On the importance of a 'rape' exception in abortion bans: I've seen many pro-life pundits dismiss the common three abortion exceptions (rape, incest, mother's life in danger) as distractions and rare. Problem is, for any legislation as personal and invasive as an abortion ban (which is the goal of pro-lifers), these exceptional circumstances require exceptional remedies. Failing to find said remedies would create new problems and quickly undermine the laws.
Take rape. The pro-life position is, 'abortion is murder and outweighs the woman's right to choose'. In the case of rape, an absolutist pro-life position would be that abortion is still murder and the fetus wasn't guilty of a crime. Here's an example of that position (towards the bottom). It's one thing to argue that an abortion in the case of rape is wrong; it's quite another to legally require the victims of rape to bear the children of their attackers. The difference between 'ought' and 'must' is huge, and pro-life absolutists fail to understand the importance. If abortion is outlawed in the case of rape, the rapist is given indefinite control of the victim.
Along those lines, there's an even more fundamental reason to allow abortion in the case of rape: having it banned gives rapists an incentive to commit the crime. Rape is often about power rather than lust, and few things are more powerful than procreation. Forcing the victim to bear and likely care for the child, passing on genes without needing a willing partner, and... well I'm sure there are other perverse incentives rapists could conjure up for themselves. The point is that to the extent that willing procreation is vital to humanity itself, even sacred, it ought not be perverted by forcing women to have the babies of rapists.
You might ask yourself, "is banning abortion in the case of rape even an issue?", and to that extent I say, yes. Polls show that 10-15% of the population is pro-life absolutist, and several percent more favor banning abortions where the mother's life isn't at stake. This represents anywhere from 30-50+% of the overall pro-life movement. What's more, absolutists represent the majority of funding and energy in the pro-life movement. If Roe v Wade is overturned pro-life legislation will be passed in many states, and take effect in states where laws are written to begin if Roe is overturned. An example of the latter is Louisiana, and that law does not allow for abortions in the case of rape.
To complicate things further, even if an abortion ban allows such abortions, it's crucial that a good system be in place for deciding such situations. For instance, would the standard of proof be a legal conviction, or would it be lower than that? Would litigation be expedited, or would lawyers be able to drag things out until delivery? Go too far in the direction of the victim and you risk branding innocent men rapists. Go too far in the direction of the accused and you risk a de facto ban, harming the victims.
I'm a firm believer in 'defeating' political opponents with reason; converting them to your side. Pro-lifers who either haven't considered or refuse to consider the very real consequences of an abortion ban make it much harder to convince pro-choicers to switch, especially women. To a large extent absolutists do the pro-life cause a disservice, because pro-choicers fear that the end of Roe v Wade would lead to abortion policy being set by the kind of people who give no regard to the potential horror visited on rape victims. Serious abortion opponents *must* give more thought to a post-Roe world if they want to become a clear majority in the nation.
On the presidential election: The more I think about it, the more convinced I am that there hasn't been a president in modern times whose policies I broadly agreed with. Not even Reagan. Coolidge probably comes closest of those in the last century, but even he was tied to things like racist immigration quotas and appointing a Supreme Court Justice who did immense damage to the Originalist cause.
Duncan Hunter and Fred Thompson aren't perfect, but they at least campaigned as unabashed right-wingers. John McCain's flip-flopping and unpredictable populist outbursts, coupled with a guaranteed Democratic congress and his desire to be seen as 'bipartisan', means he won't be the kind of leader I'm hoping for. If you're familiar with my positions you know I dread a win by either Democrat. Thus, whoever wins it means at least 4 more years of disappointment.
What I'd like to know is, are any of you out there actually enthusiastic for the policies set out by one of the three remaining candidates? I wonder what it's like to have a candidate you agree with in a position to lead the most powerful nation in the world. Must be nice. Like being a Patriots fan.
Thursday, April 17, 2008
Tuesday, March 18, 2008
EJ Dionne's anti-capitalism meltdown
EJ Dionne of the Washington Post is normally someone I categorize as someone I disagree with, but understand. This column, however, goes off the rails.
1. What, exactly, is with his use of 'capitalists' in the first sentence? Couldn't that theoretically mean everyone in the private sector? Isn't the guy who runs the car wash down the street a capitalist just as much as the hedge fund manager jumping out of his 50th story office window? It's that kind of careless verbiage that will turn people off from your point of view, especially right off the bat.
1a. What conservative in his right mind would say that *all* capitalists are good and perfect? I see references to capitalism and 'the free market'. Part of capitalism is that businesses which are run poorly go out of business. What conservative disagrees with that? If managers at an investment firm flush the firm's assets down the drain with bad investments, they deserve to be out on the street. Who is EJ responding to? He makes a lot of sarcastic quips along these lines and it's a strawman argument.
2. How on earth does the government have its hands off of the financial sector? Is the federal reserve not a government agency? Isn't it generally agreed that the housing bubble was born and nurtured by too-low too-long interest rates courtesy of the fed? This is a recurring theme.
3. What conservatives believe that the government should pick up the tab for failing firms? That said firms are seeking relief is no shock; any number of corporations rely on political patronage and pork and corporate welfare. It's something worth condemning these *particular* capitalists over, and their governmental enablers. It's not a particularly useful club to use against conservatives unless he has concrete evidence of right-wing desire for bailouts.
1. What 'capitalist' doesn't believe in the possibility of asset bubbles and recessions? The pure free market cure is to have bubbles pop, the asset (in this case housing) decline to a sustainable level, and whoever goes out of business as a result, tough. Now, I'm of the opinion that there ought to be *some* government action in response to situations like these. Some amount of lending, some amount of interest rate lowering, evaluate what laws and policies might be preventing a recovery, that sort of thing. But nothing in this, not even the collapse of Bear Sterns, is anywhere close to a 'near meltdown of capitalism', and it certainly doesn't repudiate capitalist principles. In THIS case, as with the tech stock bubble, the biggest losers are the guys with the seven-figure salaries. They're the ones with the most invested in failing outfits. And they're the ones who deserve to take the hit, not taxpayers.
2. Again, EJ brings up an example of government not doing enough and says the problem is with unfettered capitalism. The Great Depression, however, shows the opposite. Hoover and congress did several things to shove the economy into the dark depths of depression, notably the Revenue Act and the loathsome Smoot-Hawley tariff. Hoover tried to tax and spend and regulate his way to a good economy and made things worse. FDR could have pushed to remove the tariffs and lower taxes in order to help consumers and stimulate investment and entrepreneurship, but instead piled on more spending, more taxes and more regulation. One can argue that in the end government saved the day with spending on WW2, but it's difficult to blame the Great Depression on not enough government action.
The rest of the column goes on in similar fashion: pro-market types should feel sorry and embrace more taxes and entitlements. Lots of vitriol and emotion, but the end EJ only wound up defeating his own made-up mirage of conservatives and 'capitalists'. How exactly Bear Sterns et al. proves that taxes aren't high enough is beyond me.
Never do I want to hear again from my conservative friends about how brilliant capitalists are, how much they deserve their seven-figure salaries, and how government should keep its hands off the private economy. The Wall Street titans have turned into a bunch of welfare clients. They are desperate to be bailed out by government from their own incompetence, and from the deregulatory regime for which they lobbied so hard.
1. What, exactly, is with his use of 'capitalists' in the first sentence? Couldn't that theoretically mean everyone in the private sector? Isn't the guy who runs the car wash down the street a capitalist just as much as the hedge fund manager jumping out of his 50th story office window? It's that kind of careless verbiage that will turn people off from your point of view, especially right off the bat.
1a. What conservative in his right mind would say that *all* capitalists are good and perfect? I see references to capitalism and 'the free market'. Part of capitalism is that businesses which are run poorly go out of business. What conservative disagrees with that? If managers at an investment firm flush the firm's assets down the drain with bad investments, they deserve to be out on the street. Who is EJ responding to? He makes a lot of sarcastic quips along these lines and it's a strawman argument.
2. How on earth does the government have its hands off of the financial sector? Is the federal reserve not a government agency? Isn't it generally agreed that the housing bubble was born and nurtured by too-low too-long interest rates courtesy of the fed? This is a recurring theme.
3. What conservatives believe that the government should pick up the tab for failing firms? That said firms are seeking relief is no shock; any number of corporations rely on political patronage and pork and corporate welfare. It's something worth condemning these *particular* capitalists over, and their governmental enablers. It's not a particularly useful club to use against conservatives unless he has concrete evidence of right-wing desire for bailouts.
But if this near meltdown of capitalism doesn't encourage a lot of people to question the principles they have carried in their heads for the last three decades or so, nothing will. We had already learned the hard way -- in the crash of 1929 and the Depression that followed -- that capitalism is quite capable of running off the rails. Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal was a response to the failure of the geniuses of finance (and their defenders in the economics profession) to realize what was happening or to fix it in time.
1. What 'capitalist' doesn't believe in the possibility of asset bubbles and recessions? The pure free market cure is to have bubbles pop, the asset (in this case housing) decline to a sustainable level, and whoever goes out of business as a result, tough. Now, I'm of the opinion that there ought to be *some* government action in response to situations like these. Some amount of lending, some amount of interest rate lowering, evaluate what laws and policies might be preventing a recovery, that sort of thing. But nothing in this, not even the collapse of Bear Sterns, is anywhere close to a 'near meltdown of capitalism', and it certainly doesn't repudiate capitalist principles. In THIS case, as with the tech stock bubble, the biggest losers are the guys with the seven-figure salaries. They're the ones with the most invested in failing outfits. And they're the ones who deserve to take the hit, not taxpayers.
2. Again, EJ brings up an example of government not doing enough and says the problem is with unfettered capitalism. The Great Depression, however, shows the opposite. Hoover and congress did several things to shove the economy into the dark depths of depression, notably the Revenue Act and the loathsome Smoot-Hawley tariff. Hoover tried to tax and spend and regulate his way to a good economy and made things worse. FDR could have pushed to remove the tariffs and lower taxes in order to help consumers and stimulate investment and entrepreneurship, but instead piled on more spending, more taxes and more regulation. One can argue that in the end government saved the day with spending on WW2, but it's difficult to blame the Great Depression on not enough government action.
The rest of the column goes on in similar fashion: pro-market types should feel sorry and embrace more taxes and entitlements. Lots of vitriol and emotion, but the end EJ only wound up defeating his own made-up mirage of conservatives and 'capitalists'. How exactly Bear Sterns et al. proves that taxes aren't high enough is beyond me.
Tuesday, February 26, 2008
Dissecting anti-war talking points
Normally, I don't go back and attack a columnist after rebutting an article. If it's three people who always write together, I think I can do three. This trio appeared in the "holiday edition" Ditchblog, about 3/4ths of the way down. Before they trotted out a really weak talking point about "strategic drift". Now they're trotting out multiple talking points that, while wrong, are much more serious and deserving of response.
So they start with 'nam, and to an extent they have a point. If a Democrat is elected, pulls out of Iraq, and things go south there, the GOP will bring up various talking points in regards to why they think Democrats are to blame for what happened in Vietnam. Here is the article that does the best job of delivering said talking points I've seen. There are a lot of ways to combat said points, and the three authors decide to wave it away with "fact that the war was lost in Southeast Asia, as opposed to the halls of Congress, is no matter". You can't brush aside Laird's piece so lazily, and Laird is just giving an expanded version of the usual right-wing Vietnam litany.
Moving on, the trio returns to an anti-war beef I can sympathize with.
Dubya, ever the not-so-great-communicator, did not do a very good job of providing a timeframe for the 'political reconciliation' end of things. To the extent that he did, the impression was that it would follow right on the heels of a decline in violence. The surge started up a year ago, reached its manpower peak in June, and by September we had the first round of hearings as to its efficacy. At that point I don't know if any of the 18 benchmarks had been met. What I do know is that more movement has happened on the benchmarks in the last month than in the previous year, and also the strength of the security gains wasn't clear until at least October if not November. Considering the pace at which America's vaunted democracy passes important legislation, just how fast does Iraq need to move on the most important laws imaginable before the entire thing is a failure? Again, this is something that the president should be addressing to the public, rather than me on a blog in response to a newspaper column.
In the short run, nominal insurgent groups were used to help root out al Qaeda cells. In the medium run, the real Sunni power brokers (tribes) are participating exponentially more in governance and Sunnis are joining Iraq's police and military forces by the thousands. The Iraq-based Sunni uprising against Iraq's central government is over as far as being a threat to the nation's integrity, and nearly all Sunni leaders now understand that in order to effect events in Baghdad they have to participate in the political process. Local insurgent groups in Anbar have no more desire to blow up Shiite markets and certainly aren't going to try to overthrow the green zone with the type of arms we gave them. Sunnis are unhappy with the current Iraqi federal government, but are now willing to settle things with words and ballots rather than bullets. The political process is what matters, not loyalty to sitting politicians. It's a tricky but important distinction.
This is wonderful. *Americans* are the cause of conflict, and *other governments* will provide solutions! It's so clear! It's so simple! It's so utterly and obviously wrong!
The rest of the region had their chance in 2005 and 2006. The "cumbersome and clumsy" Americans largely retreated to their bases, an Iraqi federal government was formed, and if the region wanted to promote stability they could have done a diplomatic surge. Instead they aided and condoned the influx of arms and fighters who escalated the sectarian conflict to a boiling point. Saudi Arabia and Syria could have put a lid on al Qaeda; Iran could have put a lid on Sadr. They chose not to. When it looked like Iraq was racked by the exact violence that Korb, Podesta and Takeyh mention above, those governments did exactly the wrong thing if they truly desired stability.
The root cause of violence in Iraq isn't Americans, it's other governments trying to put their favored group on top. Iraq's Sunnis were used as a proxy against the unthinkable prospect of Arab Shiites holding power. Iraq's Shiites, once provoked enough, were used as a proxy to try and liquidate the Sunni population of many neighborhoods and cities. It took a surge of American troops to break huge segments of the Sunni and Shia populations free of that pernicious influence, and if America leaves Iraq en masse it will open the door for those regional actors to resume their proxy war and put a stopper in what political progress there has been. Again I point to the utter lack of political progress in the years of rising violence, compared to the compromises reached in Baghdad just a few months after it was secured.
While I'm going after that paragraph, I'm just stunned that the authors would characterize America's presence in Iraq that way at this point. "Cumbersome and clumsy" is a great way to describe things in 2003. "Cumbersome", not so much after the Iraqi government was in power. "Clumsy" is absolutely the wrong word to describe things under the leadership of Patraeus. What US troops do on the ground right now is nothing short of amazing, and it certainly isn't getting in the way of Iraqi politicians working together. On the contrary: the US has done an incredible amount to foster and facilitate reconciliation between Sunnis and the central government.
They keep layering it on:
Respect for America in the long run is best served by whatever policies best promote stability and democracy in Iraq. Leave the door open for another round of bloodletting, and America will be the worst of all worlds: a hegemon who can't get the job done. America's presence for years was marked by violence without progress; that isn't the case today. If we stay long enough to leave behind a stable, democratic Iraq, that will do far more for US/Muslim relations than heading to the exit a year or two faster.
What's more, the "reservoir of antagonism" is much more complex than Iraq. To the extent that young Arabs are going to take up arms against the infidel, they were already willing to do so for reasons from support of Israel to raunchy pop culture to the invasion of Afghanistan. Moving troops from Mosul to the Pakistani border might play well in blue states and Europe, but it won't make a dent in jihadi sentiment.
Finally, the events of the last two years in Iraq have provided a powerful narrative that is changing the way Muslims look at the war on terror. While al Qaeda has time and again shown its willingness to deliberately slaughter innocents, America has worked hand-in-hand with local groups to bring about security and begin the work of rebuilding. The news on al Jazeera is hardly rose-colored, but it's no longer possible to do the "Americans bad, insurgents good" reporting that used to be the norm. Opinion polls in many countries have demonstrated a decline in support of wholesale terrorist violence in general and al Qaeda specifically. The horror of Muslim-on-Muslim terrorism has been made clear, and that momentum is best maintained by assisting Iraq in wiping out the last terrorist cells and making sure they don't come back.
It would be one thing for them to publish that column a year or two ago, but today I find it very much lacking.
Even a cursory examination of American history reveals the complexity of concluding a war that has taken on such a stark partisan tint. The shadow of Vietnam looms, as it has become standard Republican narrative that back then it was the Democrats in Congress who stabbed America in the back by cutting off funding for a winning cause. The fact that the war was lost in Southeast Asia, as opposed to the halls of Congress, is no matter. The Republican machine will press this same theme should it lose the White House in November. A Democratic administration would be accused of surrendering to evildoers, as once more the dovish successors of George McGovern are wrongly said to have pulled defeat out of the jaws of victory.
So they start with 'nam, and to an extent they have a point. If a Democrat is elected, pulls out of Iraq, and things go south there, the GOP will bring up various talking points in regards to why they think Democrats are to blame for what happened in Vietnam. Here is the article that does the best job of delivering said talking points I've seen. There are a lot of ways to combat said points, and the three authors decide to wave it away with "fact that the war was lost in Southeast Asia, as opposed to the halls of Congress, is no matter". You can't brush aside Laird's piece so lazily, and Laird is just giving an expanded version of the usual right-wing Vietnam litany.
Moving on, the trio returns to an anti-war beef I can sympathize with.
Republicans will claim that after four years of disastrous mistakes, the Bush administration finally got it right with its troop "surge." Yet even despite the loss of nearly 1,000 American lives and the expenditure of $150 billion, the surge has failed in its stated purpose: providing the Iraqi government with the breathing space to pass the 18 legislative benchmarks the Bush administration called vital to political reconciliation. To date it has passed only four.
Dubya, ever the not-so-great-communicator, did not do a very good job of providing a timeframe for the 'political reconciliation' end of things. To the extent that he did, the impression was that it would follow right on the heels of a decline in violence. The surge started up a year ago, reached its manpower peak in June, and by September we had the first round of hearings as to its efficacy. At that point I don't know if any of the 18 benchmarks had been met. What I do know is that more movement has happened on the benchmarks in the last month than in the previous year, and also the strength of the security gains wasn't clear until at least October if not November. Considering the pace at which America's vaunted democracy passes important legislation, just how fast does Iraq need to move on the most important laws imaginable before the entire thing is a failure? Again, this is something that the president should be addressing to the public, rather than me on a blog in response to a newspaper column.
Moreover, as part of the surge, the administration has further undermined Iraq's government by providing arms and money to Sunni insurgent groups even though they have not pledged loyalty to Baghdad.
In the short run, nominal insurgent groups were used to help root out al Qaeda cells. In the medium run, the real Sunni power brokers (tribes) are participating exponentially more in governance and Sunnis are joining Iraq's police and military forces by the thousands. The Iraq-based Sunni uprising against Iraq's central government is over as far as being a threat to the nation's integrity, and nearly all Sunni leaders now understand that in order to effect events in Baghdad they have to participate in the political process. Local insurgent groups in Anbar have no more desire to blow up Shiite markets and certainly aren't going to try to overthrow the green zone with the type of arms we gave them. Sunnis are unhappy with the current Iraqi federal government, but are now willing to settle things with words and ballots rather than bullets. The political process is what matters, not loyalty to sitting politicians. It's a tricky but important distinction.
Beyond the impracticalities of the surge, it is important to realistically measure the costs and consequences of a categorical U.S. withdrawal. The prevailing doomsday scenario suggests that an American departure would lead to genocide and mayhem. But is that true? Iraq today belongs to Iraqis; it is an ancient civilization with its own norms and tendencies. It is entirely possible that in the absence of a cumbersome and clumsy American occupation, Iraqis will make their own bargains and compacts, heading off the genocide that many seem to anticipate. Opponents of the war seem to have far more confidence in Iraqis' abilities to manage their affairs than do war advocates. Moreover, a U.S. withdrawal would finally compel the region to claim Iraq, forcing the Saudis, Iranians, Jordanians and others to decide whether a civil war is in their interests. Faced with that stark reality, they may seek to mediate rather than inflame Iraq's squabbles.
This is wonderful. *Americans* are the cause of conflict, and *other governments* will provide solutions! It's so clear! It's so simple! It's so utterly and obviously wrong!
The rest of the region had their chance in 2005 and 2006. The "cumbersome and clumsy" Americans largely retreated to their bases, an Iraqi federal government was formed, and if the region wanted to promote stability they could have done a diplomatic surge. Instead they aided and condoned the influx of arms and fighters who escalated the sectarian conflict to a boiling point. Saudi Arabia and Syria could have put a lid on al Qaeda; Iran could have put a lid on Sadr. They chose not to. When it looked like Iraq was racked by the exact violence that Korb, Podesta and Takeyh mention above, those governments did exactly the wrong thing if they truly desired stability.
The root cause of violence in Iraq isn't Americans, it's other governments trying to put their favored group on top. Iraq's Sunnis were used as a proxy against the unthinkable prospect of Arab Shiites holding power. Iraq's Shiites, once provoked enough, were used as a proxy to try and liquidate the Sunni population of many neighborhoods and cities. It took a surge of American troops to break huge segments of the Sunni and Shia populations free of that pernicious influence, and if America leaves Iraq en masse it will open the door for those regional actors to resume their proxy war and put a stopper in what political progress there has been. Again I point to the utter lack of political progress in the years of rising violence, compared to the compromises reached in Baghdad just a few months after it was secured.
While I'm going after that paragraph, I'm just stunned that the authors would characterize America's presence in Iraq that way at this point. "Cumbersome and clumsy" is a great way to describe things in 2003. "Cumbersome", not so much after the Iraqi government was in power. "Clumsy" is absolutely the wrong word to describe things under the leadership of Patraeus. What US troops do on the ground right now is nothing short of amazing, and it certainly isn't getting in the way of Iraqi politicians working together. On the contrary: the US has done an incredible amount to foster and facilitate reconciliation between Sunnis and the central government.
They keep layering it on:
The strategic necessities of ending the war have never been more compelling. In today's Middle East, America is neither liked nor respected.
...
America's occupation of Iraq is estranging an entire generation of Arab youths, creating a reservoir of antagonism that will take decades to overcome. A Democratic president who may enjoy a modest honeymoon in the Middle East simply by virtue of not being George W. Bush can take a giant step toward reclaiming America's practical interests and moral standing by leaving Iraq.
Respect for America in the long run is best served by whatever policies best promote stability and democracy in Iraq. Leave the door open for another round of bloodletting, and America will be the worst of all worlds: a hegemon who can't get the job done. America's presence for years was marked by violence without progress; that isn't the case today. If we stay long enough to leave behind a stable, democratic Iraq, that will do far more for US/Muslim relations than heading to the exit a year or two faster.
What's more, the "reservoir of antagonism" is much more complex than Iraq. To the extent that young Arabs are going to take up arms against the infidel, they were already willing to do so for reasons from support of Israel to raunchy pop culture to the invasion of Afghanistan. Moving troops from Mosul to the Pakistani border might play well in blue states and Europe, but it won't make a dent in jihadi sentiment.
Finally, the events of the last two years in Iraq have provided a powerful narrative that is changing the way Muslims look at the war on terror. While al Qaeda has time and again shown its willingness to deliberately slaughter innocents, America has worked hand-in-hand with local groups to bring about security and begin the work of rebuilding. The news on al Jazeera is hardly rose-colored, but it's no longer possible to do the "Americans bad, insurgents good" reporting that used to be the norm. Opinion polls in many countries have demonstrated a decline in support of wholesale terrorist violence in general and al Qaeda specifically. The horror of Muslim-on-Muslim terrorism has been made clear, and that momentum is best maintained by assisting Iraq in wiping out the last terrorist cells and making sure they don't come back.
It would be one thing for them to publish that column a year or two ago, but today I find it very much lacking.
Friday, February 22, 2008
Various comments
On the election: It shouldn't shock any of you to learn that I prefer McCain to Obama and Clinton, and that I would have preferred someone else to McCain. If anyone is interested I'll go into detail about why, but it should be clear enough from my past writings.
One thing the 2008 race has made crystal-clear is that if you want a candidate who really fits your beliefs, you need to worry about PRIMARIES the most. If you're a Democrat, you could go for populism (Edwards) or 'hope' (Obama) or competence (Clinton) or down-the-line progressive dogma (Kucinich) or... well there was Dodd and Richardson and Biden at some point and I'm not sure what they brought to the table. But if you think taxes aren't progressive enough, you want out of Iraq, you want universal healthcare, you want judges who support Roe v Wade, and so on and so forth, you had plenty to pick from. I haven't seen any left-wing commentators who didn't like at least one of the initial pool of candidates.
The same goes for the right, at least if you really surveyed the field. For all the grousing about how none of the 'major' candidates followed the straight-and-narrow of conservative dogma, there was Duncan Hunter who got zero support from the conservative establishment and never gained traction. Hunter was as conservative as you could ask for. Incredibly, the ins-and-outs of the GOP field was entirely based on media coverage. Who was viable and who wasn't, who was hot and who wasn't, who was electable and who wasn't. After so many years of the GOP falling so very short of the ideology they supposedly represent, the Rush Limbaughs of the world stayed on the sidelines until long after it was too late. Watching the right-wing bigwigs have a fit over McCain is maddening since they had more than enough time to back someone else.
People who complain about politics and 'the system' never seem to recognize that there are opportunities for them to have an effect. There are primaries for many offices, and I've found that in general there's at least one good choice for the ideologically-minded in any given primary. That person doesn't always win, but at least there's a choice. And in a primary, the efforts of one supporter can effect things exponentially more than in a general election. That's the time to get involved.
On earmarks: I've seen many 'realist' political writers scoff at those who fixate on less than 1% of the federal budget. The real money is in (entitlements / the military), they say. If the entitlements go away, the money would still be spent by the government!
If pork is so small, why does it get so much attention among those concerned about the fiscal health of the nation? I think of it as applying the "broken windows" theory to the federal budget. Pork/earmark spending, whether it be for bike paths or boondoggle military hardware, is something that directly corrupts politicians. Campaign contributors and lobbyists and those with the right connections get a big piece of the pie, and politicians lose sight of what their real job is supposed to be. If we can't get rid of spending that both left-wingers and right-wingers agree should be cut, if we can't get rid of a pernicious influence on those in charge of the most powerful nation in the world, then what chance is there of changing the big stuff? 'Broken windows' theory worked to reduce street crime in many cities. True earmark reform could start to do the same to crimes being committed in Washington DC.
The usual response-to-a-column-I-dislike: Michael Kinsley says the surge is a failure. Not because security hasn't improved; it has. Not because political goals are stalled; several key bills have progressed and/or passed in the last few months. No, Kinsley says the surge has failed because the total number of troops in Iraq isn't going down fast enough.
This is so petty. First off, the 'implication' he says Bush used in pushing the surge was never there. Bush used words like 'victory' about a thousand times, meaning that the key goals were security and political gains, not troop reduction. Secondly, the surge only started a year ago, and there was absolutely nothing implied about how soon troop levels would go below 2006 levels.
The point of the surge is that you could keep troop levels where they were indefinitely and things weren't going to improve enough for a responsible withdrawal. The "stay the course" 2005-2006 disaster adequately proved that. By surging in enough troops we gave confidence to Sunni tribal leaders that we could protect and assist them in the process of kicking foreign terrorists out of Anbar. We had enough manpower to take and hold cities and parts of Baghdad that had never really been under control. Iraqis who wanted to join security forces were no longer blown up waiting to apply. By getting so many of these places securable for the long-term, by making the environment more conducive for Iraqi self-policing, it will allow for that responsible withdrawal in the coming years.
He continues:
Prudence is a sign of failure? The administration, having seen security gains from past mini-surges fail to hold, is taking it slowly. You might even say they're being cynical. Golly, I wonder why they'd be cynical about things taking a turn for the worse in Iraq?
It would be irresponsible and stupid to flee Iraq as soon as things got better. There are still terrorist cells to be flushed out, there are still security forces to train, and there is still a fear in parts of Iraq that security will be fleeting. A gradual drawdown will give recently secured parts of the country time to relax, it will give newly minted security forces time to get experience before being given the reigns, and it will make sure that terrorists aren't allowed to gain new footholds. Kinsley is opposed to the war, that's fine. My problem is that he's setting a standard of success that has nothing to do with actually accomplishing the goals of the surge, and in fact works against it.
One thing the 2008 race has made crystal-clear is that if you want a candidate who really fits your beliefs, you need to worry about PRIMARIES the most. If you're a Democrat, you could go for populism (Edwards) or 'hope' (Obama) or competence (Clinton) or down-the-line progressive dogma (Kucinich) or... well there was Dodd and Richardson and Biden at some point and I'm not sure what they brought to the table. But if you think taxes aren't progressive enough, you want out of Iraq, you want universal healthcare, you want judges who support Roe v Wade, and so on and so forth, you had plenty to pick from. I haven't seen any left-wing commentators who didn't like at least one of the initial pool of candidates.
The same goes for the right, at least if you really surveyed the field. For all the grousing about how none of the 'major' candidates followed the straight-and-narrow of conservative dogma, there was Duncan Hunter who got zero support from the conservative establishment and never gained traction. Hunter was as conservative as you could ask for. Incredibly, the ins-and-outs of the GOP field was entirely based on media coverage. Who was viable and who wasn't, who was hot and who wasn't, who was electable and who wasn't. After so many years of the GOP falling so very short of the ideology they supposedly represent, the Rush Limbaughs of the world stayed on the sidelines until long after it was too late. Watching the right-wing bigwigs have a fit over McCain is maddening since they had more than enough time to back someone else.
People who complain about politics and 'the system' never seem to recognize that there are opportunities for them to have an effect. There are primaries for many offices, and I've found that in general there's at least one good choice for the ideologically-minded in any given primary. That person doesn't always win, but at least there's a choice. And in a primary, the efforts of one supporter can effect things exponentially more than in a general election. That's the time to get involved.
On earmarks: I've seen many 'realist' political writers scoff at those who fixate on less than 1% of the federal budget. The real money is in (entitlements / the military), they say. If the entitlements go away, the money would still be spent by the government!
If pork is so small, why does it get so much attention among those concerned about the fiscal health of the nation? I think of it as applying the "broken windows" theory to the federal budget. Pork/earmark spending, whether it be for bike paths or boondoggle military hardware, is something that directly corrupts politicians. Campaign contributors and lobbyists and those with the right connections get a big piece of the pie, and politicians lose sight of what their real job is supposed to be. If we can't get rid of spending that both left-wingers and right-wingers agree should be cut, if we can't get rid of a pernicious influence on those in charge of the most powerful nation in the world, then what chance is there of changing the big stuff? 'Broken windows' theory worked to reduce street crime in many cities. True earmark reform could start to do the same to crimes being committed in Washington DC.
The usual response-to-a-column-I-dislike: Michael Kinsley says the surge is a failure. Not because security hasn't improved; it has. Not because political goals are stalled; several key bills have progressed and/or passed in the last few months. No, Kinsley says the surge has failed because the total number of troops in Iraq isn't going down fast enough.
In fact, the surge was presented as part of a larger plan for troop withdrawal. It was also, implicitly, part of a deal between Bush and the majority of the people in this country who want out of Iraq. The deal was: Just let me have a few more soldiers to get Baghdad under control, and then everybody, or almost everybody, can pack up and come home. In other words: You have to increase the troops in order to reduce them. This is so perverse on its face that it begins to sound Zen-like and brilliant, like something out of Sun Tzu's "The Art of War."
...
But we needn't quarrel about all this -- or deny the reality of the good news -- to say that, at the very least, the surge has not worked yet. The test is simple and built into the concept of a surge: Has it allowed us to reduce troop levels to below where they were when it started? And the answer is no.
This is so petty. First off, the 'implication' he says Bush used in pushing the surge was never there. Bush used words like 'victory' about a thousand times, meaning that the key goals were security and political gains, not troop reduction. Secondly, the surge only started a year ago, and there was absolutely nothing implied about how soon troop levels would go below 2006 levels.
The point of the surge is that you could keep troop levels where they were indefinitely and things weren't going to improve enough for a responsible withdrawal. The "stay the course" 2005-2006 disaster adequately proved that. By surging in enough troops we gave confidence to Sunni tribal leaders that we could protect and assist them in the process of kicking foreign terrorists out of Anbar. We had enough manpower to take and hold cities and parts of Baghdad that had never really been under control. Iraqis who wanted to join security forces were no longer blown up waiting to apply. By getting so many of these places securable for the long-term, by making the environment more conducive for Iraqi self-policing, it will allow for that responsible withdrawal in the coming years.
He continues:
The surge will have surged in and surged out, leaving us back where we started. Maybe the situation in Baghdad, or the whole country, will have improved. But apparently it won't have improved enough to risk an actual reduction in the American troop commitment.
And consider how modest the administration's standard of success has become. Can there be any doubt that it would go for a reduction to 100,000 troops -- and claim victory -- if it had any confidence at all that the gains it brags about would hold at that level of support? The proper comparison isn't with the situation a year ago. It's with the situation before we got there.
Prudence is a sign of failure? The administration, having seen security gains from past mini-surges fail to hold, is taking it slowly. You might even say they're being cynical. Golly, I wonder why they'd be cynical about things taking a turn for the worse in Iraq?
It would be irresponsible and stupid to flee Iraq as soon as things got better. There are still terrorist cells to be flushed out, there are still security forces to train, and there is still a fear in parts of Iraq that security will be fleeting. A gradual drawdown will give recently secured parts of the country time to relax, it will give newly minted security forces time to get experience before being given the reigns, and it will make sure that terrorists aren't allowed to gain new footholds. Kinsley is opposed to the war, that's fine. My problem is that he's setting a standard of success that has nothing to do with actually accomplishing the goals of the surge, and in fact works against it.
Monday, February 4, 2008
A column based on a book based on a strawman
If I'm going after someone writing in Le Monde, one might assume I'm attacking a Frenchman. Happily in this case I'm attacking an American by the name of Chalmers Johnson. Perhaps someone with the last name of Ditch shouldn't mock someone's name, but Chalmers? Really? That must have been a fun childhood. Most of his ideas are much more worthy of ridicule than his moniker.
The gist of his argument is that US military spending is causing huge deficits, which in turn greatly harm US financial health. I will begin by noting the few things which we agree on.
There is no way around the fact that a significant percentage of military spending is pork, and in many cases pork that utterly dwarfs more famous things like the 'bridge to nowhere'. Congressmen push for the purchase of billion-dollar hardware that the military doesn't want, Senators demand that superfluous domestic bases remain open, and it's been going on for decades. Hundreds of billions of dollars have been spent in a way that would irk hawks just as much as doves, though for some reason military pork isn't as widely reported as domestic pork.
The second area of agreement is that government spending financed by deficits for the purpose of 'job creation', which is the functional definition of Keynesian economics, is not good policy. A congressman who lobbies for a military project in his or her district because it would 'create jobs' either does so by diverting funds from the general public through taxes, or by deficit spending. Some level of deficit spending is tolerable, but after a certain point it isn't. Chalmers things that the US debt is too high, and I agree.
If only those areas of agreement covered even a fraction of his column, which is from what I can tell little more than an extended book plug.
Whoa, whoa, whoa, when did tax policy come into play? What does that have to do with the military? Ah, it has to do with the debt. Chalmers wants to raise taxes and gain more revenue to start paying off the debt. Taxes are relevant in a debate about deficits, and you know what else is? The rest of the federal budget, most of which is non-military. Chalmers bases his 'three broad aspects' on three broad (false) assumptions, the first being that only military spending and too-low tax rates are the cause of deficit spending.
Chalmers expands on this later, and comes up with $1.1 trillion in annual military spending. Included in this number are such items as "$1.9bn to the Department of Justice for the paramilitary activities of the FBI" and "$200bn in interest for past debt-financed defence outlays". The military's portion of debt financing is certainly into the billions, but unless debt financing is well over $500 billion it makes no sense to say that the military is responsible for that much. It makes even less sense to lump that, homeland defence (which is mostly about 'first responders') and veterans affairs into "military spending", and then compare that with armies-and-armaments spending of other nations. Chalmers doesn't even NEED to high-ball the military spending number, since the amount that can't be contested is in the 600-800 billion range, but he does anyway just to get the maximum outrage impact. $1 trillion is the magic number.
UPDATE: In regards to the $200 billion in interest counted as military spending, the 2009 budget has $260 billion in interest. This means for 2007, Chalmers is counting all or the vast majority of debt interest payment as being from military spending, even though military spending hasn't been a majority of the federal budget in generations.
Moving on, Chalmers provides the following as 'no relation to the national security' items:
-Pork-barrel military projects wanted by congressmen
-Excess nuclear weaponry
-????
One might assume that he views the war in Iraq as being in this category, but he doesn't even come out in opposition to it. An article thousands of words long, discussing current US military spending, contains the word Iraq 4 times, and all of them are neutral! Johnson doesn't attempt to say that the mission is wasteful, or the way it's done is wasteful... he doesn't SAY anything about a war that adds hundreds of billions to the current spending level! He references pork projects without saying how much they total, and notes that much military spending is obscured from public view, but surely there must be some way to explicitly bring up what he sees as bad spending, what a reasonable level would be, etc. This would be a perfect place to try and hype a military version of the 'bridge to nowhere', something that doves and fiscal libertarians can unite against... nope. Just a vague "look at how much is being spent, it must be mostly waste!". Granted, there's the "for more details, buy my book" aspect of things, but if he has time to give line-items like *the FBI*, and lots of debt-related minutiae, why so little that directly impacts the core of his argument?
Oh and he doesn't actually address the "we aren't taxing the rich enough" part either, meaning that he makes no serious attempt to prove the first of his three 'broad aspects'. Let's move on to the second.
I'm not even sure what to do with this. Who has ever, EVER said anything like this? I've heard politicians say this in the context of government spending on the environment, but not the military. Chalmers dredges up some obscure government quote about the US economy being able to provide a high standard of living and a strong military- which is true by the way- and then says that this proves his claim of the existence of 'military Keynesianism'. This is really his core argument, and it's a blatant strawman. I won't even go into the "public policies focused on frequent wars" argument, which is a nod to "military-industrial complex" conspiracies. The term comes from Eisenhower, who was primarily referring to pork projects, not imperialism. 'Military Keynesianism' can perhaps explain some of the wasteful spending, though political greed is a better explanation. It certainly doesn't explain the bulk of hawkish military spending since WW2, from the anti-Soviet buildup to the current war on terror.
Here we see Johnson's second broad (false) assumption, that most military spending is done not in the interest of securing the country, but in a vain attempt to do 'make work'. For instance, this passage:
I'm willing to grant that we didn't REALLY need that many nukes. Why have enough to blanket the earth so many times over when a much smaller number spread out in enough locations could have provided the same deterrence capacity? Chalmers is really slick here. If we didn't need most of the bombs (never mind that many people actually believed they were needed), then most of the spending was wasteful, and it could have been given to starving orphans and union workers! Sadly, no. The production of the first nuclear weapon was several orders of magnitude greater than the production of the last. An enormous amount was spent on theorizing, researching and testing. Even assuming the $5.8 trillion number is accurate, there's no way of knowing how much went to 'excess' or 'make work' nuclear warheads, as opposed to baseline keeping-up-with-Stalin, etc.
The second 'broad aspect' is a thinly-constructed strawman. Let's move on to the third.
Oh wait, we're not allowed to talk about the tens of trillions spent on wealth transfer payments and federal bureaucrats, my bad. Here's what he actually said:
Leaving aside left-leaning budget priorities, I will continue to agree that excess military spending burdens the economy. It wastes resources. If only he would make ANY attempt to distinguish between what's necessary, what's debatable, and what's wasteful, but he doesn't. As a result all military spending is maligned as a burden we should seek to be rid of. For instance, he approvingly quotes the following passage:
YES! What fools we were! We could have just spent ABSOLUTELY NOTHING on defense and we'd be twice as wealthy! Brilliant!
He also says the following:
Woods is the source of the earlier 'total military spending versus total infrastructure value' comparison. "Between 1/3rd and 2/3rds"... ummmmmm... okay. Let's take a look at the data used to derive this figure:
Oh there isn't any? Well shucks. I mean, Chalmers isn't making an unsubstantiated claim, he's just approvingly quoting some other guy making an unsubstantiated claim! Can't blame him for that, can we? And when he talks about "turning over the nation’s largest manufacturing enterprises to the Department of Defense", which is his own claim, why that has ample evidence:
Oh, well I'm sure it's in the book!
Chalmers goes on to discuss US manufacturing woes, and by this point in my blog response I'm not even sure if it's worth continuing. He just keeps bringing up military spending numbers and interspersing economic woe numbers and it's the thinnest of thin "correlation equals causation" gruel. Why is the only reason, the ONLY reason for the decline of the US manufacturing sector, military spending? Is it taxes? No, those aren't high enough. Could it have something to do with jobs 'lost' to machines? Considering that the value of goods manufactured in the US is higher than ever, I'm guessing the mechanization of industry plays a significant role. Perhaps globalization, which gives an advantage to foreign manufacturers who use low-cost labor? Maybe, just maybe, cushy union contracts make US labor less competitive compared to said overseas laborers? No. No, my friends, it's all the military.
This is his third and final broad (false) assumption: that defense spending, which accounts for only a couple percent of GDP, was the primary factor in reducing America's manufacturing competitiveness. Just like the only federal spending that matters to him is military spending, the only government resource use and opportunity cost that he sees is for the military.
I'm sure Chalmers provides much more data, lots of quotes of experts who agree with him, and much more logical justification in his books. In the context of a column, however, he's using very few facts to support his biggest logical leaps and lots of space to prove the one thing everyone already knows (the US military spends a lot). As with so many other articles I've targeted, even long ones, going for too many big assertions at once makes it very difficult to properly make a case for any of them. A piece going after military pork, excess bases and redundant nukes would still have the impact of hundreds of billions worth of spending, opportunity costs and so on, and could sow the seeds of his other main points. Instead he uses an overly broad brush to paint all military spending. Maybe he thinks he can get away with it because he's preaching to the choir.
The gist of his argument is that US military spending is causing huge deficits, which in turn greatly harm US financial health. I will begin by noting the few things which we agree on.
There are many reasons for this budgetary sleight-of-hand ... but the chief one is that members of Congress, who profit enormously from defence jobs and pork-barrel projects in their districts, have a political interest in supporting the Department of Defense.
There is no way around the fact that a significant percentage of military spending is pork, and in many cases pork that utterly dwarfs more famous things like the 'bridge to nowhere'. Congressmen push for the purchase of billion-dollar hardware that the military doesn't want, Senators demand that superfluous domestic bases remain open, and it's been going on for decades. Hundreds of billions of dollars have been spent in a way that would irk hawks just as much as doves, though for some reason military pork isn't as widely reported as domestic pork.
The second area of agreement is that government spending financed by deficits for the purpose of 'job creation', which is the functional definition of Keynesian economics, is not good policy. A congressman who lobbies for a military project in his or her district because it would 'create jobs' either does so by diverting funds from the general public through taxes, or by deficit spending. Some level of deficit spending is tolerable, but after a certain point it isn't. Chalmers things that the US debt is too high, and I agree.
If only those areas of agreement covered even a fraction of his column, which is from what I can tell little more than an extended book plug.
There are three broad aspects to the US debt crisis. First, in the current fiscal year (2008) we are spending insane amounts of money on “defence” projects that bear no relation to the national security of the US. We are also keeping the income tax burdens on the richest segment of the population at strikingly low levels.
Whoa, whoa, whoa, when did tax policy come into play? What does that have to do with the military? Ah, it has to do with the debt. Chalmers wants to raise taxes and gain more revenue to start paying off the debt. Taxes are relevant in a debate about deficits, and you know what else is? The rest of the federal budget, most of which is non-military. Chalmers bases his 'three broad aspects' on three broad (false) assumptions, the first being that only military spending and too-low tax rates are the cause of deficit spending.
Chalmers expands on this later, and comes up with $1.1 trillion in annual military spending. Included in this number are such items as "$1.9bn to the Department of Justice for the paramilitary activities of the FBI" and "$200bn in interest for past debt-financed defence outlays". The military's portion of debt financing is certainly into the billions, but unless debt financing is well over $500 billion it makes no sense to say that the military is responsible for that much. It makes even less sense to lump that, homeland defence (which is mostly about 'first responders') and veterans affairs into "military spending", and then compare that with armies-and-armaments spending of other nations. Chalmers doesn't even NEED to high-ball the military spending number, since the amount that can't be contested is in the 600-800 billion range, but he does anyway just to get the maximum outrage impact. $1 trillion is the magic number.
UPDATE: In regards to the $200 billion in interest counted as military spending, the 2009 budget has $260 billion in interest. This means for 2007, Chalmers is counting all or the vast majority of debt interest payment as being from military spending, even though military spending hasn't been a majority of the federal budget in generations.
Moving on, Chalmers provides the following as 'no relation to the national security' items:
-Pork-barrel military projects wanted by congressmen
-Excess nuclear weaponry
-????
One might assume that he views the war in Iraq as being in this category, but he doesn't even come out in opposition to it. An article thousands of words long, discussing current US military spending, contains the word Iraq 4 times, and all of them are neutral! Johnson doesn't attempt to say that the mission is wasteful, or the way it's done is wasteful... he doesn't SAY anything about a war that adds hundreds of billions to the current spending level! He references pork projects without saying how much they total, and notes that much military spending is obscured from public view, but surely there must be some way to explicitly bring up what he sees as bad spending, what a reasonable level would be, etc. This would be a perfect place to try and hype a military version of the 'bridge to nowhere', something that doves and fiscal libertarians can unite against... nope. Just a vague "look at how much is being spent, it must be mostly waste!". Granted, there's the "for more details, buy my book" aspect of things, but if he has time to give line-items like *the FBI*, and lots of debt-related minutiae, why so little that directly impacts the core of his argument?
Oh and he doesn't actually address the "we aren't taxing the rich enough" part either, meaning that he makes no serious attempt to prove the first of his three 'broad aspects'. Let's move on to the second.
Second, we continue to believe that we can compensate for the accelerating erosion of our base and our loss of jobs to foreign countries through massive military expenditures — “military Keynesianism”. By that, I mean the mistaken belief that public policies focused on frequent wars, huge expenditures on weapons and munitions, and large standing armies can indefinitely sustain a wealthy capitalist economy. The opposite is actually true.
I'm not even sure what to do with this. Who has ever, EVER said anything like this? I've heard politicians say this in the context of government spending on the environment, but not the military. Chalmers dredges up some obscure government quote about the US economy being able to provide a high standard of living and a strong military- which is true by the way- and then says that this proves his claim of the existence of 'military Keynesianism'. This is really his core argument, and it's a blatant strawman. I won't even go into the "public policies focused on frequent wars" argument, which is a nod to "military-industrial complex" conspiracies. The term comes from Eisenhower, who was primarily referring to pork projects, not imperialism. 'Military Keynesianism' can perhaps explain some of the wasteful spending, though political greed is a better explanation. It certainly doesn't explain the bulk of hawkish military spending since WW2, from the anti-Soviet buildup to the current war on terror.
Here we see Johnson's second broad (false) assumption, that most military spending is done not in the interest of securing the country, but in a vain attempt to do 'make work'. For instance, this passage:
Between the 1940s and 1996, the US spent at least $5.8 trillion on the development, testing and construction of nuclear bombs. By 1967, the peak year of its nuclear stockpile, the US possessed some 32,500 deliverable atomic and hydrogen bombs, none of which, thankfully, was ever used. They perfectly illustrate the Keynesian principle that the government can provide make-work jobs to keep people employed. Nuclear weapons were not just America’s secret weapon, but also its secret economic weapon. As of 2006, we still had 9,960 of them. There is today no sane use for them, while the trillions spent on them could have been used to solve the problems of social security and health care, quality education and access to higher education for all, not to speak of the retention of highly-skilled jobs within the economy.
I'm willing to grant that we didn't REALLY need that many nukes. Why have enough to blanket the earth so many times over when a much smaller number spread out in enough locations could have provided the same deterrence capacity? Chalmers is really slick here. If we didn't need most of the bombs (never mind that many people actually believed they were needed), then most of the spending was wasteful, and it could have been given to starving orphans and union workers! Sadly, no. The production of the first nuclear weapon was several orders of magnitude greater than the production of the last. An enormous amount was spent on theorizing, researching and testing. Even assuming the $5.8 trillion number is accurate, there's no way of knowing how much went to 'excess' or 'make work' nuclear warheads, as opposed to baseline keeping-up-with-Stalin, etc.
The second 'broad aspect' is a thinly-constructed strawman. Let's move on to the third.
in our devotion to socialism (despite our limited resources), we are damaging the long-term fiscal health of the US. These are what economists call opportunity costs, things not done because we spent our money on something else. Our public education system has deteriorated alarmingly. We have reduced the incentive to achieve, stunted job growth, and created dependency on the government. Most important, we have lost our competitiveness as a manufacturer for civilian needs, an infinitely more efficient use of scarce resources than entitlements
Oh wait, we're not allowed to talk about the tens of trillions spent on wealth transfer payments and federal bureaucrats, my bad. Here's what he actually said:
Third, in our devotion to militarism (despite our limited resources), we are failing to invest in our social infrastructure and other requirements for the long-term health of the US. These are what economists call opportunity costs, things not done because we spent our money on something else. Our public education system has deteriorated alarmingly. We have failed to provide health care to all our citizens and neglected our responsibilities as the world’s number one polluter. Most important, we have lost our competitiveness as a manufacturer for civilian needs, an infinitely more efficient use of scarce resources than arms manufacturing.
Leaving aside left-leaning budget priorities, I will continue to agree that excess military spending burdens the economy. It wastes resources. If only he would make ANY attempt to distinguish between what's necessary, what's debatable, and what's wasteful, but he doesn't. As a result all military spending is maligned as a burden we should seek to be rid of. For instance, he approvingly quotes the following passage:
According to the US Department of Defense, during the four decades from 1947 through 1987 it used (in 1982 dollars) $7.62 trillion in capital resources. In 1985, the Department of Commerce estimated the value of the nation’s plant and equipment, and infrastructure, at just over _$7.29 trillion… The amount spent over that period could have doubled the American capital stock or modernized and replaced its existing stock
YES! What fools we were! We could have just spent ABSOLUTELY NOTHING on defense and we'd be twice as wealthy! Brilliant!
He also says the following:
It was believed that the US could afford both a massive military establishment and a high standard of living, and that it needed both to maintain full employment. But it did not work out that way. By the 1960s it was becoming apparent that turning over the nation’s largest manufacturing enterprises to the Department of Defense and producing goods without any investment or consumption value was starting to crowd out civilian economic activities. The historian Thomas E Woods Jr observes that, during the 1950s and 1960s, between one-third and two-thirds of all US research talent was siphoned off into the military sector
Woods is the source of the earlier 'total military spending versus total infrastructure value' comparison. "Between 1/3rd and 2/3rds"... ummmmmm... okay. Let's take a look at the data used to derive this figure:
Oh there isn't any? Well shucks. I mean, Chalmers isn't making an unsubstantiated claim, he's just approvingly quoting some other guy making an unsubstantiated claim! Can't blame him for that, can we? And when he talks about "turning over the nation’s largest manufacturing enterprises to the Department of Defense", which is his own claim, why that has ample evidence:
Oh, well I'm sure it's in the book!
Chalmers goes on to discuss US manufacturing woes, and by this point in my blog response I'm not even sure if it's worth continuing. He just keeps bringing up military spending numbers and interspersing economic woe numbers and it's the thinnest of thin "correlation equals causation" gruel. Why is the only reason, the ONLY reason for the decline of the US manufacturing sector, military spending? Is it taxes? No, those aren't high enough. Could it have something to do with jobs 'lost' to machines? Considering that the value of goods manufactured in the US is higher than ever, I'm guessing the mechanization of industry plays a significant role. Perhaps globalization, which gives an advantage to foreign manufacturers who use low-cost labor? Maybe, just maybe, cushy union contracts make US labor less competitive compared to said overseas laborers? No. No, my friends, it's all the military.
This is his third and final broad (false) assumption: that defense spending, which accounts for only a couple percent of GDP, was the primary factor in reducing America's manufacturing competitiveness. Just like the only federal spending that matters to him is military spending, the only government resource use and opportunity cost that he sees is for the military.
I'm sure Chalmers provides much more data, lots of quotes of experts who agree with him, and much more logical justification in his books. In the context of a column, however, he's using very few facts to support his biggest logical leaps and lots of space to prove the one thing everyone already knows (the US military spends a lot). As with so many other articles I've targeted, even long ones, going for too many big assertions at once makes it very difficult to properly make a case for any of them. A piece going after military pork, excess bases and redundant nukes would still have the impact of hundreds of billions worth of spending, opportunity costs and so on, and could sow the seeds of his other main points. Instead he uses an overly broad brush to paint all military spending. Maybe he thinks he can get away with it because he's preaching to the choir.
Friday, January 18, 2008
Thomas Walkom: my least favorite Canadian
Well, well, well, what have we here?
Right, you signed on to fight terrorists. Sadly, in Afghanistan and elsewhere there is little distinction, and if you want to be nice and leave "insurgents" alone that tends to open things up for terrorists. The Taliban was in essence an insurgency when it obtained power in Afghanistan, and al Qaeda continues to exist under its cross-border protection.
This is so close to being a fair complaint. It's one thing for the US to say "oh, don't worry about sending troops to Iraq". It's another to say that and then add "by the way, we need you to send troops to Afghanistan because we don't have enough". Perfectly reasonable for a Canadian opposed to the Iraq war to be grumpy over that. Yet what did he say earlier?
The shape of the fight in Afghanistan when Canadian troops started taking enemy fire was the same then as it is today. Canada DID sign on to fight insurgents, because by the end of 2001 the Taliban had shifted from government to insurgency. Mr. Walkom doesn't say if he opposed the deployment at the time, but the use of "we" signifies that Canada as a whole was duped into its current role in Afghanistan. Sorry, no dice. If Canada had taken a position of "we won't deploy to Afghanistan because that will only be enabling the war in Iraq", I'd have disagreed, but it is principled. Canada knew what it was doing, and Walkom is being silly with this point.
If only he stopped at "silly".
It's points like this where I wonder if I need to say anything. I've seen a fair number of talking points aimed at the war in Afghanistan, and as much as I disagree with them, few are as blatantly IGNORANT as that. The "why don't we invade Saudi Arabia" talking point was barely tolerable on 9/18/01; saying it on 1/18/08 is pathetic for someone who's published. Saudi Arabia deserved a heck of a lot more diplomatic pressure than it got, but the 9/11 attacks were planned and coordinated by al Qaeda, based in Afghanistan. What part of the Taliban/al Qaeda alliance is difficult to grasp? How can anyone who gets paid to write about world affairs not grasp the difference between the bad but legal spread of Wahabi Sunni Islam by Saudi Arabia, and the destruction of the World Trade Center by terrorists based in Afghanistan and protected by the Taliban, and why military action would be used against one and not the other?
Wait, I just found an earlier column that explains Tom's viewpoint a bit more.
Really? That's what you're going with? "It was never explained"? I'm absolutely baffled by that kind of sophistry.
Except that it wasn't dropped at all? When the Taliban/AQ group moved its center of gravity to Pakistan, they continued to mount attacks on Afghanistan with the goal of retaking it. Going after terrorists whenever they crossed into Afghanistan was better than not going after them at all, and additionally it allowed allied forces to launch attacks into Pakistan whenever we got a not-so-subtle OK from their government.
So we should just let the Taliban retake Afghanistan? So attempting to prevent al Qaeda from having a base of operations should be dropped if they manage additional attacks?
There's no small number of different ways to debate the war on terror. A Canadian has even MORE avenues, because Canada wasn't attacked and isn't liable for the mess in Iraq. Yet Walkom decides to make statements that combine extreme ignorance, pathetic strawmen, and "lalala I'm not listening". He's so actively bad that he damages his side of the argument by proxy.
Good job, Toronto Star.
American Defence Secretary Robert Gates may well be right when he says that Canadian and European troops in Afghanistan are not well equipped to fight a counter-insurgency campaign. But what has been lost in the controversy over his impolitic remarks is that we did not sign on to fight insurgents – there or anywhere else.
Right, you signed on to fight terrorists. Sadly, in Afghanistan and elsewhere there is little distinction, and if you want to be nice and leave "insurgents" alone that tends to open things up for terrorists. The Taliban was in essence an insurgency when it obtained power in Afghanistan, and al Qaeda continues to exist under its cross-border protection.
It was only after 2003, when the U.S. found itself troop-short and bogged down in Iraq, that Washington changed the rules of engagement for its allies. Gradually, Afghanistan became NATO's war. Washington's plan then was to gradually reduce its 20,000 troop commitment to Afghanistan and switch them over to Iraq.
Which is why, since 2006, Canadian troops have found themselves under fire in the Taliban stronghold of Kandahar.
This is so close to being a fair complaint. It's one thing for the US to say "oh, don't worry about sending troops to Iraq". It's another to say that and then add "by the way, we need you to send troops to Afghanistan because we don't have enough". Perfectly reasonable for a Canadian opposed to the Iraq war to be grumpy over that. Yet what did he say earlier?
we did not sign on to fight insurgents
The shape of the fight in Afghanistan when Canadian troops started taking enemy fire was the same then as it is today. Canada DID sign on to fight insurgents, because by the end of 2001 the Taliban had shifted from government to insurgency. Mr. Walkom doesn't say if he opposed the deployment at the time, but the use of "we" signifies that Canada as a whole was duped into its current role in Afghanistan. Sorry, no dice. If Canada had taken a position of "we won't deploy to Afghanistan because that will only be enabling the war in Iraq", I'd have disagreed, but it is principled. Canada knew what it was doing, and Walkom is being silly with this point.
If only he stopped at "silly".
It's worth remembering that we keep sending soldiers to Afghanistan not because Canada has been attacked by the Taliban, but because our friends, the Americans, feel they are at war with them.
...
Yet this was never our war. It was always America's. The U.S. chose to declare Afghanistan the enemy after the terrorist attacks of September 2001. Had Washington elected to avenge 9/11 by invading the country from which most of those terrorists came, Canadian troops would now be fighting in Saudi Arabia. Their call, their war, their show.
It's points like this where I wonder if I need to say anything. I've seen a fair number of talking points aimed at the war in Afghanistan, and as much as I disagree with them, few are as blatantly IGNORANT as that. The "why don't we invade Saudi Arabia" talking point was barely tolerable on 9/18/01; saying it on 1/18/08 is pathetic for someone who's published. Saudi Arabia deserved a heck of a lot more diplomatic pressure than it got, but the 9/11 attacks were planned and coordinated by al Qaeda, based in Afghanistan. What part of the Taliban/al Qaeda alliance is difficult to grasp? How can anyone who gets paid to write about world affairs not grasp the difference between the bad but legal spread of Wahabi Sunni Islam by Saudi Arabia, and the destruction of the World Trade Center by terrorists based in Afghanistan and protected by the Taliban, and why military action would be used against one and not the other?
Wait, I just found an earlier column that explains Tom's viewpoint a bit more.
Exactly why it made sense to overthrow the government of Afghanistan for an outrage perpetrated by Saudis and planned in Germany was never explained.
Really? That's what you're going with? "It was never explained"? I'm absolutely baffled by that kind of sophistry.
For a while, the ostensible aim of the war was to capture alleged terror mastermind Osama bin Laden and destroy his training camps. But after he escaped and the camps relocated to neighbouring Pakistan, that rationale was quietly dropped.
Except that it wasn't dropped at all? When the Taliban/AQ group moved its center of gravity to Pakistan, they continued to mount attacks on Afghanistan with the goal of retaking it. Going after terrorists whenever they crossed into Afghanistan was better than not going after them at all, and additionally it allowed allied forces to launch attacks into Pakistan whenever we got a not-so-subtle OK from their government.
Then we were told we were fighting in Afghanistan to destroy terrorists there before they attacked us here. But as the citizens of London and Madrid discovered, war is not so easily contained by geography.
So we should just let the Taliban retake Afghanistan? So attempting to prevent al Qaeda from having a base of operations should be dropped if they manage additional attacks?
There's no small number of different ways to debate the war on terror. A Canadian has even MORE avenues, because Canada wasn't attacked and isn't liable for the mess in Iraq. Yet Walkom decides to make statements that combine extreme ignorance, pathetic strawmen, and "lalala I'm not listening". He's so actively bad that he damages his side of the argument by proxy.
Good job, Toronto Star.
Wednesday, December 12, 2007
Ridiculous historical comparisons and strawmen...
...so naturally venerable Time Magazine decides to publish this gem.
Michael Kinsley is going after the standpoint associated with right-wingers on immigration, that is to say, opposing normalization of illegals and such. He manages to brush aside or ignore any number of salient points, he makes assumptions, and he wraps it up with a hilariously bad ode to border-hoppers. Since there's only one article I'm going after I'll tackle it in full.
On its face this seems so close to being reasonable, but it really isn't. First, it ignores large numbers of people who don't have any issue with large numbers of illegal immigrants, who oppose enforcement of existing laws, and who oppose measures designed to stem the future flow of illegals. This is the position of no small number of activists and lobbyists on the issue.
Kinsley goes on to essentially say that the only sides in the debate are pro-immigration and anti-immigration, but that's not the case; there are a rainbow of possible positions. It would be like boiling down tax policy to 'pro-tax' and 'anti-tax'. The 'enforcement first' position wants the law enforced. Kinsley concedes that immigration laws aren't enforced well, but then says that enforcement doesn't matter, and it's all about where to 'draw the line'. He brings up speeding, and it's an interesting point, but it's wrong.
The debate about speed limits tends to be where to set the limit, not about enforcement. If the debate was about enforcement, we would discuss things like whether or not to put more cops on the street to set more radar traps and thus catch more speeders. Try to imagine someone saying "there should be more police monitoring the roads", and the response being "let's raise the speed limit". Not a very cogent rebuttal. Yes, raising the speed limit would reduce the number of people in violation of the law, but the limit was set there for a reason. The immigration debate has both a 'where to set the limit' aspect and a 'what's the best way to enforce the limit' aspect. Kinsley presents a false dichotomy by saying that you can only care about one aspect.
"You can't care about enforcement because some other laws aren't enforced properly" is a pitiful argument. "You can't care about enforcement because we could easily increase the number of legal immigrants" is fatuous; INS can't even properly handle the current number of legal immigrants. In a perfect world the INS would have excess capacity, and it would just be a matter of setting the quotas. In the real world, the INS mailed visas to 9/11 hijackers in 2002. Kinsley shows no sign of recognizing the potential problems involved with jacking up immigration limits. It's one thing for a theorist to try to say why he or she favors more immigration; it's another for a writer published in a major magazine to say that 'increasing legal immigration is easy'.
These lines are maybe worse: "If your view is that legal immigration is good and illegal immigration is bad, how about increasing legal immigration? How about doubling it? Any takers? So in the end, this is not really a debate about illegal immigration." Which in essence conflates favoring SOME level of legal immigration with favoring ANY level of legal immigration. To apply the speed limit debate, imagine someone saying "if your view is that going 55 miles per hour on the freeway is good, how about doubling the speed limit?". Imagine that being said in response to "there should be more radar traps". It is in fact possible to care about large numbers of people in the country illegally while at the same time being in favor of some level of legal immigration. Just because that level might not be Kinsley's preferred one doesn't change a thing.
'We know that the line is too long'. There. Right there, even more than earlier in the piece, Kinsley assumes that everyone else sees things the way he does. What if someone doesn't think the line is long enough, or that it's acceptable? And for that matter, since there IS in fact thousands upon thousands of legal immigrants let into the US every year, how exactly does that equate to current illegals having no chance to return? But since "we know perfectly well", that's not up for debate. Everyone knows it. Going back to the tax analogy, "we know perfectly well that taxes are too high" would not be a compelling argument to be made in favor of cutting taxes. The fact that there is an opposing side means that the all-inclusive "we" is being improperly used.
What's riskier: crossing the US/Mexico border in 2007, or crossing the Atlantic Ocean in 1887? Which cost more for those immigrants? Or how about this: are there any illegal immigrants working and living in the kind of conditions seen in the days of the Industrial Revolution? Upton Sinclair's The Jungle was exaggerated at worst but it certainly wasn't very far off when you examine things like life expectancies and standards of living. The people Sinclair wrote about were immigrants living in urban ghettos. Harvesting produce, cutting grass, scrubbing toilets and nannying might be rough compared to accounting but not in comparison to sweatshops and subsistence farming. "Who loves America more"? It must be today's illegals! Why? Because that way anyone who opposes mass legalization or a doubling of quotas is a monster. Who loves America more? It can't be the pro-enforcement crowd, because they don't agree with Michael Kinsley.
Michael Kinsley is going after the standpoint associated with right-wingers on immigration, that is to say, opposing normalization of illegals and such. He manages to brush aside or ignore any number of salient points, he makes assumptions, and he wraps it up with a hilariously bad ode to border-hoppers. Since there's only one article I'm going after I'll tackle it in full.
What you are supposed to say about immigration--what most of the presidential candidates say, what the radio talk jocks say--is that you are not against immigration. Not at all. You salute the hard work and noble aspirations of those who are lining up at American consulates around the world. But that is legal immigration. What you oppose is illegal immigration.
This formula is not very helpful. We all oppose breaking the law, or we ought to. Saying that you oppose illegal immigration is like saying you oppose illegal drug use or illegal speeding. Of course you do, or should. The question is whether you think the law draws the line in the right place. Should using marijuana be illegal? Should the speed limit be raised--or lowered? The fact that you believe in obeying the law reveals nothing about what you think the law ought to be, or why.
Another question: Why are you so upset about this particular form of lawbreaking? After all, there are lots of laws, not all of them enforced with vigor. The suspicion naturally arises that the illegality is not what bothers you. What bothers you is the immigration. There is an easy way to test this. Reducing illegal immigration is hard, but increasing legal immigration would be easy. If your view is that legal immigration is good and illegal immigration is bad, how about increasing legal immigration? How about doubling it? Any takers? So in the end, this is not really a debate about illegal immigration. This is a debate about immigration.
On its face this seems so close to being reasonable, but it really isn't. First, it ignores large numbers of people who don't have any issue with large numbers of illegal immigrants, who oppose enforcement of existing laws, and who oppose measures designed to stem the future flow of illegals. This is the position of no small number of activists and lobbyists on the issue.
Kinsley goes on to essentially say that the only sides in the debate are pro-immigration and anti-immigration, but that's not the case; there are a rainbow of possible positions. It would be like boiling down tax policy to 'pro-tax' and 'anti-tax'. The 'enforcement first' position wants the law enforced. Kinsley concedes that immigration laws aren't enforced well, but then says that enforcement doesn't matter, and it's all about where to 'draw the line'. He brings up speeding, and it's an interesting point, but it's wrong.
The debate about speed limits tends to be where to set the limit, not about enforcement. If the debate was about enforcement, we would discuss things like whether or not to put more cops on the street to set more radar traps and thus catch more speeders. Try to imagine someone saying "there should be more police monitoring the roads", and the response being "let's raise the speed limit". Not a very cogent rebuttal. Yes, raising the speed limit would reduce the number of people in violation of the law, but the limit was set there for a reason. The immigration debate has both a 'where to set the limit' aspect and a 'what's the best way to enforce the limit' aspect. Kinsley presents a false dichotomy by saying that you can only care about one aspect.
"You can't care about enforcement because some other laws aren't enforced properly" is a pitiful argument. "You can't care about enforcement because we could easily increase the number of legal immigrants" is fatuous; INS can't even properly handle the current number of legal immigrants. In a perfect world the INS would have excess capacity, and it would just be a matter of setting the quotas. In the real world, the INS mailed visas to 9/11 hijackers in 2002. Kinsley shows no sign of recognizing the potential problems involved with jacking up immigration limits. It's one thing for a theorist to try to say why he or she favors more immigration; it's another for a writer published in a major magazine to say that 'increasing legal immigration is easy'.
These lines are maybe worse: "If your view is that legal immigration is good and illegal immigration is bad, how about increasing legal immigration? How about doubling it? Any takers? So in the end, this is not really a debate about illegal immigration." Which in essence conflates favoring SOME level of legal immigration with favoring ANY level of legal immigration. To apply the speed limit debate, imagine someone saying "if your view is that going 55 miles per hour on the freeway is good, how about doubling the speed limit?". Imagine that being said in response to "there should be more radar traps". It is in fact possible to care about large numbers of people in the country illegally while at the same time being in favor of some level of legal immigration. Just because that level might not be Kinsley's preferred one doesn't change a thing.
And it's barely a debate at all. ... Now, for whatever reason, support for immigration is limited to an eccentric alliance of high-minded Council on Foreign Relations types, the mainstream media, high-tech entrepreneurs, Latinos, the Wall Street Journal editorial page and President George W. Bush. Everyone else, it seems, is agin.
Maybe the aginners are right, and immigration is now damaging our country, stealing jobs and opportunity, ripping off taxpayers, fragmenting our culture. I doubt it, but maybe so. Certainly, it's true that we can't let in everyone who wants to come. There is some number of immigrants that is too many. I don't believe we're past that point, but maybe we are. In any event, a democracy has the right to decide that it has reached such a point. There is no obligation to be fair to foreigners.
But let's not kid ourselves that all we care about is obeying the law and all we are asking illegals to do is go home and get in line like everybody else. We know perfectly well that the line is too long, and we are basically telling people to go home and not come back.
'We know that the line is too long'. There. Right there, even more than earlier in the piece, Kinsley assumes that everyone else sees things the way he does. What if someone doesn't think the line is long enough, or that it's acceptable? And for that matter, since there IS in fact thousands upon thousands of legal immigrants let into the US every year, how exactly does that equate to current illegals having no chance to return? But since "we know perfectly well", that's not up for debate. Everyone knows it. Going back to the tax analogy, "we know perfectly well that taxes are too high" would not be a compelling argument to be made in favor of cutting taxes. The fact that there is an opposing side means that the all-inclusive "we" is being improperly used.
Let's not kid ourselves, either, about who we are telling this to. To characterize illegal immigrants as queue-jumping, lawbreaking scum is seriously unjust. The motives of illegal immigrants--which can be summarized as "a better life"--are identical to those of legal immigrants. In fact, they are largely identical to the motives of our own parents, grandparents and great-grandparents when they immigrated. And not just that. Ask yourself, of these three groups--today's legal and illegal immigrants and the immigrants of generations ago--which one has proven most dramatically its appreciation of our country? Which one has shown the most gumption, the most willingness to risk all to get to the U.S. and the most willingness to work hard once here? Well, everyone's story is unique. But who loves the U.S. most? On average, probably, the winners of this American-values contest would be the illegals, doing our dirty work under constant fear of eviction, getting thrown out and returning again and again.
And how about those of us lucky enough to have been born here? How would we do against the typical illegal alien in a "prove how much you love America" reality TV show?
What's riskier: crossing the US/Mexico border in 2007, or crossing the Atlantic Ocean in 1887? Which cost more for those immigrants? Or how about this: are there any illegal immigrants working and living in the kind of conditions seen in the days of the Industrial Revolution? Upton Sinclair's The Jungle was exaggerated at worst but it certainly wasn't very far off when you examine things like life expectancies and standards of living. The people Sinclair wrote about were immigrants living in urban ghettos. Harvesting produce, cutting grass, scrubbing toilets and nannying might be rough compared to accounting but not in comparison to sweatshops and subsistence farming. "Who loves America more"? It must be today's illegals! Why? Because that way anyone who opposes mass legalization or a doubling of quotas is a monster. Who loves America more? It can't be the pro-enforcement crowd, because they don't agree with Michael Kinsley.
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