TGIF: Arms Sales and Democracy

The U.S. government's role as the world's premier arms donor and dealer is now under renewed scrutiny. I can't imagine why.

But seriously...

We may legitimately ask if this role fulfills democracy's promise of, in Lincoln's words, "government of the people, by the people, for the people." Or are we justified in concluding that with the government's arms distribution, democracy falls short of its promise even more so than it does in its other functions?

This is something Chris Coyne of George Mason University and its Mercatus Center F. A. Hayek program spends a lot of time studying. In this video and published work, Coyne closely examines the international arms trade, which the U.S. government dominates. Things look bad both for the arms trade and for democracy.

David Friedman, the author of The Machinery of Freedom, has pointed out that Winston Churchill's observation about democracy -- "the worst form of Government except for all those other forms" -- is not praise democracy but actually a put-down of government per se: if democracy is the best we can do, then we've got problems. 

The intrinsic flaws of democracy have been much discussed. (Here's an unappreciated example.) The problems start with the impotence of a single vote. If by your own actions you can't affect the outcome of an election, what incentive do you, a busy person, have to invest time, money, and effort to become an educated voter? In selecting a candidate you'll use criteria other than the kind you use when buying a car, a carp, or a carpet because in contrast to the marketplace, in politics your choice is not decisive.

Most people don't like to hear that their one vote does not count. They evade the simple probability. I would ask the skeptic this: if it were legal to buy another person's vote, how much would you pay? 

Related to the problem of the impotent vote is the problem of costs and benefits. When you pick out a car, carp, or a carpet, you know you will pay the price and get (virtually all of) the benefit. So you choose accordingly. Contrast that with politics, where any one voter will pay only a tiny fraction of the full social cost and get only a tiny fraction of the total benefit, say, from a tax cut. Incentives matter. In politics, spill-over effects abound, and no one, unlike in the market, has a profit incentive to "internalize the externalities." Political operatives actually benefit from that problem because they can exploit it to justify wielding more power. That's a perverse incentive.

Democracy's other flaws relate to the politicians' and bureaucrats' limited knowledge and limited ability to create social order and to their desire to advance their own careers. These are the well-documented Austrian and Public Choice critiques of government. Some political operatives may be sincere, but if so, they are sincerely deluded in thinking their method -- coercion -- works for the rest of us.

Finally, we have the problems of asymmetrical information and lack of accountability. Voters will always be ignorant about much of the bureaucracy's operations and full consequences. Closely monitoring the state is impossible. Moreover, should voters learn about the harm the government does, the costs of really changing things are likely to be prohibitive. Forget about suing the state. All of this adds up to virtually zero accountability.

Coyne builds on this critique by taking a concept -- "noxious market" -- that is used against the free market and applying it to government arms sales. "Noxious market" is a term a philosopher coined to condemn certain alleged morally offensive private exchanges. The markets for kidneys, drugs, sexual services, and other things are said to involve sellers or buyers who are so vulnerable and ignorant that the government ought to step in to protect them and society at large.

Coyne thinks entrepreneurship can provide remedies in the private market, but then asks a good question in the interview: "What happens if we extend the logic of noxious markets to the government realm?"

So one area where we focus our research is on the international arms trade. Our conclusion is that it is a highly noxious market. It takes advantage of the vulnerable [such as the powerless taxpayers]. There are massive asymmetries [of knowledge], both domestically and internationally. And there's reason to believe it leads to really significant harms for societies where the arms go, but also the broader world as well.

In other words, he says, if the objection to noxious markets is "weak agency" in some of the participants, there is no realm in which agency is weaker than in government arms dealing and foreign policy in general. In that realm, the ruled populations on all sides can hardly know what is going really on, and catastrophic unintended consequences usually result. Where do those arms end up and who are they used against?

Government of the people, by the people, and for the people is a chimera. The only alternative is a framework based on individual rights, including property and contractual rights.

 

TGIF: Cooperation versus Bigotry

We who value individualism, freedom, and social cooperation as essential to flourishing should be distressed by the hostile bigotry that has lately reared its ugly head, to some uncertain extent, on the streets and campuses of America and abroad. This is not new. In America we've seen it intermittently in both directions on racial issues just in this century. It seems related to an intolerant, zero-nuance, take-no-prisoners, and glib attitude among many contenders over racial, religious, and ethnic controversies.

Now it is showing itself in ugly group chants and more personal communication calling for violence against Jews and Arabs, and perhaps even direct harassment and assault.  A couple of people have died. Anti-Semitism and anti-Arabism should be off-limits. Regardless of the target, the unrestrained hostility is frightening on many counts, not least of which is its ominous implications for spontaneous social /market cooperation..

I couldn't possibly know whether these clashes are common or just fringe opportunism -- let's hope the latter. In the heat of a controversy it is possible to misread innocent events and words. The principle of charitable interpretation ought to apply unless solid evidence to the contrary revokes it. We should also be aware that government officials and the news media, for obvious reasons, might be inclined to exaggerate. 

The point is that much could be at stake if impressions are not exaggerated -- including the trust and cooperation that characterize market-oriented societies. Social strife can have severe consequences. Even public demonstrations can create rippling animosity.

I am not suggesting, of course, that limits on free speech and the press would be in order in the name of social cooperation. That would make no sense. For one thing, hate-speech prohibitions and the like would bolster state power with vague statutes: governments have been major disrupters of cooperation, market and otherwise, throughout history. Contrary to what we teach our children, words can hurt, but it's not the kind of hurt that justifies retaliatory force. Threatened and initiated force, though, is another story.

Similarly, restrictions on immigration and the internet, along with enhanced government monitoring and data collection, would be ludicrously ironic since those are the means of interfering with cooperation.

The right and wrong of foreign conflicts, and U.S. government complicity in them, is separate from my point. Strong convictions and feelings are entirely understandable and proper. But when become collectivist bigotry, civil peace can be put at risk. That should worry anyone who grasps the relationship among social cooperation, markets, and general well-being.

Champions of individualism reject the divisive collectivism displayed in ethnic, racial, and religious hostility. Such feeling flows from the tribalism that is a vestige of a primitive, pre-individualist distant past. A person's natal or otherwise unchosen "membership" in a group says nothing about his or her character, moral principles, or position on controversies. The right to be free of coercion is an individual-based, not group-based principle. Persons can think for themselves. That's individualism, both ethical and methodological. We abandon it at great risk.

As the economist Ludwig von Mises explained in Human Action, which he considered calling "Social Cooperation," civilization began to dawn when the earliest perceptive people realized that strangers could represent not existential threats but potential gains from trade. There lay the road to mutual self-interest and prosperity. It was long ago, but some people haven't yet learned. Samuel Johnson was onto something when he said, "There are few ways in which a man can be more innocently employed than in getting money."

I'll give Mises the final word on the link between free cooperation and prosperity, and by implication the danger from overwrought polarization (from Human Action, chapter 24, "Harmony and Conflicts of Interest", section 3, "The Harmony of the "Rightly Understood" Interests):

[N]ature does not generate peace and good will.... What makes friendly relations between human beings possible is the higher productivity of the division of labor. It removes the natural conflict of interests. For where there is division of labor, there is no longer question of the distribution of a supply not capable of enlargement. Thanks to the higher productivity of labor performed under the division of tasks, the supply of goods multiplies. A pre-eminent common interest, the preservation and further intensification of social cooperation, becomes paramount and obliterates all essential collisions. Catallactic competition is substituted for biological competition. It makes for harmony of the interests of all members of society. The very condition from which the irreconcilable conflicts of biological competition arise--viz., the fact that all people by and large strive after the same things--is transformed into a factor making for harmony of interests. Because many people or even all people want bread, clothes, shoes, and cars, large-scale production of these goods becomes feasible and reduces the costs of production to such an extent that they are accessible at low prices. The fact that my fellow man wants to acquire shoes as I do, does not make it harder for me to get shoes, but easier.

Let's not have our mutual interest get lost in the heat of controversy.

TGIF: When History Didn't Begin

I agree with UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres. I've never written those words before. But on Oct 24, Guterres said to the UN Security Council (emphasis added):

The situation in the Middle East is growing more dire by the hour.

The war in Gaza is raging and risks spiralling throughout the region.

Divisions are splintering societies. Tensions threaten to boil over.

At a crucial moment like this, it is vital to be clear on principles -- starting with the fundamental principle of respecting and protecting civilians.

I have condemned unequivocally the horrifying and unprecedented 7 October acts of terror by Hamas in Israel.

Nothing can justify the deliberate killing, injuring and kidnapping of civilians – or the launching of rockets against civilian targets.

All hostages must be treated humanely and released immediately and without conditions. I respectfully note the presence among us of members of their families.....

It is important to also recognize the attacks by Hamas did not happen in a vacuum.

The Palestinian people have been subjected to 56 years of suffocating occupation.

They have seen their land steadily devoured by settlements and plagued by violence; their economy stifled; their people displaced and their homes demolished. Their hopes for a political solution to their plight have been vanishing.

But the grievances of the Palestinian people cannot justify the appalling attacks by Hamas. And those appalling attacks cannot justify the collective punishment of the Palestinian people....

What was the reaction? Israel's government demanded that Guterres resign for justifying (sic) Hamas's crimes. According to statements from Israeli UN ambassador Gilad Erdan and foreign minister Eli Cohen, Guterres therefore is unfit for his job.

According to the officials, Guterres's offending words were these: "the attacks by Hamas did not happen in a vacuum." Those words preceded Guterres's reference to what the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank endured under Israeli occupation since 1967.

Beyond doubt, Guterres condemned Hamas's mass atrocities of Oct. 7. He clearly said that killing civilians cannot be justified. And he unequivocally called for the immediate and unconditional release of the hostages. Look at his remarks. But he has been vilified by Israeli politicians for saying in effect that history did not begin on October 7, 2023. Of course, the statement is true, but some things just may not be said.

Strangely, the Israeli government says Guterres did not condemn the horrendous Hamas violence against Israeli civilians. Israel's position apparently is that even to remind people that history did not begin on October 7 is to justify murder, kidnapping, and mayhem. It's as if trying to comprehend is to justify. But those are two different mental operations. 

The Israeli officials also presumably objected to Guterres's condemnation of the collective punishment that Israel was inflicting, again, on the rightless Palestinians in the crowded Gaza Strip, most of whom are not members of Hamas and most of whom could not have voted for Hamas almost 20 years ago because they were too young or had not even been born yet. Almost half the 2.3 million Palestinians of tiny Gaza are under 18.

So Israel is gaslighting. If we can't believe the Israeli government on something we can so easily check, how can we believe it on anything else? Just the other day U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said something similar to what Guterres said, but so far without consequence: "Ultimately, the only way to ensure that this crisis never happens again is to begin setting the conditions for durable peace and security, and to frame our diplomatic efforts now with that in mind." In his requests is that Israel not reoccupy Gaza and that it end the 17-year blockade. That sounds like another way of acknowledging that the October 7 attacks "did not happen in a vacuum."

Why is Israel going after Guterres for his unexceptional statement? It wasn't just the timing. Yair Lapid, a former prime minister of Israel and a former journalist, gave the answer when he said, "If the international media is objective, it serves Hamas. If it just shows both sides, it serves Hamas... My argument is that the media cannot just claim to bring both sides of the story. If you do that, you are only bringing one – Hamas’s side...."

Really?

TGIF: The Glorious Bourgeois Peace Movement

Those of us whose pro-peace/antiwar principles are of the bourgeois classical-liberal variety need reminding now and again that we have a glorious tradition going back hundreds of years. We need not get lost in the dominant rhetoric that opposes war, empire, and its deadly accouterments from a flawed anti-individualist, anti-Western, and socialist position.

No, we can draw on a proud history of writers and activists who opposed war and intervention not just for the obvious reason --  harm to others -- but also because peace and nonintervention are required for reaping the full benefits of private property, specialization and the division of labor, free global trade, and the unobstructed movement of people in search of better lives. It would be mistaken to regard this as a union of humanitarian and so-called "economic" justifications for peace-mongering. For those classical liberals, freedom to produce, trade, and consume was simply another humanitarian reason to oppose the disruption of war.

Two of the best exemplars of bourgeois pro-market peace activism were the Englishmen Richard Cobden and John Bright, both members of Parliament, manufacturers, orators, and activists. In the mid-19th century, they built a movement that has been in the history books ever since. They are best known for opposing England's tariff on imported grain ("corn"), which raised the price of bread to enrich the land-owing aristocracy. Cobden and Bright successfully fought their battle through the Anti-Corn Law League.

Cobdden and Bright did not compartmentalize but rather explicitly linked free trade to peace and opposition to military spending and intervention. They had a friend and ally on the continent in the French laissez-faire liberal Frédéric Bastiat.

These classical liberals understood that if a social conflict is to be avoided and society is to develop for all, then the industrious members of the population -- entrepreneurs and employees, both of whom produce valuable goods through their labor -- must be free from those who use government-granted privileges to legally steal from the industrious. (Ironically, Marx credited the classical liberals with devising this class analysis, but then screwed it up by putting business creators in the exploiter class.)

Cobden and Bright were not only clear and analytical; they were also passionate. They were great orators inside of Parliament and outside. The liberals' association of peace and free trade can be seen in this example of Cobden's eloquence:

How shall a profession which withdraws from productive industry the ablest of the human race, and teaches them systematically the best modes of destroying mankind, which awards honours only in proportion to the number of victims offered at its sanguinary altar, which overturns cities, ravages farms and vineyards, uproots forests, burns the ripened harvest, which, in a word, exists but in the absence of law, order, and security — how can such a profession be favourable to commerce, which increases only with the increase of human life, whose parent is agriculture, and which perishes or flies at the approach of lawless rapine?

He finishes this passage with a rebuke to those who wanted the English government to compel foreign populations to do business with privileged government-granted monopoly interests:

They who propose to influence by force the traffic of the world, forget that affairs of trade, like matters of conscience, change their very nature if touched by the hand of violence; for as faith, if forced, would no longer be religion, but hypocrisy, so commerce becomes robbery if coerced by warlike armaments.

Cobden told his fellow members of the House of Commons:

It is only necessary that you should be agreed that war is a great calamity, which it is desirable we should avoid if possible.... My object is to see if we cannot devise some better method than war...; and my plan is, simply and solely, that we should resort to that mode of settling disputes in communities, which individuals resort to in private life. I only want you to go one step farther, to carry out in another instance the principle which you recognize in other cases -- that the intercourse between communities is nothing more than the intercourse of individuals in the aggregate. I want to know why there may not be an agreement between this country and France, or between this country and America, by which the nations should respectively bind themselves, in case of any misunderstanding arising which could not be settled by mutual decision of arbitrators.

He also warned about the government's unlimited spending on armaments: "I wish to know where this system is to end."

On another occasion, he advised, "I say, if you want to benefit nations who are struggling for their freedom, establish as one of the maxims of international law the principle of non-intervention."

These men were called "Little Englanders" for the obvious reason: they opposed the empire. Cobden also said, "I believe the progress of freedom depends more upon the maintenance of peace, the spread of commerce, and the diffusion of education, than upon the labours of Cabinets or Foreign offices."

Bright was no less eloquent:

This is war -- every crime which human nature can commit or imagine, every horror it can perpetrate or suffer; and that this is our Christian Government recklessly plunges into, and which so many of our countrymen at this moment think it patriotic to applaud! You must excuse me if I cannot go with you. I will have no part in this terrible crime [the Crimean War against Russia]. My hands shall be unstained with the blood which is being shed.... [B]ut no respect for men who form a Government, no regard I have for "going with the stream," and no fear of being deemed wanting in patriotism, shall influence me in favor of a policy which, in my conscience, I believe to be as criminal before God as it is destructive of the true interest of my country." (83)

This could be said about the United States today: "What are we to say of a nation, which lives under a perpetual delusion that is about to be attacked...?"

As noted, these Manchester men of business (along with their predecessors such as Adam Smith, and successors such as Herbert Spencer) embraced Western classical-liberal values with gusto. They were ready to condemn institutions that did not live up to those values. But despite its flaws, they were not embarrassed to embrace Western modernity, the Enlightenment, and the Industrial Revolution, understanding that all civilizations had flaws, such as slavery and the glorification of war, which were to be eliminated. But they knew better than to throw the baby out with the bathwater, which many people today do not.

Let's not forget these great figures who were vital to the development of today's high living standards and of the universally applicable philosophy of individual liberty, private property, free markets, and peace. This proper foundation for domestic and foreign policy was and today remains explicitly pro-freedom in all spheres and anti-aggression. Thus in the spirit of Cobden and Bright, true liberals are entitled to oppose war and empire while identifying with neither the "left" nor the "right."