Searching for Oskar Schindler

<Cross-posted to the League of Ordinary Gentlemen>

I considered titling this post a more academic "Rejoinders to a Utilitarian Framework for Evaluating the Morality of Abortion" but thought better when I realized how many lines that would take up.  

First, I'd like to say thank you to Erik Kain at the League of Ordinary Gentlemen for agreeing to guest-post my recent offerings on abortion to that excellent blog and allowing me to receive excellent feedback from its excellent commentariat (167 responses as of press time).  

I'd also like to thank Jeremy Stangroom for setting up a forum to examine this and other difficult ethical dilemmas with some philosophical rigor and for engaging my argument and providing the kind of feedback that allowed me to refine it for publication.  Now on to the rejoinders:

1.  The first concern, raised by many many commenters, which I would like to address here is that the pro-life movement is generally dastardly and underhanded and engages in rhetorical bait-and-switch, moving of goalposts, demonizing their opponents, and all sorts of other trickery and tomfoolery.

This is true.  Some of them do, and these elements usually command a disproportionate amount of media attention, just as some in the pro-choice camp debate dishonestly as well and are well-publicized for it.  One of the many fundamental problems with the abortion issue in the United States is in the way it is construed: one side hates life, the other side hates choice.  This leads to one side arguing as if life is the only consideration when de facto it isn't and one side arguing that choice is the only consideration when de facto it isn't.  I constructed my matrix under the assumption that both positions were valid (by virtue of being widely held) and that any thoughtful, democratic examination of the issue required weighing the concerns of each party against each other.

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Cutting the Gordian Knot Between Socialism and Libertarianism

Alexander cuts the Gordian Knot

It is popular within the libertarian blogosphere to label pejoratively any recommendation of the use of state power to achieve liberty as "statist", as if any policy suggesting the use of the state apparatus to solve problems of insufficient liberty is objectively evil and destined to lead us all down the road to totalitarianism.  Not only is this tantamount to mindless orthodox hackery, but it is also quite absurd.  

In a liberal regime, state power is best understood as what ultimately (I use this term in the sense of "finally" and not "fundamentally" as I generally support vigorous primary social restraint on undesirable behavior, i.e. shunning or boycotting) prevents the war of all against all.  Indeed, the present scope of state power can be best understood as the result of historical forces and individual aggregate self-interest operating within the liberal program.  In the words of Alexis de Tocqueville:

(In a democracy) no man is obliged to put his powers at the disposal of another, and no one has any claim of right to substantial support from his fellow man, each is both independent and weak. These two conditions, which must be neither seen quite separately nor confused, give the citizen of democracy extremely contradictory instincts. He is full of confidence and pride in his independence from his equals, but from time to time his weakness makes him feel the need for some outside help which he cannot expect from any of his fellows, for they are both impotent and cold. In this extremity he naturally turns his eyes toward that huge entity which alone stands out above the universal level of abasement. His needs, and even more his longings, continually put him in mind of that entity, and he ends by regarding it as the sole and necessary support for his individual weakness. 

Of course, state power has tended to excess, and it must be controlled by the collective balancing forces of a bottom-up, democratically-conscious populace (which explains why democracy-building seldom works) and liberal, private institutions, but there are elements of state power which all citizens can (and have) agreed are for the best at least in principle if not in practice: proscriptions against murder for instance, the national defense, the police, even anti-trust regulations to prevent private institutions from subtracting from the general aggregate welfare (or challenging the government power monopoly).

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A Response to Jane Mayer

typical libertariansI read all of Jane Mayer's New Yorker epic takedown of the American libertarian movement.  "Covert Operations: the Billionaire Brothers Who Are Waging a War Against Obama" is about the Brothers Koch a.k.a. "The Kochtopus", two - or four, depending on which brothers one considers part of the Koch inner-circle - shady oil billionaires behind the curtain of the libertarian movement from the Cato Institute to the Tea Party.  It's creepy to think there's one devious, eight-armed creature pulling all those levers of influence, like "The Company" from Prison Break.  But Mayer's propagandistic assessment is underhanded, full of political bias, and based on fallacious logic.  And before you suspect me also of being on the Koch's payroll (I live below the poverty line.), I go on the record as saying that I think we should use as little fossil fuels as possible, that big business is obstructionist and has unduly influenced policy-making in Washington, and that oil is the devil.

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"The Million Moron March"

Image courtesy of Mario PiperniRiffing off John Batchelor's column ("The Festival of Fools") and John Avlon's column ("I Have a Nightmare"), both for the Daily Beast, I too came up with a pithy title for this post on the most recent Tea Party event (because that's really what Glenn Beck's "Restoring Honor" march on the Washington Mall is.  The demographic is exactly the same.)  I generally agree with Batchelor that this particular march is a non-issue:

The celebrity Glenn Beck has organized a festive and apparently harmless public event for the Washington Mall that he calls “Restoring Honor.” This theme is so deeply bland that it invites us partisans to look for inner meaning, such as the fact that August 28 is the anniversary of Martin Luther King’s revolutionary March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, or such as Beck’s Fox News Channel seeking a low-budget reality show to sell for the dog days of summer programming.

The trick here may be that Beck’s event, which will feature the celebrity Sarah Palin, is not about anything at all. It is a farce of an event in the way the bookish Karl Marx meant it, “History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.”

However, I disagree with Batchelor's contention that we should take Beck's idiocy at face value: and I have a few general qualifications for the "Tea Baggers are morons" crowd.

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Dennis Kucinich is a Maverick

As the bowtie attests to, Dennis Kucinich knows PR.Ron Paul is the most mavericky (read that story if you haven't yet.) in our static and worthless government, and Dennis Kucinich is the second most mavericky.  John McCain is not a maverick, and is probably nothing more than a soulless talking meat puppet.  Anyways, here is Kucinich's take on the Obama Administration's taking a page from the George W. Bush playbook:

Who is in charge of our operations in Iraq, now? George Orwell? A war based on lies continues to be a war based on lies. Today, we have a war that is not a war, with combat troops who are not combat troops. In 2003, President Bush said 'Mission Accomplished'. In 2010, the White House says combat operations are over in Iraq, but will leave 50,000 troops, many of whom will inevitably be involved in combat-related activities. 

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More Mini-Postage

NRO says China should teach U.S. lessons about economic freedom, since apparently Chinese citizens enjoy more economic freedom than their counterparts in the U.S.  Joe tweeted:

"NRO says China could teach US lesson in economic freedom. I say: Stop smoking crack, wannabe edgy Obama critics!"

I agree and disagree with what Joe's saying here.  NRO should stop smoking crack, and they are wannabe edgy Obama critics, but as a an openly conservative magazine, NRO kind of has a duty seemingly to massage some Obama criticism into nearly everything that outfit puts out.  It's par for the course, which is why I rarely read NRO these days.  I prefer to get my "conservative news" from Sarah Palin's facebook page.  No, not really.

Nevertheless, as I commented in Google Buzz a few days ago, I don't think it's at all controversial to claim that Chinese citizens enjoy more economic freedoms than their counterparts in the U.S., nor is it an attack on Obama. It's just a fact.  Without a strong regulatory state to impose things like safety standards and enforce zoning laws, people with money in China can pretty much do whatever they please, as long as they don't criticize the government.

People fallaciously assume that democracy and capitalism forever go together like peas and carrots.  I prefer to think that capitalism is the natural state of civilization.  Fighting free markets is like trying to grow European crops in the New World.  Democracy on the other hand, as history seems to attest to, is fragile, and must be protected by complex systems of law and civic robusticity.   

That is to say, imposing Democracy neccesarily entails curtailing economic freedoms.  I can't buy votes.  I can't bribe officials.  I can't pay you to kill a business rival.  etc.   

Why Individual Freedom Sucks and We Shouldn't (Necessarily) Fear China

image courtesy of www.patriotdepot.comI'm about to commit an American taboo worse than almost anything except making a racist joke: I'm about to make the suggestion that the individual freedom held as a sacred value in Western Democracies can be bad.  As a libertarian, this is especially uncharacteristic of me, but self-criticism is necessary and awesome.  Keep in mind that I'm not saying that individual freedom is always bad; I'm simply making the point that there are trade-offs, and a strong case to be made for restraint coercive or otherwise, preferably otherwise. 

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Death Penalty Rube Goldberg Machine

Focusing on procedural details distracts from real ethical issues. source: cartoonstock.comI recently wrote a post on the value of Rube Goldberg machines as educational tools and how the checks and balances of the American system can be understood as the applied principles of Rube Goldberg.  One of the major premises of the post was that while Rube Goldberg machines are often metaphorically linked with inefficiency and other unpleasant things, a more appropriate metaphorical link is to safeguarding against human emotion by creating an elaborate code of exact steps that must be taken for something to occur.  In this way, Rube Goldberg machines operate as systemic checks against human emotions.

It's a two-sided coin: while checks and balances safeguard against Constitutional Amendments banning gay marriage, forced military conscription, and Prohibition (oops), the recent events in Utah reveal the extent to which capital punishment in America has become a Rube Goldberg Machine, the effect of which is to bureaucratize killing and eliminate the soul-searching and guilt we should all feel for taking a person's life.  

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Our Visceral (Energy) Policy

Please help me live by writing to your Representative about nuclear power. Photo by Norbert RosingIn "No Energy". the Atlantic's Joshua Green writes about the history of environmental disasters - in particular oil spills - spurring on environmental legislation.  There was the landmark 1969 spill off Santa Barbara which gave birth to Earth Day and the National Environmental Protection Act, thereby putting a moratorium on offshore drilling.  And the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill catalyzed the 1990 Clean Air Act, eight years in the making.  Seems pretty straight-forward.

So why does the most recent Gulf explosion have most politicians defending offshore drilling?  Green suggests that the Democrats have put all their eggs in one basket with the Kerry-Graham-Lieberman Climate Bill, viewed as a final Hail Mary attempt to regulate carbon emissions during this session of Congress.  The bill is a two-headed monster of a compromise, pushing for nuclear energy and offshore drilling investments while simultaneously starting implementation of a cap-and-trade scheme for electrical utilities and gradually expanding to other industries.  The rush to defend offshore drilling is par for the course for soulless Republicans and political maneuvering for sneaky Democrats.  God (or BP) clearly doesn't care.

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Democratic Militarism

One of the best known theories of Political Science is the "Democratic Peace Theory" which notes that democracies rarely go to war with one another.  The most prominent explanation for this historical trend is that voting brings accountability preventing leaders from unnecessarily engaging in war.  However, Daniel Larison emphatically skewers the notion that Democracies aren't particularly warlike:

States that do not respect international legal norms vis-a-vis other states tend not to abuse human rights at home (or at least they abuse them much less often), while states that abuse human rights at home want to maintain certain strong international legal norms if only to guarantee non-interference in their internal affairs. Internal and external policies are never entirely separable, because the same government is responsible for both, but looking at the last sixty-five years it is not at all clear that repressive and abusive states are more likely to disrupt or undermine international stability.

In other words, China does lots of nasty things to its own citizens, but the U.S. is a hell of a lot more likely to go invade another country and do nasty things to those citizens.

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Prison Reform through Electoral Reform

America is desperately in need of prison reform.  We have the largest prison population in the world, with 2.3 million people incarcerated, and our rate of imprisonment is six times as large as the global median.  We send too many people to prison, often for minor offenses like using drugs or writing bad checks, and for too long, since older people are more expensive to incarcerate and much, much less likely to engage in criminal activity.  Unfortunately, there isn't much of a constituency for prison reform since ex-felons can't vote and generally politicians fear seeming "soft on crime."  However, the New York Times editoral yesterday advocating allowing felons to vote in federal elections may partially solve that problem.  The proposal that makes sense on it's own merits, but will also create a powerful new incentive for politicians to treat former criminals as human beings.

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Iraq Elections: A Small Step, Not a Giant Leap

After a year of worry, heightened by the drama of the de-Ba'athification candidate purge, the Iraqi elections went off without many hitches.  Which is to say that there were plenty of bombings, 38 people were killed, but turnout was high with two-thirds of the country voting including a majority of the Sunni population which boycotted the last election in 2005.  That's good news for the Iraqis and it's better news for us, because it means that we are on pace to leave on schedule by the end of 2011.  What the election does not do, however, is retroactively vindicate the decision to invade Iraq.  

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Stick the Landing: the State of the Union

With the left disheartened by the Mass-acre last week and health care reform's freshly dismal prospects, the right energized by the apparent success of their intransigence and the need to rally the country amidst difficult circumstance, President Obama was like a gymnast needing to perfectly execute a maneuver of highest degree of difficulty at last night's State of the Union.  No one's surprise, he nailed it.  He rallied weak kneed Democrats with a reminder that they were elected to get things done, not "run for the hills."  He leaned into the Republicans by staking out a variety of center-right positions including nuclear power, off-shore drilling, deficit reduction and small-business tax breaks while chiding them for privledging politics over leadership.  Most importantly, he reminded Americans again and again of the mess he inherited and the steps he had done to fix things.

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Joe Lieberman or Arrow's Impossibility Theorum in Action

Joe Lieberman's recent promises to kill Health Care reform if it includes either a public option and opt-in Medicare haven't made him very popular on the internet or my email in-box.  It doesn't help that pretty much everyone left of center hates him already; he is Benjamin Linus as far as I'm concerned: not trusting him isn't enough, just having him around means he's probably going to ruin it for everyone.  The health care bill was already such a mess that I've avoided writing about it because it just depresses me and now Tricky Joe steps in and kills two of the more interesting parts of the bill.  However, rather than simply bemoan Lieberman's existence, I thought I'd point out that this is a tailor made example of Dr. Kenneth Arrow's Impossibility Theorum.

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A Response to Jonathan Chait

For years now, people far less libertarian than I have been recommending I read Ayn Rand.  While I admit I have no interest in reading her books, I know enough about the author to find her distasteful, iconoclastic, and hypocritical.  Libertarianism is an ideal which treasures self-governance - that is, personal responsibility for one's actions and the freedom to make really bad mistakes as well as the freedom to believe something stupid.  I was excited when I heard about Jonathan Chait's New Republic trashing of Rand, but after I read the article, I couldn't help but feel angry and offended.

Chait, like many, many political commentators from the left, assumes that libertarianism is a simple, unnuanced ideal, that libertarians are incapable of breaking with dogma, and, in general, are a group of elitists who seek to control the world via some sort of perceived innate ability to be better than everyone else at almost anything.  This is an absurd caricature.  Libertarianism is motivated by different factors for different people, despite the fact that Chait suggests it is a psychological disease resulting from abusive parents!

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