Category Archives: ethics

Herman Cain and the Debate

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Herman Cain has withdrawn from the Republican campaign, sidelined by allegations of sexual misbehavior.  Some find it hard to believe that there was nothing to those allegations, even though no substantiation ever has been offered.

Cain himself, and fellow Republicans, thought the allegations too much a distraction, and so he believed himself unable to discuss the real issues at hand.  Apparently none of these worthies have ever heard of gorilla dust.

But this surrender comes against the backdrop of other Republican candidates who’ve been called out for similar misbehaviors—that actually have occurred—and who have successfully answered those manufacturing the distractions, thereby canceling attempts to move the discussion away from the issues facing us.

No, the real problem with Cain’s retreat is that this is another instantiation of the Republicans’ inability to control the debate, their inability to keep the discussion on topic.  They routinely allow the other party to decide the terms of reference, whether it be gutting Social Security with payroll tax cuts rather than giving Americans real, income tax cuts; or ad hominem attacks to which the Republican targets respond, and respond, and respond; or class warfare, to which the Republican response is to…claim class warfare, but not to push a coherent tax reform plan of their own; or a tax and spend plan masqueraded as a jobs bill, to which the Republicans respond by saying, “No,” without offering a coherent jobs plan of their own.  The list goes on.

They don’t even talk about the budget the House passed at the start of the current session that reduces the deficit and addresses the national debt, and that sits ignored in the Democratic Party-controlled Senate.  They don’t even talk about the 15+ jobs bills the House has passed that sit languishing in that same Senate.  Because the Progressives don’t want to talk about these things, the Republicans won’t; they can only respond to Progressive initiatives.

And yet manufacturing “distractions” is exactly what the Progressives intend to do to their eventual Presidential campaign opponent in 2012.  And to all of their Congressional opponents.  Because they have no hope of arguing the issues themselves, and because they know they can get away with it.

Removing the Progressives from office in 2012 is very uncertain, regardless of any early poll suggestions.

Government Controls: A European Example

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I’ve been posting about the European debacle for some time; here’s another.  I stay on this subject because there are lessons here for us, lessons that are especially urgent given that our political class sees Europe as a valuable model for governance.

Here are the current moves, just completed or in progress.  Six central banks have gotten together to make acquisition of dollars for Europe, paid for with euros, a whole lot easier.  This move just buys some time, maybe, but it doesn’t address the underlying problem of too much government spending and too much unserviceable sovereign debt.  And it ignores the risks to us should sovereign default in the euro zone become widespread.

The move in progress is an attempt to more tightly integrate the euro zone nations’ budgets—to put them more under the control of the EU central “government” in Brussels, and less under the control of the sovereign nations responsible for them.  Indeed, as proposed by French President Nicolas Sarkozy, this is a three-part move: morphing the Treaty of Maastricht (which created the EU and the euro) into a new treaty incorporating greatly increased budget discipline imposed from Brussels; creating a European Monetary Fund, nominally to support “countries in difficulty;” and euro zone moves made by majority vote rather than requiring unanimity.

The arguments made for tighter integration, singling out Sarkozy (he’s by no means the only one making these arguments; he’s just the loudest and most articulate) include the following.  “All economies became totally under the mechanism of finance, the speculative logic. We’ve seen how it’s affected industry. Also how it’s degraded the value of work.”  And “There can be no common currency without economic convergence without which the euro will be too strong for some, too weak for others, and the euro zone will break up.”

Taking the three steps to tighter integration in turn, here are some problems.  The various sovereign governments [sic] have, with their central planning to their varying degrees, already been over-managing their national economies, and the result is too much spending and too much borrowing, and so we have the present economic strait.  It’s illogical to expect that even more centralized control will improve on the track record—correcting the failure of central control by increasing the degree of central control makes no sense.

Second, a European Monetary Fund “support” facility will only be used to bail out those nations that find themselves in economic trouble.  Nations will have no incentive to apply discipline, or to do more than pay lip service to budgetary diktats from Brussels.  Knowing—or merely believing—that a bailout will be in the offing completely undoes any hope of greater national responsibility.  Feeding this is the fact that now the nations involved can blame their troubles on Brussels’ requirements and so demand that Brussels fix them.  Through the EMF.

Third, the majority vote capacity just means that the profligate many can demand that the responsible—and so sound—few make up the shortfalls of the many’s failures.  This means that Germany will reduced to the euro zone’s piggy bank.  Some argue, though, that this is only just.  It’s what reparations are for.

But at bottom, the argument for tighter integration—no matter the mechanism—ignores some fundamental problems that must be solved before the euro zone’s sovereign debt problems (note that: the problems are those of the individual sovereign nations, not of the euro zone as a whole) can be solved.  For instance, to take a narrow case for illustration, “the mechanism of finance” is not what has cheapened labor.  Things like 35-hour work weeks; labor laws that functionally guarantee a job for life, regardless of the performance of the employee; and retirement in middle age have done that.

But more importantly, tighter integration is doomed to fail when the polities involved don’t agree on the relationship between citizen and government, the role of government, or the purpose of money.  It is this too-great heterogeneity of social philosophy that drives the single euro to be too strong for some and too weak for others.

The parallels with our own situation are apparent.  We have an increasingly intrusive central government that seeks to increase its control over our own economy in order to correct the failures of its prior controls.  We have an increasingly profligate central government that spends too much by ever-increasing margins, and so that borrows ever increasing amounts.  We have a central government that insists on bailing out every one and every thing, thereby attempting to ban failure from our own market place.  And the Fed has been turned into the national piggy bank.

The answer for us, as it is for the EU, is less central control and greatly shrunk governments and reduced government roles.  And greater respect for the intelligence and the wisdom of the sovereign citizens, and so greater trust in us to take care of ourselves and of our neighbors without government diktats, without government taking our property to redistribute to others, without government “protecting” us from ourselves and the consequences of our actions—which “protection” also protects us from the consequences of our successes.

It’s the Wrong Fight

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Republicans say that any tax cuts must be paid for with spending cuts elsewhere, and this is certainly true.  But what they’re talking about in the present case is payroll tax cuts.  Certainly, these cuts also must be paid for with spending cuts from somewhere else, but the logic ends there.

Senator Dick Durbin (D, IL) even calls out the Republicans on the matter, as I’ve written elsewhere.  But why are the Republicans letting themselves be drawn into this at all?  They’re ceding the terms of the debate and the entire debate to the Progressives.

On what basis do the Republicans—or anyone—agree that funding for Social Security should be cut?  This is a program that is already widely acknowledged to be desperately in need of reform or it’s destined for failure, yet the Progressives refuse to allow any reform.  Cutting funding by cutting payroll taxes that are intended for the Social Security Trust Fund only hastens that collapse.  Instead, we get Senator Jon Kyl’s (R, AZ) lame answer that “The payroll tax doesn’t go into general revenue. It supports Social Security.”  While true, it misses the whole point.  What is the Republican’s plan for reforming Social Security (and Medicare)?  Congressman Paul Ryan (R, WI) put forward ideas for both programs in the budget the House passed in 2010 that are worth serious discussion.  Yet Republicans have barely mentioned those ideas since: were they not serious about these reforms?

More to the point, why didn’t Kyl turn the argument back on Durbin and ask him why he’s opposed to really leaving money in the hands of Americans and our businesses by supporting income tax cuts for everyone?

Senator Durbin has agreed that tax cuts are good for Americans (he said so with the payroll tax cuts); Republicans should be arguing for income tax cuts, and permanent ones, not just via the annual argument over extending the Bush tax cuts, or some subset of them.  Republicans should be challenging the Progressives to offer legislation that provides for permanent income tax cuts for individuals and for businesses; they have a willing ally in Senator Durbin.  Or he’ll be shown by the debate to be disingenuous.  Republican candidates for President have offered real, broad tax reform; Republicans should be discussing these ideas more—in town hall meetings, on the floor of the House and Senate, on the radio and TV talk shows, at every chance they get—and they should make chances to talk about them.  Since they don’t do any of that, I have to ask: of what are they afraid?

The US already has the most progressive individual income tax structure in the developed world.  The President is openly engaging in class warfare as he campaigns for reelection and for his More Taxes More Spending ideology.  The Progressives in the Senate have not allowed the Senate to satisfy its statutory duty to propose an actual budget—of any sort—for nearly three years.  The Progressives nearly blew up the debt ceiling negotiations over their refusal to cut spending and their demand to raise taxes.  The Progressives did succeed in blowing up the Super Committee with their nonnegotiable demand to raise taxes by $1 trillion dollars.  The Republicans need to be calling out the Progressives on all of this.

Instead, Republicans let the Democrats control the argument and limit it to a narrow, doomed to fail path.

On top of this, the only jobs program that gets debated is the Progressives’ tax and spend Jobs Bill, while the Republicans don’t even have a coherent jobs message of their own, much less an actual plan.  Oh, yeah, there’s that Ryan bill from nearly two years ago.  About which they’re absolutely silent.

By letting the Progressives have the debates on their terms—again—and by having no coherent message of their own, the Republicans are in danger of giving control of the House right back to the Progressives in 2012 and of leaving control of the Senate and of the White House in their hands, too.  We’ve seen how well that’s worked for our country.  Four more years will only extend the damage to national disaster proportions.

It Isn’t Just Our Own Progressives….

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In an interview with Spiegel Online International, ex-Greek Prime Minister Giorgios Papandreou had this to say in response to Spiegel‘s question of where fault lies for the present crisis:

…we need strict budgetary discipline, and we have to reduce expenditures, but we also need growth strategies. And we cannot lose sight of the markets, either. It is unacceptable that they are the ones driving the countries…not giving their governments the time that democratic institutions need. This undermines our democratic foundation. That’s why we need strict regulation of the markets and more transparency, and why we have to contain the rating agencies. We, as socialists, have demanded this again and again, because we cannot do this alone as a single country. This is a mistake being made by the global political class and, in particular, by conservative Europe.

And this brief exchange:

SPIEGEL: They have dictated the strategies for some time now. The primacy of the political class seems to have been suspended.

Papandreou: That’s true, unfortunately. If we decide at 2 a.m. that we have to make a decision because the stock market in Japan is about to open, it’s an acknowledgement of the superior power of the markets.

What a breathtaking lack of understanding of economics, of free markets, even of democratic principles.  With Europe as their role model, it’s no wonder our own Progressives have so damaged our economy and our government.

Papandreou wants growth strategies.  What more powerful growth strategy can there be than to get government out of people’s and business’ way, to let labor go back to being mobile, to let citizens and businesses make their own decisions?  How much more stimulative (to coin a phrase) can government be than to reduce the cost of doing business by reducing taxes on businesses, on citizens, on exchanges between citizens along with that “budget discipline” and those “reduced expenditures?”

A concern, expressed in complete seriousness, is that markets are driving the nations, and not the governments.  Are not the people sovereign in Europe?  Is government truly the Sovereign in the land of John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau?  People, in a free environment, are free to express their will over their government politically, but that’s not all.  To have a truly free environment, they must be free, as well, to instruct their government economically in a free market.  Every citizen in a free country gets two votes: one at the ballot box and one in his economic exchanges with his fellow citizens.

Another concern, expressed with the same lack of understanding, is that people, with their economic decisions, are not giving their governments the time that democratic institutions need in which to act.  But this is to assume that governments must be in the business of governing citizens’ economic decisions in the first place.  Since legitimate government has no such role, legitimate government needs much less time.

As if that’s not enough—or perhaps it’s deliberate (this would be consistent with the European attitude that government must decide for the people)—Papandreou wants to censor the information that people and businesses use in making their economic decisions: “contain the rating agencies.”  Government will make better decisions with its information base than can the citizens for themselves.  Hmm….  How’s that working out today in Greece and in the EU generally?  Do the people or the government, even in Europe, have the better record over the last several decades?

“We cannot do this alone as a single country.”  No closed economy—no economy that has no access to exogenous funding—can “do this alone,” since “this” is government making the decisions, government taxing everyone to pay for the welfare of everyone.  However, expanding this to the euro zone, or all across Europe, begs the question.  The expansion just expands the bounds on what is still a closed economy whose policies depend on outside financing to pay the difference between what the taxes can provide and what the government has promised.  An expansion only ensures that everyone else is dragged into the pit, also.  Making the thing be global changes the situation not a bit.

But in a huge misunderstanding that’s entirely consistent with the European view of “democracy,” of “freedom,” of “markets,” European government Progressives have completely missed the fact that their markets, at bottom, have very little freedom in economies so heavily laden with regulations and government “oversight.”  The polities have only limited freedom in government-controlled societies that limit labor mobility, that limit business choice, and that discourage entrepreneurship (which is entirely consistent with the lack of market freedom).  The Progressives have no understanding whatsoever of the concept of democracy and of individual liberty.  Papandreou’s own government was brought down by the other governments of the EU for the unpardonable sin of asking the Greek people for their opinion of the latest round of bailouts.  The wills of the French and Dutch citizens, when they rejected the European Union Constitution in their plebiscites, were blithely overruled by their governments signing the Treaty of Lisbon, which enacted that Constitution in all but name.  But this failure to understand is not all on the elitists.  In societies where tax evasion is a sport, where the rule of law is a thing of ridicule—this is not the stuff of freedom and democracy, either.

The failure of understanding can be summed up in Papandreou’s own lament: the superior power of the markets.  How terrible it is that government should be subordinate to the will of its people as expressed in a truly free market.

Democracy, free markets, individual liberty demand that the sovereign people make their own decisions, and live with the outcomes and prosper from those outcomes, or recover from the outcomes and then prosper.  These three—free markets, democracy, and individual freedom—are bound up tightly among each other.  None can exist without the others also existing.  Governments must accord citizens the respect of being responsible for their own actions, and the citizens must reassert this right for themselves.

America’s Future—Foreign Policy Principles, Part IVa

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In this companion post to Part IV of my foreign policy principles, I offer some means (far from exhaustive) of recognizing friend, ally, enemy, and foe.  The ideas I describe may seem obviously simplistic; however, in light of the incoherence of the present administration’s foreign policy—and that of prior administrations post-Reagan—it seems that an enumeration is useful.

In general, in any dispute there will be those who are “with us” and those who are “against us”—and some will always try to sit out the affair.  Of those who are “with us”, we need to know who is a friend, and who is an ally. An initial filter might seem to be a shared core set of beliefs.  This characteristic is highly useful, but I suggest that it’s only a secondary filter whose value is greatest when used to assess the potential durability of a relationship and thus to help discriminate a friend from an ally; it cannot, though, define either.

What are the essential differences between a friend and an ally?  The distinction lies in motive and purpose of the relationship.  An ally is with us against a common foe, for so long as the joint opposition suits our individual purposes—the allies of WWII, for instance.  Similarly, an ally is with us to achieve a common purpose for so long as the coordinated effort in the achieving suits us both—the building and manning of a space station, for instance.  For a friend, these short-term common ends are irrelevant; indeed, we might not work together on very many endeavors at all.  We simply associate with each other freely and easily.  Our bond is deeper, and far less a matter of convenience.

How might we recognize a friend?  A friend is a nation that moves to stand with us, that sends its assistance unasked in our moment of need, or that moves to stand with us in a conflict that has been thrust on us by another.  Our common efforts—military, political, diplomatic, economic, etc.—are joint endeavors, not merely coordinated actions of allies.  An example of a friend might be England and Poland, who stood with us in Iraq and Afghanistan despite their own misgivings about those wars or their duration.  An example might be the United States, who at Japan’s request, sent an envoy to northern Korea to support Japanese efforts to recover their citizens, stolen by the northern Koreans in the ’70s and ’80s, despite the harm sending an American envoy did to our efforts to prevent this entity from acquiring nuclear weapons.

This is not to say that a friend always takes our side uncritically, although one might on occasion.  Having criticisms and standing with us despite them is the mark of an even stronger friendship.  Their doing so with criticism, though, puts a premium on us: it creates in us a moral obligation beyond our simple duty to reciprocate in their hour.  We owe a friend thoughtful consideration of their criticisms; even more than that, we owe either a change in our own behavior where their criticism is legitimate, or a clear and unequivocal answer where we disagree with the criticism.

And that’s it.  It’s a short list containing a single way to tell a friend, especially compared to the much longer list of ways by which to recognize an enemy or a foe.  But that’s as it should be.  Our friends are “high, bright, and clear,” while our enemies and foes lurk in the shadows.

How do we recognize an ally?  Some recognition keys include offers, or accepting our offers, to work toward a common goal, whether this be sharing costs in a resource development project, or sharing financial data concerning a third nation of common interest.  Recognition keys also include offers, or accepting offers, to jointly oppose a third nation or non-national entity interfering with matters of mutual interests.  Nations working together to reduce piracy off the Horn of Africa are allies, for instance, as well as those nations of WWII mentioned above.  Recognition keys further include willingness to permit over-flight, transit transportation, staging, and so on in their territory to facilitate our prosecution of a conflict or other endeavor.  Granting basing rights to facilitate supply delivery to a combat zone is an example of an act of an ally.

While understanding who is our friend and who is an ally is important, it’s arguably even more important to recognize those who are “against us,” including distinguishing between our enemies and our foes.

An enemy is actively attacking us or planning to do so.  The difficulty here sometimes lies in recognizing the attack.  It isn’t always as open as a Schleiffen Plan’s storming across a border or an Operation AI’s aerial bombing attack on a naval base.  In the 21st century, there are many more ways of executing an attack and of prosecuting the subsequent war than merely shooting at us.  It might not even be a formal nation-state conducting the attack; rather the entity might be a non-national organization of terrorists.  Attacks might consist of cyber-attacks that impede or destroy nationally critical networks or that plant malware to be used for this at a different time.  Attacks might consist of economic embargos.  Indeed, the war may be purely one-sided, ranging from the asymmetrical warfare perpetrated by non-national terrorist organizations to a war where only one side is actually fighting because the victim of the war isn’t even aware of it: those cyber-attacks, for instance.

On the other hand, our enemy may “merely” be carrying out a collection of acts, short of legally defined war, that are designed to harm our friends and allies or us to the point of tightly circumscribing freedom of action or even to the point of subjugation.

In particular, we cannot accurately estimate other nations’ relationships to us or their intent by actively offering excuses for their behavior (vis., the Chinese want sea bottom resources, and this justifies aggressively seeking control of the South China Sea, at the expense of that area’s other bordering nations: the Republic of the Philippines, The Socialist Republic of Vietnam, and the Republic of China).  On the contrary, such actions must be assessed, and their underlying motives must be estimated, by their effect on our friends and allies and on us.  And we must understand that the other nation’s imperatives and motives may be nothing like ours.  It is legitimate, despite this though, to assume that the other nation’s leadership, in taking those actions, are neither stupid nor ignorant; they understand fully the impact—and so the implications—of their actions on our friends and allies and on us.  In essence, then, a nation’s publicly-stated intent is largely irrelevant; we must read their actions and assess their motives in light of those impacts.

How do we recognize an enemy, then?  Only by recognizing the shadowy keys of inimical behavior.  To repeat, understanding the other nation’s or non-national organization’s imperatives, so that we can (better, if still imperfectly) understand its motives, is critical, as is the fact that we must work from the premise that the leadership in question is highly intelligent and highly motivated: they know what they are doing, and they know the effect of their actions on us. We can infer their goals from their actions’ predictable effects.

What are our recognition keys?  Acts of enmity include these (a non-exhaustive list) in addition to classic military attacks:

  • deliberately restricting our access to critical resources—oil, for instance, or rare earth metals—for the purpose of damaging us.
  • actively moving to seize control of international waters whose free navigation and/or freedom of access to undersea resources are important to us or to our friends or allies.
  • harassing our ships in international waters or our aircraft in international airspace.
  • shipping, as part of ordinary trade, poisoned products: formaldehyde-laced gypsum board, or toxic baby food, for instance.
  • manipulating their currency value so as to damage our economy.
  • attacking our computing and/or communications networks, or our computer-controlled infrastructure, with cyberware capable of damaging/destroying those targets, or planting malware that will be used “later” for that purpose.
  • providing aid to terrorist organizations plotting, or which have carried out, attacks on us or our friends or allies.
  • moving to facilitate the acquisition of weapons of mass destruction by other nations or non-national organizations that are hostile to us and/or our friends or allies.
  • actively arming those who intend to use those weapons against us or our friends or allies.
  • directly threatening our allies with nuclear attack if we don’t comply with the threatening nation’s wishes.
  • deploying nuclear weapons so as to carry out those threats.

As the number actions from this such a list which a nation or non-national organization carries out goes up, so does the clarity of that nation’s enmity toward us increase.

There is one more class of nation or non-national organization to be identified, and that is what I’ll call a foe.  In this usage, I consider a foe to be an ally of our enemy, loosely analogously to an ally of us.  A foe works deliberately against the interests of our friend or ally or of us as a common goal with another nation, but only for so long as that commonality of purpose exists.  As with identifying an enemy, the recognition keys are shadowy and unclear by themselves.  That list, though, is the same as the keys to identifying an enemy, with the single difference of motive.  This difference is that the foe, of its own volition, is following another nation’s lead in the actions; it is not acting as the primary decision-maker.  (As an aside, a nation or non-national organization forced into the role of foe, but which would not act inimically were it left to its own choices, represents a point of fracture within the enemy’s structure.  This, though, is the subject of a different thread.)

There are two items which I have deliberately elided in order to maintain a certain clarity, and these are the overlaps possible between the actions of an enemy or foe and the actions of an aggressive competitor, even the (less common) overlap with the actions of a friend or ally.  This overlap is a major factor in the need to understand the nation in question and its motives.

The other item is the nation that is neither friend or ally nor enemy or foe, mentioned briefly above.  Such spectators are neutral in some sense, and by holding themselves on the sidelines, tend to render themselves irrelevant to the essentials of the struggles of the active players.