Category Archives: culture

A Thought on Privacy

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Mayor Michael Bloomberg, in an absolutely awesome expression of governmental hubris, says that New Yorkers should just “get used to” the city’s rapidly proliferating surveillance cameras.

You wait, in five years, the technology is getting better, they’ll be cameras everyplace…whether you like it or not[.]

Amazingly, Federal Judge Richard Posner agrees.

Obviously, surveillance cameras didn’t prevent the Boston Marathon attacks.  But they may well have prevented further attacks planned by the bombers, including whatever destruction they may have attempted to cause in New York City.  Moreover, the criticism ignores deterrence.  By increasing the likelihood that terrorists or other criminals will be apprehended, surveillance cameras increase the expected cost of punishment.  That will not deter all attacks, but it will deter many.

Surveillance cameras also can be expected to increase the cost—and difficulty—of maintaining individual freedoms in the face of a constantly snooping government.  But surveillance cameras are of a piece with the lockdown imposed on Boston during the recent manhunt.

Ben Franklin was right.  Posner and Bloomberg are wrong.  But the latter plainly are speaking from the perspective of government and not from the perspective of government’s employers.

Progressivism, Conservatism, and Moral Equivalence

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Herb Croly, a founder of the Progressive movement, had this to say about the advantages of Progressivism:

To be sure, any increase in centralized power and responsibility, expedient or inexpedient, is injurious to certain aspects of traditional American democracy.  But the fault in that case lies with the democratic tradition; and the erroneous and misleading tradition must yield before the march of a constructive national democracy.  …the average American individual is morally and intellectually inadequate to a serious and consistent conception of his responsibilities as a democrat.

Theodore Roosevelt, another founder of the movement, spent much of his New Nationalism speech touting the virtues of the Federal government in nationalizing American businesses and of government guidance for individual prosperity.  There’re these, for example:

It has become entirely clear that we must have government supervision of the capitalization, not only of public-service corporations, including, particularly, railways, but of all corporations doing an interstate business.
…
It is my personal belief that the same kind and degree of control and supervision which should be exercised over public-service corporations should be extended also to combinations which control necessaries of life, such as meat, oil, or coal, or which deal in them on an important scale.  I have no doubt that the ordinary man who has control of them is much like ourselves.  I have no doubt he would like to do well, but I want to have enough supervision to help him realize that desire to do well.

And

We grudge no man a fortune in civil life if it is honorably obtained and well used.  It is not even enough that it should have been gained without doing damage to the community.  We should permit it to be gained only so long as the gaining represents benefit to the community.  This, I know, implies a policy of a far more active governmental interference with social and economic conditions in this country than we have yet had, but I think we have got to face the fact that such an increase in governmental control is now necessary.

FDR imposed wage and (farm) price controls because he didn’t believe businesses or Americans who ran them or worked for them were smart enough or honest enough to make their own decisions.

President Barack Obama is working to nationalize one-sixth of our nation’s economy, and he is on record as saying

I think at a certain point, you’ve made enough money.

And

I think when you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody.

On the other hand, our Declaration of Independence has this:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed….

Thomas Jefferson had this on wealth redistribution and personal responsibility, in particular:

To take from one, because it is thought his own industry and that of his fathers has acquired too much, in order to spare to others, who, or whose fathers, have not exercised equal industry and skill, is to violate arbitrarily the first principle of association, the guarantee to everyone the free exercise of his industry and the fruits acquired by it.

Jim DeMint, late of the US Senate and current President of The Heritage Foundation:

Well, one of the most important things for Americans to be reminded of is that a lot of the exceptional nature of our country is founded in Judeo-Christian values that promotes individualism, personal responsibility, a strong work ethic, and a commitment to family, charity.

Mitt Romney had this during the 2012 Presidential election campaign:

We [conservative Republicans] believe in individual initiative, personal responsibility, opportunity, freedom, small government, the Constitution.  These principles, these American principles, are key to getting our economy back to being successful and leading the world.

It’s clear that Progressives subscribe to the view that Big Government is a better arbiter of what an individual should do with his prosperity or his business than is that individual, and that Big Government is the proper repository of moral obligation toward men and not men themselves.  The inevitable outcome of Progressivism, though, is failure.

It is a dependency on government (which can only benefit the men in government and not at all those dependents).  It is all men being equally poor, rather than all able to increase their individual and family prosperity, albeit some will be more successful than others.  It is all men being equally amoral, having surrendered their moral obligations (if not the duties themselves, as these are as inalienable as the rights that flow from them) to government to handle in their place.

Conservatives, on the other hand, subscribe to the view that government is legitimate only when it works for the people—the people consent to its behavior and governance.  To that end, government is best when it’s kept small and controllable.  Moreover, Conservatives hold to the primacy of the man over the state.  They also believe that not only are individuals better suited than government to determine the disposition of their own efforts and assets, they are obligated to make those decisions for themselves.  And to help those less fortunate, whether that poorer fortune comes through poorer decision-making, lesser ability, or just bad luck.

The inevitable outcome of Conservatism is quite different than that of Progressivism.

It is the opportunity—and the ability—of every man to show the best that there is in him.  It is the ability of every man and his family to climb the economic ladder, to leave poverty behind.  It is the ability for every man to satisfy his own moral obligations: his obligation to be the first to take care of his family, his obligation to do his best to not be a burden on others’ charity (and to stop being a burden as soon as may be should circumstances force him onto that charity), his obligation to help those less fortunate than himself, no matter his own present circumstance.  It is a recognition that government does, indeed, have a role to play in charity when more local resources are exhausted or otherwise unequal to the task—but as a last resort, not a first.

It is moral and economic prosperity and innovation for each of us, for all of us together, and through that, for our nation—and so for our safety.

There is no moral equivalence between these two ideologies; one world view plainly is superior to the other.  (In truth, the present dichotomy isn’t unique concerning the premise of moral equivalence; that’s just a tool with which Progressives attempt to legitimize their Big Government Knows Better meme.)

Some Thoughts on Conservatism

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Jennifer Rubin has some.  For instance,

The old guard has become convinced that Reagan’s solutions to the problems of his time were the essence of conservatism—not simply conservative ideas appropriate for that era.

And

The Republican Party may survive, but only if its politicians, activists, donors and intellectuals rethink modern conservatism and find new issues to defend and new arguments with which to defend them.

There is nothing at all temporal about conservative values.  Nor is there need to “rethink modern conservatism—” which is simply a figment of her imagination—or to find “new issues to defend.”  Conservative principles of limited government, low taxes and government spending, and personal freedom and responsibility, which are the principles Reagan espoused (they were not “Reagan’s solutions” are timeless.  Rubin managed to pack two false premises into those remarks.

Then there’s this:

Even after Obama’s reelection, Reagan-era conservatives have scorned any challenge to the party’s status quo, conducting search-and-destroy missions against ideological deviations from the Reagan playbook.

And

After the top sliver of the Bush-era tax cuts expired, tax increases could not be part of a budget because, as we know, Republicans are opposed to taxes.  Same-sex marriage must be opposed, because Republicans defend “traditional marriage.”  And despite Reagan’s spearheading of immigration reform in 1986, Republicans have to oppose that, too, because theirs is the party of law and order.

These are Rubin’s straw men; it’s her responsibility to defend them, no one else’s.  Except the no more tax increases part: limited government—which demands shrinking the one we have—is, as noted above, a rather timeless Conservative principle.

…principles that voters had rejected in two national elections.

Really?  Voters voted them up in the last two elections in which I participated.  Conservatives made serious gains in Congress and in state legislatures and governor’s houses in both, and they lost fewer Congressional seats than normal in a Presidential election in the last one.  I’d say Conservatives are continuing to gain ground—on our timeless principles.

The rest of Rubin’s piece is just more of this.

Conservative principles of small, limited government, low taxes and tax rates, limited Federal spending, and an emphasis on personal freedom and responsibility—with that limited government as a last resort, not a first—are as valid today as they were in 1790.

Rubin is arguing from straw men and false premises.  As long as she insists on doing this, she isn’t just wrong, she’s irrelevant.

Focus

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Shailini Jandial George, Suffolk University Law School Professor of Legal Writing, posits the following scenario, which she says is growing ever more common in law classrooms:

[Lara Law Student] arrives to her first-year torts class, flips open her laptop, and rests her iPhone on her desk.  Her professor starts his lecture, while she checks her email.  She visits Facebook to check out “must see” photos flagged by a friend.  When the professor turns to the subject of negligence, Lara Law Student remembers that her mom is getting sued and emails her for an update.  She’s then distracted by a text from a friend inquiring about her lunch plans…and so on.

I think George underestimates the deficiency; such behavior is growing more common in all classrooms.  Regardless, she has a solution:

“Instead of conveying all the class information via reading, lecture, and discussion, which can overtax the verbal channel in working memory,” educations should use more pictures….

[L]aw students can greatly benefit from using visuals to remember rules, apply rules to slightly modified hypothetical situations, and apply rules to completely novel situations in exam situations.

Imagine teaching our social compact documents—our Declaration of Independence and our Constitution—and their underlying principles from pictures (how many drawings did Locke use in his Second Treatise?).  Imagine teaching the British constitution—which is much more document intensive than our own—from pictures.

“Conveying…information via reading, lecture, and discussion” does not at all overtax the “verbal channel in working memory;” each of those media already are rife with visual aids (Locke notwithstanding).  What overtaxes “verbal channels” is lack of practice and lack of focus (both of which STEM-ers as well as lawyers need in spades), and that lack results from all of those distractions which George illustrates in her scenario.

Maybe another education reform would be to enclose classrooms inside Faraday cages.

The Boston Lockdown

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While the second terrorist in the Boston Marathon bombing still was being hunted, Boston and a number of surrounding suburbs were put on lockdown, as police recommended (strongly) that everyone should stay indoors while they searched for the terrorist, a terrorist who, as it turns out, had escaped the perimeter the police had set up to enclose a small part of the city.

During that lockdown, Boston took a number of hits, and so I have some thoughts about the pros and cons of the matter.

  • Pros:
    • easier to spot the terrorist on the move (which the police never did)
    • clearer lines of fire should they need to engage
  • Cons:
    • citizens were unable to participate in the manhunt, even though part of a citizen’s duty is to aid the police
    • citizens were unable to go about their own business, except at government behest
    • economic activity in the city came to a halt for the duration
    • a “go inside and hide” mentality makes it easier for a government to dominate its people

The city and people of Boston took hits from the impairment of their individual freedoms (this time, brief) and to their economic activity (this time, both brief and local).  In the end, too, the lockdown contributed very little to the actual tracking and capture of the remaining terrorist.

There are a couple of things about this: for one, these now are tools for subsequent terrorists in their subsequent activities.  On an individual basis, the loss to Boston and to Bostonians was small—but scaled up, with terrorists now acting so as to prompt further lockdowns, the losses can easily mount to a scope far beyond the reach of any physical terrorist act or collection of them done in concert.  Disruptions to our lives get us dancing to the terrorists’ tune as surely as actually killing us.

Widespread lockdowns also get us in the habit of letting the government corral us, for our own good.

Keep in mind Benjamin Franklin’s warning:

Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, will have neither Liberty nor Safety.

Although the warning might be hard for some to understand, it being older than one hundred years.