Sinners in the Hands of an Angry Blog

First Pinochet (BIH: 12/10/2006), then “President-for-Life” Niyazov of Turkmenistan (BIH: 12/21/2006) and now it looks like we might get a dead Saddam before the month is out.  I couldn’t have asked for better Christmas presents.  Would it be too much to hope for Castro to kick the bucket before the end of the year?

Here’s another appalling eminent domain abuse story. Ben Penner is the owner of American Formal Wear, a shop that was forcibly relocated to make room for H&R Block’s new headquarters:

“Right now they have a tall fence around us; it looks like we are in jail,” Penner said. “We haven’t got the new building done yet, and they are forcing us out. We’ve been paying taxes for 60 years, and I think they are treating us shamelessly. They like H&R Block better than us.” Penner wants a couple more weeks to move.

But Andi Udris, president and chief executive of the Economic Development Corp., said Penner wanted a two-week extension two weeks ago and was given more time to move than some other businesses because he was relocating, not closing.

“We want to make sure he has enough time to get out, because we’re not kicking him out onto the street. But on the other hand, he doesn’t look like he’s a person ready to move,” Udris said. “I cannot jeopardize a multimillion-dollar project that really is at the heart of getting downtown revitalized because one person has a hard time understanding that this time the neighborhood is going to get redeveloped.”

“Getting downtown revitalized” is an interesting way to describe his project. Mr. Udris seems to believe that the vitality of a city is depends on having some wise city planner putting all the right pieces in place. If you’ve got a large corporate headquarters “anchoring” a “district,” and you bring in the requisite number of highbrow shops and restaurants and some suitably trendy condos, the city will thereby become “revitalized.” And if (most likely, when) those begin to deteriorate, that’s evidence that even more “revitalization” is needed, and so the city will embark on another round of forcible relocation of successful businesses, demolitions, and heavily subsidized imports of more desirable businesses.

This is strikingly similar to the Bush administration’s attitudes toward Iraqi reconstruction during the early months of the Iraq war. There, too, the Bush administration vision for Iraq was defined in rather concrete terms: the mission will be accomplished when we capture or kill enough of the bad guys. To that end, the administration proceeded in a rather ruthless fashion to get rid of as many bad guys as possible. They banned Baath party members from high office (many of the bad guys were Baathists), disbanded the Iraqi army (many of whom had been Saddam loyalists) and began rounding up large numbers of Iraqi civilians who were suspected insurgents.

But strangely enough, this hasn’t made Iraq, more peaceful, stable, or democratic. Every time we kill an insurgent, three more seem to spring up in his place. The reason is that our policies have failed to treat the Iraqis as human beings, individuals with their own needs, desires, and concerns. When we disbanded the army and banned Baath party members from public service, we did indeed remove some bad people from positions of influence, but in the process we also threw a lot of innocent people out of work. When we raided neighborhoods and rounded up thousands of suspected insurgents, we did catch a few bad people, but we also humiliated a lot more innocent people in the process.

What we should have done is to pay careful attention to the existing structures of Iraqi society and work hard to earn the trust and support of those who already have influence. It also would have been good to bend over backwards to respect the rights of ordinary Iraqis, the vast majority of whom were not, at the outset, involved with the insurgency. The key to success, in other words, would have been to treat the Iraqis like individuals worthy of respect, rather than interchangeable game pieces to be moved around the board at the convenience of American commanders.

If we had gotten those fundamentals right (and I’m not sure we could have, given our limited resources and even more limited understanding of Iraqi culture) the macro-level aspects of Iraqi society would have taken care of themselves. Instead, we went for the macro-level stuff first. We pushed for elections and the writing of a constitution, as though these could bring law and order. But that gets things precisely backwards. Good micro-level institutions are a precondition, not a result, of democratic government.

Precisely the same principle applies to revitalizing a city. A city’s vitality is the result of hundreds of thousands of people voluntarily choosing to locate there due to the wealth of economics, social and cultural opportunities available. Successful corporate headquarters, hip bars and restaurants, and trendy condos are the result, not the cause, of city vitality. If you get the fundamentals right, by making the city a place that’s hospitable to businesses and residents, the trappings of trendiness will come all by themselves, as talented and trendy people will flock to the area.

But trying to “revitalize” an area by mimicking the most superficial indicia of a trendy urban area is putting the cart before the horse–just like holding elections and writing constitutions before you’ve managed to pacify cities and towns.

In particular, what Kansas City needs is a lot more people like Ben Penner, hardworking small businessmen who have a stake in the city. Some of them will be successful and grow to be the next H&R Block. All of them will generate new jobs and tax revenue for the city. But instead, KC seems to believe that the way to “revitalize” the city is to kick small businesses out of the city to make room for larger business.

That creates three problems. First, it does violence to the existing sources of vitality of a city, likely causing additional residents and businesses (for example, the suppliers and customers of the evicted businesses) to leave the city. Second, to the extent that it does attract some new businesses, they tend to be the most mercenary, companies like Wal-Mart that will come into a city for as long as there are subsidies available, and then will close up shop and move to the next city as soon as the subsidies dry up. Attracting those kinds of businesses is a recipe for future problems. Most importantly, it undermines the security of everyone’s property rights, which can itself be a major cause of “blight.” People who expect that their property might be forcibly seized in a few years are far less likely to invest in maintaining or improving that property today. Hence, “blight” becomes a self-fulfulling prophesy, and “revitalization” a never-ending process.

I thought this insight by Ezra Klein was fantastic:

A primary effect of the Bush years, however, has been convincing me, and many others, that Republicans do not elect serious or prudent folks who take their responsibilities to government and country seriously, and thus no self-sustaining draft program can be implemented because you never know what sort of demagogue or fear-monger will win the next election.

He’s talking about the draft, and I wholeheartedly agree with him that a draft is a bad idea. But I wonder if the same logic doesn’t apply to other proposals to transfer a lot of authority from individuals to the government. For example, Ezra is enthusiastic about giving the federal government–the same federal government that Ezra doesn’t trust with a larger military because it’s often run by Republican hacks–more power over our health care system. But if many of our elected officials are not “serious or prudent” (and I think even Ezra would conceded that this description applies to at least a few Democrats as well), isn’t it foolhardy to put them in charge of the health care system?

Of course, Ezra’s likely response is that our health care system is already run by insurance companies, many of which are themselves not especially competent. With which I wholeheartedly agree. But if that’s the problem, then shouldn’t we be devoting at least some of our mental energies to reducing the power of both insurance companies and the government over our health care system? And shouldn’t we, at a minimum, approach the idea of socialized medicine cautiously, keeping always in mind the possibility that a poorly-structured national health care system will simply give the health care industry to plunder the treasury the same way that the defense industry has used the war on terrorism as a pretext for enriching themselves?

Rich Lowry says he and other conservatives were wrong about the way things are going in Iraq. Stanley Kurtz explains that the media are to blame!

Media coverage of Iraq has been biased, and that bias has indeed helped to shape events there for the worse. At the same time, conservative distrust of the media’s very real bias has inclined us to dismiss reports about problems in Iraq that are real.

In the end, I think the media bears fundamental responsibility for this. Had they been less biased–had they reported acts of heroism and the many good things we have done in Iraq–I think conservatives would actually have taken their reporting of the problems in Iraq more seriously. In effect, the media’s consistent liberal bias discredits even its valid reports.

But you are right that MSM’s failings place a burden on smart conservatives not to be too dismissive, just because of the bias. We wish the media were more balanced, and therefore more believable. But we only hurt ourselves if we automatically dismiss anything MSM reports. Again, I think the media bears the lion’s share of the responsibility for this problem. But conservatives still need to be smart about this, or we only end up hurting ourselves.

So the media reported on events in Iraq accurately, conservatives refused to believe the reports, and this is the media’s fault?

The president is in denial. The war in Iraq is still a battle between a “unity government” that’s trying to establish order, and terrorists and “extremists” who hate freedom (and children) and are trying to undermine the effort. The one-two punch of the election and the ISG report appears not to have sunk in. In particular, the fact that most of the violence is now being perpetrated by Shia and Sunni militias who are largely targeting each other, rather than the Iraqi or American governments, per se, appears not to have made an impression on him.

So I agree with Matt. Bush “in his own goofy way clearly believes roughly what he says about Iraq.” He doesn’t think anything about the war effort was or is fundamentally misguided, and he plans to keep doing roughly what he’s doing until it succeeds. The fact that things have gotten more difficult just proves we have to try harder–send more troops, spend more money, plan for a longer stay.

I think it’s safe to say that we’ll be in Iraq for as long as George W. Bush is in the White House. Extricating ourselves before 2009 would have been a challenge even with a president who understood how hopeless the situation is. With a president who plans to stay until we win, there’s no chance that we’ll be out before 2009. The only thing that’s going to cause a change in strategy is a new guy in the Oval Office. And lord help us if the new guy is John McCain.

The Washington Post reports on the dismal news from Iraq:

The Pentagon said yesterday that violence in Iraq soared this fall to its highest level on record and acknowledged that anti-U.S. fighters have achieved a “strategic success” by unleashing a spiral of sectarian killings by Sunni and Shiite death squads that threatens Iraq’s political institutions.

In its most pessimistic report yet on progress in Iraq, the Pentagon described a nation listing toward civil war, with violence at record highs of 959 attacks per week, declining public confidence in government and “little progress” toward political reconciliation.

I don’t think any of us can grasp the sheer magnitude of the carnage going on over there. 959 attacks a week is nearly a new attack every 10 minutes, seven days per week, 24 hours per day. In a country the size of Texas.

And the situation will likely only get worse. Yet the president believes he can wait another couple of weeks–i.e. allow a few thousand more Iraqis to die–before announcing a new strategy.

Hat Tip: David Boaz

Newsweek reports that “For 220 years, Americans have elected only white male Christians with no hint of ethnicity to the White House.”

Really? If you’re white, you have “no hint of ethnicity?” Even if we concede that WASPs have no ethnicity, I could have sworn JFK was an Irish Catholic.

You should check out Glen Whitman and Jerry Taylor’s smart comments in response to my post from last week about the Coase theorem. Here’s Glen:

the Coase Theorem doesn’t cease to apply in the context of large wealth effects. It just has to be stated more carefully. The Coase Theorem doesn’t say that (as long as transaction costs are low) the outcome will be the *same* regardless of initial allocation. It says that the outcome will be *efficient* regardless of initial allocation. So your claim in this post is that it might be efficient for the twins to remain together under one rights allocation (anti-commons) while it’s efficient for them to separate under the other rights allocation (commons).

This points up a (relatively well-known, but little discussed) problem with trying to assign basic rights by reference to efficiency: what is efficient depends in part on the initial allocation of basic rights. So if that’s your point, I think it’s a good one.

And here’s Taylor:

Yes, who gets the intial rights to high-value assets under public control (like, say, ANWR) will often dictate who will ultimately control those rights once trading begins in the market. The initial allocation will have a wealth effect, but not an efficiency effect. I am primarily interested in the latter, not the former, which is why staking the Sierra Club with ANWR, for instance, doesn’t bother me. It is indeed odd that the market would be just as efficient if the Sierra Club owned ANWR as it would be if Exxon Mobil owned ANWR, and that either would occur depending upon how privatization was begun. But the analysis holds up.

This sounds about right to me. And, in case I didn’t say it before, I think his proposal is a great idea, although I’m not going to hold my breath for it to happen any time soon.

Primary horse race analysis this far from the election is inane:

Democratic strategist Stephanie Cutter said Clinton and Obama have emerged as the front-runners much earlier than was the case in previous campaigns. But she said another candidate could compete with them.

“There’s room for one more. The question is: Who is it right now? And I don’t think anybody can tell you with any real certainty of who that could be,” she said.

Cutter said it is unclear if Edwards, despite campaigning hard in Iowa, can hold onto his lead until early 2008, when the state holds its nominating contest, as potential rivals get serious about the race.

Remember in early 2003 when Dick Gephardt and Joe “Three-way tie for Third” Lieberman were considered John Kerry’s principal competitors. Or the flurry of media attention that Wesley Clark got in September 2003? Or late in 2003 when the conventional wisdom was that Howard Dean’s momentum had become unstoppable?

Even declaring front-runners this far out from the election is pointless. It’s a good bet that Hillary and John Edwards will be strong contenders. Obama might be a strong candidate as well, if he decides to get into the race. But the voters won’t even start paying attention to this race for another year. There’s lots of time for an unknown name to step into the race.

So here’s my prediction for the Democratic primaries: at some point in the next 12 months, the idea that Hillary and Obama have the race all but sewed up will look incredibly silly.

Julian describes a conversation with a public health nazi smoking ban advocate:

Suppose we had “smoking variances” that bars could purchase for their liquor licenses, maybe limited to 15 or 20 or 30 percent of the total number of liquor licenses issued—pick the number you like. That should eliminate the worry that professional bartenders “don’t really have a choice” about what kind of environment to work in, so would that be OK? The answer was that it wouldn’t, because that 15 or 20 percent would have to pay significantly higher wages to attract workers—at least, this will happen if you buy the theory that many bar workers just hate the smoke but are subjects of economic coercion under the status quo—and “nobody should have to choose” between their health and an extra buck or two an hour. “Nobody should have to” here meaning, of course, “nobody should ever be allowed to.” (This is, by the way, one of the slipperiest locutions out there today: Any time you have an option you “have to” either take it or not take it. To have more options is to be “forced” (by the law of the excluded middle) to choose between them: Logically speaking, you “must” either accept any offer or fail to accept it. So having choices becomes a species of coercion, and removing them a kind of liberation! Orwell would be proud.)

And he offers a sharp analysis of why this rather silly line of reasoning often makes sense to people

I think it’s also partly that we end up conflating intuitions about distributive justice with the intrinsic coerciveness of the choice situation. That is, if we contemplate someone’s being prepared to seriously jeopardize their health for what seems like not much money, it throws into relief how badly off they must be, since health really is sufficiently widely and strongly valued that it makes a good comparison point. But, of course, what’s bad or unjust is their having so few resources that they regard that tradeoff as a net gain. The added option doesn’t make matters worse, it just highlights an already existing circumstance—whether “unjust” or merely unfortunate—that it might otherwise be easier to ignore.

Quite so. Of course it’s bad that there are people who have to choose between being exposed to secondhand smoke and taking a smaller paycheck. But that’s not an argument for taking the more lucrative opportunity away. Even poor people are capable of weighing the costs and benefits and making a sensible decision. So more choices are better–even for poor people.

You know, I’d be a lot less suspicious of the global warming skeptics of the world if so many of them didn’t turn out to be assholes. Here’s a passage from Michael Crichtans’s latest book:

Alex Burnet was in the middle of the most difficult trial of her career, a rape case involving the sexual assault of a two-year-old boy in Malibu. The defendant, thirty-year-old Mick Crowley, was a Washington-based political columnist who was visiting his sister-in-law when he experienced an overwhelming urge to have anal sex with her young son, still in diapers. Crowley was a wealthy, spoiled Yale graduate and heir to a pharmaceutical fortune. …

It turned out Crowley’s taste in love objects was well known in Washington, but [his lawyer]–as was his custom–tried the case vigorously in the press months before the trial, repeatedly characterizing Alex and the child’s mother as “fantasizing feminist fundamentalists” who had made up the whole thing from “their sick, twisted imaginations.” This, despite a well-documented hospital examination of the child. (Crowley’s penis was small, but he had still caused significant tears to the toddler’s rectum.)

I’m sure it’s a total coincidence that The New Republic has a writer named Michael Crowley who went to Yale. And I doubt there’s any connection to the fact that Crowley wrote a long story criticizing Crichton’s previous book. That book was State of Fear, which I’m told portrays global warming as a hoax dreamed up by left-wingers.

Global warming is a sufficiently complex subject that even after devoting non-trivial amounts of time educating myself about it, I don’t feel comfortable forming a strong opinion on the subject. I find arguments like this pretty compelling. But on the other hand, there sure do seem to be a lot of sketchy people on the side of the skeptics.

For example, I think that Paul Krugman was engaging in a bit of hyperbole when he accused my former colleague Patrick Michaels of “fraud pure and simple” during 1998 Congressional testimony. But he wasn’t totally off-base. I looked up the original paper, and it sure looked to me like Michael’s gave a misleading summary of Hanson’s 1988 model in his testimony, thereby creating the impression that Hanson’s model had fared more poorly than it actually did at predicting the events of the preceding decade. I’m not sure that rises to the level of fraud, but his testimony certainly had the character of propaganda to it.

I’m not quite ready to jump on board with the folks who say that anyone who questions the Al Gore theory of global warming is in the same category as intelligent design theorists and Holocaust deniers. But I would sure would be a lot less suspicious of the dissenters’ arguments if I didn’t keep finding new reasons to question their integrity.

(HT: Lippard)

I agree with Matt that trying to score political points about Pinochet’s economic policies is rather dumb. (he has a more detailed post about Chile vs. Cuba today) Even if you truly believe that dictators with free market policies are better than socialist ones, (and obviously, any free marketeers believes that free markets = good will believe that bad + good is better than bad + bad, in a simple form of moral addition) I don’t really see the benefit in arguing for it in the realm of Pinochet’s Chile. Which, as Yglesias points out, was like all dictatorships — fraught with nepotism, corruption and personal enrichment of politicans — things that aren’t exactly “free market.”

It’s an interesting scholarly debate, but it’s not one for pushing free market principles. Any time you want to convince someone of the wonders of a certain idea, it’s probably not best to bring up the times those ideas (even just nominally) were effected by brutal dictators. And if you are trying to prove that socialism is great, you probably don’t want to bring up the economic policies of National Socialism in Germany or Communism in Russia, because any debate on that will inevitably call up the other… less savory things those regimes did.

When I read “The Fall of the Third Reich” by Albert Speer, I found it interesting that in the last days of the war, he turned to what was (in the context of Nazi Germany) effectively free market techniques to achieve higher production in spite of the bombing. Is this an interesting fact? Sure. Does it make sense to me as an advocate of free markets? Yup! But I don’t really bring it up when I’m trying to convince my left leaning friends: “Hey, but the Nazis did it and look how well that turned out!”

For the same reason, it’s not enough to say “well, look how brutal the Communist nations turned out” as a rebuttal of socialism. You have to prove that the brutality of those regimes was a direct result of socialistic policies. I certainly don’t believe that a country’s economic system can be totally decoupled from its political one, but it’s a fair challenge to say that they a country could have a good and moral plan for one but not the other.

… identifies the real villains in today’s society — people who publish uncredited photos on the internet.

Millions of commercial Web sites and personal blogs would be required to report illegal images or videos posted by their users or pay fines of up to $300,000, if a new proposal in the U.S. Senate came into law.

Oh, and it also babbles about social networking sites having to delete accounts owned by sex offenders. Which, I would think, would require the rest of us to prove that we aren’t sex offenders in order to post. Anyway, I would like to thank fark.com for that link, but I would explicitly NOT like to thank or credit John McCain’s website for the following (horrific) image.

Did that really cause someone $300,000 worth of damage? Is this really a proportional response?  Also, to fellow co-posters, I hereby disclaim responsibility if a team of crack McCain Commandos raid your houses.

Paul Krugman reminds us of “The Cassandra Chronicles,” a piece shocking both for its imperial hubris and literary ignorance.

Shortly after U.S. forces marched into Baghdad in 2003, The Weekly Standard published a jeering article titled, “The Cassandra Chronicles: The stupidity of the antiwar doomsayers.” Among those the article mocked was a “war novelist” named James Webb, who is now the senator-elect from Virginia.

The article’s title was more revealing than its authors knew. People forget the nature of Cassandra’s curse: although nobody would believe her, all her prophecies came true.

Ezra seems to believe that the Fed is somehow scheming to undermine wage growth for ordinary workers:

It’s always nice to see the Fed flipping out in fear over slight increases in wages. Sort of clarifies things, you know? Given that the late-90s saw lower-than-we-thought-possible unemployment combined with rapid wage growth and a surprising absence of inflationary pressure, you’d think some wage growth after five years of stagnation would be warmly greeted by the Fed — instead, they’re ready to slam on the brakes. The absurdity of it is almost too rich to convey, but the Federal Reserve literally takes wage growth for the median American as a warning sign of a sick economy.

Meanwhile, as Matt notes, it’s a nice coincidence that we’re supposed to believe that a quarter century of this sort of Fed policy had no effect on income inequality, which was, of course, entirely caused by skills-biased technological change. That Europe also saw the same change without the corresponding increase in inequality must not be mentioned. Also, don’t mention any of this. That’s not to say it’s all, or even mostly, Fed policy — Ben Bernanke isn’t advantaging the top .1% above the top 1% in any serious way — but a basket of things which have rapidly enhanced the capabilities of the rich to get richer, and heavily impeded everyone below them.

This line of argument doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me. The Fed has a single policy lever, the size of the money supply. Expanding the money supply rapidly causes prices to rise (more dollars chasing fewer goods), which businesses often misinterpret as increasing demand for their products, causing them to simultaneously increase production. That’s nice in the short run (because demand for the factors of production, including labor, rise rapidly) but it’s bad in the long turn because it makes the subsequent economic downturn more severe. Conversely, contracting the money supply causes prices to fall (fewer dollars chasing more goods), which businesses will interpret as falling demand for their products and causes them to cut back production. This can lead to a recession or–if the contraction is too severe–a depression.

Now, the important point here is that there’s only one lever. Workers, investors, rich people, and poor people all share the same money supply. The Fed can expand or contract it but that’s it. So if you want to say that the Fed is increasing income inequality, you need to explain how the Fed is using that one policy lever in a way that affects rich and poor people differently.

It’s true, of course, that if the Fed “slams on the brakes” by contracting the money supply and causing a premature recession, it is likely to halt the growth or real wages. But it’s likely to have equally negative effects on corporate profits, real estate, and any other economic activity that’s denominated in dollars. Yes, poor people would be hurt, but so would rich people.

So I don’t get it. Matt seems to think that part of the story is that debtors benefit from easy money, while creditors benefit from tight money. That’s certainly true on the margin, but it runs up a couple of problems. First, although the Fed clearly has lots of control over short-term, nominal interest rates, it’s not clear they have much control over long-term, real interest rates. And those are the rates that really matter as far as net creditors are concerned. The yield on 10- and 30-year treasury notes, which are good benchmarks for the cost of capital throughout the economy, show surprisingly little connection to the short-term interest rates that the Fed targets in its monthly meetings.

The second problem is that as an empirical matter, the Bush administration has been a period of extraordinarily low interest rates. As you can see here, the federal funds rate was at its lowest point in half a century between 2002 and 2005. In fact, after adjusting for inflation, the federal funds rate was indistinguishable from zero for most of the first Bush term. If this is the Fed helping creditors, they don’t seem to be doing a very good job.

So I don’t get it. There’s probably some subtle economic point I’m missing here, but I’m having trouble seeing how the Fed’s decisions have any particular redistributive implications. It seems to me that everybody–rich and poor, worker and investor, creditor and debtor–has benefitted tremendously from the Fed’s focus on controlling inflation over the last quarter century.

The name of the “Employee Free Choice Act” is a cynical euphemism. The central provision seems to be that it replaces the current system, under which the employees of a given employer vote via secret ballot on whether they want to join a union, with a “card check” system in which obtaining the signatures of 50 percent of workers, plus one, is sufficient to create the union.

It’s worth noting from the outset how illiberal the system already is. Imagine if we took the same approach to creating churches. Someone who wanted to start a new church would have to collect a certain number of signatures from residents in a particular neighborhood. Once the required number of signatures were collected, an election would be held. If the majority of the residents voted in favor of the new church, that would become the official church of that neighborhood, and the state would begin automatically collecting tithes from the paychecks of every resident.

We don’t normally force people to join organizations just because a majority of their friends, neighbors, or co-workers would like them to. Yet for reasons that aren’t clear to me, unions are considered different. When it comes to the workplace, if 60 percent of the workers want to form a union and 40 percent do not, the 60 percent have the right not only to form the union and force the employer to bargain with it, but they have the right to negotiate on behalf of the 40 percent who voted against the union and to help pay for the operation of the union they opposed.

It might be objected that a church is a matter of conscience, whereas unions provide services that benefit all their workers. I think that’s debatable, but even if we take it as given, that’s not all unions do. In particular, they funnel millions of dollars every election cycle to electing Democrats. Forcing a Republican to give to a union that donates its money to Democrats strikes me as nearly as illiberal as forcing a Catholic or Jew to contribute to a Lutheran church.

OK, so the current union rules aren’t especially liberal to begin with. But now we’ve got the “Free Choice” act which makes it even easier to coerce workers to join unions by taking away their right to a secret ballot. If we’re going to have this goofy system where a majority of workers can coerce the minority into joining the union, at the very least we should make sure that the majority actually is in favor of unionizing. But with the “Free Choice” act, workers who didn’t want a union would be required to make their stand on the issue publicly known (or at least known to the union) inviting reprisals and social ostracism from union supporters. It certainly wouldn’t enhance voters’ “free choice” to run our elections by giving each office to the candidate who collected the most signatures in support of his candidacy. It’s not obvious why a secret ballot is any less important to the free choice of workers.

The fundamental issue here is that the unions always like to paint this as a dispute between workers and employers. Measures that make it harder to form unions are depicted as “anti-worker” or “pro-employer.” But in fact, the dispute here is between workers who want a union and other workers who don’t want a union–because they don’t want their money to go to Democrats, or because they’re afraid that unionization will damage their relationship with their employer, or because they simply don’t think it’s worth the money. Those workers’ rights are trampled by “pro-worker” legislation like the Employee Free Choice Act, which is really about taking choices away from those workers who would prefer not to have a union representing them.

Foreign Affairs is hosting a roundtable discussion of the Iraq Study Group. Stephen Biddle writes:

The prognosis for Iraq looks bad and is getting worse. If the trend does not improve soon, the United States may have no choice but to cut its losses and get out. Recently, many have looked to the bipartisan Iraq Study Group to engineer a change in strategy that might arrest this decline, and the ISG’s report does indeed contain some useful ideas and worthwhile recommendations. But on the whole, it offers the political groundwork for a complete withdrawal more than it offers a sustainable solution to the conflict.

Via Henley, this is just appalling:

Among the 1,000 people who work in the U.S. Embassy in Iraq, only 33 are Arabic speakers and only six speak the language fluently, according to the Iraq Study Group report released on Wednesday.

“All of our efforts in Iraq, military and civilian, are handicapped by Americans’ lack of knowledge of language and cultural understanding,” the bipartisan panel said in its report. “In a conflict that demands effective and efficient communication with Iraqis, we are often at a disadvantage.”

The ISG seems to think that this means we need to step up our language training efforts–as though the need for more fluent Arabic speakers hasn’t been conventional wisdom for years. I agree with Henley that they’re 4 years late and a billion dollars short on this. In 2002, devoting more resources to Arabic literacy would have been a fantastic idea. Today, it’s simply delusional to think that people who start training today will be ready in time to make any difference.

Listening to Sandra Day O’Connor and Leon Panetta on NPR this morning, I got the same impression: the ISG’s recommendations are 3 years late and a trillion dollars short. Asked to summarize the report’s recommendations, she said that we should accelerate the training of the Iraqi army by embedding more Iraqis in the American military and vice versa. Then, if all goes well, most American troops would be out by 2008. But an unspecified number of troops would have to stay in Iraq for an unspecified number of years to support the Iraqi troops.

That’s the optimistic scenario. And it’s not appreciably different from the optimistic scenario the Bush administration has been touting for the last couple of years. The line has always been that we’ll withdraw our troops when the Iraqi troops are ready, and we’ve always been told that that will take a year or two. So while it’s good to see a “bipartisan” panel admitting that the strategy to date has been a disaster, I don’t see how the ISG has recommended anything other than more of the same.

Spencer Ackerman, freed of the shackles of his New Republic affiliation, has a great article on the Iraq Study Group report:

Given the specific lineup of the 10 wise men and women serving on the Iraq Study Group, the most conspicuous absence is that of supermodel Heidi Klum. Sure, she has no relevant experience in foreign policy, nor any real knowledge of Iraq — but neither do commissioners Sandra Day O’Connor, Vernon Jordan, Alan Simpson, or Edwin Meese. What Klum does have to offer is a lesson completely lost on the commission, one taught each week on her hit reality show Project Runway: you’re either in, or you’re out. When it comes to Iraq, it’s good advice.

From the commission’s perspective, however, such advice would represent a dangerous breakdown of Washington’s most enlightened foreign-policy tradition — that is to say, bipartisanship. The Iraq Study Group, led by George H.W. Bush’s secretary of state, James Baker, and 9-11 Commission co-chairman Lee Hamilton, made a point from the outset of its work to rule out the outer boundaries of the Iraq debate. Its report refuses to bless the idea of sending new combat forces to Baghdad, the favored solution of hawks like Senators John McCain and Joe Lieberman; and it also blanches at what Baker called “precipitous withdrawal,” the position held by many in the Democratic Party, the country as a whole, Iraq, and the world. A safe consensus is what the commission is out for, as reflected by the name for their strategy: “responsible transition.”

As Ackerman makes clear, the report has a lot of good information about what’s wrong in Iraq, but when it gets to the part about what to do about it, there’s a lot less there than meets the eye. Most of it is, in Ackerman’s apt phrase, “new lipstick on a very old pig.” And there’s this gem by Jim Baker from the press conference:

We have one last chance at making Iraq work, and, more importantly, one last chance to unite this country on this war.

More importantly? More importantly? Maybe the guy misspoke. But maybe he inadvertently described the real mission of the group: (As Matt puts it) “for a bipartisan political elite to try to avoid embarrassment.”

Personally, I think it’s more important to avoid unnecessary American casualties than to avoid embarrassment. But then I wasn’t responsible for getting my country involved in a catastrophic war.

Via Julian, boy is Kevin Drum’s reaction to Brink Lindsey’s excellent piece on “liberaltarians” disappointing.

Lindsey’s piece is a pretty clear-eyed look at whether liberals and libertarians can get along. He avoids pretending that there’s a huge pool of libertarians just waiting to be tapped (though he makes a nod in that direction by claiming that 13% of the population is “libertarian-leaning”). He doesn’t pretend that anyone who believes in individual rights is automatically a libertarian, even admitting that most of the social policies favored by libertarians were originally “championed by the political left.” And he forthrightly admits that social policies don’t matter that much anyway: it’s in the economic sphere where the libertarian rubber meets the liberal road. Of course, that’s also where the “liberaltarian” dream dies a nasty and horrible death

Drum seems to be going out of his way to misread Lindsey here. Here’s what Lindsey actually said:

Liberals and libertarians already share considerable common ground, if they could just see past their differences to recognize it. Both generally support a more open immigration policy. Both reject the religious right’s homophobia and blastocystophilia. Both are open to rethinking the country’s draconian drug policies. Both seek to protect the United States from terrorism without gratuitous encroachments on civil liberties or extensions of executive power. And underlying all these policy positions is a shared philosophical commitment to individual autonomy as a core political value. The central challenge in cementing a new fusionist alliance–and, make no mistake, it is a daunting one–is to elaborate a vision of economic policy, and policy reform, that both liberals and libertarians can support.

I don’t understand how you get “social policies don’t matter that much anyway” from that paragraph. In fact, Lindsey’s point is precisely the opposite: things do matter, and they could therefore serve as a strong foundation for an alliance.

When Lindsey says that the central challenge is hammering out disagreements on economic policy, he’s not saying that those are the issues that matter more. He’s just pointing out that those are the areas where disagreements exist.

I think Drum’s post–and even more so Drum’s commenters–illustrate the real obstacle to a liberal-libertarian alliance: the coalitional psychology of America’s left-right divide is so deeply entrenched that it’s almost impossible to overcome. Americans see the political world as divided into two warring camps, one on the left and one on the right. And for historical reasons, libertarians are perceived as being in the right-hand camp.

And the dynamics of the political process make these groupings self-reinforcing. Someone might initially become a liberal because of her views on abortion or gay rights. But once she makes liberal friends and reads liberal blogs, she comes to regard people who like tax cuts as being in the same category as people who bash gay people and oppose abortion rights. After a while, hearing someone advocate tax cuts gives her the same visceral negative reaction as hearing someone bash gay people.

As a result, you get the kinds of absurd caricatures you find in Drums comments: “Libertarians: Liberals who want to be racist, and conservatives who want to smoke pot.” “As a practical matter Libertarianism is basicly selfishness on stilts.”

There are enough people who think this way that a liberal-libertarian fusionist movement is likely to be doomed before it gets off the ground. No matter how much libertarians and liberals have in common, most of them are going to have trouble getting over their reflexive dislike of one another–dislike that was reinforced during a half-century of conservatarian fusionism.

Which isn’t to say that this will be the case forever. If the GOP continues to be the part of warmongering and intolerance, at some point liberals and libertarians will become accustomed to thinking of each other as allies rather than adversaries. But it will take years to overcome the groupthink that currently reinforces the perception that libertarianism is a movement of the right.