarian approach to a serious plague. I don’t think there is one. Maybe most people would respond to sensible leadership, but public health is one of those areas where a few people with the freedom to pursue screwy ideas can mess up everybody.

Global warming. There’s a reason why small-government candidates deny global warming: Denial is the only answer they have. Global warming is a collective problem, and there is no individualistic solution to it. Even market-based approaches like cap-and-trade require a massive government intervention to create the market that attacks the problem.

Property. Now let’s get to that more serious reframing.

I had to live outside the Libertarian worldview for many years before I began to grasp the deeper problem with it: property. Every property system in history (and all the ones I’ve been able to imagine) are unjust. So a government that establishes a property system, defends it, and then stops is an agent of injustice.

Libertarians tend to take property as a given, as if it were natural or existed prior to any government. But defining what can be owned, what owning it means, and keeping track of who owns what — that’s a government intervention in the economy that dwarfs all other government interventions. You see, ownership is a social thing, not an individual thing. I can claim I own something, but what makes my ownership real is that the rest of you don’t own it. My ownership isn’t something I do, it’s something we do.

[Aside: This is why it’s completely false to say that government programs primarily benefit the poor. Property is a creation of government, so the primary beneficiaries of government are the people who own things — the rich.]

Property and Labor. It’s worthwhile to go back and read the justifications of property that were given in the early days of capitalism. The most famous and influential such justification was in John Locke’s 1690 classic The Second Treatise of Civil Government. Locke admits that both reason and Christian revelation say that God gave the world to all people in common.

But I shall endeavour to shew, how men might come to have a property in several parts of that which God gave to mankind in common, and that without any express compact of all the commoners.

Locke argues that we individually own our bodies, and so we own our labor. So when our labor gets mingled with physical objects, we develop a special claim on those objects. The person who gathers apples in a wild forest, Locke says, owns those apples.

The labour that was mine, removing them out of that common state they were in, hath fixed my property in them. … Though the water running in the fountain be every one’s, yet who can doubt, but that in the pitcher is his only who drew it out? His labour hath taken it out of the hands of nature, where it was common, and belonged equally to all her children, and hath thereby appropriated it to himself.

But Locke attaches a condition to this justification: It only works if your appropriation doesn’t prevent the next person from doing the same.

No body could think himself injured by the drinking of another man, though he took a good draught, who had a whole river of the same water left him to quench his thirst

And that’s where the whole thing breaks down. Today, a baby abandoned in a dumpster has as valid a moral claim to the Earth as anybody else. But as that child grows it will find that in fact everything of value has already been claimed. Locke’s metaphorical water is all in private pitchers now, and the common river is dry.

When that individual tries to mingle labor with physical objects, he or she will be rebuffed at every turn. Gather apples? The orchard belongs to someone else. Hunt or fish? The forest and the lake are private property.

The industrial economy is in the same condition. You can’t go down to the Ford plant and start working on your new car. You have to be hired first. You need an owner’s permission before your labor can start to create property for you. If no owner will give you that permission, then you could starve.

Access to the means of production. In Locke’s hunter-gatherer state of Nature, only laziness could keep an able-bodied person poor, because the means of production — Nature — was just sitting there waiting for human labor to turn it into property.

Today’s economic environment is very different, but our intuitions haven’t kept up. Our anxiety today isn’t that there won’t be enough goods in the world, and it isn’t fear that our own laziness will prevent us from working to produce those goods. Our fear is that the owners of the means of production won’t grant us access, so we will never have the opportunity to apply our labor.

I meet very few able-bodied adults whose first choice is to sit around demanding a handout. But I meet a lot who want a job and can’t find one. I also meet young people who would be happy to study whatever subject and train in whatever skill would get them a decent job. I am frustrated that I can’t tell them what subject or what skill that is.

Justice. A Libertarian government that simply maintained this property system would be enforcing a great injustice. Access to the means of production should be a human birthright. Everyone ought to have the chance to turn his or her labor into products that he or she could own.

What’s more, everyone should get the benefit of the increased productivity of society. No individual created that productivity single-handedly. No individual has a right to siphon it off.

But instead, our society has a class of owners, and everyone else participates in the bounty of the Earth and the wealth of human progress only by their permission. Increasingly, they maneuver into a position that allows them to drive a hard bargain for that permission. And so higher productivity means higher unemployment, and the average person’s standard of living decreases even as total wealth increases.

The role of government. I anticipate this objection: “You want to go back to being hunter-gatherers. We’ll all starve.”

Not at all. I want a modern economy. But a lassez-faire economy that takes the property system as given is unjust. It is the proper role of government to balance that injustice, to provide many paths of access to the means of production, and to compensate those who are still shut out.

To prevent government from doing so, in today’s world, is no way to champion freedom. Quite the opposite, it’s tyrannical.

By weeklysift | Tagged , , | Comments (284)