Tag: Politics

I’m glad to see that people who have committed fraud are convicted. Such things should happen for free. Newsweek (via MSNBC) interviews Allan Sloan, editor of the Wall Street Journal on why the government succeeded in this case. I think he has some good points. Some of the accounting material in this case, and the rules and methods of investment are so complex that it is doubtful you could find a jury that would understand. (I would note, a bit off-topic, that I think this brings up a 21st century problem with the concept of “jury of one’s peers.” Peers of whom? Could we get a jury of accountants or business managers to hear a case like this? I think the idea of either an expert or “qualified” jury might have some merit.)

But my concern is with the penalties for white collar crime. We’re likely to send these guys to jail, probably at some low to medium security facility, and not only will we have the expense of what they did to the country, we’re going to have to care for them for a long time. I think we should examine the penalties for non-violent crime in general. Technology is such that people can be monitored inside society. Prison was, at one time, a more humane option for punishment than certain corporal punishments. I think we need to ask just what it is accomplishing at this point.

I’m not talking about letting white collar criminals off. I would suggest that there might be a way to monitor them in society, allow them to make an income at a job that is monitored, and require some additional financial penalty, proportionate to what they did. If they can’t pay that off in their lifetime, so be it.

This is just an embryo of an idea, but I think it should be considered. Along with finding a way to get out of the failed drug war, this would be an excellent way to reduce the prison population, thus reducing expenditure, and at the same time find a profitable way to harness this class of criminals. Perhaps the time has come to seriously reconsider the prison system.

Every few days I get an e-mail from one or another Christian group that wants me to boycott something or try to get someone else to boycott. Though most of the e-mails I get are from conservatives, liberals are by no means immune to the urge to boycott. I’m not a boycotter. I don’t even think official “boycotts,” as in economic sanctions, generally work all that well, and they don’t have the publicity and “forbidden fruit” effects.

So here we have the Chinese government, upset that people are sticking pins into dolls, and thus creating a black market, raising the price, and increasing the popularity. They have the force of law, but the force of culture just may be stronger. (Newsweek story Curse of the Bureaucrats.)

Boycotts create publicity. It’s a simple fact. If you say, “boycott Walmart,” and then explain that even though their prices are lower, one should avoid shopping there because of higher moral values, what you have done is given Walmart priceless publicity for their lower prices. My wife recently worked for a short period of time at a grocery chain that competes with Walmart in our area. Of course the employees would all hear the talk about bad Walmart, and the much better service at their store. But when we bought groceries at Walmart we would frequently encounter other employees of this chain. Bluntly, we, and they, bought groceries where we could most afford them.

One conservative boycott I was invited to join was against the NBC show The Book of Daniel. I was supposed to urge my affiliate not to carry the program because it was so bad. Instead, I blogged about it, told people they should watch the initial episode (assuming they were even vaguely interested) and decide for themselves. I e-mailed my local affiliate and suggested they should air the show and let us, the viewers, decide. Well, The Book of Daniel was not a good enough show for even the publicity effect of a national boycott to help. I suspect they had many more viewers of that first episode, but most of us decided we didn’t really care that much. On the other hand there was the show NYPD Blue, which also was the target of boycott calls, and which succeeded and prospered, substantially due to the publicity generated.

Boycotts make a show “forbidden fruit.” Face it, ever since the Garden of Eden, people have an attraction for things that are forbidden. I don’t think just permitting everything is necessarily the answer, but we do need to consider the attraction of forbidden things when we are trying to make rules. This is likely what China is running into with the voodoo dolls. A craze like that would probably pass on its own, but you make it illegal and see how hard it is to root out, even under a repressive regime.

There may be occasional, rare times when such action is actually profitable. I’m not certain of the figures, but I think that South Africa under apartheid was one such case. The government’s activities were so universally condemned, and people could easily enough find alternative sources, so boycotts did likely help bring the government down. But I think such things work rarely and irregularly, whether privately or government sponsored.

Besides these political boycott campaigns, I hope we’ll think about sanctions and how they are likely to work in international relations. We just came off of some 10 years of economic sanctions prior to the invasion of Iraq. Just how did anyone benefit? We’re looking at sanctions on Iran. Will they really work, or will they just make certain politicians feel better and let them tell their consituents, “Yes, we’re doing something about Iran. We’re calling for sanctions.”

While I’m at linking to Steve Reuland’s Blog, let me call attention to his entry on gas prices, and note that I agree 100%.

But let me add a few of my own comments. We need to develop alternative sources of fuel. There is no single technology that solves all things, and there is no technology that is yet fully developed. Research and development requires money, and there has to be an incentive. The easiest way to provide that incentive is to allow gas prices to rise. This encourages people to conserve fuel, by driving less, using more public transportation, and looking for more efficient household appliances, amongst other things. In addition, it provides an incentive to those who can provide alternative sources of energy.

This may sound insensitive. But if we continue to behave the way we have been we are going to keep seeing larger and larger problems in the future. The time to get started on this was at least 30 years ago; now is hardly to early to get to work. The new sources of fuel will not be developed, combined with the infrastructure to produce, store, distribute, and use them, without the expenditure of resources, and those resources have to come from somewhere. In addition, efficient options for reducing our use of fossil fuels also require development, production, and distribution. Again, all that requires money. In economics, there really is no such thing as a free lunch.

We can continue to be irresponsible and pass the problem on to our children (though it probably won’t wait that long), or we can behave like responsible adults and deal with it now.

In his regular column in Newsweek, Rabbi Marc Gellman comments on the need to speak out about the situation in Darfur. I want to call attention to his column, Responding to Evil, and suggest you read it, if nothing else so that you will see this:

The most important thing I have taken from Wiesel’s incantatory and luminous work is that we must speak out, not necessarily to change the oppressors of our world but so that the oppressors do not change us.

This is good writing and to the point. I have little to add. Let’s tell our political leaders!

Is democracy the right thing for every country in the world? Is America the best example of this? Should we make it one of our policy goals to implement democracy in other countries?

Newsweek’s Christopher Dickey doesn’t like America’s example of democracy, and he says so at length at The Mechanics of Democracy (Newsweek on MSNBC). He cites the problems in the 2000 presidential election, particularly here in Florida as a good reason not to be smug about American democracy. Now while I think that the election in Florida was quite comical, and I also think that the US Supreme Court accepted a case they had no business accepting, I nonetheless think 2000 was a fine year for democracy in America.

Why? For the simple reason that we settled the election through a legal process, however messy it may have been. We had no violence, no revolution, and though many people’s feathers were ruffled, we went back to governing the nation afterward. We can complain about the courts, but in the final analysis, the Supreme Court’s opinion of what is its business is what holds, so I can think the case was none of their business all I want, and it is quite meaningless. The same thing applies to issues of popular vote and the electoral college. We have a system that prescribes that electors are chosen at the general election, and that those electors then choose the president and vice-president. The person who wins that vote in the electoral college is the president, all whining and complaining about popular votes aside. If we want a tidier end result, somebody needs to get out there and win by a more substantial margin.

If you haven’t gotten my drift by now, let me tell you. It’s not that I approve of the results of all these elections. It is that I don’t think democracy as such is an ultimate value. My concern is for a constitutional government that has reasonable rules of succession, and that can maintain the general support of the people for the system, even when it does not do so for the particular people.

Let’s look at the situation in Florida in 2000. The problem for Republicans was that the Florida Supreme Court was dominated by Democratic appointees. The problem for Democrats was that the U. S. Supreme Court was dominated by Republican appointees. By philosophy, Republicans should have left the issue in the state courts, but that was a loosing proposition for them. Democrats would normally have been more likely to see a federal issue, especially if minority voters were being under-represented, but for them, the Florida Supreme Court was the best option. Politics being what it is, it was too much to expect either party to argue on principle that the issue should be decided by a court that was likely to rule (or had already ruled) against them. Any Republican who had followed principle on this one would have had my undying admiration, but considering I have a record of voting for the loser in election after election, that might not be a great incentive!

Despite all this, the system worked, in my view, because we got a government peacefully, and were able to revisit the situation four years later. Democrats would do well to ask not why they keep getting close elections stolen, but rather why they have been unable to win a clearer margin of victory against a Republican candidate who’s popularity has varied from marginal to dismal. Is it perhaps because Democrats haven’t put up a sufficiently credible candidate?

But then we start to look at the rest of the world. While I wouldn’t have a problem with them following our example, as messy and just plain human as it is, I wonder if they really should do so. I was in the U. S. Air Force during operation Just Cause, sometimes called “Just ‘Cuz We Wanted To” by the less reverent among us. In that case, the United States took the position that it had the right to indict and then arrest the president of a foreign country, something we couldn’t do to our own president, and then we went to war to demonstrate that. I visited Panama after the invasion under the new government. Prior to the invasion one could walk the streets of Panama City at night in relative safety. Afterwards, crime was rampant, and visiting military personnel were required to stay inside at night, and it was recommeded behavior for visitors generally. Businesses normally had armed private security guards.

Panama is better off today than it was just after the invasion, but I have to wonder where it would be as a country if we had not interfered? People have questioned George Bush’s doctrine of a preemptive war, but what was the justification for the invasion of Panama?

But let’s look at another angle. Should we have creating a government that we like as a war aim in a foreign country. Let’s assume for a moment that there was justification for invading Iraq and removing the regime of Saddam Hussein. Given such a justification, is it either good or practical to have as a war aim the creation of a government that suits a list of American requirements? I must question whether it’s good, because I can’t see how we have the right to determine just what type of a government another country should have. I question whether it’s practical simply because we are unlikely to make a workable set of requirements that combine our ideals with that country’s culture.

We have a contradictory set of aims in our foreign policy. We want certain other countries to be democratic. We want them to elect “good” governments by our standards, and we want them to provide adequate security to prevent terrorism against our interests based in their territory. We could accomplish the latter two–a government we approve of, and a level of security–by becoming an occupying power, and investing the effort, determination, and ruthlessness required of that process. But of course that would not be democracy. The Romans used that type of method in setting up client states. “He’s your king, but we have to approve.”

I think war is sometimes necessary. But a war that pursues impossibly large or contradictory goals, and pursues those goals with insufficient force is simply a way to kill people.

We need to make a decision as a nation. Is it our responsibility to create democracy around the world? If so, we need to foster democracy, and that will inevitably mean that governments will come to power that we don’t like. Some of those governments will be too weak to deal with terrorism and criminal activities. Others, like Hamas, may be terrorist oriented themselves. But if democracy is our goal, then we need to live with that. If security is our goal, then our behavior should be different. Support of somewhat repressive regimes, assuming they’re effective, might be a better way to accomplish this goal in many cases. But harassing friendly governments (in this definition) about their human rights record, while rejoicing in the benefits of the security that provides, is hypocritical, and I suspect counterproductive in the long run. On the other hand we could only take military action when we have a limited security goal that does not involve taking responsibility for the government of the country in the process.

The Democrats are right, I think, in asking for an exit strategy from Iraq. But they are wrong on making it time based. We should look at where we are now, create a set of conditions to fulfill, and exit when those conditions have been fulfilled. Those conditions should not include making certain the new government of Iraq is going to succeed, or that it will be a completely friendly one. Those latter two are impossible goals unless we intend to become an occupying power for the long term.

I don’t think the United States would make a good occupying power. At least I hope not.