Latest TGIF

TGIF: Government Should Stop Its Own Violence First

Stupid Criminals

Maybe not all criminals are stupid but a lot of them are. The apparent Boston Marathon bombers opened the last chapter of their criminal enterprise by robbing a 7-11. How hackneyed can you get?

UPDATE: Latest word is that the Tsarnaev brothers did not rob a convenience store at all. (Someone else did that.) What they did was hijack a Mercedes SUV and force the driver to get money out of an ATM. They then let the driver go unharmed, while taking his car.

Frog Supremacy

Frogs are superior to human beings. They do jump out of gradually heated water.

Demagogy on Manchin-Toomey

The Manchin-Toomey expansion of background checks to private gun sales was reasonable legislation, its advocates insist, because it would have forbidden the creation of a federal registry and exempted transfers of guns between family members and between friends.

Those features appear to be in the bill, but why should that matter? The champions of Manchin-Toomey would have us believe that once the bill passed, no more gun laws would ever be proposed again. That is, they’re either naïve or dishonest. I don’t think they’re naïve.

MSNBC host Joe Scarborough, a former member of the House and self-styled Second Amendment man who supported Manchin-Toomey, is an egregious example of this dishonesty. He spent weeks mocking opponents for not being mollified by the bill’s compromises. Can he be unfamiliar with the legislative tactic of gradualism? Start a program small to minimize opposition, then expand it in later years when people have become inured.

It’s not as though this tactic has never been used. The income tax started small in 1913 and applied only to the richest Americans. Those who expressed concern that the tax would expand were ridiculed as paranoid. Sen. William Borah, an Idaho Progressive Republican said, “No sane man would take from industry its just reward or rob frugality of a fair and honest return.”

As I wrote in Your Money or Your Life: Why We Must Abolish the Income Tax (1999):

The 1913 income tax was put at 1 percent on net income after a personal exemption of $3,000, some credits, and an additional $1,000 exemption for married couples living together. There was also a graduated 2 percent to 7 percent surcharge on incomes from $20,000 to $500,000….

In 1913, the average personal income was $621. Only 2 percent of the population was liable for the tax between 1913 and 1915.

In other words, the tax was introduced as a tax on the rich exclusively.

If the system were in place today, a single person making less than about $45,000 (the bottom 75 percent of filers) would pay no tax. A couple earning less than $60,000 would pay nothing. Incomes up to $300,000 would be in the 1 percent bracket. Someone would have to make $7.5 million before paying the top 7 percent rate. In 1994 dollars, the exemptions of 1913 would be worth $44,776 for a single person and $59,701 for married couples.

But it didn’t take long for the tax to become a tax on the masses. War, as usual, fueled the expansion. The anti-tax prophets were right.

The income tax is not the only example of gradualism. Social Security was also introduced as a modest program with a low tax. (The public was against it.)  Now it and Medicare take about 15 percent of a worker’s income. For details see Charlotte Twight’s Dependent on D.C.

The upshot is that you cannot judge a legislative bill in isolation. The dynamics of politics must be taken into account, especially the politicians’ ability to (in Twight’s words) “manipulate political transaction costs.” This refers to the many methods that government officials have to conceal what they’re doing and to make it costly for people to resist if they find out.

How might this idea apply to Manchin-Toomey? This isn’t rocket science. The bill may promise universal background checks (except for family members and friends), but it can’t keep that promise. Criminally minded people will always find ways to obtain guns outside the system. Theft and the black market will make that a certainty. Gun-running is as old as guns themselves, and nothing is more adaptive than the black market.

So what will happen after the next atrocity occurs with a firearm? The advocates of universal background checks will surely say, “We tried this modest approach, and it failed to keep guns out of the hands of bad people. We must do more.”

“More” could well include national registration. It’s a matter of logic. If I own a gun, how can the government assure that I haven’t sold it without running a background check on the buyer? One way the government might find out is to establish a gun registry and periodically do spot checks to see if people still possess the guns that are registered to them. If people are serious about outlawing sales without backgrounds checks, wouldn’t they be driven to such a proposal? As the ACLU has pointed out, the civil-liberties implications are ominous. Registration makes confiscation feasible.

This is not paranoia. It’s a recognition of the dynamics of demagogic politics. If, as polls purport to show, 90 percent of people favor universal background checks and they prove futile in stopping gun atrocities, what will people favor next? Which way are they likely to go: toward full deregulation of gun ownership or toward more draconian measures?

I know where my money is.

Interview on Tracesofreality.com

Guillermo Jimenez interviewed me for Tracesofreality.com. Here's the video:

Time to Bring Bush & Co. before the International Criminal Court

From the New York Times:

A nonpartisan, independent review of interrogation and detention programs in the years after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks concludes that “it is indisputable that the United States engaged in the practice of torture” and that the nation’s highest officials bore ultimate responsibility for it.

The sweeping, 577-page report says that while brutality has occurred in every American war, there never before had been “the kind of considered and detailed discussions that occurred after 9/11 directly involving a president and his top advisers on the wisdom, propriety and legality of inflicting pain and torment on some detainees in our custody.” The study, by an 11-member panel convened by the Constitution Project, a legal research and advocacy group, is to be released on Tuesday morning.

Read more.

What We Know about the Boston Marathon Bombings

They were crimes, not acts of war.

The Boston Marathon Bombings

My heart goes out to the loved ones of those who were murdered, the injured, and all others who were affected--the people of Boston.

The Libertarian Angle

The latest edition of FFF's The Libertarian Angle is now online. Issues discussed: gun control and Melissa Harris-Perry's view that children belong to the "community."

TGIF: The Market Is a Beautiful Thing

Market advocates tend to respect the intellect of their fellow human beings. You can tell by their reliance on philosophical, moral, economic, and historical arguments when trying to persuade others. But what if most people’s aversion to the market isn’t founded in philosophy, morality, economics, or history? What if their objection is aesthetic?

Read TGIF: "The Market Is a Beautiful Thing"

The Deir Yassin Massacre, April 9, 1948

Today is the 65th anniversary of the slaughter of the Arab inhabitants of the Palestinian village Deir Yassin (population about 600), west of Jerusalem, at the hands of Zionist militias, Irgun and Lehi, or Stern Gang. About a hundred residents, including 30 infants. (Irgun was led by future prime minister Menachem Begin. Another future prime minister, Yitzhak Shamir, was a Lehi commander.) By any standard, these were terrorist organizations. Indeed, conservative historian Paul Johnson writes that the Zionist militias created the terrorist model in the Middle East.

Dein Yassin was just one of the many atrocities that comprise the Nakba, or the catastrophe that befell the Palestinians in the founding of Israel. In fact, residents of other Arab villages fled their homes as the Zionist paramilitary forces spread the word about Deir Yassin. Historian Ilan Pappe writes, "At the time, the Jewish leadership proudly announced a high number of victims so as to make Deir Yassin the epicentre of the catastrophe--a warning to all Palestinians that a similar fate awaited them if they refused to abandon their homes and take flight." In his memoir, Begin wrote that panicked Arabs fled their homes in great number at the "wild tales of 'Irgun butchery.'"

Here is a moving account by Dina Elmuti at Electronic Intifada.

According to Wikipedia:

In 1949, despite protests, the Jerusalem neighborhood of Givat Shaul Bet was built on what had been Deir Yassin's land, now considered part of Har Nof, an Orthodox area. Four Jewish scholars, Martin Buber, Ernst Simon, Werner Senator, and Cecil Roth, wrote to Israel's first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, asking that Deir Yassin be left uninhabited, or that its settlement be postponed. They wrote that it had become "infamous throughout the Jewish world, the Arab world and the whole world." Settling the land so soon after the killings would amount to an endorsement of them. Ben-Gurion failed to respond, though the correspondents sent him copy after copy. Eventually his secretary replied that he had been too busy to read their letter.

In 1951, construction of the Kfar Shaul Mental Health Center began, using some of the village's houses, now hidden behind the hospital's fence, with entry closely restricted. Har HaMenuchot, a Jewish cemetery, lies to the north. To the south is a valley containing part of the Jerusalem Forest, and on the other side of the valley, a mile and a half away, lie Mount Herzl and the Holocaust memorial museum, Yad Vashem.

For more, see Jeremy Hammond's The Rejection of Palestinian Self-Determination and Ilan Pappe's The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine.

TGIF: The Myth of Market Failure

When I say that market failure is a myth, I don’t mean to deny that ... regrettable situations can occur. I only mean to deny that they are peculiar to the market.

Read: "The Myth of Market Failure."

Latest Op-ed

Progressives Believe in Money Magic - - The Future of Freedom Foundation

TGIF: Loving Economics

TGIF this week is a review essay of Peter Boettke’s new book, Living Economics: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow. Enjoy!

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.

Roderick Long Scores on the Marriage Equality Issue

Victory Through Lexicography? | Bleeding Heart Libertarians

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.

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.