Stultitia Delenda Est

Not all politicians are horrid, twisted homunculi devoid of any moral decency. It just seems that way sometimes. Then, on rare occasions, a politico like this comes along and suddenly my libertarian heart grows three sizes and I think that maybe there’s hope:

Governor Chafee is refusing to turn over a suspected murderer in state custody to the federal government, declaring that doing so would expose prisoner Jason Wayne Pleau to the death penalty, a penalty he says has been “consciously rejected” by Rhode Island, even for the most heinous of crimes.
…

“In light of this long-standing policy, I cannot in good conscience voluntarily expose a Rhode Island citizen to a potential death-penalty prosecution. I am confident that Attorney General [Peter F.] Kilmartin and Rhode Island’s criminal justice system are capable of ensuring that justice is served in this matter.”

Good for you, Governor Chafee.

I have read and heard the end of this quote many times, but never in its full context:

“Democracy. The theory that two thieves will steal less than one, and three less than two, and four less than three and so on ad infinitum; the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.” – H. L. Mencken, H. L. Mencken: Three Books. Kindle Edition. Loc. 1143-1145.

I don’y really have anything to add to this.

So the unposted draft that I alluded to a few days ago contained some muddled, half-formed thoughts about civilization vs. barbarism. These turned out to be somewhat topical with the recent death of Osama bin Laden. Osama bin Laden was a barbarian and he met a gruesome end, as many barbarians often do.

Now let me be very clear that Osama bin Laden was not a barbarian because of his race, religion, or culture. He was a barbarian because some fraction of people, through time and across cultures, decide that they will do whatever it takes to get what they want, even if it means destroying lives, property, or society.

And, in some very rare occasions, the destroying of lives, property, and society becomes the end in itself. So it was with Osama bin Laden.

For those of us on the side of civilization, the manner in which we deal with barbarians is a huge issue. It is, in fact, in existential one, insofar as it shapes our society in deep and lasting ways. Civilizations have to deal with barbarians much the same way that organisms have to deal with viruses and other pathogenic agents. Organisms have immune systems, civilizations have law and culture.

And just as immune systems can often deal poorly with pathogens, causing afflictions worse than the pathogen itself, or can even misconstrue harmless material as a pathogen and attack it, damaging the body in the process, so too civilization can deal well or poorly with barbarism.

I think it’s high time to admit that we, as a civilization, are not dealing well with one strain of pathogenic barbarism. The damage that we have done to our society in the name of fighting terrorism is far worse than the disease of terrorism itself. Our response to terrorism has cost us more American lives than has terrorism. It has cost us more money and productivity than has terrorism. It has damaged our freedom in deep and enduring ways that terrorism never could.

So, in a perverse way, we’re helping the terrorists get their way. The immune systems of our society, its legal and cultural bulwarks against cheats, thugs, and murderers, is doing more damage the Body of the Republic than are the barbarians themselves.

In the case of someone so virulent as Osama bin Laden, Radley Balko is right: he won. We saw to that.

We cannot end terrorism anymore than we can end the larger problem of barbarism. What we can do, however, is to make sure that our responses to it are healthy, effective and appropriate. Because if we don’t, then we’ll be spending our time groping Miss America¹ and bombing weddings in the Third World. Which is exactly what the barbarians would be doing, if they had their druthers.

So is the world a better place because Osama bin Laden’s no longer able to murder people and destroy their livelihoods? Yes. I think that it is.

But was he in any way the biggest threat to our security or liberty? No. That would be our overblown, heavy-handed response to his perfidy. The only thing that can do more damage to society than barbarism, is deliberate self-destruction under the guise of protecting ourselves from barbarism.

The routinely excellent Foreign Policy recently posted an article by Charles Kenny about Pre-Modern peoples and the dangers of helping to “protect” them from modernity. A quote from the article:

“The glorification of … tribal life, with its supposed freedom from violence, poverty, drugs, crime, and overpopulation, is part of a dangerous denial of the huge benefits that modernity has brought to the vast mass of humanity. It is easy to get emotional about a supposedly idyllic Stone Age existence when we’re staring at elegant photographs on a computer screen while sipping our Starbucks chai latte. But if we decided to actually return to the lifestyle of uncontacted peoples, the vast majority of the planet would die off from starvation, and those who remained would face nasty, brutish, and short lives. Romanticizing that lifestyle provides no insights into how we can better run a planet of 7 billion people on a sustainable basis — and does little to illuminate the challenges and needs of tribal people themselves.”

Modernity has brought us untold wealth, health, knowledge, prosperity, peace and happiness. We are, by any objective measure one cares to offer, much better off than so-called “uncontacted peoples”. Such people are at the mercy of famine and natural disaster, they routinely suffer and die from treatable or curable ailments, and they labor for hours just to ensure the basic necessities of life. Theirs is not a life situation to be envied.

Put another way, there’s a simpler word for subsistence living absent of modern infrastructure, medicine, and food supplies. It’s called poverty.

As with other breeds of Malthusians, Primitivists and Neo-Luddites, I have the following offer to make to those people who seriously suggest that we should emulate the strife and hardship of uncontacted peoples:

You first.

At the height of British naval power and imperial dominance, the United Kingdom maintained a doctrine called the Two-Power Standard. This meant that it committed to maintaining a naval force at least as large as the next two largest navies in the world.

Assume for a moment that, instead of ships and crew, we switch to measuring this standard in currency. Britain, then, would fulfill its two-power standard if it spent as much or more on its navy as the next two biggest naval powers in the world.

Based on this metric, what “power” standard does the United States maintain? How many other countries, selected in order of military spending, could we outspend even if they band together.

Care to hazard a guess?

Turns out that America currently maintains a Twenty Power Standard. In other words, we spend more on defense every year than the combined spending of:

1. People’s Republic of China
2. France
3. United Kingdom
4. Russia
5. Japan
6. Germany
7. Saudi Arabia
8. Italy
9. India
10. Brazil
11. South Korea
12. Canada
13. Australia
14. Spain
15. United Arab Emirates
16. Turkey
17. Israel
18. Netherlands
19. Greece
20. Colombia

Source.

But sure, let’s defund NPR. That’ll fix our spending problem. Let’s make meaningless cuts that aren’t actually even cuts, just very minor increases in planned spending.

Unless you’re serious about spending cuts on the order of many hundreds of billions of dollars across the board, then you are not serious about deficit reduction. (And let’s be very clear, we don’t have a revenue problem, we have a spending problem. Bullshit “tax the rich” class warfare-ism won’t save us, it’ll just make things worse.)

Until we’re ready to make serious cuts into government spending, with an eye towards hundreds of billions or more sliced out of the budget, then we’re going to keep marching down the path to true fiscal disaster. This profligacy can’t keep going forever.

On the other hand, I hear Hong Kong’s nice this time of year.

Almost done with my oncall rotation, so hang in there a little bit longer and post volume should pick up again. In the meantime, read the gut-wrenching story of Vladimir Komarov, a cosmonaut who, to steal John Roderick’s words, “didn’t make it all the way home”.

He died, ultimately, because he knew either he or his best friend had to. And he chose himself. It’s a very sad story of the perils of “National Greatness” thinking, a government that sees its people as resources to be used and discarded, and, ultimately, the sacrifices that we’re willing to make for our friends and loved ones.

Related, here’s John Roderick performing, “The Commander Thinks Aloud” about another set of astronauts that didn’t make it home:

My on-call rotation continues to bury me. Here are some links, videos, etc. to keep you all busy.

3 shell scripts to improve your writing, or “My Ph.D. advisor rewrote himself in bash.” – We should each always be trying to automate ourselves a way. When the things we do now are done by our tools, then we free ourselves up to do more interesting and important things.

It’s Faster Because It’s C – Shaving your horse won’t help you win the Kentucky Derby. Switching to C (probably) won’t make your code any faster. Always know your bottleneck, and don’t waste cycles optimizing the wrong thing.

Top 10 Performance Problems taken from Zappos, Monster, Thomson and Co – The title lies. There’s either 11 or 13 of them depending on how you count. At any rate, all of them are things to be aware of.

And now, two libertarian-related videos. First off, “Who Benefits from the Drug War”?

Second, Dr. Jeffrey Miron of Harvard University and the Cato Institute gives a great explanation of what it means to be a libertarian:

Finally, to all my fellow Washingtonians, please help end the drug war and ask your state representatives to support HB 1550. This bill would legalize marijuana for personal consumption, regulating its sale and production. Weed would be treated more or less like alcohol, being available to adults 21 years of age or older through state-licensed liquor stores.

Sit down, get out your pencils and a sheet of college-rule, because Mr. Bryan Caplan is about to take you to school:

FFF Economic Liberty Lecture Series: Bryan Caplan from The Future of Freedom Foundation on Vimeo.

Caplan’s hour-plus take does a pretty good job of demolishing anti-immigration arguments, but if there’s any questions still remaining in your mind, here’s a supplementary reading list that should put those questions to rest:

Steve Chapman, “Immigration and Crime” (Reason Magazine, posted a year ago today on 2010.02.22). Key quote:

“Since 1986, the year of the infamous amnesty for illegal immigrants, the U.S. murder rate has plunged by 37 percent. (In Chicago, the number of homicides went from 747 in 1986 to 460 last year.) Forcible rape is down 23 percent. Drunk driving fatalities are off by more than half. You are safer today than you were before all those undocumented interlopers arrived.”

“The Implications of Immigrant Entrepreneurship” (Forbes.com, 2007.07.03) Quote:

“A survey of 28,000 companies found that immigrants were key founders in more than a quarter of all the engineering and technology companies set up in the U.S. between 1995 and 2005.

The new research–led by Vivek Wadhwa, an executive-in-residence at Duke University’s Pratt School of Engineering–is a follow-up of a study published earlier this year by Wadhwa and his team that had counted $52 billion in annual sales by these immigrant-founded companies. Total employment at those companies: roughly 450,000.”

“Rethinking the Effects of Immigration on Wages”, Gianmarco I.P. Ottaviano, Giovanni Peri. 2006.08 National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). Abstract:

“This paper asks the following question: what was the effect of surging immigration on average and individual wages of U.S.-born workers during the period 1990-2004? We emphasize the need for a general equilibrium approach to analyze this problem. The impact of immigrants on wages of U.S.-born workers can be evaluated only by accounting carefully for labor market and capital market interactions in production. Using such a general equilibrium approach we estimate that immigrants are imperfect substitutes for U.S.- born workers within the same education-experience-gender group (because they choose different occupations and have different skills). Moreover, accounting for a reasonable speed of adjustment of physical capital we show that most of the wage effects of immigration accrue to native workers within a decade. These two facts imply a positive and significant effect of the 1990-2004 immigration on the average wage of U.S.-born workers overall, both in the short run and in the long run. This positive effect results from averaging a positive effect on wages of U.S.-born workers with at least a high school degree and a small negative effect on wages of U.S.-born workers with no high school degree.”

At this rate it won’t be long before I need a “China Miéville is Right!” category. It’s strange how often I end up agreeing with a Trotskyite like him.

“The major monstrosities of imperialism are things like expropriation & mass murder. Among imperialism’s minor crimes, to which an appropriate response might be not so much rage as a gasp of epochal irritation, is that it treats humanity as if it is truly, epically, boundlessly thick.

…

“Traditionally, the totem of emancipation is a mole, industrious little seditionist unexpectedly poking up throughout history to throw the cantering jodhpured fuckers off their horses. Blair, Biden & their colleagues appear to believe, instead, that it is a goldfish.”

RTWT, as the kids these days are saying.