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Following from my post here, which produced a lot of heated comments (including, I am sorry to say, a few from yours truly), and Perry’s ‘proportionality’ post yesterday, it might be worth taking a few minutes to read this long but worthwhile essay by Christopher Hitchens. Hitch writes about the Allied bombing offensive of the Second World War, the obliteration of cities like Dresden, Hamburg and the subsequent – and controversial – vilification of Bomber Command leader Arthur Harris. I will not try to summarise what Hitchens has to say, which revolves around a new book by English writer A.C. Grayling, but here is a bit towards the end to give some of the flavour:
However, if we are to be allowed alternative historical courses and speculations, there is a “moral” that Grayling overlooks. What if the RAF had been in good enough shape to inflict “terror” on Berlin in the fall of 1939? What if the United States had determined to strike the Imperial Japanese Navy first? What if the League of Nations had decided to stand by the Spanish Republic and Abyssinia, and had pounded Franco’s and Mussolini’s armies before they could get off the mark?
Those who oppose violence on principle are called pacifists. Those who oppose it until its use is too little and too late, or too much and too late, should be called casuists. Those who try to resist their own despotisms, and who appeal in vain to lazy democracies who are also among the potential victims, and who welcome the eventual arrival of the bombs and planes–I am thinking of some courageous Serbian and Iraqi democrats–should be called our allies now, and in Europe should have been our allies no later than 1933.
Moral crisis is the vile residue of moral cowardice, and Grayling has fully proved this without quite intending to do so. His book is a treatise, not on the dubiety of the retributive, but on the urgency and integrity of the “preemptive.”
On a personal note, it enrages me how the area bombing of German towns, for example, was denounced by people with the wisdom of hindsight, although it should be noted that the bombing was questioned at the time and not just by lily-livered peaceniks. As a son of an RAF navigator, I also have to recognise that in Britain, a country isolated in the early years of the war, having lost Singapore, Trobuk, fighting a terrible campaign to avoid starvation against U-boats, that the bombing of German towns and cities was seen as a vital way to hit back. Hitchens does not mention another very good reason: the bombing tied up hundreds of Luftwaffe aircraft that would otherwise have been deployed on the Eastern front, and forced the Nazis to tie up a lot of manpower and material to deal with air attacks.
Where does all this take us to what is going on in the Middle East now? To repeat a point made in my previous article, countries like Israel are entitled to do what is necessary to prevent their own extinction. For to be clear about this: Hizbollah and their backers want Israel to be wiped off the face of the earth. So it is only right that the country should do what is deemed necessary to prevent its destruction, even if that involves loss of civilian life. But I make no apologies for re-stating my revulsion at those who claim that there is “no such thing as an innocent civilian” in order to justify use of massive military force. There are plenty of good arguments for using massive force, however awful, but dehumanising millions of victims beforehand by claiming “Muslims are all alike,” or whatever, is not one of them.
I suppose it had to happen. As global temperatures supposedly rise – and it is not difficult to accept that claim right now in my sweltering apartment – certain groups are playing the victim card by suing governments and other agents for causing global warming and hence hurting their livelihoods.
Great article in American magazine Reason here about the arrest of David Carruthers, CEO of the BetOnSports online gambling business. Following hard on the heels of the arrest of the three Natwest bankers on charges connected with the collapse of Enron, it seems the British state is steadily losing the ability to protect its citizens from being grabbed by U.S. authorities for arrest for offences which are not offences in this country and where the domiciles of a person’s businesses are outside the United States.
Carruthers was on his way from London, where his company is headquartered, to Costa Rica, where its online betting operations are based. The business is perfectly legal in both of those places, but not in the United States. And since most of its customers are Americans, Carruthers is guilty of about 20 different felonies.
Or so the FBI and the Justice Department say, and they are the ones with the guns and handcuffs. Catherine Hanaway, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Missouri, accuses Carruthers and 10 other people associated with BetOnSports, including company founder Gary Kaplan, of violating the 1961 Wire Act, which prohibits using “a wire communication facility” to accept bets on “any sporting event or contest.”
Despite the talk of fraud, BetOnSports is not accused of ripping off its customers. This case has nothing to do with consumer protection, except in the sense of protecting consumers from their own desire to bet on sports.
These cases present a number of difficulties. I think American authorities are entitled to crack down on crimes of theft, fraud and violence even if those crimes have not occured on U.S. soil but involve injury to a U.S. citizen. That is fair. But the BetOnSports case suggests that, in this internet, globalised age, the writ of the U.S. legislature seems to run across the whole planet (well, most of the planet. I do not think extradition will work any time soon in North Korea).
Besides the legal niceties, there is also hypocrisy of nanny-state legislators at work here. America boasts the ultimate gambling city on the planet: Las Vegas, not to mention hosts of other places in Reno, Atlantic City and various Indian reservations. Not to mention the various state lotteries from which the U.S. tax-eaters gain a hefty income. And that is what this arrest and closure of on-line gambling is about. The faux moral scolds who decry gambling are not concerned about people pouring their hard-earned cash down the drain. No, they are worried that a nice source of tax revenue is passing them by.
Our own political masters in Britain are scarcely better in their approaches to the various ‘sinful’ activities that need to be regulated to protect a benighted populace. Drinking hours are liberalised and super-casinos are encouraged and yet smoking in a private member’s club is banned and cultivation of cannabis plants in your back yard for medical use will get you sent to jail or hit with a hefty fine. What a great world we live in.
The Tate Modern gallery, built in an old power station, hosts art which is frequently of no aesthetic value whatever, in my opinion, other than to demonstrate the vacuity of much that passes for Modern or post-Modern, art. Apparently, this giant sculpture is to be built:
London’s Tate Modern, the world’s most popular modern art museum, unveiled plans on Tuesday to build a giant glass pyramid-style extension which its creator described as a “pile” of boxes.
Unlike the uniform glass pyramid in the courtyard of the Louvre museum in Paris, the planned extension to the converted power station on the southern bank of the Thames is asymmetric.
The new building, which aims to ease visitor congestion, should be ready in time for the Olympic Games in London in 2012 and will cost around 165 million pounds to complete at current prices.
Makes the heart swell with patriotic pride, does it not? I love the line about the Olympics. Expect more stunts like this, paid for by the taxpayer, as the Games approach. Do not say you were not warned.
While on the subject of the dreadfulness of post-modernism, I can recommend this book.
Diana Hsieh, a hardline objectivist of the Big-O variety, thinks libertarians like Tom Palmer, whom she cites in an article on her Noodlefood site here, are losing their nerve if they worry about attacks on civilian targets in places like Beirut. She writes:
Obviously, wars cannot be fought without harm to civilian populations. Governments and their militaries do not exist in some separate dimension from civilians, such that they might be uniquely targeted by an invading force. Enemy governments are thoroughly integrated into the territory over which they rule, depending upon its wealth, hospitals, roads, factories, trains, farms, ports, industry, people, and more. That’s why quickly and decisively eliminating the threat posed by an enemy nation cannot but require the bombing of so-called “civilian” targets.
Moreover, without active support and/or tacit submission from a majority of the civilian population, no government could maintain its grip on power. That’s why the vast majority of the population of an aggressive enemy nation are not morally innocent bystanders. The sometimes-awful luck of genuine innocents in wartime, such as young children or active dissidents, is a terrible tragedy. However, the party responsible is not the nation defending itself but rather all those who made such a defense necessary, particularly the countrymen of the innocents complicit in or supportive of the aggression of their nation.
I am very troubled by that last paragraph. Hsieh seems to be saying that civilians in a country that is led by a brutal government are, unless they do everything to rebel, more or less complicit in the crimes of that government. Therefore, they have little or no excuse to complain if bombs come raining down on their homes.
This way of reasoning involves, by an ironic twist, to a sort of collectivist “guilt” shared across a whole populace. If a family living say, in Stalin’s Russia or Hitler’s Germany have not actively sought to overthrow those governments, then they are somehow not terribly deserving of our compassion (Hsieh, to be fair, seems to exempt children and one or two other groups from this).
I entirely defend Israel’s right to do what is necessary to defend itself from terror groups like Hamas and Hizbollah, and alas, its actions may lead, inevitably, to the loss of civilian life. I consider myself pretty much pro-Israeli and have nothing but contempt for the bogus moral equivalence drawn in certain parts of the media between the actions of the Israeli armed forces and terror groups. But I have a real problem with the line of argument presented here by Hsieh. The ends do not always justify the means, and as moral agents, it is surely right to minimise loss of innocent life as far as possible if that can be done. For consider this: if the western powers had really thrown off all moral constraints about foreign populations in the recent past, then much of the Middle East would be a radioactive wasteland.
A while back I suggested that the the high price of gold may be a harbinger of rising inflation, and that even though some people suggest that gold prices are a fogeyish obsession of a few “gold bugs”, the price movement of this golden metal can still offer an early indicator of trouble.
I think I can say a mild “I told you so”. After having been off the radar for years, due to a variety of factors, inflation is rearing its head again. To an extent, of course, the cost of living has been rising in Britain a lot more than official statistics suggest because of the way in which Britain’s finance minister, Gordon Brown, has stripped out things like housing price movements and taxes to make the figures look better. (In all fairness to Brown, his Tory predecessors were no better in this respect). Anatole Kaletsky has a good article here warning that the mighty U.S. Federal Reserve is in danger of letting the inflation genie out of the bottle. A further rise in rates, he says, may be needed, possibly raising the risk of a recession. He may be right. The Fed’s key lending rate is 5.25 percent and has risen 17 times since its low-point around the time of 9/11.
It is a bit rich, though, for an unashamed neo-Keynesian like Kaletsky to bash the Fed for failing to be tough enough, and for not acting sooner, on rates. Kaletsky has not been shy of bashing the European Central Bank for its supposedly restrictive approach on interest rates. The problem of course is that no central bank chief, even if he or she has the wisdom of Solomon, can anticipate perfectly the right course for interest rates. If such a central bank makes an error, that mistake can be enormously costly in terms of jobs, livelihoods, even the loss of homes (I recall a now-departed commenter, called Euan Gray, dismiss such concerns with a sort of “let the experts sort it out” approach of his.)
The perils of central bankers getting the economic signals wrong explains why some classical liberal economists remain fond of F.A. Hayek’s argument for a return to a sort of commodity-backed, competitive currency system. Yes, such a system would have its problems and banks might go bust from time to time. But although such a banking system would have its crises, they would be relatively small compared to the risk of an entire economic region getting into trouble on account of a mistake by a central bank chief and his economists. The bigger and more powerful the central bank, the bigger the potential cockups. That remains for me a great attraction of Hayek’s idea: mistakes will get made, but those mistakes will be dispersed and people will have options to flee a delinquently-run currency.
Reuters journalist Paul Hughes chose to spend a holiday with his wife in Beirut. just as the violence broke out. Here’s his vivid take on what it is like in that city at the moment. When it comes to covering events in Lebanon with a salty mixture of black humour, PJ O’ Rourke, of course, remains the master.
The man who brought us the ultimate tough private eye, Mike Hammer, has died at the age of 88. I quite liked Mickey Spillane’s hard-boiled fiction, though goodness knows it never pretended to be Henry James or Proust (and was all the better for it, probably). Bob Bidinotto has a nice article saying farewell to the old fella. Here is a report over at Bloomberg. I am sure Hammer is laughing over a large bourbon somewhere before going out to tangle with treacherous dames and cut down the bad guys.
As I write this, I am reading a Reuters report saying that Britain could have the highest temperatures in recorded history later this week – possibly up to 39 degrees Celsius as warm air from Continental Europe moves north. Phew. Whatever the cause for a run of hot summers in recent years, there is no doubt now that working in Britain during the summer months would be a lot less pleasant were it not for the invention of air-conditioning. Mind you, it seems that Britain still has not quite figured out how to manage AC systems properly. In my time working in London, the systems have been frequently unreliable although my modern office in London’s Docklands is excellent. London’s Tube does not have it (the excuse I hear is that the tunnels are not large enough for the technology to work efficiently). Even so, the use of air conditioning seems to be spreading, although I don’t have reliable statistics to hand but just personal experience over a decade or more of going to different offices in town. Here is a story about how a hospital in Belfast is supposedly the first major building to use AC. (Belfast?)
→ Continue reading: Thank goodness for artificial cooling
I think Tory leader, windmill pioneer and attendee of uber-Chav celebrity bashes, David Cameron, might want to take a break from the social whirl and read this about the much-derided U.S. tax cuts of 2003:
In the nine quarters preceding that cut on dividend and capital gains rates and in marginal income-tax rates, economic growth averaged an annual 1.1%. In the 12 quarters–three full years–since the tax cut passed, growth has averaged a remarkable 4%. Monetary policy has also fueled this expansion, but the tax cuts were perfectly targeted to improve the incentives to take risks among businesses shell-shocked by the dot-com collapse, 9/11 and Sarbanes-Oxley.
This growth in turn has produced a record flood of tax revenues, just as the most ebullient supply-siders predicted. In the first nine months of fiscal 2006, tax revenues have climbed by $206 billion, or nearly 13%. As the Congressional Budget Office recently noted, “That increase represents the second-highest rate of growth for that nine-month period in the past 25 years”–exceeded only by the year before. For all of fiscal 2005, revenues rose by $274 billion, or 15%. We should add that CBO itself failed to anticipate this revenue boom, as the nearby table shows. Maybe its economists should rethink their models.
Britain’s Conservatives believed – at least during the 1980s when a certain Nigel Lawson was Chancellor – that cuts to marginal tax rates could actually generate more, not less revenue for the State, as well as being a good thing in its own right for widening economic liberty and reducing the bite taken out of the pockets of the citizenry. Now, I know that some libertarian purists out there might actually be suspicious about a measure that would raise more revenues, even if it is a good thing for individual taxpayers. I say let purity be damned. we know that politicians are not motivated much by supposed abstract concerns about the balance between the individual and the State these days, but the practical benefits of cutting tax rates should still resonate with our political classes. The Laffer Curve still operates, at least if you accept the WSJ article. Even current Chancellor Gordon Brown might wake up to the sort of facts that the Wall Street Journal is on about. It would be nice to think that the Tories would seize on such data, make a fuss, point out the benefits of flattening the tax code, simplifying it and cutting rates. Instead, unless I am missing out here, is silence.
Maybe the implosion of the current government means the opposition can afford to slump in the hammock during the back end of summer and wait. But it would be nice to think that they could be a tad more ambitious. Only a tad – I would not want our Dave to break into a sweat or anything.
American economist Thomas Sowell remains, in my view, one of the “must-read” authors for folk interested in the case for liberal markets and critiques of well-intentioned but hubristic social policy. In one of his books, The Vision of the Anointed, he hits upon a key fact that is so often ignored by writers making statements such as “X percent of the population own Y percent of the wealth”, and then proceed, in terms of great indignation, to argue for massive redistribution of wealth to rectify said terrible state of affairs. Sowell points out that what such statements miss out is that we are all getting older, our lives change, and as we do so, it is common for folk to pass from one wealth bracket to another:
“One common source of needless alarm about statistics is a failure to understand that a given series of numbers may represent a changing assortment of people. A joke has it that, upon being told that a pedestrian is hit by a car every 20 minutes in New York, the listener responded, “He must get awfully tired of that!” Exactly the same reasoning – or lack of reasoning – appears in statistics that are intended to be taken seriously.” (page 43).
I am still unconvinced of the isolationist argument vis Iraq that would have had Western militaries – and probably as a result civilians – quit the entire Middle East, and leave Saddam to wreak havoc as he has before, but my goodness, the case for non-interventionist foreign policy has never looked so good at the moment as the insurgency in Iraq gets worse. Jim Henley sums up the “do as little as possible” school of libertarian foreign policy as well as anyone:
If a war is worth years of struggle, billions squandered and thousands or tens of thousands of dead on both sides, why isn’t peaceful change worth as much? Why is it a “bold initiative” to announce a “generational struggle” to transform a region of the world through a war that might or might not achieve its ends, but preemptively absurd to launch a generational struggle to transform the same region through nonintervention, to instill liberalism and justice by exemplifying it? Because people might get killed? People get killed the other way. Because it might not work? Look around you. The other way isn’t working now.
My main problem with Jim’s argument is that setting an example to the dictatorships, thugocracies etc of that region would strike me as a fairly drawn-out, if not rank impossible, endeavour (that’s putting it politely, ed). We are talking about a process that might last thousands of years. And I am afraid that in the meantime, the various despots in that region might not quite get with the Enlightenment programme and develop a continued fondness for blowing infidels up. At best, I would say that such folk might, even at their craziest, be deterrable, which is why I think the libertarian world-view – if I can presume to call it that – should focus on deterrence, and forswear the temptations of what folk called pre-emptive action. But again – and Jim and others have to answer this question – does observing the niceties of national sovereignty always trump other considerations? For me, one of the clearest-cut examples of justified and smart pre-emption was the Israeli airforce’s bombing of the Iraqi nuclear facilties in the early 1980s. No doubt some libertarian “leave-well-alone” foreign policy commenters fulminated about that event at the time, in a way that may have echoes now in what is being written about Israel’s actions in Lebanon (see the posts below).
What to do?
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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