Go Big or Go Home

With the troubling situations in both North Korea and Somalia, many people are thinking about how to handle these situations. The answer must be the old adage "go big, or go home".

After the successful rescue of a captured American ship captain, Somali pirates have vowed to step up their efforts and get revenge upon western vessels for the loss of their kinsmen. Just today, we've already seen an escalation in hijackings including the first night-time raid and another attack on a US ship. At the same time, North Korea has yet again abandoned the 6-party talks, kicked out IAEA inspectors, restarted it's nuclear programs and swore that it would start production of another nuclear bomb.

So, what is to be done about all of this? Some have come up with a variety of possible ways forward, including several task forces in the Department of Defense. The problem, in the end, boils down to a repeat of similar problems in the past. Are we willing to sacrifice what it takes to fix the problem in order to fix the problem? Is our policy going to be based on what we want, or by what we're willing to pay?

If we rewind the clock 10 to 15 years, we can clearly see that we've had this problem before. Somalia had collapsed and was threatening both US interests and a vague sense of moral indignation at mass slaughter. At the time, the Clinton policy was driven not by a strategy that looked at the end goal (fixing things) and deciding how to take the steps necessary to that end. Instead, it was driven by the amount of political capital, money, and American blood that the president was willing to spend. The strategists had to do the best with what they had, rather than getting what they needed to do the job. In the end, the plan unsurprisingly fixed nothing AND shed much more political capital AND American blood than was allowed for at the outset.

The second big situation of the 90's, of course, was Iraq. Iraq, for a time, was developing nuclear weapons (until their facilities were turned into blasted heaps of rubble by the Israelis). Likewise, Saddam endlessly threatened his neighbors and the US. The diplomatic confrontation went on and on. Year after year, the US would provide support for Iraq, only to have it's chain yanked. Oil for food turned into money for Saddam. A tightly-controlled, autocratic regime knew how to play America to get what it wanted, every time, and make Clinton look like an ass, every time. A political cartoon that ran in my local paper showing Saddam with a paddleball with the ball replaced by the head of Bill Clinton was tragically appropriate.

So what happened in the end? With Iraq, people were so fed up with Saddam (especially in the government) that the president fabricated and embellished a case for war against our enemy that we were just frankly sick of having to deal with (so much so that the government nearly unanimously approved of war). Because we were jerked around so much for so long, we eventually snapped and were willing to put the resources on the line to fix the situation (by ousting Saddam). Likewise, when we failed to do anything about the situation in Somalia, the situation in Somalia continued. The piracy we're dealing with is a direct result of having failed to deal with the situation in the first place.

Thus, it can be clearly seen that by caring about a situation, but taking action based on cost, not results, leads us inevitably to a situation where we're going to pay the cost anyway (if not moreso) in the end. Thus, no matter how uncomfortable things are, we need to be willing to "go big". If we really care about North Korea's nuclear weapons program, we've got to be willing to destroy the government of North Korea. If we really care about Somali pirates, then we're going to have to put the proper amount of resources on the line to actually do the nation-building required to get the job done. Otherwise, we're just going to have to do this later, at greater cost.

Of course, there is one out to this all. That is, of course, that we could stop caring. If we simply forbid American vessles to travel through the Suez canal, or simply handed complete worry and responsibility of a nuclear North Korea (or Iran for that matter) to local powers and totally washed our hands of it, then we wouldn't need to spend any resources at all. Sure, the problems wouldn't be fixed (as if they would through a tempered response), but they wouldn't be our problems any more. This is the "go home" option, where we solve our problems by simply refusing to care about them. Of course, this option would throw away any moral obligatiojavascript:void(0)n to any human being outside of the borders of the United States.

Otherwise, to take a middle road means cost for no results. It means a tragic reliving of the Clinton years of foreign policy that will ultimately end with a president like Bush who will actually act to try and solve problems rather than letting them fester. If Obama decides to break from the Bush way of thinking and adopt the Clinton, he's just setting himself up to be replaced by another Bush. Hopefully we can have the clear-sightedness to actually cut losses where they should be cut, and do the proper actions to fix things, rather than just more unpopular, or unproductive squandering of American blood, treasure, credibility, and respect.

A Victory for Piracy (the good kind)

With a few key pieces of internet legislation that have come up recently, mankind has shown of its awesome ability to keep doing what it wants to do, even if a segment of it thinks they shouldn't.

It can not be stated enough on this blog that coersion doesn't work. When one person tells another person to stop doing what they're doing, it doesn't matter how big of an institution the first person makes, or how much power they can pump into it, that person will always fail in the end. A vast majority of the time, failure starts the instant direct coersion is let up. Check out this article from cracked.com for some great examples.

One of the things that people want is to have access to things that entertain them, and they want it now, and they want it to be priced at the most on-the-house level possible. Of course, industry giants that became industry giants specifically because they offered people just enough of what they want, but not enough to stop making fistfuls of cash from them, hate this part of human nature. If only it happened to be true that what we all wanted was to be entertained and to give away as much of our GDP as we could in the process. The solution, of course, has been to offer their services, but then to tell people what they can and cannot do.

This, generally speaking, always fails. What intellectual-property-mongers of all media tried to do when people ignored them and started downloading songs and movies was, of course, to use coercion. Did suing teenagers for embarrassingly large piles of cash get people to do what they want? Does anyone wonder how effective coercion is?

Of course, futility has a frustrating inability to convince irrational people to stop doing that which has no utility. Unfortunately, it's this very same group of people who happen to have money and power. Take Sweden, for example. The statehouse there recently enacted tough new anti-internet-piracy laws. Because the police can now take down your computer's IP address, naturally all forms of internet piracy were going to come crashing to a halt. Because states can use coercion to get their way, remember?

While traffic on piracy sites did decline for about a day, they shot back up when piracy organizations offered a new service. Now, you can keep on doing exactly what you wanted to do, but your IP will be scrambled, and your actions will be untraceable. Not only was this an easy thing for pirating organizations to do (heck, I could set up a VPN if I wanted to), and not only did they likely have this new service up BEFORE the resolution actually got signed into law, but the best part is that the organizations are charging a nominal fee for their service. The end result of attempting to legislate morality? People are doing exactly what they were doing before, but now the people facilitating the same (now illegal) activity are making more money than ever before.

Sound familiar? There are countless examples from Prohibition to the Drug war. In fact, the state of Mexico is so devoted to legislating out drug use and trafficking that the state has nearly gone bankrupt and collapsed in on itself in an attempt to use a failed strategy for an end that they will never be able to achieve. If it takes the ultimate destruction of Mexico to prove that coercion has no utility, than I guess it will be worth it, but I have this sneaking suspicion that all lessons would immediately be lost.

Thankfully, SOMEONE has taken notice of this. Recently, France's parliament passed a law that said that if recording industry people broke into your computer and found at least three pieces of pirated anything they could permanently ban you, personally, from the internet. Somehow, a majority of French legislators actually thought that this would work. Thankfully, nearly 2 in 3 of people in the French National Assembly realized how absolutely retarded this idea was (not to mention the eggregious trampling on civil liberties), and voted it down.

Tragically, France's president has forced the legislative bodies to vote on it again after their spring break. I suppose the only ally of idiocy is persistence.

A Failure of What?

As Somali pirates continue to hijack more and more vessels, fingers are being pointed, but who's really to blame?

Piracy off of the horn of Africa has been rife over the past few months, but with the capture of an American vessel and the first of many British warships entering the area, the issue is once again heating up. While the temporary solution to the problem seems to be clear, the causes and thus the long-term solutions seem to be muddled and unknown.

When I was driving home today, I heard a guest on "The World" give what must surely be the most western version of the story. Namely, Somalia is chugging out pirates because it has a failed state. Because there is no overarching coercive force to force the law on desperate Somalis, they are behaving so reprehensibly. Notwithstanding that coercion doesn't work, the feeling is that if the Somalian state is unable to beat it's own citizens into doing what's right, other states will send their navies in to beat up Somalian citizens into doing what's right (we insist).

But, of course, the whole point of a state is not to force it's population into a certain set of behavior patterns through force. It is unsurprising that those states who have held such to be their mandate have all invariably failed. Put otherwise, it is the attempt to mete out law at all costs that causes states to fail, rather than the failure of a state that causes lawlessness. After all, there are many communities in the world that don't have direct, external, state-sponsored law that do just fine (like the Amish, for example), and to think that men are naturally savage and require strong governance over them to prevent rampant anarchy and death may be surprised to know that their philosophical roots were already cut out nearly 400 years ago...

The particular guest then went on to say that another reason for Somali piracy is the desperate condition of Somalis. Specifically, because they have a failed state, they don't have education, roads, or welfare. Simply put, without government giving you what you need, you are left in a world of squalor. Of course, this idea is actually absurd. People have gotten on well enough without states providing infrastructure or medical bill reimbursement or factory-produced government schools for millennia. If this hyper-statist point of view were accurate, then the entire world, pre-westphalia, would have been nothing more than barbarity and mass butchery: something we know to be patently false.

We know as fact that people can take care of themselves without a government handing them everything without immediately resorting to things like piracy. The overbearingly western idea that the failure of the state has transitively caused the problems is clearly confused. Thea idea that Somalis are risking their lives for $10 million in one go when they otherwise might make $10 over their entire lifetime seems much more at heart in this issue. We could just lump this all into a category of mass greed if it weren't for the fact that Somalis do suffer SO much and are in SUCH a state of destitution. Such want undoubtedly would drive people to float rafts hundreds of miles away from shore just for a chance at relief.

This brings us to another thing that this particular guest noted. Somalis are in a very desperate state, and we know this because almost everyone there is reliant on food aid. Once again, there is reason to believe that this line of thinking has been turned on its head. It is assuming that the Somalis are desperate (perhaps due to lack of an overbearing government), that they are required to take food aid in order just to get out of the worst of their deprivation. In fact, it may be that the opposite is true: food aid is CAUSING the worst of the deprivation.

Foreign aid is often channeled into the hands of governments who simply divert the funds for themselves. Somalia was no exception to this in the early 1990's. Those resources that DO manage to make it down to regular people undermine the fledgling ability for the people to provide for themselves. After all, what Somali farmer or pastor can possibly compete against free food from the rest of the world? What you wind up with is with a bunch of out of work farmers swelling the need for more aid, while no longer being able to help free their country from their need of it. Add to that interest payments on loans, and we can begin to see a fundamental factor for the worsening of the situation in Africa since we've started giving out aid.

So, in the end, if it's not a matter of a failure of state or a failure of aid that's causing the conditions which breeds piracy, then the question is, "this is a failure of what?" Firstly, and most clearly, this is a failure of Somalians to provide well enough for themselves. If they grew enough food, and desired political unity and economic stability (rather than the tribalism and looter-take-all attitude which has been rife in Somalia for the past few thousand years) enough, they would be able to MAKE an environment in which piracy was no longer such a good-seeming option. While a state may very well be helpful, all states rest on the consent of the governed (they are made for the people BY the people), and the governed seem to have no will to make a state. It requires little imagination to consider what would happen were a state forced on them from outside...

While the Somalis should take a lion's share of the blame (but if they don't feel guilty, then what good will it ultimately do?), the outside world certainly hasn't helped. Rather than encouraging entreprenurialism, or civil society, it encourages dependency (which, in the end is really another word for slavery), and attacks civic institutions as harbingers of terrorism. We want Somalia to step in line, and do things our way. After all, there's a profit to be had.

If we want to have any hope to change this situation, there seems to be only two real options. The first is to swarm the Gulf of Aden with warships and murder anyone caught in a boat, while at the same time colonizing Somalia and giving (forcing on) them a state which they were unable to make themselves. Extreme order through extreme coercion. Welcome to the 1800's. The second, of course, is to stop half-assedly engaging with Somalia in a system which is ultimately propagating the problem. By this, I mean that we need to wean Somalia off of its dependency that is ultimately its ruin, and we need to stop behaving like we can control a Somali state (or even that we know what it should look like), and let Somalia grow up into a strong, independent nation. Stiflement begets destitution begets retribution, now as in the past, and to simply state that Somalia has "failed" to make a state in our image that follows our laws and norms is simply continuing the problem to the indefinite future.

Marching to a New Tune

With the events of the past few days, it appears that there has been a real change in the way the United States handles it's defense policy. What direction is our military taking into the future?

Only a few hours ago, the Secretary of Defense Robert Gates announced a new direction forward for the Pentagon. In it was not simply a change of rhetoric, but a change in direction. Because the change came from a bureaucrat, it is possible that much more of the change will actually be implemented, which means that we might very much see some real changes to the U.S. military in the next few decades.

The change is moving things forward in a few different ways. The biggest is that it is reversing the long-standing trend of cuts to active-duty military personnel. No longer is the path toward eventually phasing out the human aspect entirely, but rather it is realizing the extensive needs of the human element in the irregular wars we've been fighting (after all, drones can't go house to house and ask residents to give out names of terrorists like real people can). As well, there's a focus of moving towards increasing special ops, as well as more translators, and social studies majors embedded in military units.

But what's more important than what's put in is what's left out. The highlight of the chopping block was the Future Combat Systems program. Basically, for the first time since the New Model Army, a major military was being redesigned from the ground up in a cohesive way. One protocol for networking vehicles together, one protocol for weapon specs and military doctrine to use them. Rather than being hodge-podge upgrades, this was going to be a clean-sweep, followed by a set-piece American army.

The problem, other than it's massive budged overruns and startling lack of progress, was what it was designed to do. Specifically, it was designed to fight a major war with contemporary major powers.

The problem, of course, is that none of the other major powers have made any real strides in their military capabilities in over 20 years. The U.S. ended the Cold War 2 or 3 steps ahead of everyone else, and, due to research over the past 20 years, are now more like 10 or 12. In short, the U.S. already HAS the ability to crush any possible combination of major powers in a conventional war, and that would only happen in the first place once it somehow became okay to engage in such a war in the age of nuclear weapons.

There is still, however, the vague threat of developing industrialized powers. Iran, for example, could be persuasively argued to be trying to make a nuclear weapon while North Korea just attempted another ballistic missile test.

The thing we have to remember, though, is that the U.S. as far as military technology is concerned, is where it is due to 50 YEARS of cold war defense spending as the most productive nation on the planet. North Korea, on the other hand, is using a way smaller resource base, and has spent much less time. The U.S., for example, was able to put a satellite into orbit after 10 years of trying. North Korea, on the other hand, has spent the past 10 years since their first disastrous taepodong test (that blew up less than a mile off the launchpad) reworking the rocket into one that can unreliably fail and discharge its payload somewhere in the Pacific Ocean.

This new move by the pentagon shows that someone down there understands that we already have the ability to crush everyone, and the most threatening states (conventionally speaking), are ones that are so far behind our current capabilities that if we stopped now, it would take centuries for them to catch up.

But what does this all mean? Firstly, it means that the Department of Defense is FINALLY coming to the realization that, even though we've had a long time since our last major war, the next major war is still an impossibly long way into the future. As well, it signals a turning away from the idea that technology wins wars to the idea that technique wins wars. It's going to be the trained counter-insurgent, not the trained F-22 Raptor pilot that will really be winning our wars in the future.

As such, with a change in doctrine, capabilities, and funding, the U.S. will be much better handled to win wars like Iraq and Afghanistan in the future. Of course, in theory, it also gives everyone else a chance to catch up to us, military-technology-wise. Once a relative single, overarching hegemon in the field of global power is gone, conflict among major powers is not only possible, but likely. This conflict, however, would still be deterred by the threat of nuclear weapons (unless people have actually gotten rid of them in the far future). As such, major war will only be possible if several major actors catch up AND technology neutralizes nuclear weapons.

Given the fact the the U.S. is the only country seriously attempting to neutralize nukes (through it's variety of anti-missile systems), and it's joining the rest of the developed world that isn't really making conventional weapons upgrades, a move in the direction that the Pentagon is currently taking seems more than prudent.

For further reading, click here or here.

A Victory for Science (Part 3)

While the recent Texas evolution fight made a loser out of both Creationists and Evolutionists, thankfully science came out the winner.

A Victory for Science (Part 1)

A Victory for Science (Part 2)

Recently, the state of Texas underwent a periodic review of it's biology curriculum textbook. At primary issue was a debate over how evolution should be taught. The results were mixed. For the last part of this three-part blog, I'm going to look at the real winner of this battle of wits: science.

The entire point of science, as I see it, is to make the most accurate generalizations about the universe. In order to do this, it tries to be objective as it can, demanding rigor through repeatable experimentation, falsifiability, and open disclosure of methods, along with debate of conclusions in peer-reviewed journals. Subjectivity can produce accuracy, but not consistently, and it's much more difficult to dislodge subjective falsehoods than objectively-created ones.

As such, in order to avoid the pitfalls of subjectivity, science has to constantly be critical and skeptical. It has to be constantly on the lookout for doctrine and dogma. Otherwise, people could make up their own worldviews using some data generated by the scientific method and then call their worldview "science", and that everyone else is a subjective moron for not believing in it. It is these worldviews, no matter the data that is in them, that becomes dogmatic.

Tragically, huge swaths of what the theory of evolution has created is, in fact, worldview. Long ago, people like Huxley made up their own religion using some real science that Darwin had done. This worldview hijacked the objective system of science to create a subjective ideology, and then branded anyone who didn't believe in evolution to not believe in science. Refusal to believe in ANY subjective system, no matter who came up with the data does NOT mean that you disbelieve in objective systems, like science.

But tragically, this hasn't been apparent to so many scientists over time. As such, many believe that in order to believe in the objective system of science, you need to believe in the subjective parts that snuck in.

Thankfully, however, at least in the state of Texas, this tragedy is under siege. Now high schoolers are being taught that they need to approach theories critically and conclusions with skepticism. They are learning that real science involves real debate, not simply accepting what more senior scientists, or a simple majority of the science community says is so. They are learning that disagreeing with conclusions does not mean that you are an unscientific heretic to rational thought and reasonable disposition.

Not only will students have a more mature understanding of how the scientific process works, but it also emphasizes the power that real science has. As mentioned before, students who are able to critically handle data and debate conclusions are less likely to fall for non-science like creationism while they're busy disbelieving non-science like evolutionism. As well, it embeds the principle that conclusions from authority should be questioned and tested, whether the truth comes from the lips of high-ranking priests, or high-ranking scientists. Noocracy averted, democracy is still safe for the future.

Hopefully these kinds of people will go on to enter scientific professions so that they can help clean out future subjective messes, and the scientific body will be better off for it. If we are forced to have non-scientific groups propounding real science to clean out the non-science from scientific groups, then so be it. Texas definitely made the right call.


For further reading, click here.

A Victory for Science (Part 2)

While the recent Texas evolution fight made a loser out of both Creationists and Evolutionists, thankfully science came out the winner.

A Victory for Science (Part 1)

Recently, the state of Texas underwent a periodic review of it's biology curriculum textbook. At primary issue was a debate over how evolution should be taught. The results were mixed. For the second part of this three-part blog, I'm going to look at one of the losers to this battle of wits: creationists.

Creationists just plain old don't like a lot of the conclusions that the theory of evolution implies. I don't know of any who disbelieve in the science of genetics, but I also don't know any that believe that non-life begets life, and that organisms in one kingdom, given enough time, can turn into organisms that belong to another kingdom. The thing is, for hardcore creationists, it's NOT a simple matter of being skeptical of a scientific theory, it is the purposeful rejection of an ideology because it is in conflict with theirs. It's not that evolution untenably corroborates disassociated data, it's that if you believe in it, you go to hell.

While it would be easy to claim that creationism has somehow won in this whole affair, the ultimate result is the opposite. The current Texas decision has set a precedent that will ultimately HURT the creationist standpoint.

This is because the tactic that creationists have used is a tactic of "don't just believe what you're told, or what's popular". Of course, Christianity isn't well-known for it's skeptical disbelief in that which cannot be empirically verified. No, the real point of this type of argument is two-fold. The first is that it presents a legitimate window through which one can scientifically doubt the "scientific" principles of evolution. With their foot in the door, creationism is allowed to wedge it's own "science" in: intelligent design.

Intelligent design is not science. It is an ideologically-driven train wreck between philosophy and data (just like evolution). It makes sense to create a new pseudo-science that has positive ramifications on your ideology to counter a pseudo-science that has negative ramifications. The problem, of course, is the method that creationists are using to get their blend of garbage to replace the existing blend.

The method, remember, is to question everything. Be critical. Be skeptical. The reason, of course, is that this spirit (the spirit that drives real science) has a tendency to wash away non-science mumbo jumbo. The error, though, is to assume that once people use critical reasoning against evolution, they won't then turn the very same against creationism. There is no way that creationism, as a science, can survive against critical thinking.

At best, it's a wash for creationism. Yes, the kids may not believe in evolution, but they're not going to believe in intelligent design either. But here's the dangerous part: you've taught your kids to be skeptical. It's not going to take long before those same little 9th grade critical thinkers to point their aim at Christianity. Remember, Christianity, at least the parts that attempt to describe history and universal fact, does not hold up well against science. If you don't believe me, just ask the Catholic Church.

In the end, critically thinking teens will start looking at Christianity and coming to conclusions like "Christianity is the belief that a cosmic Jewish Zombie who was his own father can make you live forever if you symbolically eat his flesh and telepathically tell him you accept him as your master, so he can remove an evil force from your soul that is present in humanity because a rib-woman was convinced by a talking snake to eat from a magical tree..."

Thus critical reasoning destroys the religion of evolution, thus it destroys the religion of Christ. As such, by using this tactic, creationists are ultimately destroying themselves, which is why this recent decision in Texas makes them a loser too.

A Victory for Science (Part 1)

While the recent Texas evolution fight made a loser out of both Creationists and Evolutionists, thankfully science came out the winner.

Recently, the state of Texas underwent a periodic review of it's biology curriculum textbook. At primary issue was a debate over how evolution should be taught. The results were mixed. For the first part of this three-part blog, I'm going to look at one of the losers to this battle of wits: evolutionists.

For pro-evolution people (specifically, those who care enough to actually have a vehement opinion on the matter), the result was shocking. To this group, this is nothing short of the state of Texas saying that hard, irrefutable, scientifically-driven, absolute facts of the universe are equal in legitimacy to witchcraft and voodoo. To many in this camp, it is a fundamental debasement of science.

In order to hold this view, you need to have a worldview that tells you that "if the method is good, then the conclusions are good". If you have the proper methodology (say, the scientific method), then the data that you gain from the process is true, and any conclusions that corroborate with are fact. End of story. This is called positivism.

The problem, of course, is that positivists take a warped, inaccurate and, most importantly, limited view of science. Positivism ignores the fact that science has made countless blunders and wildly inaccurate statements over it's long history. Furthermore, it ignores the fact that the data being collected, no matter the methodology, is taken through the lens of human institutions. Which experiments are run in which manner on which hypotheses, and, most importantly, how to subjectively interpret the data into scientific facts is based on human institutions that deal with things like power, money, pride, and all of the other millions of things that make humans subjective. To say that objective truth can be determinately ascertained is flat out silly.

But it's actually more than that. If you take a certain set of data, and, necessarily, introduce human subjectivity to create an ideology, you are doing nothing different than religions do. What you have, in both cases, is not some absolute truth (no matter how much religious figures or positivists would say otherwise), but a primarily faith-based worldview, comprised of a handful of data points and a lot of wishful thinking. In the end, when a positivist looks at evolution: a concept that almost totally defies the ability for the scientific method to even function (ie. science can not prove any given historical event happened), then what the positivist has in evolution is a worldview with a smattering of data and a lot of faith.

As such, what we're seeing here is really people's faith being challenged. As such, it is unsurprising that some evolutionists (like the one linked to above) believe that evolution should not only be taught as absolute truth, but that science classes should prevent students from using critical thinking to examine it. It should be believed, no questions asked.

This is not science. This is religion. It doesn't matter if the particularities of the belief system are different.

But alas, some jerks who have a different religious ideology for how the universe was created and why humans exist have forced the state of Texas to teach children to use objective, skeptical, critical thinking skills on determining the viability of "facts" that are drawn from certain data sets. Unfortunately for evolutionists, they are being beaten by what science actually stands for. Odd that it took another religious group to do what those who have draped themselves in the mantle of science should have been doing this whole time.

The USA CEO?

After Obama's recent declaration of the termination of GM's CEO, some have come to see Obama as the new CEO of the United States. Where is all of this actually heading, if anywhere?

The US government has semi-nationalized the banks with the way the bailouts have been going so far. As well, the government has actually taken over non-bank corporations (like Freddie and Fannie), but these are still a part of the financial, near-bank, systems in the US. Now, for the first time, Obama has set his sights of direct, top-level government intervention on a non-financial company: General Motors.

To the political right, this looks like socialism, plain and simple. The government is coming in and taking ownership/control of the means of production of the most productive sectors of the economy in a bid to exchange wealth generation for security. Curtailing of civil liberties will invariably and immediately follow behind, etc. etc. Despite how easy it is to point the finger at socialism and shriek in horror, this isn't actually what's going on.

What's going on is a knee-jerk reaction, not a well-planned conspiracy to undermine America. People feel upset that CEOs screwed up royally. They're also upset because they are being affected by the screw-up, but they had no power to prevent the problem. In short, we can "fire" our public leaders when they go astray, but when we can't do it to our private leaders (CEOs), AND we can't secretly transfer some of the blame to ourselves (because we never put them in in the first place), it makes us all very angry. There is no end to our righteous cries for vindication when we are being hurt by a power over which we have no control. It's not a "no taxation without representation" so much as a "no taking risks that can destroy us all without representation". The wording is different, but the sentiment is very much the same.

We do, now, have a way of remedying this problem through those we HAVE elected. If CEOs do a cruddy job, Obama has now made it possible (if not the responsibility) of the government to remove them, and put in someone better, as we can't remove them by ourselves. Depreciation of shareholder confidence and consumer advocacy is NOT the same as ousting someone in an election.

This GM step isn't, however, a step toward socialism. In order to socialize, the government needs to fire the CEOs and replace them with government agents. Furthermore, everyone needs to be put on the payroll of the state, the non-government bureaucracy eliminated, and the state needs to officially incorporate it into their system. While it's done this with the FDIC, and has somewhat done this with Freddie Mac, it has most certainly NOT done this with GM.

Instead, the government simply exerted itself as a entity that sits above corporations with power over them. That way, it gets to go in and do occasional actions (like fire CEOs) without having to do the tremendously complicated and costly process of actually running the businesses. You get all the political benefits without any of the liability. Sort of like arming rebel groups.

This "socialism light" is actually a form of corporatism. Corporations still exist in their non-democratic, closed off, profit-seeking ways, but they have a connection at the very highest eschelons with the government. The government doesn't tell them what to do (every once in awhile, perhaps, but it's not a planned economy by a long shot), or how to do it, but it's allowed to step in and commit drastic action when their seats are on the line.

Of course, you just might be asking yourself now if corporatism isn't actually a pillar of fascism. It is. Of course, we're not taking steps in other fascist directions like hyper-nationalism or imprisoning people of ethnic groups we hate, but this recent step is one that takes us towards fascism, rather than socialism. Remember that just because fascist institutions were destroyed by a total, global war bent on destroying it (a testament to it's strength, in a way), doesn't mean that the ideas have gone away, even if they've taken on new names.

Government power-grabbing without necessarily getting it's fingers dirty in the nitty-gritty day-to-day has happened during an innumerable amount of crises. This time doesn't seem to be much different. Who knows, maybe we'll eventually get our old mercury dimes back.

Terrorism? Let us help (we insist)!

As Pakistan continues to crumble, it's ability to handle sworn enemies of the United States is decreasing. Will we insist on helping out like we've done in the past?

Today's attacks in Pakistan have thrown yet another point on the line that is pointing to Pakistan's downfall. As terrorism has been ramping up along with political corruption, paramilitary groups are staging even more and more flagrant attacks (if they can shoot up and capture a police barracks in broad daylight, how much more flagrant can they get?), while the government is less able to stop them. While the US may be able to otherwise overlook internal gubernatorial collapse of a third-world nation, this time the bad guys are people who we have sworn to destroy. This time, it's personal.

The US has had a long history of intervention in foreign countries where direct national security is possibly at stake. Can't stop the Zapatistas who are flooding Texas with gang violence? Don't worry, Mexico, we can take care of that problem for you... we insist. Don't care to take out Al Quaeda, Taliban? Don't worry, let us take care of them for you... we insist. Over the past century, there have been dozens of countries that the US has sent boots into from the more obvious (like the invasion of Afghanistan), to the dubious (like the invasion of Lybia), to the blatantly unnecessary (like the invasion of Iraq). No American president (including the current one) has been able to fully resist the seductive call to send American troops places where they're not really needed in order to fix a problem that someone else should have.

The real question, then, is how does the president handle this call? The last one clearly made no qualms about turning his desires into action. The current one, however, has chosen a more Clinton route of under-the-radar, more secretive things that ultimately yield far fewer results, but do so at far less liability. Rather than spending real money and putting real lives on the line, the strategy basically involves things like arming rebel groups that are fighting whoever we're also fighting, or launching a few missiles in and hoping for the best. At the most, US involvement involves dragging dozens of other countries into UN pacts (or NATO, in the case of Clinton in the Balkans) to help us fix other people's problems.

Of course, unlike Operation Desert Fox, Obama has a lot more technology to do the secret dirty work. Specifically, we have lots of unmanned aerial drones, the use of which has escalated since Obama's taken over. Of course, it's still an egregious breach of international law, but we haven't felt we need permission for these kinds of attacks in the past, and we certainly don't feel like we need it now.

Of course, with all of these "limited liability" strategies, they tend to be horrifically short sighted. Was it really a good idea to accidentally lose a bunch of stinger missiles for Islamic Afghan fighters to use against the soviets? Was it really a good idea to give Saddam Hussein a bunch of weapons to use against Iran? History is flooded with examples of limited liability tactics that both don't achieve the desired effect, but also are ultimately counterproductive.

And here we are shooting drones into Pakistan. If Israel has been able to teach us anything over the years, it's that aerial bombardment does NOT destroy terrorist networks (if anything, it has the opposite of the desired effect). Likewise, the flagrant disregard for Pakistan's sovereignty is further weakening the state, making them LESS able to handle the problem by itself which will require MORE American involvement down the road. If committing acts that we knew would cause a future environment that would allow us to invade Pakistan was the point of all of this, we're definitely on the right track.

Because once the Pakistan state looses it's last shred of legitimacy (no matter how much money we give to corrupt government officials in civilian aid), then the problem over there is going to get much worse, and we're going to feel obligated to handle the mess that the Pakistani's might have been able to fix, without our help. In all likelihood, we're going to put boots on the ground because the problem will feel like it needs to be fixed, and we'll insist that we're the ones to fix it.

The Obama War

With Bush gone, and Obama in, the war in Afghanistan is set to go off in a new direction. What will this direction likely mean for the ultimate outcome?

Earlier this morning, Obama gave a speech outlining his plan for the war in Afghanistan. As the conflict was a key part of his campaign, it makes sense that he was going to unveil something different than his predecessor's strategy of "do nothing and hope it works out".

His plan basically breaks down into two big camps. The first prong of the strategy is to throw more troops and more money at the problem by simply increasing the number of both that the US is to put into Afghanistan. The second is to go in with a second army: one of clerks, bureaucrats, engineers, teachers, and other civil servants to do some serious, hardcore nation building.

Obama was mocked during the campaign for following his party ('s leadership's) line that the surge in Iraq had failed. While towing the party line may be forgivable, it seems that it has betrayed a real lack of knowledge of why the surge worked, and why the first prong of the new strategy in Afghanistan is doomed to fail.

In Iraq, after the crushing victory over the Iraqi army, there was this definite sense that the US should just stick around for a little while, taking an unobtrusive role, but to get out as soon as possible. The strategy was one of handover: hand over security responsibility to the Iraqi police, hand over nation building to the fledgling Iraqi republic, and hand over a stunning victory for the US without handing over the mess. As such, the general Casey way of doing things was to take a very backseat role as an advisor, training Iraqi forces from the safety of their bases. When things would flare up, the army would go in for a quick strike, and all of the insurgents would just move somewhere else.

Under this strategy, the war in Iraq failed. The basic screw-up was believing that a weak state can provide security, rather than the correct view that a weak state requires security as a prerequisite in order to be able to do anything at all. Handing over responsibility to someone who couldn't be responsible ended, predictably, in failure. Obama is currently set up to repeat this mistake. The plan is to send in a bunch of observers and trainers for the explicit strategic purpose of handing control of security over to the Afghanis. If this failed in a country with a weak state, I fail to see how this will work in a country that has almost never even had a centralized state in its entire history.

The second prong of the new strategy is basically to give the Afghanis a government. The officials there are all apparently so corrupt, and have such a little idea of what governance should actually look like (once again, because they've had virtually no experience), that the so-called government really isn't doing anything but funneling American dollars into their Swiss bank accounts. This, however, is the very definition of occupation in everything but name. If we're sending in our army, and our foreign government officials are actually creating a nation by themselves, then any Afghani who stands on top is really more of a symbol. Needless to say, if the plan was to create an environment to hand over political control to the Afghanis, is seizing political control over the Afghanis the way to do it?

I would personally say that after a few decades of showing the Afghanis how to run a proper centralized bureaucracy, they'd catch on and do okay, but is that really what Obama is setting out to do? Likewise, can a true Afghani government ever exist if the state is under constant security threats (the kind likely to be perpetrated by the military arm of this strategy)?

I very much applaud Obama's clear thinking with regards to the fact that nation building is a better long-term strategic goal than hoping it all just works out by itself. However, the end result will not be good if the plan forward is worse than just doing nothing. If we've learned anything from Iraq it's that security must come FIRST before anything else can be done. This means that Obama needs to have taken the real lessons from the surge to heart. He needs to place a lot of troops in harm's way (in order to actually engage in the communities that they are in), even if Obama needs to abandon his foolish idea of working with other nations that have no real interest in the conflict's result. He needs to be willing to spand a lot of money in bribes, which will have a direct effect, unlike when the money goes into the same accounts anyways through corruption. He also needs to understand that the Afghani army is nowhere NEAR close to providing security for Afghanistan, and taking the standpoint of "the more that indigenous guards take over the better" is only going to end in disaster, just like last time.

The last thing left to see is if Obama will make good on his repeated threats to invade Pakistan if it can't stop the terrorists hiding just across inside its borders. If so, then Obama would truly, and, I might say, miraculously, be repeating every single major foreign policy mistake of the Bush administration. Until then, it's just time to break out the popcorn and see how this show plays out.

Save Us from the Dollar!

People are starting to buzz about a global reserve currency. Will it solve the world's problems? What will its ultimate effects be?

About a month ago, Russia declared that the world should have a new super-national currency to replace the U.S. dollar as the primary currency reserve. Just this week, China called for something similar, while the UN just got on board today.

Whatever the explicit reasoning behind this, the implicit reasoning is clear: other countries are getting sick and tired of being whiplashed by the US economy. When times are good, and the dollar is strong, everybody else gets a free ride on the stable-currency express. The problem, of course, is that if the US economy tanks, it takes everyone else down with it. You know what they say when the US economy sneezes...

Assuming that we're talking about a real currency (rather than just something neutral that helps facilitate trade, something which things like gold already do), that means that it's going to come with a real organization involved in real monetary policy. This is quite a bit to take on, and it's effects need to be thought through.

Firstly, will a single currency, sitting in reserve in all of the government's stockpiles, stop other nations from hurting when the US goes into recession? The answer, of course, is no. This economic recession, for example, was made global primarily by foreign investors buying bad financial products (like CDO's, or mortgage backed securities). When they went bust, so did the investors, including a lot of foreign banks. The particular country in which the risky investables were produced isn't important.

The effects on foreign lands were further greatly exacerbated when Americans, laden with fear and debt, stopped their orgy of consumption. Lack of imports by America destroyed most of the rest of the developed world, whose economies were heavily based on exports (mostly to America). So goes the developed world, so goes the rest. Countries all across Africa, South America, and Southeast Asia tanked as demand fell through the floor.

If the American government had some of it's cash reserves in a mythical global reserve currency, then the American government would be less effected by this. Of course, the American government barely imports things, and in any case it pales by comparison to private sector, consumer demands. This basic idea is also true of other governments. In fact, the only real place where a non-sovereign global reserve would do anything is to curb the fact that governments lost money when the dollar dropped compared to their currency. Of course, no national currency is going to have complete stability compared to a global reserve currency, so this problem will always happen. The problem, of course, is that it opens this problem to burn governments when the world has problems. This means that a calamity in Africa, say, would drag down the world currency, when little, if anything, would have happened if the government were holding dollars (the US government generally being unfazed by problems across most of the world). As such, a global reserve would be introducing new liability for no real gain.

Finally, we have to ask ourselves who gains and who looses in this reserve currency idea? If the reserve exchange rate was set too high (say, above the dollar), then developed countries would be okay (after all, the pound sterling isn't destroying Britain's economy). Less developed countries, on the other hand, would have to sacrifice years of GDP for just a small amount of currency. This means that it becomes more difficult to trade for anything, which means that people can less afford food and medicine. As well, it makes it cheaper for foreigners of the developed world to buy stuff from less developed countries. While this would seem good on the outset, we have to remember that while demand is going up because their money is so worthless, the system that increases the demand makes the money more worthless. In the end, poor countries work more to get less. While I'm not saying that a global reserve currency is advocated for reasons of economic imperialism, it can't have escaped everybody's notice that they can buy things like oil, diamonds, and slave-labor produced items for even cheaper than before.

Of course, if they set it too low, then there is problems with rampant inflation. If Rwanda is able to exchange one of it's currency for 10 reserve notes, then the United States will be able to purchase hundreds of trillions of them. Needless to say, inflation hitting a less developed nation's reserve currency would be disastrous, especially given that their national currencies tend to already suffer from this problem.

In the end, a global reserve currency would send a shock through world markets if they didn't set the level exactly right and it would then only serve to weaken the stability of global trade by removing the backing of the strongest economy on the planet and letting it float with the vagaries and liabilities of all countries. The US would still be able to drag other countries down, just like now, while at the same time the strength of the US wouldn't be able to single-handedly save the day when things take a turn for the worse somewhere else on the globe.

States Within States

Americans like drugs.

Just ask Mexico. That country is the biggest middleman on the entire planet between growers and consumers of drugs, which has put the 1970's French Connection to shame. Moral arguments about drug use aside for a moment, this whole affair is destroying the state of Mexico. It has spent billions of dollars, hundreds of lives, and decades of time to shut down the drug Cartels, so many resources, that the State is losing the battle, and may implode on itself soon.

The question is, why? Why would the state put it's very existence on the line to prevent another organization from having power over a particular facet of the country?

Take the corporation, for example. A corporation is a hierarchical power structure that handles resources and products for the betterment of people's lives (if they never made anyone's life better, then who would ever buy their product or service?). Oddly enough, this sets up an interesting Venn diagram with what the United States government is supposed to do.

Compare the mission statement of the preamble of the Constitition to what a corporation would want. It is definitely in the best interest of a corporation to ensure domestic tranquility as consumer confidence tanks in a crisis. No one wants to spend money when they're afraid, which is why investors tend to shy away from places around the world without tranquility, and why corporations lobby governments for this very thing in disturbed markets around the world. For this same reason, corporations are interested in the common defense. Note the massive and extensive use of the Blackwater corporation in Iraq. Given that promotion of general welfare is the reason we give them money, corporations have this interest at heart as well.

In the end, corporations and the federal government have a lot of the same mission statement, which, in the end, makes them competitors. At least in the US, the government tries to mostly step out of the way of corporations, and leech money off of them to pursue the state's own ends, rather than trying to shut them down. A part of this, perhaps, comes from the fact that corporations are able to do some things better than the government itself (for example, almost all of my material possessions, except for some postage stamps and my driver's license came from a corporation, not the government).

But sometimes these large, powerful, money-soaked organizations go afoul of the state, and the state decides to crush it no matter the cost. For example, the US put a vast amount of resources to break up the mob in the 1920's, and it applied basically all of its resources to blowing up several southern governments during the Civil War. Why is it that sometimes states can live in harmony with states within states, but sometimes they can't?

Other than some machismo confrontation of pride, it seems to me that the conflict occurs when an average group of citizens (people living within a certain territorial, geographic boundary) doesn't need to follow the regulations imposed upon them by the state. For example, making money isn't against the laws of the state, but giving people drugs is. If an organization makes it possible to use drugs, then it is in conflict with an organization, the state, that demands that its laws are always followed within its physical jurisdiction.

This is an affront to old ideas of nationalism. When states started hitting the scene a few hundred years ago, one of the things that they got was sovereignty: they could not be held to account by any other organization. As a part of this, they had complete sovereignty over anything in their realm, that is, they could judge anything below them while being immune from judgment on the top. While sovereignty has been eroding from the top from things like international law, it seems that states are still hell-bent on being able to control things underneath them.

Of course, I must once again ask, why? Why does the state need to preserve a philosophical standpoint in which all organizations from the individual up to the state have to look like a jawbreaker, where every level is inside of every other level? Why can't it look more like a sandwich with the state as a layer on top, rather than an all-encompassing layer around?

It seems that as nationalism is fading, the state will have to accept its diminishing role in the world as higher and lower level organizations flex more and more of their muscle. Otherwise, we will continue to see things like Mexico's desperate gambit that threaten to destroy the state itself if it loses.


For further reading, click here.

AIG and the Civil War

In 1861, the American Civil War pitted the vastly more populous, vastly richer and more industrialized North against the Confederacy, which was sitting on a possibly-rebellious slave population that outnumbered their masters 10:1, and that had no navy and thus could never receive reinforcements or supplies. The outcome of this conflict was obvious from the get-go. The Union soldiers would literally be home by Christmas.

A man named George B. McClellan was given charge of the Union army to make short work of it all, after a brief battle that took the existing regional commander out of the picture. All he needed to do was take the Juggernaut union army on a three day's long march from Fort Monroe to Richmond, and all this nonsense would be over. Done and done.

McClellan, unfortunately, wound up being an awful general. He was cautious when he needed to be risky, risky when he needed to be cautious, and put his own reputation on the line less frequently than the blood of his soldiers. But personal reasons to hate him aside. He was a bad general. He drew his first major battle at Williamsburg, followed by a loss at Seven Pines, just a few miles from Richmond. His easy advance turned into a humiliating, fighting retreat that ended in the disaster of the 2nd battle of Bull Run. After this, the Confederacy was on the attack. The end result of his bungling was the battle of Antietam which managed to get more Americans killed on any singly day than any battle before or since. It did not, however, end in anything more than an indecisive draw.

With great disgust of both the people and the government at his actions, McClellan was replaced by General Burnside. Burnside set out to do what McClellan could not, beat up the numerically inferior Confederate army and actually end the war proper. The result was the battle of Fredericksburg: one of the most humiliating defeats for the Union cause of the war. Like his predecessor, all Burnside had managed to do was get a lot of Union soldiers killed for no real purpose. He also oversaw a general crumbling of the army as desertion rates soared.

Burnside was replaced by General Hooker (after whom we get the slang word for prostitute), whose own moral behavior aside, only really managed to enforce crony-ism in the army, and lead the Union to a crushing defeat at Chancelorsville, called "Lee's perfect battle". Though decisive, unlike his predecessors, he was sleazier, and a bad general, but he wasn't even all there as far as common Union ideology was concerned, once saying that "Nothing would go right until we had a dictator, and the sooner the better."

We are facing a similar type of problem today in our economic crisis. We have had a lot of CEO's, the proverbial generals of capitalism, who have had a massive amount of resources and large, powerful institutions, and one easy task: make us all some money. Economic growth should have been easy with the best people involved on the job. Like the Union generals, however, they were of dubious scruples, unclear in purpose, and most importantly, really, really bad at their jobs.

The end result, then as now, is disaster. Politicians and the populace alike are demanding the heads of industry giants, especially the ones at AIG, who have taken huge bonuses as a reward for leading our modern day Union into the dirt. It is clear with our Wall Street exec's as it was with the army's exec's back in the day that the old leadership was bad, and that new leadership is required. The question, then, is who do we get to do the job right?

When McClellan screwed it all up, they went for another general. When they got a worse one, they put another general in charge. They didn't put the army under the control of some random government bureaucrat or some other random person. They put the army in control of similar people with the same training, and the same experience, and the same expertise, and they did WORSE than the people they put in before them.

This is exactly the problem that we're having with AIG. Businesses have gone bust, the economy is tanking, and CEO's legitimately bear a big chunk of the blame. The government plan over the last year or so is to fire the CEO's and appoint a government bureaucrat because the other CEO's out there that are trained the same way and are doing the same things are still out there making it WORSE.

The problem, though, is that some random, everyday government bureaucrat is NOT going to be able to lead an army as well as a general, and they're NOT going to be able to handle a massive corporation as well as a CEO. In the end, even if they're making the problem worse, you need the same type of people who have the pertinent training and experience to be able to actually fix the problems. If specific generals and CEO's are causing problems, than those specific ones should be brushed away, but having a systemic change to hand over power to a class of people who we know are less qualified is an unjustified way of handling our anger.

In the end, Lincoln kept on picking more generals to command his army, even though it was the generals that were losing the war and destroying America. Hooker would be replaced by Meade, who beat Lee at Gettysburg but shamefully let them get away. Meade was made a subservient of General Grant, who had a vision of warfare that eventually brought about the ultimate victory of the Union army in the Civil War.

If Lincoln had decided to get rid of the commander of his army and replace him with a government appointee from the war department (or somewhere else in the bureaucracy), it is unclear what would have happened in the war. It is certain however, that it took a man who had spent his whole life in the army and had fought in the trenches and had fought his way up the rungs to the top, who was the person who had the experience and leadership qualities to be able to lead the army to victory, no matter HOW bad his predecessors had been.

Why should we expect it to be any different with our CEO's?


For further reading, click here.

Money and Wealth

To continue from my last blog, this time, let's talk about wealth.

Wealth is another one of those tricky ones, as it's also mostly relative. Wealth can, broadly speaking, refer to two things. The first is that someone is considered wealthy when they have a lot of what they value ("he hasn't a dime, but his family is happy" implies he's wealthy, even if it's just wealth in heart rather than a sum of money). The second is when people have a lot of what is generally considered to have a lot of value. For example, ALL people value shelter, ergo someone who had shelter in a community where nobody had any would be considered wealthier. The same goes for other broad, social things, like having fancy or nutritious food, a lot of shelter, at least one form of transportation (like a car), a refrigerator, washing machine, and a host of things that fit the Norman Rockwell vision of the American Dream.

It is important to remember that wealth is NOT money. Money, is an arbitrary human construct that allows us to quantify wealth when talking with other people about it. It is understandable to see why people think that money IS wealth, but it's important to remember that when we do crazy stuff with money, we're not affecting wealth at parity.

The first major difference is how wealth and money are made. Wealth, generally speaking, is generated through the creation of objects, or a continuous service. For example, you have running water and sanitation in your house. This standard of living increase is an actual part of wealth (especially if no one else around you did). Likewise, wealthier people are those who have better houses, cars or estates (goods), or better nutrition, health, or comfort or convenience (services). In any case, wealth generation is ultimately a creative process (even if it's just maintenance).

It is also divorced from money. If inflation suddenly caused the price of goods to increase by 100%, would the usefulness of the house (the value you place in it) as a shelter increase or decrease? Likewise, if your savings account were wiped out, what would that do to your car's ability to get you to work? The answer to these questions, of course, is "nothing". The only effect that price has on the wealth of a product or service is when people think that something is worth more or less because the price is different. Certainly, however, this confusion barely changes the wealth of only the smallest section of things (if any).

What is important here is that wealth is ultimately a by-product of production, whether of the durable, like refrigeration or sanitation systems, or the non-durable, like a haircut.

Money, on the other hand, is a very different beast. Money is created when people say that there is more money. The Federal Reserve, for example, recently increased the money supply by 1 trillion dollars. They may not have even printed a single new bill (due to most money being handled electronically), but yet the money supply drastically rose. Another way that money is created is through interest. If I borrow $10, and I need to pay $11 back, there is ultimately $1 more in the system that was magically created. Of course, this interest can be leveraged to extreme levels where debt upon debt upon debt creates a tower of money.

This creates an interesting set of issues. The first, of course, is "who should create more money?" If everyone could simply make more money, the value of the money would decrease instantly and drastically. Given the same amount of wealth and a higher amount of money (and a market system that allows for the transparency to see what those two numbers are), the prices will go up if the money amount goes up while the wealth amount stays the same. This, of course, is inflation.

The second, and more important question is "who should get the new money?". Obviously, when the Fed increased the money supply by a trillion dollars, they didn't do it by simply adding $3 to every American's checking account. Instead, the money is going to be mostly going into banks, and into the government itself. Likewise, when you create money through loans, the person who loaned you the money gets all of the increase in the money supply.

This is important because of inflation. When the money supply goes up, the prices of everything goes up (albeit, unevenly). So while everything becomes more expensive, only some people get more money. While some people are magicians with money, most people who get some of that new money only get enough to cover for the inflation that they caused by making more money. For example, if most bank savings account rates were 1%, and their loan rates were 10%, then they would be increasing inflation by 10% (because that's the amount of new money over the same amount of wealth), while the bank itself only actually makes 9%, because it has to pay me some. This is oversimplified, of course, but even stocks, which are considered one of the most risky ways to store your money, only goes up about 6% a year, while inflation goes up and reduces the wealth-aquiring power of that money by 3%: half of the gain. Currently, the Federal Government returns just about 0% to its investors, and banks do only slightly better (compared to the -30% of stocks last year).

As such, it's less of a case of the people who make and keep money richer, while the rest of us stay the same, it's that the people who make the money stay the same, and the rest of us get poorer. In the struggle to get ahead, people are actually just staying where they are while they push everyone else behind.

Ethical questions aside for a moment, this is clearly a bad system. What we want is a system whereby people can become wealthier, rather than just richer (have more money). Instead, we have a system where people's wealth levels stay the same, or go down as their money doesn't go as far.

This can be seen by a disturbing trend in America. My grandfather worked hard, and was able to support a wife and several children, all while being able to accrue new wealth as technology provided it. My father worked hard, and was able to support a wife and a couple of children, but not with a whole lot of bells or whistles, and he had a good, white-collar technology job (compared to my small-farm grandpa). I have to work a part time job AND my wife has to work. Not only can we not dare to think about how much children would cost us, but we're not able to accrue as much wealth as our parents (we can't afford cable TV, 2 cars, etc.) The rate at which people even younger than me return home and live with their parents when they are done with their run through the education system (including college) is absolutely massive compared to my parent's generation, and nigh infinitely more than the near zero of my grandparents. The fact that most households have to have both parents employed just to get by also shows this trend.

In short, people are working harder and harder for more and more money that gets them less and less wealth. Billions of families live paycheck to paycheck, even in the developed world. Americans may make thousands of times more money than an equivalent worker in Africa, but they're both just a few paychecks away from their families literally starving and being homeless. As the CPI continues to soar, it's clear that the system is broken, and the more we put into it, the more broken it gets.

Then, of course, there is the hitherto avoided ethical question. "Who sould have more wealth?" and "Who should see their wealth decline?". Currently, the answer seems to be "Those who are movie stars or who can commit fraud on Wall Street" and "everybody who isn't in the first camp", respectively. Is this what we want? If fraud and celebrity status and professional sports are the only thing that gets you ahead, and everything else causes you to lose, doesn't that just teach us (and our next generation) that if you can't play football, you should learn white-collar crime?

Instead, we should have different values, and have a system that gives wealth (NOT just money) to those who participate in those values. If we value teachers, we should give them more wealth, rather than just hoping that a little more money will fix the problem. Likewise, we should be encouraging behavior that increases the wealth of others, rather than penalizing laborers by sending their jobs overseas, just so someone else can have more money. Yes, money can be used to acquire wealth in individual instances, but due to the fake nature of money, it's not stable or certain (other than it's certain to get you less wealth over time).

It seems to me to be a simple confusion in priorities along with a confusion that the capitalist notion of "make more money" automatically results in "have a higher standard of living". While that may be true for those with a LOT of money, the vast majority of everyone else only sees the decline. While the re-enactment of usury laws may be a tad harsh, it seems to me that people need to be un-brainwashed from the idea of making money for money's sake, so that those who only have a little aren't pushed too far behind.

The Economic Crisis, Deflation and the Louisiana Purchase

In order to make this connection, I'm going to need to spell out a few terms, so bear with me a moment.

The first term I need to define is "value". While value usually refers to a state that is a function of worth divided by price ("that's a great value on that can of beans" is a statement about cost/benefit). Because I need a transitive verb, I'll be referring to value as the worth that someone applies to some thing ("I value your trust" for example).

That said, value is something that is very relative. You may value a high-performance sports car while I might value a well-crafted wine or a meticulously painted Repan or Degas. Furthermore, you may think very lowly of my grape juice and old paintings, while I may assign little value to your brightly polished chunk of metal. The important thing is that no one thing has the exact same value to more than person.

The other term here is money. Money is a fictional construct that allows people to quantize the value that they put on something. It helps us see the relativity of value (and to a lesser extent, wealth), and allows us to trade things of equal value, (not objectively, but subjectively based on the person and item). In the end, if we feel that we've given away something that means more to us than what the other person had to part with, we feel treated unfairly. Money both reveals and alleviates this to a great extent. In any case, the important thing to remember about money is that it isn't real. It doesn't represent the actual value of anything. This is why we're allowed to do really goofy stuff with it, as it's pretty much all math, and hypothetical, fiat-based situations.

Anyways, let's get to the heart of the matter. So we've got this economic crisis going on (click here for a really good, simple explanation). What's of particular note of interest here is how money and wealth relate to each other.

People value houses. This idea of value, over a period of time, caused the amount of money required to get that to go up. In theory, this was just matching the price with the value (trying to make things even), but in reality, the price vastly outstripped the value. Eventually, people started to figure this out in a very brutal way.

So, through a complex series of financial services multiplied by time and events, it all came crashing down. This lost a lot of investors their money. They did not, however, lose their wealth. Remember, money isn't wealth. All the things that the investors valued, like their house and their children and their Degas in the living room were left untouched. Some people did lose these things, like the deadbeats who couldn't pay their mortgages who lost their homes and the investment bankers who lost their shirts, but most people lost things like pensions, college savings, and other things where nothing was physically taken away from them.

Of course, these people (ie. everyone) did lose something. They lost their ability to be able to afford things they value, like food, once they retire. They lost their ability to give their children a valuable education. These things are worrying, but far from immediate. These things, rather, are relegated to the world of "wall street", a fake world where people trade around worthless scraps of paper and electronic bits. If this were the only result of the economic collapse, there wouldn't be much of a problem. This crisis, however, has bled into "main street".

For example, few people are going to have enough things that other people value enough to buy a home by trading it in. Instead, people usually borrow the money to do this. Said money has mostly dried up at the moment. Likewise, there are a lot of businesses out there that create things that everyone values, like cars, who, due to stupid stuff that they've done with labor unions and risky investment, taxes, etc. are forced to take the money they get and basically throw it away, rather than exchange it for things that are valuable (such as parts to make new cars). When this happens, businesses go bust, and people lose their jobs.

So what? All a job gets you is money, and money is fake anyways, right? Of course, a vast majority of people are completely ignorant about how to get the things that they value without just handing over money to someone else to get it. This means that a person who becomes unemployed is left with two choices: learn how to grow food real quick, or get a new source of money so that you can just buy things again.

In the end, it's a breakdown of value. When we're faced with a situation where we can only purchase so much value, we tend to rank things, and just as quickly bump up the value of the top things and bump down the value of other things. We start ranking things into needs and wants, and statements like "we don't need new rotors on our car yet" start showing up. It's not that people intrinsically want working breaks less, but its value is decreased relative to other things when the money is tight.

Of course, what this brings is deflation. As we value things less, the prices go down to match the value. As prices go down, so do the balance sheets of companies. In a perfect world, this would be fine, as employers would simply match the cost of living decrease to a pay decrease and everything hits equilibrium again.

Of course, to some people, particularly people who big into big labor, are horrified at even the idea of wages (money) going down, even if it allows them to buy the same, or more goods and services (value). Likewise, modern economics are big into inflation, in part because of what their ideologies tell them about deflation. In the perfect world of most modern economists, people who have a lot of money will loan it out as interest, which creates more money (I borrow $10 and give back $11, there is now an extra dollar of money in the system). Of course, more money spread around the same amount of wealth (value) causes the price to go up. They have more money to deal with it, the rest of us who aren't lending out money at interest don't. See THIS map of US inflation and how it's changed since modern monetary policy started being implemented in the 30's and 40's).

So, when prices are not allowed to deflate, yet the value of things is going down (due to a system which has created a crisis), eventually things collapse, and the money price of things goes up while the value of things continues to go down. In the end, you have "stagflation". When this happens, anyone is in a tight jam, especially if you're literally fighting for your survival.

France had just such a problem. Back in the early 1800's every single European country was sending it's armies into France in order to remove a particular political leader and return France to it's old, pre-revolutionary, autocratic, bureaucratic self. No one was buying French goods, as their value was decreased for political reasons (and because they might be just about to be blown up by English cannons). As exports tanked, jobs started bleeding like neck wound (like today). Suddenly, people made things which were valuable to themselves, but less valuable to others. As jobs went away, nobody had any money, and scarcity suddenly kicked in to drive up prices. It was Jimmy Carter meets the industrial revolution.

So, what could France do? Napoleon, in his genius, decided to take the millions and millions of angry, unemployed French people and press them into the army. Now people had jobs, AND France was less likely to immanently collapse due to foreign invasion. Two birds with one stone. The problem, of course, was how to fund it all. In the end, the French needed to take something that they had that had little value to them, and find someone for whom it had a lot of value. The money gained from the sale could quickly be turned over into something that France actually valued, like muskets.

The answer was land. Just like state governments and movie stars today, France started selling off the assets it didn't need to afford the ones it did. In France's case, it literally decided to sell its global empire (which hadn't been doing much for it). The prime slab was in the Americas: Louisiana.

Back, long ago, North America was divided up like a jawbreaker. There was the hard center between Boston and Charleston on the Atlantic coast that belonged to Britain. Outside of that was a concentric ring that went through the Caribbean through New Orleans and St. Louis up through Quebec. Outside of that was lands claimed by the Spanish, or were considered to worthless to take from the native populations. Of course, after the American Revolution, the need to contain the British was drastically weakened, as their only holdings were Fort Detroit and Ottowa. Combine that with a string of successful slave rebellions in the Caribbean, and all the sudden France's desire for empire waned. Simply put, there wasn't nearly as much value in North America as there had been when they took the trouble to carve out the territory in the first place.

But if there was someone who was willing to buy the land from France, especially for an amount of money greater than France valued it, then it would be in their best interest to sell it and turn the money into something it did value. The United States was only too willing to oblige. They needed space, they needed stable trading ports, and, most importantly, they needed the lowest number of threatening European powers bordering their fragile near-confederacy as possible.

Thomas Jefferson was willing to shell out $10 million (in 1803 dollars!) just for the port of New Orleans and the immediate surrounds. The French, on the other hand, needed more money, so they were willing to throw in the entire rest of the Louisiana Territory (all 1 million square miles) in with it for a mere $5 million more. The Americans were stunned. The deal was just too good to give up.

In the end, America bought the territory and doubled in size. France was able to get the funding it needed to raise 3 million soldiers and win the battle of Austerlitz a few years later. Win-win.

Perhaps, assuming we don't change policy to actually fix the problems we're in right now, we could consider something likewise for our current economic woes.

Judicial Reform (Part 3)

Judicial Reform (Part 2)
Covering the application of justice in the modern world

Judicial Reform (Part 1)
covering a brief philosophical history of justice

So, what are we left with?

We are left with a judicial system in which the state takes over as prosecutor when a "crime" has no victim, and the way in which the scales are balanced is by the method which has the least utility, while at the same time is the most expensive, destructive, and ultimately detrimental.

So what can we do?

The first thing, of course, we need to do is to completely eliminate any form of attempting justice that relies on coercion. No fines, no fees, no prison, no capital punishment. Period.

Of course, this does cause a few loose ends to show up. The first is, "how do we do justice?", that is, how do we balance the scales? In the end, a victim who is unable to find justice can be worse than a perpetrator who has chafed under the coercive punishment of imprisonment. The best answer is restitution, as it is the most satisfying way of vindicating the victim, and thus the least amount of action is actually required for the victim to feel that justice has been done.

If you burn down my house, for example, and you go to jail, the fact is that I still don't have a house (and to add injury to insult, I now need to pay for your jail time). This is clearly an unsatisfying way to vindicate my pain, and, as such, more of it is required to go the same distance. This is, of course, disastrous when more of the most expensive means is the only option.

Furthermore, being the victim of crime and injustice is a deeply personal thing. What is troubling to most people who have had their house broken into is less the stuff that's been taken, and more the deep feeling of invasion of privacy and fear for their families. This personal aspect is left unsatiated with the application of justice in our modern world. As such, not only is punishment bad for the criminal, and only gets worse the more you apply, punishment is also unsatisfying to the victim, which means that more is required in order for justice to be served.

This is why restitution is by far the better means of handling justice than retribution and revenge. After all, if someone broke into your house and stole something, which would be more satisfying, the perpetrator returning the stolen property, sincerely apologizing, and buying you a new and improved front door lock, or to have the perpetrator worked through a sterile system and have them sit in a prison, get free room and board, and you have to pay for it all? You can take pleasure in the actual mental anguish of imprisonment, but it is invariably far less satisfying compared to a solution that is personal, applicable and appropriate, and, most importantly actually fixes the problems caused by the crime.

The other major loose end is how to deter crime. Obviously, we would all like to have a judicial system that helps prevent crime in the first place, rather than just trying to clean up the mess. Again, I turn to John Burton:

The axiomatic element in all human behavior is relationships. No progress can be made in the study of any level of behavior unless there is description and explanation of relationships, how they evolve, how they are learned, what patterns emerge, and why there is observance of and deviance from them.

At the ground floor level, conflict is an aberration, a breakdown in social or authority relationships. Having thus deviated, the subject is required to experience a form of punishment or negative satisfaction. Punishment, even physical punishment, by a parent is usually in the context of a relationship. It is not the physical hurt that has any effect. What is at stake is the relationship, and to preserve this the child is prepared to conform if necessary. But punishment by a parent, teacher, or authority with whom there is no valued relationship rests entirely on the physical pain or the deprivation inflicted, with which the human organism has a physical and mental capacity to cope. It is this form of punishment, unassociated with valued relationships, that the court, authorities and society inflict. Behavior is not altered by it in the direction intended.

The point being made is that coercion is temporary, abstract, and resistible, actual deterrence comes from things that are permanent and personal. For example, if the relationship with someone you love is damaged by something you do, it will have a deeply personal effect, that is permanent until you can make up for it (that is, until justice is served). In this way, the perpetrator is given a positive goal of how to make amends for their crime, and plenty of reason to do so (what they have with the other person is lost until they make amends). Rather than the idea that a crime will create a temporary, abstract problem that can be resisted, such actions would create a sense of personal loss that will endure until it is eventually undone. Clearly the latter is not only more deterring, but provides much more impetus for the criminal to actively correct their problem in the way that will be the most satisfying to the victim. Compared to the current system that provides no impetus for restoring the world to its pre-crime state, and is less satisfying to the victim, and is expensive and destructive, clearly this method is the one of choice.

Of course, this requires there to be something out there that any given person would be loathed to allow to be lost or negatively altered. Again John Burton:

Modern industrial society tends to destroy and not to build relationships. Technological developments require shifts in occupation and changes in living environments. There is no identity, or relationship on a personal basis, with a monopolized industry, a large company, or the society as a whole represented by the tax gatherer. In the absence of internalized norms you do not pay your fare or for your shopping unless clearly required to do so. This is a situation that will get worse as industrial society gets larger and even more anonymous.

If relationships are the backbone of deterrence, and the lack of them is the result of modernity, what are we to do? I mean, how much different is your life from prison actually, other than that you have to work and your family is already there? Clearly, without this excommunication (exile) and public humiliation (capital punishment) have little utility.

Of course, it would be easy to just say "death to modernity" and try to recreate a feudal system (which might not be so bad now that we know how to combat the plague), but such a drastic social overhaul would be a bit of a challenge. That being said, in a targeted way, this would actually be possible. After all, if people don't hold people they care about at gunpoint for their money, or steal their car, or whatever, wouldn't it make sense to do things to make people care about each other? After all, would it be better to spend $10,000 per year per poor, urban youth to get them to know and care about their neighbors, or would it be better to spend $10,000 per year to destroy that same youth's future while leaving the victim unvindicated after a crime has already been committed?

The answer is obvious. If you spend even half that amount, you're still spending $100 per person per week just for them to get to know people in their community. You could just GIVE them the money for helping the elderly, and you'd be relatively sure that you're clearing out a whole class of people that the person won't commit a crime against. Plus, the more involved a person gets in a community, the easier it is for them to get involved in their community. The more involvement, the more personal risk to the person who might commit a crime (and, arguably, the less likely they are to commit a crime in the first place).

This is not an idle pipe-dream, while spending most of our focus on prisons. Why should we abandon the better, cheaper system for the vastly more expensive system that causes more problems than it attempts to solve?

On a final note, I believe that we need to systematically end any court case that begins with "the people of..." Crimes against the state, unless they are actual, honest to goodness crimes against the state itself (like embezzlement from a state fund, or defacing state property, etc.), should be completely thrown out. There MUST be a victim in the courthouse (or perhaps their family in the case of a murder) who has actually been victimized by the defendant. If there isn't then such a case is CAUSING injustice to the "defendant", rather than meting out "justice" in balance for a "crime" that has no actual victims.

If the state gets on the ball and throws out victimless crimes and it throws out the methods that require a lot of pain and destruction just so that the victim remains unsatisfied, we can have a working legal system which finally stops creating more suffering than it attempts to alleviate.

Judicial Reform (Part 2)

Judicial Reform (Part 1)
covering a brief philosophical history of justice

Judicial Reform (Part 3)
The conclusion to how the justice system should be reformed.

Now that some of the background of why we do justice the way we do has been laid down, it's time to move on to how we actually practice justice in the real world.

It is clear to see that justice, as it is practiced today, is first and last focused on punishment. While some small programs exist (such as anti-drug campaigns) to preempt violent or otherwise subversive or harmful behavior, a near total majority of time, focus, and funding is put towards figuring out to do once a person has already committed a crime. While civil courts tend to place their focus on adequate restitution, that is, forcing the guilty party to compensate the afflicted party for the damage that they have done, the criminal courts, at least in the United States, have a complete fixation on punishment and retribution. The point is not to restore the world to a pre-crime state, but to inflict damage on the offender to an equal amount that they damaged others by committing their crime.

This relies, 100% on coercion. Armed police officers arrest you, and powerful people put you into prisons where you are forcibly detained by more armed officers. It relies on power, and it relies on force, and, in rare circumstances, it relies on violence. More over, it is difficult to do (in part because people tend to resist punishment, compared to restitution or forgiveness), and it has become atrociously expensive. Nowadays, it costs $50,000 per person per year to keep people in prison. If I embezzle $10,000 from a government agency and am locked up for 10 years as a result, the state is burdened by $500,000, a fifty fold harm to the state than if I had just walked away with the money. Clearly there is something wrong with this system if the entire point is to restore balance.

But apart from the horrendous inefficiencies of our current justice system, we have to ask the more crucial question: "does coercion even work?" The only real strategy that a system that can only attempt justice after crimes have been committed is to see if the way in which they meted out justice prevented future crime. While the system may be able to bring the scales back into balance through coercive punishment, I think it would be difficult to find a person who disagrees with the idea that the justice system should also help keep things in balance. If coercion can not do this, it means that the only use of coercive justice is to balance the scales in the least popular, most expensive way possible. Such a system, naturally, should be done away with and replaced.

Allow me to reference John Burton from his essay "International Relations or World Society?" (International Studies Association, "The Study of World Society, the London Perspective", 1974):

There are those at the ground floor level who claim to be "political realists". They have a Calvinistic conception of behavior related very closely to traditional normative notions reflected in legal thinking. Their assumption appears to be that, generally speaking, persons and states conform to agreed norms of behavior because of coercion and threat, together with some sense of moral obligation. The questions they ask are why does the minority not conform and how can it be made to conform? ... The role of the state is to control [peoples'] behavior and is given a legitimate monopoly on violence.

However, there is a false assumption inherent in the ground floor notion of coercive authority... The assumption that policies of coercion deter. The average prison sentence in Britain was 28 percent longer in 1971 than it was in 1961, but there was no apparent positive effect. In education, in industrial relations and in communal relations, threat and coercion are found not to be effective deterrents. This is the empirical position. At all levels, the tendency is to respond to failure by applying more of the same medicine and not to acknowledge that the initial analysis was probably faulty. When "law and order" fails, the level of coercion is increased.

It is this form of punishment... that the court, authorities and society inflict. Behavior is not altered by it in the direction intended: on the contrary, the behavioral response is to damage the person or property of that authority as soon as opportunity offers.

Of course, John Burton was not the first person to notice this effect. As Confucius once said "a man will be good only while he is punished, and, once the punishment is over go back to his ways. A man of propriety, on the other hand, will shun evil ways always."

In fact, I believe it would be difficult to find someone confident that punishment is a serious deterrent, and the fact that 1 in 30 Americans is currently behind bars should testify to this (and the Department of Justice presumes that 1 in 15 people will have spent some time in prison as of this year). In fact, rather than thinking about this abstractly and empirically, we can also bring it down to the concrete level. Ask yourself, have you ever known that doing something had a punishment attached to it, but you did it anyways? This is so pervasive that it because the prime statue for burning people at the stake during the inquisition: auto de fe (or, as Mel Brooks summarizes: "Its what you oughtnt to do but you do anyway.")

So, if coercion is not, in fact, much of a deterrent, then why do we continue to use it, despite its enormous costs, both monetarily and socially? This brings us once again to the history of justice. Hundreds of years ago, the application of justice basically boiled down to two forms: exile, or capital punishment. Firstly, these two options were very inexpensive. Exile, of course, was free, while capital punishment required someone to spare a few moments to slap someone in the local pillory, or some other form of public shaming. While this type of coercion may lack utility, at least it doesn't absorb massive amount of resources and destroy lives while getting the same amount of nowhere.

The second main thrust is that it is actually possible to deter someone from doing something if you remove the person altogether. A brigand exiled to the other side of the ocean is physically unable to terrorize your populace. Likewise, if someone is put to death, it will be challenging, to say the least, to lapse into recidivism. Once again, exile is free, and a single rope can be used at more than one hanging. The important thing to consider, though, is that neither of these methods are designed to level the scales per se. While it definitely may have a balancing effect, the point is clearly focused on deterring further crime, rather than punishing someone and hoping that they won't do it again (which we know doesn't work).

While prisons are thought to have this same effect, they are not the reason we use them. Instead, the rise of the prison system as we know it today, comes on the back of the "penitentiary" movement. The point of the court sending you to prison wasn't so much so that the scales would be re-balanced, or that you would be taken away from society so you couldn't cause problems (although these were both intended side effects) but rather to place criminals in a place where they could do penance for their sins and come out as a reformed person who would not commit crime again. These old penitentiaries were built in the spitting image of old monasteries with rows of cells which contained an ascetic nothing but a bible, and a church in the middle. Criminals would pray until God healed their souls. Free from sin, they would be let out to crime no more.

As noble of an experiment as this was, it clearly failed. In the end, prisoners did not reform simply by being placed in a whitewashed room and told to pray it out. Unfortunately, the prison system lurched on as a zombie. The rows of cells would stay, as would the idea of keeping dangerous people away from society. However, rather than being a place that temporarily housed people while they waited capital punishment or while they prayed, being incarcerated became a PART of the punishment itself. Soon, it would become THE sole punishment for criminal offenses. Gone was a way of punishment that deterred crime (like executions), or reduced recidivism (monastic prayer), and what was left is a non-deterring coercive force of punishment that is as expensive as it is ineffective. It's interesting to note that prisons today are still called "correctional facilities" as if they actually correct anything.

Finally, there is a more insidious side of punishment. That is, that punishment invokes a deep-seated human desire for revenge against our punishers. Not only does punishment fail to deter in the first place, but it actually increases the afflicted's desire to be a violent person. This is easy to understand when the process of imprisonment rips families apart and causes people to be much less likely to get employed or be able to do other things to start a new life once they've been in prison.

The idea that cruelty, even in the name of balancing the scales of justice, creates more problems than it causes is pervasive in the course of human events. Heavy "strategic" bombing in World War 2 sought to break the morale of civilians by bombing them. In fact, strategic bombing increased the resolve of the afflicted population. Likewise, putting down rebellious behavior by force quickly gets re-branded as "massacres" from Waxhaw to Baghdad. While it is easy for our minds to drift to the few times when coercion worked, like the ending of the Boer War with concentration camps, or the end of World War 2 with nuclear weapons, it betrays the fact that coercion almost never works, and when it does, the coerced party must be utterly destroyed. Is that what we want to do to people who park the wrong way on the street or sell insurance with an outdated license?

The way that our modern societies apply "justice" in the real world is an abhorrent mess. Based on a failed experiment over a hundred years ago, we now choose to use the most expensive, most demeaning, least utile form of meting out justice and deterring crime. The only way such a system can be ultimately successful is if all people are born and die in a cell, or if the state is willing to use the equivalent of nuclear weapons on its own population. Clearly, the system must be thrown out immediately.

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