Monthly Archives: December 2011

False Choices

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This article in The Washington Post centers on falling municipality revenues due to falling housing values and so falling property tax valuations, but it contains an item that wants attention.

The Post cites Thomas Fitzpatrick, of the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, making this remark in a study he co-authored titled “Municipal Finance in the Face of Falling Property Values:”

It appears that the dramatic fall in property values across the country will accelerate the financial distress of municipalities in the wake of the Great Recession.  If creative ways to make up for this lack of revenue are not found, local governments may face the undesirable choice of either raising property taxes or reducing funding for essential services.

But this is bad logic.  It proceeds from the false assumption that whatever a (even local) government does is perforce “essential.”  Further, Fitzpatrick presents the false dichotomy that the only two options available to such governments are either raising taxes or curtailing “essential services.”

In fact, most of what government does is highly desirable, in the short term, but very little of what government does actually is essential.  Moreover, much of the “essential services” displaces the moral responsibility of individual citizens and arrogates that morality to government, to the long term detriment of individual citizens, the local communities which are made up of them, and to society as a whole.  The only truly useful, essential services are police and fire, and refuse collection.  All the rest are better handled by individuals, churches, and charitable organizations, with (even local) government stepping in only as a last resort, not as the first.  And so government always can cut back on its spending and reduce its nonessential “essential” services.

The article itself concludes with this remark:

Instead, towns across the map have relied on an array of maneuvers to cut costs—renegotiated pensions, furloughs, salary freezes, hiring freezes and layoffs. Many also are charging higher user fees for garbage pickup, recreation centers and other services.  And many cities have explored entering into shared service agreements with one another to save money.

These sound like good solutions, not “instead” solutions.  When government is acting in its proper role of “common good” and as a last resort otherwise, it gets a whole lot cheaper to maintain.

Progressives, Caring, and Politics

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Arthur C Brooks’ 2007 book, Who Really Cares: The Surprising Truth About Compassionate Conservatism, contains a trove of data that indicate conservatives give more to charity—even after taking out church-related giving—than do Progressives.  This is substantiated by a 2008 Gallup poll covering 2008 in which the polling data indicate that Conservatives donated 3.5% to 4.5% of their incomes to charitable endeavors, whereas Liberals donated just 1.25% to 1.5%.

And now there’s this from The Washington Post concerning the Solyndra fiasco and the Progressive loans for greens program.  The Post went through some thousands of memos, company records, and internal ­e-mails obtained from the Obama administration in an effort to understand the underpinnings of that loan and the motivations underlying the Department of Energy’s general lending practices.  Although nominally about supporting development of “green” energy and “green” jobs, the Solyndra loan, and apparently DoE’s support for “green” loans, was driven more by politics and political optics than anything else.

The documents reviewed demonstrate that, as Solyndra began to falter and its imminent failure became increasingly obvious, administration officials worried almost exclusively about political fallout and the impact that the company’s failure could have on President Obama’s re-electability.  Indeed, The Post reports that

Rarely, if ever, was there discussion of the impact that Solyndra’s collapse would have on laid-off workers or on the development of clean-energy technology.

Ryan Alexander, of Taxpayers for Common Sense, expands on this:

What’s so troubling is that politics seems to be the dominant factor.  They’re not talking about what the taxpayers are losing; they’re not talking about the failure of the technology, whether we bet on the wrong horse.  What they are talking about is “How are we going to manage this politically?”

There’s also a lot of crony capitalism revealed in The Post‘s reporting, but that’s not unique to this administration or to Progressives; rather, the point in this context is the callousness of the Progressives (who piously demand taxation for wealth redistribution in their Roman Circus-like pandering, in contrast to their attitude toward personal charitable giving, and toward the human fallout of their policies).

Now it’s certainly true that a program must be politically feasible, or government can’t do it, no matter how legitimate it may be for government to have that program.  But political consideration to the exclusion of any concern at all for the harm done to the flesh and blood people that do the work associated with the program?

More Government Thinking for Us

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Big Brother is at it again.

Now Uncle Sugar’s National Highway Transportation Safety Administration wants every automaker to follow the exact same rule about how to turn off a car.  Because we’re unable to figure out how to turn off our engines and electric motors unless all the systems look alike.  Next, NHTSA will be mandating the size of the fins on our cars.  Oh, wait….

There is a superficially sound argument for this mandate.  Steven Stepanian, a driving instructor at Driving Concepts, supports it this way:

The faster you can get the car disabled, the faster you are out of danger.  If the situation is such that you need to shut down the power to the engine or electric motor, you want it done as soon as humanly possible. I can’t come up with a reason that you would want to delay that action.

There are a couple of problems with this, though.  What is the danger, exactly?  Shutting down the engine disables the power steering and power brake systems: the car doesn’t become uncontrollable, but it does get, suddenly, a lot harder to control.  Second, how often does our car actually run away with us?  Most often, runaways turn out to have been caused by operator error: the driver stamped on the gas pedal instead of the brake pedal, and then panicked (even if only momentarily).  Reaching for the Emergency Off switch is faster than getting off the wrong pedal?  The driver is going to think of that switch while he’s panicked?  I can’t come up with a good reason why I need another switch to manipulate in such a situation.  The ignition key turns everything off just fine.  Even in keyless entry cars.

Electric cars certainly would benefit from a kill switch that disconnects the battery system from the motor (and that cuts off the ignition from the backup gasoline engine).  (If that disconnects the battery system from the power steering and brakes, too, that would be a design flaw that wants correction.)

NHTSA also worries that, with the many and varied ways there are to start a car (really?  Turn the ignition key or push the boot-up button—how many ways are there to do that?), we might get confused in a rental or a newly bought car.  I’ve never been confused, and I’ve driven all over the country, and all over the world, in my cars and in a wide variety of rental cars (OK, I’ve not driven in Great Britain, but they all drive on the wrong side of the road, anyway, so that datum is well contaminated).  Have you ever been confused by your car’s ignition key or boot-up button?

There’s a larger question to all of this, and that is why Big Government is mandating what we must have in our cars, why Big Government is insisting on doing our thinking for us: apparently our Betters think we’re just too stupid to function in an environment that isn’t absolutely identical everywhere we go.

Big Government and Racism

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Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D, NV) likened Republicans who objected to Obamacare to congressmen (Democrats, incidentally) who, 150 years ago, fought to delay anti-slavery laws.

Congressman John Lewis (D, GA) manufactured charges of racist slurs aimed at him as he approached the capital building on the passage of Obamacare.

Ex-President Jimmy Carter (D) announced that “an overwhelming portion of the intensely demonstrated animosity toward President Barack Obama is based on the fact that he is a black man, that he’s African-American.”

Congresswoman Frederica Wilson (D, FL) blames black unemployment on racism.

On the other hand, Congresswoman Maxine Waters (D, CA) doesn’t think President Obama is black enough; she’s called him out for not doing enough to target jobs efforts at blacks in particular, instead of pushing them for all Americans.

Attorney General Eric Holder cries out that photo ID requirements for voter registration are racist: they’ll inhibit minorities from voting because they don’t already have the “correct” ID.  Apparently Holder thinks minorities are too stupid to figure out how to get an ID, and how to do so sooner than the day of an election—including one that’s still 10 months off.  Holder’s performance is just the racism of low expectations.

It seems that a failed government is hiding behind racism to try to distract us from its failures and to prevent any criticism of it for its failures.  As Charles Krauthammer has pointed out, though,

…it’s…a cowardly use of the race card and it’s unbecoming. It also is dangerous in a country where it can stoke that kind of racial animosity.

Here is another case where our government is missing a great opportunity to shut up.

America’s Future—Defense Policy Principles, Part I

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I wrote about nature of war from foreign policy perspective here.

In this first post about national defense policy principles and force structures, I want to talk about the meaning of “war” and “state of war”  from a defense policy perspective.  There is far more to war than shooting and exchanging missile fire, although overtly military actions are certainly central aspects of any war, especially in the end game.  A clear understanding is necessary if Defense and State are to work together as the unified whole they must in order for the United States effectively to defend itself in wars of any type.

The damage doesn’t have to be done with bombs or bullets.  Anything that is designed deliberately to impede or to prevent our freedom of action is damaging: it is an act of war.

What, then, is “war?”  Certainly it includes the formally declared state of war, wherein Congress acts under its Article I, Section 8 responsibilities; I won’t go into that further here.  War also includes, though, the aggregation of those acts of war described in the link above (and in links within that post); it need not be declared in order to be in progress, or to be damaging to us and to our security and even survival.  Indeed, in the modern world, where the distribution of formal military power among the nations of the world is so vastly asymmetric, the weaker almost invariably will make war—shooting or otherwise—outside a formal, openly declared state.  Rather, the (weak) attacker will fight in as stealthy a manner as can be managed, at least until the damage done has accumulated to the point of eliminating military advantage and transferring practical advantage to the attacker.  Obviously, such conflicts from deep within the shadows, includes seemingly nonviolent fighting [sic] as well as the asymmetry of terrorist attack.

Moreover, America’s enemies, especially those actively fighting us, are not even necessarily classically formed nation-states; they’re much more amorphous.  These entities, which I’ve been calling non-national entities in earlier posts, have components that are spread across national boundaries; they’re organized as coordinating, but largely separate and more or less independent components.  Further, these non-national entities operate outside Geneva Conventions governing the “proper” way of conducting warfare.  This diffusion across national boundaries and this lack of Convention guidance complicates our response to attacks, but they need not constrain us to the point we cannot defend ourselves.

Complications arise when an overt attack, or a limited series of “acts of war,” originate from within the jurisdiction of a nation-state with which we are not (formally) at war.  (When the attack originates from within a nation that is a friend or ally, the situation actually is much simpler: we can expect that when the attackers are identified, the “host” nation will act decisively on its own initiative.)  It is difficult to enter the host nation’s borders in order to strike the entity and destroy its ability to continue its war against us.  Alternatively, the diffusion of the non-national entity can make it difficult to identify useful targets.  It is the role of diplomacy to create the conditions, permissive or not, that facilitate our entry.  Afghanistan is one example of diplomacy’s success in enabling such an entry for such a purpose.

The Geneva Conventions contain within them mechanisms for prosecuting a defense against attackers who themselves do not follow the Conventions; however, even at that, the Conventions themselves are obsolete: they cannot apply in any practical way to modern wars that don’t necessarily involve actual shooting, nor are they an efficient framework for addressing the kind of war prosecuted by terrorist non-national entities.

In the end, while our diplomacy is creating the conditions that legitimize bypassing the Conventions in wars involving non-national entities and/or undeclared wars inflicted on us by nation-states, our defense policy that must create the conditions for actually fighting such wars to their only possible end: the destruction of the attacker’s ability to continue, wherever it exists, whether that attacker is a nation-state or not, and whether a legal, formal state of war exists or not.

Some examples of patterns of actions deliberately inimical to us and of non-declared war include these (note that this is not an exhaustive list; it is for illustration only).

Russia:

  • in 2007, threatened nuclear war against a US ally, Poland, if we went ahead with a planned missile defense shield radar installation.
  • in 2008, invaded and partitioned a US ally, Georgia, in a naked Sudetenland-like Anschluss.  Nominally, the partitioned provinces, with Russian tanks backing them, simply declared their independence from Georgia; however, they are functionally principalities of Russia.
  • in 2009, participated with the People’s Republic of China in a hack into our national electric power grid control facilities.
  • presently, in response our renewed efforts to defend ourselves against missile attacks, has said they will move nuclear missiles into western Russia so as to target our defensive installations, and our European allies generally.
  • actively supports Iran’s efforts to obtain nuclear weapons, knowing Iranian purposes for the devices.  Russia routinely blocks any serious options, beginning with truly effective sanctions, that would influence Iran to stop its development and acquisition efforts.

Russia’s behaviors are not overt acts of war, but they are inimical to American interests, and Russia clearly knows this.

PRC:

  • actively engaged in hacking into our defense and national infrastructure computer systems, not just for “ordinary” espionage, but also to plant malware having the purpose of disabling those systems at a time of Chinese selection.  These hacks include a years-long penetration of the US Chamber of Commerce, hacks into our national electric power grid control facilities, and attacks against Lockheed Martin, maker of our newest fighter, the F-35, as well as an attack against the F-35 program itself.
  • routinely ships poisoned trade goods, including laptops assembled in Chinese factories under US trade names having Trojans installed before they leave the factory, baby formula with poisons in the mix, gypsum sheets for American housing permeated with sulfur (including hydrogen sulfide), strontium, and organic compounds associated with acrylic paints.
  • actively supports Iran’s efforts to obtain nuclear weapons, knowing Iranian purposes for the devices.  The PRC routinely blocks any serious options, beginning with truly effective sanctions, that would influence Iran to stop its development and acquisition efforts.

While the poisoned trade goods may not be overt acts of war, but rather reflective of incompetence, it’s hard to accept the thesis that a modern nation like the PRC really is that sloppy.  The hacking and delivery of malware with a view to damaging our national ability to function plainly are acts of war, as DoD has lately recognized.

Iran has had a long-standing shadowy war in progress against the US.

  • in November 1979, Iran attacked the US embassy in Tehran and seized our diplomats and staff, imprisoning them for a year and a quarter.  Under international law, this is a casus belli.
  • in 1998, Iran, together with Sudan, participated in the terrorist bombings of the American embassies in Nairobi, Kenya and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, another casus belli.
  • presently threatens an ally of the US, Israel, with extermination.
  • presently developing nuclear weapons, which it will use for that extermination, and which it will pass to other terrorists so they can attack US allies in Europe and attack us directly in our homeland.

Northern Korea:

  • frequently attacks with artillery, and at sea, an ally of the US, the Republic of Korea.
  • transfers nuclear weapons technology to nations inimical to the US, including Saddam’s Iraq, Syria, and Iran.

Even Pakistan, a alleged US ally, actively transfers nuclear weapons technology to nations inimical to us, including the same Syria and Iran.

I’ll address the policy principles and force structure that must guide these capabilities in subsequent posts.  Our responses won’t necessarily be to shoot back, or to respond in kind (though these options will plainly be present); they do need to be directed to the purpose, and be capable, of promptly defeating the inimical acts.