Ron Paul Won’t Get My Vote

My low-level research on Ron Paul has paralleled his rise in the polls. What I have done is to give a number of opportunities to people who I know favor his candidacy and to people and organizations who I think support him to react to the latest accusations against him. This is low-level research as I said. (I am a respected conventional social scientist; no need to bore me with injunctions about scientific rigor.) This low-level research is more than most people try to do in pursuit of a rational vote, I think.

The latest accusations are also old. I am referring to the report that newsletters entitled: “The Ron Paul Letter” and such, published in the 1990s, contained both clearly racist and clearly anti-Semitic statements. (I mean anti-Semitic, not anti-Israel. He had some of those too but that’s another story altogether.) I have asked Libertarians, and what I call “orthodox libertarians”,( non-party members who are doctrinally aligned with the Libertarian Party) what they thought of the charges. This is a deliberately open-ended question. It gives the respondent a wide latitude to answer even if by changing the subject.

I received no answer or no clear answer from anyone, on my blog or through Facebook. One orthodox libertarian with whom I argue often on this blog gave me, gave us, a reading list. Of course, I don’t need, don’t want a reading list. My reading schedule is full until June 2012. Besides, there is something presumptuous about giving others reading lists. One should do it with much restraint, if at all. I imagine that my correspondents, my reader, who favor Ron Paul could have given me instead any number of easy-to-grasp, reasonable answers. After all, as thinking people, they have, or they had, to make up their minds, to decide for themselves unless they are eager to avoid the topic of those accusations altogether.

Here are some possible answers:

I don’t believe it.

It does not matter because it was a long time ago.

The statements attributed to him (that Paul himself does not deny) are not enough to prove either racism or anti-Semitism.

I don’t care if he is a racist.

I don’t care if he is anti-Semitic.

He, Paul, was not paying attention to his newsletters, as he said himself. So, the statements show nothing about him. Therefore, I don’t care.

Here is what this attentive libertarian-leaning conservative thinks about this issue. I have two explanations that are not mutually exclusive and that tell us much about him as a potential president

I think Ron Paul is both a racist and an anti-Semite but in a mild, passive way, if there is such a thing. Racism first. It has several possible sources. We are used in America to the poisonous, virulent kind of racism, to the brand that is associated with lynching. I doubt Paul has this in his heart. I think his passive racism is rooted in indifference, in callousness only. When an ardent follower of his, an orthodox libertarian insists (on this blog) that one kind of Africans massacring hundreds of thousands of another kind  of Africans with machetes and bricks is none of our business, he demonstrates precisely this kind of callousness.But he certainly does nothing to encourage one kind of black people to murder another kind of black people. He just thinks that both killers and victims are too unlike us for us to be concerned. (There is a huge paradox there in that libertarians tend to define as “us” those who share citizenship in our state, the same state they say they want to eviscerate.) Besides, we don’t know enough to hold off the machete or the brick. Besides we don’t even know who started it. . . .

Similarly, I suspect (“suspect,” I don’t know) that Ron Paul shares in the casual anti-Semitism of his Southern social class. He is an MD. It’s common (not universal by all means) for medical doctors to have received a poor undergraduate education in the liberal arts because of the focus on “pre-med” competitiveness. His anti-Semitism, if any, is of the passive kind. It will never lead him to favor the slaughter of Jews but it allows him to live comfortably with a hazy knowledge of the harder European brand of anti-Semitism and of its historical consequences. Plus, medicine is a field of endeavor where one might bump hard against common Jewish unscrupulous industriousness. (Not my formula; I cribbed it; how sad I am it’s not mine!) Dr Ron Paul would not discriminate ever against Jews but he would not be exceedingly alert to the occurrence of such discrimination in his environment. That’s not because he is evil but because he is extremely dogmatic. Ideological dogma helps you stay consistent by telling you what to ignore.

I am adding something separately so no one will accuse me of sneakiness. It’s not difficult to find, on talk-radio and even around my coffee-shop, individuals who spout the perfect libertarian anti-interventionist line and whose discourse against Israeli “aggression” quickly drifts into the expression of characteristically anti-Semitic sentiment. I agree that politicians in general and Ron Paul in particular cannot generally be held responsible for the words of all their followers. Yet, when an occasion arises spontaneously to condemn what’s disgusting among one’s disciples, one should seize this opportunity vigorously and loudly. Mr Paul has not done this.

In addition to moderate, passive racism and anti-Semitism, Mr Paul displays a sovereign disdain for factualness. As I have pointed out several times in this blog, Mr Paul does not only make light with facts when he deals with an unexpected question, or a “gotcha” question from a reporter, or from a rival, a question for which he is not prepared. He will sometimes volunteer false information the better to make a point:

The Iraq war and the Afghanistan war are not only very wasteful, they are

stupidly wasteful. So, for example, the US armed forces spend 20 billion

dollars each year in those war theaters on air-conditioning alone.

 

There is a chance that 2 billion dollars would not be impressive enough so, why not add a zero, two zeros? What the hell?

I have met this kind of shameless mendacity before. It’s common among leaders of virtuous small sects who have spent many years in the wilderness, addressing only small groups of the already converted, the elect, those who will never contradict. In the seventies, I knew members of tiny Trotskyst groups, splinters of splinter of splinters, the shavings of multiple ideological schisms. They would speak well, with winning logic, and demonstrate a thorough knowledge of history. And then, they would come up with a howler that reminded you instantly that schizophrenics too can sound intelligent. Not that I claim Ron Paul is insane. His mind is just way out on a limb and he does not care that it is, and he probably even enjoys it.

Underlying the passive racism, the matter-of-fact anti-Semitism, and the indifference to fact lies a tremendous intellectual elitism that is fundamentally undemocratic. Ron Paul, like his fellow isolationists from the Left, does not really care what the great unwashed masses of voters know, understand or believe. He thinks they should vote for him because he is right on everything, or on everything that matters. If they don’t, too bad for them.

As I have said repeatedly, on domestic issues, I am closer to Ron Paul than to any other candidate. And I don’t treat lightly the other big difference I have with him, and with Libertarians, on foreign policy and on defense. Yet, interestingly, if this last difference did not exist, I still would not vote for Paul for president. I would not vote for him for some of the same reasons that would have turned me off Barack Obama if he had been a libertarian-leaning conservative, one favoring radical shrinkage of the federal government. There are personality issues that disqualify.

And, naturally, I have not dealt here again and explicitly with the fact that Ron Paul’s foreign policies views make him as dangerous as President Obama to the survival of this constitutional republic. Or, possibly, he is even more dangerous since Mr Obama l finally revealed himself a secret admirer of covert military action against those who would destroy us. The 01/2/12 issued of the Weekly Standard has several nice pieces about the moral giant Vaclal Havel who died last week. One article reminded me that Havel was firmly in favor of the expansion of NATO.

In the Wall Street Journal of Thursday December 29^th 2011, the political columnist Daniel Henninger gives his own take on Mr Paul’s recent surge, pre-Iowa surge, in the polls. Henninger argues that though Paul has his own strong, small but consistent following, the upsurge is simply the latest expression of the mass of “not Romney” voters seeking a good horse to ride. In this perspective, the Paul upsurge is of the same ilk as the earliest vogue for Perry, then for Cain, then for Gingrich.

Meanwhile, every day, brave young Syrians die for wanting the liberties we take for granted. None of our business, of course.

PS My constant concern about anti-Semitism does not mean that I am Jewish. I am not, never have been, never will be.

AND I AM PRETTY SURE THE MAYAS’ MATH SKILLS WERE GREATLY OVERRATED. THE FATAL DATE WAS ACTUALLY 1212. I DOUBT THE WORLD WILL REALLY END THIS YEAR, 2012, BUT IF IT DOES, I HOPE WE WILL HAVE TIME FOR ANOTHER END -OF-THE-WORLD PARTY.

“Secular Theocracy: The Foundations and Folly of Modern Tyranny,”

I recommend you use any free time you have during the holiday season to read this essay:   “Secular Theocracy : The Foundations and Folly of Modern Tyranny” (December 19, 2011).   It’s by David Theroux, founder of the libertarian Independent Institute. I think many of Theroux’s positions are wrong and and even dangerous but he is always well worth reading. In this particular essay, Theroux tries to establish that libertarianism has Christian roots. I sure hope not although I recognize the validity of my friend Rodney Stark’s argument to the effect that political systems that favor individual freedom have a historical affinity with Christianity.

Joyeux Noel et bonne annee

C”est bien la fete du jeune Juif qui n’a pas eu son bac et qui pour cela est devenu menuisier qu’on celebre. Il parlait bien; il disait beaucoup de choses justes.  Il s’etait oppose aux oppresseurs de son temps qui l’ont tue.

Autism and National Public Radio

I am obsessed with the question of widespread misinformation and even of stupidity among otherwise intelligent and formally educated people. That’s one big reason why I listen to National Public Radio.

On “Meet the Nation,” on 12/20/11, there is a far-ranging discussion of autism. The discussion begins well with a report on studies which show differences in frequency of diagnosis of autism according to socio-economic status (some studies, predictably, with race as a stand-in) and also, according to spatial patterns. The latter, is important. It means that there are geographic clusters of autism. A New York sociologist showed that those patterns are not geographical in a simple physical sense but that they vary according to school district boundaries.

Now, physical clusters of many things, including illnesses, are common because space serves as a proxy for many different kinds of living conditions: Ordinary people in the South eat more and more fat than do ordinary people in the West. Californians get more sun exposure than do New Yorkers. Suburban children don’t play the same sports as urban children. And, of course, there is the water, the quality of which varies from town to town. A dentist tells me that there are more cavities in Santa Cruz than in Salinas a few miles away, and poorer, and less educated on the average than Santa Cruz. You guessed it: city water is fluoridated in Salinas but not in Santa Cruz.

At any rate the point is that the discovery of physical clusters of a phenomenon should always constitute the beginning of an analysis, not the end. That’s not the way NPR treats the subject.

Immediately, the discussion veers to the ability of parents to obtain publicly funded help for their autistic children. The key here is that in many school districts no public resources are available if the child is not officially diagnosed as autistic. Hence, the race to diagnosis. And everything we know tells us that richer parents and more educated parents are often more likely to go after what they want and also more likely to obtain it. That’s true irrespective of the objective validity of what they want. That’s true if what they want is completely stupid.

The NPR story  tries to make the whole phenomenon of clusters a simple expression of social injustice. The clear assumption is that autism is widespread in all classes but that white upped-middle class parents obtain help while poorer parents, and of course, parents who are “people of color,” are left to struggle with often desperate family situations linked to autism. No other interpretation is examined. NPR’s single-mindedness on this issue contributes – again – to the general impression that the American society is grossly, perhaps criminally unfair. NPR does this sort of things all the time.

NPR also reports on the curious fact that the geographic clusters correspond to school district boundaries without taking the obvious next steps. Here they are: Parents gossip outside of and around individual schools. School districts aggregate those gossip patterns. Parents don’t gossip much across school district boundaries.  The propensity to want one’s children to be recognized as autistic follows parental gossip patterns rather than social-class. Social class itself is only loosely related to school district. On superficial examination it, social class, can seem to stand for school district and therefore, for gossip pattern.

If I were to deal with the spatial clusters of autism as a social scientist who tries to remain respectable, below is what I would do. If I were a journalist pretending to intellectual responsibility, I would seek the advice of a respectable social scientist such as myself, or better, of several respectable social scientists.

1   Are the clusters real? Check the counting method again. Check the results again. Look for anything that raises a red flag or even a pink flag. Counting anything pertaining to humans is not easy. Some social science facts turn out to not be facts but illusions. Some become unkillable legends.

2    I would list all the alternative explanations I and my varied advisers could come up with. This, to avoid unconscious biases.

Here is one alternative explanation that imposes itself on me with blinding clarity: Autism is yet another fashionable illness. Like its long-standing predecessor, breast cancer, it ‘s real enough but its frequency is routinely grossly exaggerated. (Here is an exercise for you: Out of 100 American women who died last year, the number who died of breast cancer is approximately ___. Correct answer soon on this blog if anyone asks me.)

When an illness becomes fashionable it’s usually because the exaggeration of its prevalence serves the purposes of a particular social group or category, or of several of them. The prevalence of breast cancer is exaggerated because it serves the myth of the neglect of women’s health by a male-dominated medical establishment and by patriarchal government bureaucracies charged with public health. The focus on breast cancer specifically is pure public relations genius. First, it’s one of the few diseases that strikes women to a dramatically disproportionate extent. You could not get the same demonstration effect from heart disease for example because its frequency between the sexes is too close to being equal. Secondly, for subjective (and completely understandable) reasons breast cancer strikes a terror in women’s hearts that no other illness comes close to achieving. Breast cancer exaggeration is the feminism of women who are too busy or too distracted to be feminists in any other way. It’s the poor woman’s feminism. It may be the last gasp of vulgar feminism.

The fashionableness of autism equally serves some social purposes.

First, it’s a mild case of Münchhausen Syndrome By Proxy. I say “mild” because in its extreme form, this mental illness refers to mothers who deliberately harm their children to draw attention to themselves. I speculate that the ever-increasing dramatic quality and variety of allegedly realistic television shows focused on women leave ever-larger numbers of ordinary women feeling left out. There are also reasons to believe that the same regular women do not receive the same amount of male attention their mothers and their grandmothers did. This would contribute to the sense of neglect. I can’t develop this theme right now. Having autistic children, even mildly autistic children, is a sure way to obtain and attention for a long time. Incidentally, I believe that a “mildly” autistic little boy would be indistinguishable from a 1950s boy who “does not like to talk.”

Second, a diagnosis of autism is a good, scientific-sounding excuse for having a dull child. What sounds better:

Although his father and I are intellectually above average, although we give our child an exceptionally stimulating home environment, our child’s performance is average;

or:  Our child is very bright, unfortunately, he suffers from the serious illness of autism?

Incidentally, the fact that autism is reported as heavily sex-linked, affecting mostly boys, makes me suspicious. Of course sex-linked pathologies exist. But the sex linkage points to a genetic origin of the illness, a subject the autism publicists are not eager to raise. The sex linkage suggests to me the verifiable hypothesis that behavior that is widespread in boys and natural in them but not in girls artificially gets treated as a pathology. Note that I would not even be able to articulate this simple hypothesis if I believed that there are only  slight anatomical differences between boys and girls. The liberal gospel hardly allows one to formulate the obvious!

I suspect that there is a ready-made cultural client base for this kind of thinking. (Autism is prodigiously on the rise. The authorities neglect the illness unless you are rich.) That would be the legions of half-educated mothers who are too busy for serious intellectual pursuits but not busy enough to avoid torturing their minds about their self-worth. The client base also includes the many mothers who are under the impression that they abandoned a serious career to rear their children and who are assailed by doubts about their choice.

I mean two things by “half-educated.” First, I include people who attended college but not classes and who never read a book while there. (That would have been a good third of my former students in the expensive university where I taught for twenty-four years.) Those are people who know that they are educated because they have a college degree but who are not educated enough to know that they are not educated.

Second, I include in the category people who graduated with a major in any number of worthless subjects, such as my old subject, “Management” and mediocre grades (You may want to see my essay on this blog on the related topic: http://factsmatter.wordpress.com/2011/11/22/occupy-wall-street-and-the-real-value-of-a-college-education/) I mention the qualification of mediocre grades because good students, those with good grades, are all the same: They educate themselves, whatever their major may be, even if it’s the proverbial underwater basket-weaving.

The intensity of the feelings shoring up the pseudo-scientific vision of the world behind the claim of an “epidemic” of autism surprises even me. Why, a few weeks ago, a friend of twenty-five years broke up with me in dramatic terms! She did it because I did not repress my skepticism when she told me she had no fewer than than four nieces and nephews, from three different sets of parents, afflicted with autism.

It turns out, my former friend is dabbling in herbal medicines. She does it without formal training. I think she meets with some successes because some plants you can read about on the Internet actually possess some curative virtues. (After all, aspirin, which really, really works, is an extract of willow bark!)  My ex-friend is resourceful and energetic. She can find the relevant info. However, her sense of self- importance could not be satisfied forever simply with making it easier for some of her friends to sleep better, or with helping alleviate chronic pain a little in others. Her self-esteem required that she tackle a more serious problem. Autism fits the bills. I suspect my ex-buddy made her hapless nephews and nieces “autistic” so she would have something important to treat. The parents, her brothers and sisters, did not object because they are part of the same potential cultural client base.

I know that I am going charged with cruelty for crimes I did not commit. I repeat that I do not deny that there is a severe mental and emotional disturbance that is loosely known as autism. I recognize that  it has severe forms that are destructive of the children affected and even more of their families. However, I am skeptical of the claim that the disease itself, as opposed to the ability to diagnose it, and as opposed to the propensity to diagnose it, has progressed in giant steps in recent years. There is autism the illness and there is also autism the informal lobby. The lobby appears to have learned nothing from the debacle of the exposure of fake research linking autism to vaccination. It had learned nothing from the myth of “hyperactivity.”

Similarly, I do not make light of the devastating disease of breast cancer nor of the fear it inspires in women. I am only reporting that its frequency is greatly exaggerated and that there are good sociological reasons that would explain why it is so.

Back to my original topic: The fact that conservatives like me keep going back to NPR and that they keep coming back annoyed simply indicates that we need something like NPR. I mean a large syndicated network that is unabashedly intellectual, that uses many hours of broadcast to deal with topics of national interest other than politics and including scientific research. The network should be set up in such a way as to promote adversarial interactions because it’s the only way to avoid seeing it captured by a particular ideological family, as is the case with NPR now. I don’t even want to risk having such a public network captured by my own ideological family because it would do the family harm. A long time ago, before NPR, there were liberals who were intellectual giants. Nowadays, I doubt they exist at all. I blame the broad comfort NPR provides liberals for this specie extinction.

And as to the question of public funding: The NPR replacement as described wouldn’t need to rely to any extent on tax money. Many private parties like me would be glad to support it voluntarily.

If I don’t talk to you before that, I wish you all a merry Christmas. That’s the way I pointedly reply to those who wish me “Happy holidays,” “Merry Christmas.” There is no question that if we are celebrating anything, it is the birth of Issa, the Jewish kid who dropped out of high-school so that he had to become a carpenter. He spoke well, clearly and forcefully. He had good thoughts about many things. And, he stood up to the bullies of his time.

PS  Of one hundred American women who died last year, four died of breast cancer.

Ron Paul Dogged by Racism Charges

This title is reproduced from Newsmax.com. It has a piece accusing Ron Paul of serious racist and anti-Semitic statements in his past. I don’t know if any of the charges are correct. I have no opinion except for the fact that I have called Paul “petulant” on this blog. I expect people who support Paul on the Internet, Facebook and even on this blog to come out and say either, ” Can’t be true,” or, “I don’t care.” It’s not much to ask for.

Note: The giant letters on this message are not intended by me . The title is a “copy and paste.”  It determined  the size of the font in my text,  following. I don’t have the skill to control the font. Sorry.

12/23/11     Newsmax is pursuing the story. The blog  (Newsmax.com) contends it has more evidence of Ron Paul’ s responsibility. My own mind is not made up. I am only perpetuating this matter because I think the accusation deserves a response by Ron Paul’s partisans, of whom I am not one. Their silence makes me increasingly uneasy.

The lack of response encourages speculation, it’s inevitable. He is one ( a speculation):  When I was younger I did a number of things of which I am not proud. When they are brought to my attention, I don’t say that someone else did it. I may try to explain; I may apologize; I never blame others.

Update December 26th 2011. The questions have been  amplified  over the past couple of days about Ron Paul’s past statements or associations. He says the statements are not his,  nor are the newsletters containing the statements. But one has to guess that he knew the people who were putting out newsletters entitled “Ron Paul Newsletter.” Hence the question about Paul’s “associations.” When the time comes and Congressman Paul is president,  I will say that the disturbing questions about whether Ron Paul is a racist or was a racist, were put up in a blog, called “Facts Matter.” Whoever is the man behind “Facts Matter” is a completely different question, obviously. Don’t be absurd!

And no, I am not calling Mr Paul a liar. I think rather that he is irresponsible and petulant, and perhaps a little cracked. Remember that he chose to tell  us in a presidential debate with precious little time allotted to him that the US armed forces in Iraq and Afghanistan spent “20 billion dollars” each year on air conditioning. You could buy some nice small countries for that kind of dough.

 

Republican Sins: Mitt, and Ron, and Newt

The much-derided Republican presidential debates are doing the job they are supposed to do. They instruct us about important candidates’ features and, by doing this, they winnow them out. They are especially important with respect to the task of showing us the dark side of candidates we like. They force us to be more mature in our enthusiasms than we otherwise would be.

The Fox News-sponsored and conducted on 12/16/11 was head and shoulders above the predecessors in terms of intellectual conduct, in terms of dignity. Nothing surprising there but it’s worth mentioning because it’s chic in some environments to treat Fox as it were beyond the realm of intellectual responsibility. Conservatives who don’t watch television have been infected by their liberal buddies (who certainly don’t watch Fox either). It’s a cheap way to join the elite. It beats reading books!

Face it, there are only three candidates left. The others – fairly or unfairly – appear as lightweights, in terms of this forthcoming election. At this point, I am about ready to stop learning anything about any of the main three. I am getting this sense of redundancy that tells you you might just as well watch a movie.

During the debate, Mitt Romney convinced me in a few words that he did not understand the basics of this country’s immigration laws. He said something about illegal aliens presently in the country having to return home and go to the end of the line and, once there, they could apply for “permanent residency or even for citizenship if that’s what they want.” I have written on this blog about the widespread ignorance of our immigration laws among conservatives. (Search.) Romney committed three mistakes of fact in a bout two sentences.

First, the “line” is so long that illegal immigrants with American-born babies largely would not make it back until their children were of college-age. Romney did not think he was making this kind of pitiless statement. He thought he was being eminently reasonable. Then, there is the fact that “permanent residency” status and citizenship are not alternatives to each other but sequential events.

I keep asserting that illegal immigration is the wrong hill to die for for conservatives, in part but not only because you can’t fight effectively if you know little about what you are fighting. There are other reasons. Yet, if you know that a large part of your potential electorate is agitated by a certain topic you should certainly inform yourself on it. That’s especially true if the information is easy to obtain and not complicated. Romney’s superb indifference to facts on immigration tells me something negative about both his personality (lazy) and his intellect. Intelligent men are aware of danger; that’s a minimum.

Romney also said that “very few countries” other than the US enjoy the rule of law. That’s a mediocre high-school student’s view of the world. It’s embarrassing. “Very few” means, at minimum, all the countries of western Europe, most of the former eastern Europe, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore. Israel etc… Why, on the same day as the debate, it was announced that a former two-term French president, a well-liked old man, had been sentenced for small-time graft that had taken place twenty years earlier! Why, isn’t the former President of Israel in jail as I write? No rule of law, indeed!

Romney is a chameleon. He does not know what his color will be tomorrow. He thinks he can always count on having learned advisers who will tell him what color to take on. In that situation, there is no compunction to burden one’s brain with trivial knowledge such as the basics of immigration law one is a discussing in a centrally important debate.

Another thing, about the revealing virtues of debates: The more Romney brags about his long career in the private sector, the less I think it’s important. You don’t really need twenty years in the private sector to understand markets. At least, there are diminishing returns. Three economics classes and occasional reading of the Wall Street Journal will get you 90% there, I think. Incidentally, I emerged from teaching for 25 years in a business school impressed with the number of downright fallacies business decision-makers usually carry in their minds. I was also taken by their retrospective blindness to the consequences of their own actions: I did exactly this at Pepsi in 1983 therefore it will work just fine for Apple in 1992. (I may have the years wrong; it does not matter).

I share most of Ron Paul’s views about how government is several times larger than it needs to be. I would subscribe to most of the radical measures he has announced to reduce the size of the federal government. Nevertheless, I have trouble imagining circumstances when I would vote for him for president. He gave more reasons for my acute concern in the debate. I think that pretty much most of what he affirms is false. Here is an example no one in the media has commented on. He said that this “country is completely bankrupt.”

First when a government is bankrupt, it does not mean that the country it tries to government is bankrupt. It can be; it does not have to be. The federal government still only accounts only for one in five dollars in the US. This means that if you told everyone to stop moving money around, at any one time, you would find only one in five dollars in some federal hands. Certainly government expenditures have effects, sometimes profound effects, on private wealth; they are not one and the same. In fact, in the perfect libertarian society – the one Paul he says he aspires to – the government would be starving and private parties would be rich.

Second, the federal government is not “bankrupt.” I, and conservatives in general, fear that it’s moving toward bankruptcy. We fear even more that, without ever reaching bankruptcy, federal debt will impose an inhumane burden on our children. But there is near-objective proof that the federal government is nowhere near bankruptcy. Private parties, individuals, companies at home and abroad, foreign governments, are still rushing to buy American government federal bonds. That’s federal debt. Their confidence is so great that they are buying at a time when those bonds are paying next to no interest.

Congressman Paul does not know what he is talking about or his words exceed his knowledge; he exaggerates for effect. Reminds me of someone, or some ones. (More on this below.)

Mr Paul also said, à propos of nothing, “To declare war on 3,5 billion Muslims…” No US official ever did that, no one ever came close, no opposition figure did either, not unless you assume that declaring war on the violent jihadists who conduct terror against Americans is the same as declaring war on all Muslims. Strange twist of perception!

I don’t hold it against Congressman Paul that he has secret information that no one else has demonstrating to him that Iran does not have a nuclear weapon and is not working toward one. Neither do I mind that he, alone, has knowledge of a carefully guarded secret: How many nuclear warheads Israel possesses. (By the way, Paul says 300. I wonder what Israel would do with so many on such a small territory. I mean the whole Middle-East rather than Israel itself.)

I don’t mind Mr Paul’s deviousness. It does remind me however of my three-year old grand-daughter subterfuges when she has been caught, she knows she has been caught, but will still not acknowledge whose hand was in which…. Mr Paul was asked three times in three different ways what he would do if he were President and if he received incontrovertible proof that the Islamic Republic of Iran actually possesses nuclear weapons. Each time he insisted that there was no such proof, that the Iranian nuclear program was all illusion and that it was an understandable response to Iran being “encircled.” (I don’t know how you can have it both ways.) In other words, each time, he changed the subject because he did not want to answer that straightforward question that might arise in any presidency and with respect to any number of countries other than Iran.

Understand my point: You can answer this kind of hypothetical question irrespective of what you believe about its premise. You can always say, “ I don’t think it does…If it did, if, I would do the following….” If you are going to be Commander-in- Chief, you have to answer this kind of hypothetical question. To refuse to do it is dishonest or childish. Mr Paul is not dishonest; he holds to his line of thinking with remarkable firmness. The problem is that part of him enjoys affirming things that no one believes. He likes to be in your face if you are one of the uninitiated. He likes to be bad. He is petulant.

I ask myself who Ron Paul reminds me of besides my high-spirited grand-daughter. First, he reminds me of the New Left leaders I knew in the seventies who never stopped affirming that the North Vietnamese Communists were going to create a workers’ paradise as soon as they won in the south of the country. They kept affirming that as workers were fleeing Vietnam in leaky boats by the hundreds of thousands. Second, he reminds me of spokespeople for the current climate change movement who will keep talking the same talk as the public evidence of their mendaciousness piles up at their feet. With both comparisons, I am referring to style, of course, not to content. Ron Paul is not a Communist and he is not a global warming advocate. (I have to state the obvious because some of my casual readers are silly.)

And then, there is Newt Gingrich. He is obviously the best informed and the most intelligent of all the candidates for President (of all parties). He speaks to the issues. He never fails to answer questions. He does so rationally and clearly. His view of American exceptionalism matches mine. He is decisive. He would be good in a crisis, including as a Commander-in Chief. And yet, yet, I agree with just about every negative thing that’s been said about Gingrich. He did seem to endorse the climate change madness. He became involved in bio-fuel boondoggles when it was predictable that they were boondoggles. He did earn piles of money being a de facto consultant with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. He had every right too, of course, as a private citizen. I am very, very sorry he denies it though he does not do it petulantly but really, really hoping it will pass, like a kidney stone. There are style issues too: I keep wondering what would make a small-time history professor in a small university even want to have a $500,000 line of credit at Tiffany’s. Hunger in men that age troubles me.

I am surely glad I don’t have to vote tomorrow. I trust I will know more in a few weeks. Things are looking good, in fact; I understand the candidates a lot better than I did after the first debate.

Wednesday, 21 Dec 2011 06:05 PM

A few days after I posted this essay, Thomas Sowell pretty much made up my mind for me. Herd is the link to NewsMax:

Read more on Newsmax.com: Thomas Sowell: I’ll Take Gingrich over Romney
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Bad Climate on Global Warming

The Durbang conference on climate change ended with a whimper as it richly deserved to do. (Did I say “Durbang” ? I am sorry, I meant “Durban,” in South Africa.) It’s simple my friends: If you have a good cause, you don’t need to lie for it , you don’t need to dissimulate, you don’t need to demonize adversaries, you don’t need to blacklist opponents

Note: Sorry, sometimes I don’t know how to control the font on this blog. I know it’s pathetic.

Here are the two questions I would would have expected good journalists to ask. I think none did because most journalists are adherents of the climate change cults and others are asleep or they have given up. Here are the questions:

1 CO2 in the atmosphere has decreased by how much as a result of observance of the Kyoto Accord by those who observed it? (I am not petty, I will take any reasonable back-of-the-envelop estimate.)

2 If all countries, including India, China, and of course, the US, agreed to reduce their CO2 emission by whatever number Greenies consider reasonable, average global temperatures would decrease by how much?Here gain, I am not hard to please.

If you manage to get answers to these obvious questions, you will be shocked. Don’t worry, you won’t.

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I was wrong yesterday when I predicted you couldn’t get answers to two sensitive questions. I had  raised two questions about global warming damage control on Facebook. As fate (or reality) would have it, both questions are answered today (12/12/1) in the Wall Street Journal: If we (the world) reduced CO2 emissions by 50% below 1992 level (1992!) by the year 2050, the difference in temperature would be .2 Fahrenheit, also by 2050. That’s 1/5 of a degree! You might remember this as the 50/50/20% scenario.

The man who gives this answer believes that there is man-made global warming. His name is Bjorn Lomborg. He is the author of two important books: “The Skeptical Environmentalist” and of ” Cool It.” Both books are easy to find and easy to read. Lomborg is a statistician by trade and training.

See also the “Climate Change” link on this blog. It leads to another blog that always has very serious material on the topic.

Libertarian Pacifism vs Liberal Pacifism: What I Learned by Arguing with Libertarians

I think there are three good reasons, and many bad reasons, to argue about politics. The first good reason is also the least important. It’s to convince the other guy, the one with whom you argue, of the validity of your views against his. The second reason is to persuade mostly passive spectators to join you and to forsake the views the other guy supports. The third reason to argue is to better understand your own views.

The first good reason is not very good. As you may have noticed, the other guy never breaks up the debate to say, “You are right; my viewpoint has been wrong, ill-thought out. I am joining your faction or your party.” Instead, when you succeed in influencing the other guy the fact comes out far from your presence. Mostly, you don’t even hear about it. Sometimes, it takes several years. I know this because it happened to me; once. I understood the validity of an interlocutor’s position ten years later. I tried to tell him but I couldn’t trace him.

The second reason to argue speaks for itself. It’s exploitive really but mutual exploitation is not really exploitation. Or, if the other guy is so simple that he does not understand that you are using him to influence others, you should not be arguing with him anyway. (Same thing as talking kindergartners out of their juice money, or really plain girls out of… well you can finish the thought.)

The third reason is by far the best. I don’t know exactly what I think until I have heard it coming from my mouth with great élan and yet sounding shockingly stupid. I am often vague in my own mind about what I believe to be true until someone else points out the absurdity of one variant of one particular interpretation of my vague belief. Often, others force me to tighten my arguments; sometimes, they force me to abandon them. Nearly always, opponents induce me to be more articulate. I respond well to partial failure, including partial failure to make my point. I know others who do too. Many of my students did although they denied it.

Those who more or less follow this blog will have noticed that frequently, I criticize the positions of Libertarians, that often, I get into arguments with individual libertarians who may or may not be Libertarians (and some who may be closet Libertarians). The arguments always revolve about military action. In every other way, I am close to very close to mainstream libertarian positions. Foreign policy and the desirability of bearing arms abroad are the only reason I cannot be a real libertarian. Those are not trivial reasons. I am quite sure there are tens of thousands like me, libertarian-leaning conservatives who think it’s not wise to espouse dogmatically pacifist positions. Libertarian theoreticians, by the way, will insist strongly that they are not pacifists. Their argument is based on tiny technicalities. Let me explain what I have come to understand as a result of my encounters with those people. First our crucial area of agreement about how things work. (I am repeating myself, I have said numerous times what I say just below.)

Every war expands the capacity, the importance, the reach of government, technically, the power of the state, relative to civil society. And every expansion of the state reduces the area left for individual freedom and for voluntary cooperative enterprise. It is rarely the case that an expansion of of the state is subsequently reversed. It follows form this succinct description that every libertarian should have a horror of war, completely aside from humanitarian pacifism. I share this sentiment.

My estrangement from mainstream libertarians and from Libertarians exists because of our different transition scenarios. I see differently, or I simply see in my mind’s eye and they don’t, the most likely process by which this society can move toward radically smaller government. I think there are two archetypes of transitions. The first one is the Somalia scenario: The organs of government fall apart of their own accord as a result of civil war or other catastrophes. I don’t want a society with small government hard enough to wish the Somalian fate upon American society.

The second scenario entails a democratic and probably gradual take-over of the organs of government by political forces that desire smaller government. We are seeing this possibility more clearly today, as I write, because of the Tea Party movement inside and outside of the Republican Party. Of course, such a peaceful take-over can only happen in a society that already enjoys constitutional government. Roughly, this means a society where elections are fair and honest and perceived to be so, where the overwhelming mass of the people abide by election results, and a society where courts are able to arbitrate decisively differences concerning election results. Obviously, the USA would be a good example of a society with constitutional government (excepting Chicago and New Orleans,of course)

If constitutional government is threatened, the likelihood of such a desirable transition is also threatened. Of course, an issue of proportionality arises here. It’s not the case that everytime a fool issues a threat against the Republic, the Republic is actually threatened. After all, Timothy McVay, a successful terrorist if there ever was one, failed absolutely to change the social order or the political order of this country. But take the 9/11 attack, another successful act of terrorism, in operational terms. It caused less than one tenth of the deaths that take place on American highways in a normal year. As I never tire of pointing out, by the way, about one half of highway deaths are connected to alcohol and therefore, completely avoidable. They are in fact a form of terrorism allowed by our collective passivity, if you will. ( I say that alcohol- related accidents are avoidable based on the following assumptions: If the first DUI were punishable by a lifetime driving prohibition and the second by a five- year prison sentence, you would quickly see the incidence of that behavior go down to near zero. This wouldn’t happen because drunk drivers would stop drinking but because they would stop driving as their friends would take away the keys. Others would have five years to dry up and reconsider. During those years, they wouldn’t kill anyone with a vehicle.) The 9/11 attack was very brilliantly organized which makes us forget how modest the means engaged were. I think I could have financed it entirely with a second mortgage on my house.

Is there anyone who doubts that the 9/11 cheap terrorist attack provoked deep and lasting disturbances in our economy? Is there anyone who doubts that such disturbances usually have grave political consequences even if no one can describe them well at the time? Is there any libertarian who does not believe that those political consequences severely undermine the credibility of arguments in favor of a weak state?

And more directly, isn’t it the case that spectacular and violent attacks against a society with constitutional government make more palatable security measures that depart from the society’s own constitutional tradition. Attacks, and even the threat of attacks, make citizens more attached to their state, more unconditionally attached to it and, accordingly, more willing to accept a measure of authoritarianism. I argue that successful attacks do more harm to the cause than do the measures taken to protect against such attacks. It’s useful to remember that the Patriot Act was a response, not a preventive measure.

And I have not forgotten the issue of assessing the credibility of threats against the Republic. I am only trying to establish that there exist threats that are credible enough to require actions protective of our constitutional arrangement. Such actions include pro-active measures abroad and the possibility of military attacks against a foreign entity. I am attentive to suggestions concerning the thesis that such actions are never necessary. Take good note of the fact that it’s the only thing I am trying to establish here. I am explicitly not arguing that the wars the US has fought were all necessary. There are wars of choice, such as the Vietnam War – that I opposed – and the liberation of Iraq – which I supported and still support. Yet, the fact that many politicians are wont to see snakes under every rock does not prove that there are no snakes under rocks.

The libertarian pacifist answer to this line of argument is dual. First, they seem to say: Attacks on the US, in general, and current attacks by Islamist terrorists, in particular, are merely responses to American own foreign policy. (I mean by “Islamist” simply that the terrorists involved declare that they do what they do in the name of Islam. I am obviously not qualified to judge the validity of their claim.) The absurdity of the “response” assertion is obvious if you make any effort to read the Islamists’ own abundant declarations. The response receives superficial support from the fact that Islamists also affirm that Islamist terrorism is a response to American and Western actions. That’s not all that they assert, however. It’s clear that we are the Great Satan, first of all because of who we are. We would be the Great Satan if there were not a single American soldier anywhere outside the US. Although the regretted Bin Laden had threatened the US in connection with American military presence in Saudi Arabia, the 9/11 attack took place after the US forces had vacated that country, not as a means to make them move. Notably Al Qaida and all of its local branches (which may be all that’s left of it, I understand), and the Islamic Republic of Iran have never offered the US conditional peace. Neither of these entities ever said, “You stay home and we will restrain any terrorist organization plotting against you.” They have made no such offer because it would destroy their very reason for being.

Libertarians who affect to believe that American actions constitute a perfect or near-perfect explanation for Islamist terrorism are just not serious, I think. It’s strange that many are well-informed people in every other way. I believe that their position if in fact anchored in stubborn, primitive, and presumptuous American isolationism dating back to the days when a warship took three weeks to arrive from Europe if it arrived at all, and when there were only en ships in all of Latin America . Those people are opposed to every proactive defense on foreign soil or even in international waters. They will tell you with a straight face (you can sometimes discern a straight face on Facebook!) that one should never direct a weapon at anyone unless one is actually attacked. Those are people whose idea of a constitutional war begins with a Pearl Harbor! And they will sometimes maintain that a joint resolution of Congress passed with a huge majority is not a proper declaration of war.

The psychological underpinning of this isolationism rests, it seems to me, in a distant and somewhat haughty 18^th century view of the rest of the world. The rest of the world, un-America, in this perspective, is quarrelsome, petty, with strong criminal proclivities, fundamentally incapable of learning or of improving itself. This perspective nourishes a peculiar version of American exceptionalism made of 90% contempt. Those who hold it are often easy to spot because they rely excessively on the term “ Old World,” happily conflating the United Kingdom with Uzbekistan and Japan with Burkina Fasso.

And in this view lies the a crucial cultural difference between Left-liberal pacifism of the well-known type and the growing libertarian pacifism. Liberals profess to reject American military intervention abroad because of a strong myth of people of color’s virtuousness. According to this liberal myth, people of color, non-whites, seldom ever do anything wrong by any standard. When they do, as when they eat their neighbors, for example, it’s always somehow because of something or other that Westerners, Whites, usually Americans have dome to them, or to someone else. Or something. And then, of course, you shouldn’t do anything to them or in connection with them.

Libertarian pacifism has a significantly different basis that is almost the obverse of the first. It’s that the rest of the world is so fundamentally, irreversibly so awful that Americans must avoid it almost all costs. That position is qualified by an “almost” because there has to be room for when the outside world simply bombs one of your cities (Japan) or when it formally announces that it’s going to wage war on you (Germany).

The ethnocentrism underlying libertarian pacifism requires willful ignorance, not simply neglect of reality but clenched-jaws blindness. It’s obvious that in every continent and in especially large numbers in Europe, there are millions of people who share, on the whole, most of Americans’ wonderful virtues. Avoiding solidarity with such people is morally disgusting and strategically irresponsible. When they suffer, we suffer in short order. When they thrive, we thrive. The fewer of them there are the more vulnerable we are. Those who hate them want to kill us too. Just consider our collective disappointment at the electoral defeat of the secular and democratic forces in Egypt right now (December 2011). Are those Americans who are disappointed just being silly? Nevertheless, there are times when the avoidance of foreign entanglement is the only realistic stance, it’s true. But, erecting impotence as the main basis for principled collective action seems absurd.

The second thing I leaned from my interactions with libertarians severally defined (see above) is also the second basis of their adherence to the principle of non-intervention. Libertarians assert that non-intervention in the affairs of foreign countries is somehow a morally superior position. Whenever you argue about this matter with a libertarian, or if you listen to Republican candidate Congressman Ron Paul, you will hear a recurrent theme: We should mind our own business. The context always shows that “our” has a national definition. They don’t say that Presbyterians should not intervene in the affairs of Lutherans, or that Texans should leave Coloradans alone, or that football fans should not criticize basketball fans. (They might agree to all the above bye-the-bye but it’s not the point they make.) In fact, they are asserting unambiguously the moral position that Americans should not interfere with what goes one in foreign countries.

Most countries today are technically “nation-states,” that is, states based more or less on a single nation. The key word here is “state.” But remember that objecting to the existence of the state in general, or, at least wishing to see the importance of the state remain small vis-a-vis civil society is at the heart of libertarianisms of all breeds (mine included). So, suddenly, those who don’t like states put themselves in a position to defend the sanctity of the boundaries of that to which they object. Does this make sense?

They say in effect: We don’t want states because they are immoral but morality demands that states must be respected as if they were moral entities.

Incidentally, there is gross indifference, a massive lack of compassion also involved in this supposedly moral posture of non-intervention. This is puzzling because many libertarians are also, individually, Christians (although Christianity is not a necessary foundation of libertarianism ). The mental gymnastics to which Christian non-interventionists must subject themselves give me a headache. They have to pretend to believe, for example, that American military intervention in Bosnia where 10,000 civilians were killed in one city alone in the years 1992 to 1996 was a morally worse act than continued passivity would have been. They must force themselves to think that somehow things would have turned out better if America had let the massacre continue. Same thing with the subsequent use of American armed force in Kosovo to stop the completion of a genocide in progress there. Memory refresher: Serbian fascist dictator (formerly Communist dictator) Milosevic in the Fall of 1998 ordered all ethnic Albanian civilians who were citizens of Serbia to take to the roads and leave. They began to do so by their hundreds of thousands, which would unavoidably have led to the deaths of thousands of the aged, the sick, and small children. The US Air Force and Navy carrier planes eventually reversed this ethnic cleansing.

Non-interventionists must also think that the slaughter of between 500,000 and one million people in Rwanda in 1994, over only three months, would have been even worse had the US (or others) sent a dozen warplanes to bomb a single radio station directing the massacre. (The low estimate of the victims comes from the always cautious Human Rights Watch.) For me, it’s difficult to imagine much that would be worse than the attempted and largely successful violent liquidation of large minority of the population of a small country. By the same token, the continuing deadly ethnic cleansing of Darfur, in the Sudan, where rape is used systematically as a weapon of war, evokes only indifference among libertarians. By the way, the arguments for non-intervention in Rwanda, and now in Darfur, are such that it’s difficult not to think about racial prejudice: Black people in remote parts of Africa are eviscerating one another? What do you expect? That’s what they do!

In summary: You can’t seriously argue that the time to fight enemies is strictly only when they are on the beach in Malibu or in the New York City subway. You can’t be taken seriously, and you should not take yourself seriously, if you say one day that you want no more state and tomorrow that state boundaries are so sacred that they must not even be breached to stop the massacre of innocents

And no, I have not changed my mind: War, even the preparation for war, are inimical to the realization of a greater sphere of individual freedom. It’s a real dilemma, no question about it. I don’t see that libertarians will make much progress toward resolving it by pretending it’s not in the room with us, like a dinosaur.

And, as one of the Founding Fathers so aptly remarked: “ If we make ourselves into sheep, the wolves will eat us.” And that’s no individual freedom!

“Occupy ….”: An Unintended Experiment in Libertarianism

The Occupy movement is, among other things and a little paradoxically, another experiment with libertarian ideas. One crucial question is this; Who performs services we have come to consider necessary when no one has taxing authority?

The Occupy encampment in Santa Cruz displays about forty tents. As I have said before, it would be foolish to deduce any sort of precise estimate of the actual population of campers from this figure. (“ Woman’s Mind; The Mysteries of Occupy….” posted October 27^th). You can’t even assume that there is one camper per tent. Some campers go home and leave their tent behind when it gets cold at night.

Whatever the case may be, in the course, of twenty-four hours, there is enough human traffic to necessitate access to a toilet. The county authorities may have discouraged the use of country building toilets or else, the campers took it to heart to demonstrate that they are responsible and self-sufficient. At any rate, there is, or there was, on the camping site a Porta-Pottie-type booth sitting (so to speak ) on a trailer. The trailer itself is, or was, hooked to a pick-up truck. For five days, there was a big hand-painted sign on the booth saying, “Dump ride needed.” I think five days is too long to wait unlike someone had the foresight to make th request well in advance of objective need. I am not expert but I don’t think the capacity of the contraption much exceeds five days even of light use. Are you with me?

To go back to my original question about libertarianism, of course, I believe that in time someone would offer the dumping service for pay. With a multiplication of sites in need, the service delivery would become more efficient and cheaper. Competition would arise, insuring a fair price (There is no other definition of “fair,” I think.) However this non-authoritarian, market response would require that someone, or some ones, pay the honey-dippers’ bill. And if you passed the hat around, there would be a chance that only the richest, or only the individuals with the most sensitive noses, or with the greatest concern for hygiene, would contribute.

And, here you go, with the “free rider problem,” the single most common justification for the existence of coerced payments that is, for taxes. Note that the last sentence in the last paragraph above points to an especially vexing implication of the free rider problem. It’s the likelihood that the virtuous would end paying the fare of the moral swines that oink among us.