TGIF this week is a review essay of Peter Boettke’s new book, Living Economics: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow. Enjoy!
Saturday, March 30, 2013
Friday, March 29, 2013
The Importance of Spontaneous Order in Teaching Libertarianism
The good folks at Libertarianism.org dug up this 1981 video of my after-dinner talk on spontaneous order from back in my Libertarian Party days.
The Right-Wing Accepts Obama’s Tribalism When It Supports Israel
The right-wing seemingly never misses a chance to go after Barack Obama for his collectivism and alleged dislike of America. Yet when Obama embraced blood-and-soil tribalism openly and implied that America was not the “land of the free” for everyone, the right-wing apparently had nothing to say.
Why? The subject was Israel, and the right-wing shares Obama’s tribalist premises on that subject.
In his speech in Jerusalem on March 21, Obama said:
For the Jewish people, the journey to the promise of the State of Israel wound through countless generations. It involved centuries of suffering and exile, prejudice and pogroms and even genocide. Through it all, the Jewish people sustained their unique identity and traditions, as well as a longing to return home. And while Jews achieved extraordinary success in many parts of the world, the dream of true freedom finally found its full expression in the Zionist idea -- to be a free people in your homeland. That’s why I believe that Israel is rooted not just in history and tradition, but also in a simple and profound idea -- the idea that people deserve to be free in a land of their own.
The first half of the paragraph is full of fable and fabrication, though he’s right about suffering, prejudice, pogroms, and genocide. To understand what’s wrong with those sentences, consult Shlomo Sand’s two excellent books The Invention of the Jewish People and The Invention of the Land of Israel (both available for Kindle). Invention is not unique to the “Jewish people.” Many peoples and nations are the product of what Sand calls “mythistory.”
What I want to focus on in Obama’s statement is this:
And while Jews achieved extraordinary success in many parts of the world, the dream of true freedom finally found its full expression in the Zionist idea--to be a free people in your homeland.
Obama is saying that Jews need to live apart in Israel or they can’t be truly free. Think about the implications. Something about Jews makes it impossible for them to be really at home anywhere—including in what the right-wing (and presumably Obama) tout as the freest nation in the history of the world. So Jews need an ethno-religiously exclusivist state. That view amounts to a wholesale rejection of the western liberal tradition, which was inclusive and universalist and in which all people have the same rights without being seen as members of a tribe. Isn’t it the official line that this is what made America great? So why is Obama rejecting it? And why is the right-wing conspicuously silent?
Of course the right-wing can’t raise any objection because it is staunchly in Israel’s corner, which means endorsing its medieval notions. (Forgive me for writing as though the right-wing is monolithic. It is not. Suffice it to say there are honorable exceptions.) So the right-wing is stuck (like Obama) with a contraction: Jews aren’t fully free and at home in what they claim is the greatest and freest country on earth. This seems to be an insult both to Jews and the United States, but no one will say it. (And people wonder why Chuck Hagel once called the Israel Lobby “intimidating”—before being intimidated into withdrawing the charge.)
Obama and the right-wing would find their position untenable if they had a few facts. Throughout Jewish history, few Jews have had any desire or perceived obligation to move to Israel. (Most of those who went wished to die there in order to be near Jerusalem when the messiah comes and raises the dead.) When the Zionist movement was launched in the late 19th century, most American Jews rejected it firmly; for one thing, they couldn’t imagine a freer place than America. They also realized that there is no Jewish People—no race, no ethnic group, no tribe—but only many culturally diverse people worldwide who (in different ways) embrace Judaism. American Jews were explicitly—vehemently—anti-Zionist and would have been even if Palestine were a “land without a people” (which it certainly was not).
Worldwide, Zionism was a minority position among Jews until World War II, at which point for most Jews it became a humanitarian cause on behalf of the survivors of the Nazi Judeocide. Besides the books linked to above, see Jack Ross’s Rabbi Outcast: Elmer Berger and American Jewish Anti-Zionism.)
Understand that Zionism did not begin as a humanitarian cause. The Zionist pioneers (many of whom were secular intellectuals) aspired to remake (invent) the “Jewish People” by getting them away from cities and towns and turning them into tillers of the soil in their own exclusivist nation. (Theodor Herzl might well have been the first self-hating Jew.) The early Zionists wanted—indeed, expected—all Jews everywhere to take up permanent residence in Palestine. (That’s why the Palestinian Arabs had to be removed, violently if necessary, from the land they inhabited and worked for at least thousand years.) By the in-gathering standard, Zionism has been a colossal failure. Few Jews want to move to Israel, and many in Israel are emigrating. When the Soviet Union let Jews leave, they overwhelmingly wanted to move to the United States, but the Israeli government conspired with the U.S. government to push them to Israel against their will. (See my “Let the Soviet Jews Come to America” [1991].)
Hence the old joke that Zionism amounts to one Jew raising money from a second Jew to send a third (poor) Jew to Israel.
As one rabbi put it recently,
When we say “Next year in Jerusalem'” [during the Passover Seder] we mean that all Jews should actually be in Israel and in Jerusalem (not just as tourists!). We mean Jerusalem as it is ideally meant to be - with the Temple, the Sanhedrin and a Jewish Monarch. We're still waiting. Even we here in Jerusalem say “Next year in Jerusalem!” [Emphasis added.]
On the basis of Jews’ demonstrated preference, the rabbi will have a long wait.
Obama’s words are a reminder of the shameful double standard favorable to Israel that many people hold when it comes to the “Jewish state’s” crimes and offenses. As David Bromwich asks, can you imagine Obama’s saying: “Shiite Islam found extraordinary success in many parts of the world but its dream of national realization has attained its full expression in Iran.”
The right-wing wouldn’t have been so silent.
Thursday, March 28, 2013
Wednesday, March 27, 2013
Op-ed: How the Media Beat the Drums for War
How the News Media Betrayed Us on Iraq -- The Future of Freedom Foundation
The tenth anniversary of the start of America’s illegal and aggressive war against Iraq should not pass without recalling that the mainstream news media eagerly participated in the Bush administration’s dishonest campaign for public support. It is no exaggeration to say that most news operations were little more than extensions of the White House Office of Communications. Abandoning even the pretense of an adversarial relationship with the government, the media became shameful conduits for unsubstantiated and outright false information about Saddam Hussein’s alleged threat to the American people. Included among the falsehoods were reports that Saddam had a hand in the 9/11 attacks, had trained al-Qaeda fighters, and had attempted to obtain uranium ore and aluminum tubes for nuclear bombs.
Put bluntly, the disastrous invasion of Iraq, which was sold on the basis of lies told by President George W. Bush, Vice-President Dick Cheney, Secretary of State Colin Powell, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, national-security adviser Condoleezza Rice, and others might not have happened without the enthusiastic help of the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, ABC, NBC, MSNBC, CBS, CNN, Fox News, and others. The blood of more than a hundred thousand — perhaps more than a million — Iraqis and 4,500 Americans is on their hands too.
Today, like the Bush administration alumni attempting to duck responsibility, the media blame “bad intelligence” for their conduct. But that will not wash. The dissenting reports of Knight Ridder’s Warren Strobel and Jonathan Landay, along with a very few others, show definitively that in 2002–03 solid intelligence information undermining every propagandistic administration claim was readily available to anyone willing to use traditional reporting techniques. Strobel and Landay were mostly ignored. On the rare occasions when the New York Times orWashington Post reported on the doubts intelligence personnel had about the Bush narrative, the stories were buried deep in the paper. (See Bill Moyers’s special “Buying the War” and Greg Mitchell’s book Wrong for So Long.)
The media did not merely pass along baseless assertions; the television channels also attempted to shape public opinion with a biased selection of guests. Prowar voices abounded, while informed war skeptics were scarce. Even when an opponent of war was featured, he or she had to share the time with a prowar advocate, yet the prowar side was often featured unchallenged. As the war became regarded as inevitable, the cable news channels shifted almost exclusively to military analysis, as though the question was no longer whether the nation ought to go to war, but rather how it would be fought. Many of the retired generals who were presented as objective experts had seats on the boards of defense contractors and were getting Pentagon briefings.
What motivated those who covered the run-up to the Iraq invasion this way? Several factors were surely at work. Groupthink and the fear of going out on a limb must have played a large role. The vaunted courage of journalists is more pose than fact. (This makes the work of Strobel and Landay, Phil Donahue of MSNBC until he was cancelled, and Bob Simon of CBS’sSixty Minutes all the more admirable.) “Pack journalism” is reinforced by a fear that reports suggesting skepticism about a military action will be interpreted as unpatriotic. The smear factories run by militarist right-wing media watchdogs ensure this will be the case. Moreover, being branded un-American for doubting a president’s case for war may lead to viewer or reader boycotts, which in turn may lead to pressure from advertisers. Thus, the corporate bottom line played a role.
Another factor is the simple truth that war makes better news than peace. No one wins a Pulitzer Prize for being a peace correspondent. We must not underestimate this as a motive for favoring war.
Finally, we can’t overlook that many in the media were simply motivated by nationalism and deference to the state with its dazzling war technology.
This story of media malfeasance would be bad enough if it were just history. Unfortunately, even as media figures now issue mea culpas about their shameful Iraq “coverage,” they are engaged in precisely the same shoddy business with respect to Iran and its alleged but unproven nuclear-weapons program.
The tenth anniversary of the start of America’s illegal and aggressive war against Iraq should not pass without recalling that the mainstream news media eagerly participated in the Bush administration’s dishonest campaign for public support. It is no exaggeration to say that most news operations were little more than extensions of the White House Office of Communications. Abandoning even the pretense of an adversarial relationship with the government, the media became shameful conduits for unsubstantiated and outright false information about Saddam Hussein’s alleged threat to the American people. Included among the falsehoods were reports that Saddam had a hand in the 9/11 attacks, had trained al-Qaeda fighters, and had attempted to obtain uranium ore and aluminum tubes for nuclear bombs.
Put bluntly, the disastrous invasion of Iraq, which was sold on the basis of lies told by President George W. Bush, Vice-President Dick Cheney, Secretary of State Colin Powell, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, national-security adviser Condoleezza Rice, and others might not have happened without the enthusiastic help of the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, ABC, NBC, MSNBC, CBS, CNN, Fox News, and others. The blood of more than a hundred thousand — perhaps more than a million — Iraqis and 4,500 Americans is on their hands too.
Today, like the Bush administration alumni attempting to duck responsibility, the media blame “bad intelligence” for their conduct. But that will not wash. The dissenting reports of Knight Ridder’s Warren Strobel and Jonathan Landay, along with a very few others, show definitively that in 2002–03 solid intelligence information undermining every propagandistic administration claim was readily available to anyone willing to use traditional reporting techniques. Strobel and Landay were mostly ignored. On the rare occasions when the New York Times orWashington Post reported on the doubts intelligence personnel had about the Bush narrative, the stories were buried deep in the paper. (See Bill Moyers’s special “Buying the War” and Greg Mitchell’s book Wrong for So Long.)
The media did not merely pass along baseless assertions; the television channels also attempted to shape public opinion with a biased selection of guests. Prowar voices abounded, while informed war skeptics were scarce. Even when an opponent of war was featured, he or she had to share the time with a prowar advocate, yet the prowar side was often featured unchallenged. As the war became regarded as inevitable, the cable news channels shifted almost exclusively to military analysis, as though the question was no longer whether the nation ought to go to war, but rather how it would be fought. Many of the retired generals who were presented as objective experts had seats on the boards of defense contractors and were getting Pentagon briefings.
What motivated those who covered the run-up to the Iraq invasion this way? Several factors were surely at work. Groupthink and the fear of going out on a limb must have played a large role. The vaunted courage of journalists is more pose than fact. (This makes the work of Strobel and Landay, Phil Donahue of MSNBC until he was cancelled, and Bob Simon of CBS’sSixty Minutes all the more admirable.) “Pack journalism” is reinforced by a fear that reports suggesting skepticism about a military action will be interpreted as unpatriotic. The smear factories run by militarist right-wing media watchdogs ensure this will be the case. Moreover, being branded un-American for doubting a president’s case for war may lead to viewer or reader boycotts, which in turn may lead to pressure from advertisers. Thus, the corporate bottom line played a role.
Another factor is the simple truth that war makes better news than peace. No one wins a Pulitzer Prize for being a peace correspondent. We must not underestimate this as a motive for favoring war.
Finally, we can’t overlook that many in the media were simply motivated by nationalism and deference to the state with its dazzling war technology.
This story of media malfeasance would be bad enough if it were just history. Unfortunately, even as media figures now issue mea culpas about their shameful Iraq “coverage,” they are engaged in precisely the same shoddy business with respect to Iran and its alleged but unproven nuclear-weapons program.
Whose Idea Was It?
With all that's going on, you may be forgiven for wondering if modern Israel was some anti-Semite's idea.
Israel's Greatest Fear
Widespread nonviolent Palestinian resistance to the Israeli occupation is the Jewish state's greatest nightmare.
Land Claim
Favoring the expulsion of people from the land they and their kin have inhabited continuously for at least a millennium, because a deity allegedly promised it to one's purported tribe thousands of years ago, seems the very essence of religious fanaticism.
Sunday, March 24, 2013
Latest Appearance on Scott Horton Show
Scott Horton interviewed me last week about Bastiat's theory of how free markets socialize wealth. Listen here.
Friday, March 22, 2013
TGIF: Bastiat on the Socialization of Wealth
My latest TGIF explores an aspect of Bastiat's thought that gets too little attention: "Bastiat on the Socialization of Wealth."
Tuesday, March 19, 2013
Get the Name Right
NBC chief diplomatic stenographer Andrea Mitchell noted yesterday that President Obama embarks today on his visit to Israel and the West Bank. This is incorrect. Obama will visit Israel and Israeli-occupied Palestine. The state of Palestine declared independence almost 25 years ago and has since been recognized by 131 of the UN's 193 member states. That the U.S. government doesn't recognize Palestine is part of its long-standing policy of enabling Israel's oppression of the Palestinians.
The Libertarian Angle
Jacob Hornberger and I have started a new weekly Internet show for the Future of Freedom Foundation: The Libertarian Angle. Here's the edition for March 12:
The first two editions follow:
The first two editions follow:
Thursday, March 07, 2013
Op-ed: Cutting Government Would Boost Economy
Budget sequestration is as modest a step toward cutting Leviathan as one can imagine. Further progress will be difficult as long as people believe that slashing the size of government conflicts with reviving the economy. Nothing could be further from the truth.Read it here.
Tuesday, March 05, 2013
The Vanishing Washington Post AIPAC Headline
This was the headline on today's Washington Post page-two story about Vice President Joe Biden's appearance at the AIPAC (Israel Lobby) conference. It's curious to say the least. Loyalty? Whose loyalty to whom? Also curious is the fact that this headline did not make the online HTML edition of the Post. It was changed to "Biden seeks to reassure AIPAC of U.S. commitment to Israel."
The website also features an e-Replica of the newspaper, but the three times I tried to view page A2, I received this message:
404 - File or directory not found.
The resource you are looking for might have been removed, had its name changed, or is temporarily unavailable.
Was the Post embarrassed by its headline?
Monday, March 04, 2013
TGIF: Sequestration and the Chimera of the Informed Voter
Sequestration is not a disaster in the making, but how's the average person supposed to know that? I look in this question in my latest TGIF: "Sequestration and the Chimera of the Informed Voter."