When asked, In your opinion what’s the biggest specific threat, foreign or domestic, to our country right now? Congressman Justin Amash answered:
The biggest threat is our national debt. Our system will collapse if we don’t get it under control. But the next biggest threat is the government’s ongoing erosion of our civil liberties.
the test isn’t if you can keep going when everything seems to be easy and things are flowing like water.
“Go ahead and vote this November. But don’t waste any more time or energy on the presidential election than it takes to get to your polling station and pull a lever for a third-party candidate—just enough to register your obstruction and defiance—and then get back out onto the street. That is where the question of real power is being decided.” -Chris Hedges
“Defending Obama as “the lesser of two evils” isn’t merely letting him off the hook for his betrayals. Those who take that position are actively enabling his conduct. They are part of the problem. If you want this country to be different, you can’t just wish for it or expect voting to effect change. You need to be part of making it happen. And that was perhaps the greatest of Obama’s deceptions, that by listening to his seductive rhetoric, your passivity made you part of something greater and was tantamount to supporting change.” -Yves Smith
In 1991, the government of Somalia collapsed. Its nine million people have been teetering on starvation ever since – and the ugliest forces in the Western world have seen this as a great opportunity to steal the country’s food supply and dump our nuclear waste in their seas. As soon as the government was gone, mysterious European ships started appearing off the coast of Somalia, dumping vast barrels into the ocean. The coastal population began to sicken. At first they suffered strange rashes, nausea and malformed babies.
Then, after the 2005 tsunami, hundreds of the dumped and leaking barrels washed up on shore. People began to suffer from radiation sickness, and more than 300 died. Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah, the UN envoy to Somalia, has said publicly: “Somebody is dumping nuclear material here. There is also lead, and heavy metals such as cadmium and mercury – you name it.” Much of it can be traced back to European hospitals and factories, who seem to be passing it on to the Italian mafia to “dispose” of cheaply. This is the context in which the “pirates” have emerged. Somalian fishermen took speedboats to try to dissuade the dumpers and trawlers, or at least levy a “tax” on them. They call themselves the Volunteer Coastguard of Somalia – and ordinary Somalis agree. The independent Somalian news site Wardheer News found 70 per cent “strongly supported the piracy as a form of national defense.”
Somali piracy has created a lucrative trade that the joint-military collaborations of heavily armed ultramodern warships deployed in the area has failed to prevent or better yet, even deter the pirates.
—Cited You Are Being Lied to About the Pirates by Johanne Hari, UN envoy decries illegal fishing, waste dumping off Somalia by the Associated Press.
In the end, it became clear even to us that comprehensive sanctions were counterproductive. They targeted the wrong group of people, and their effects undermined the necessary international support for the containment of the Saddam regime. This reality slow percolated into our small policy-making group, and eventually led to a change in policy. As the century turned, the Security council shifted towards what would become known as “smart sanctions” - whereby Iraq could import all civilian goods except those with potential military application: dual-use goods. But by then, the damage had been done.
The damage has been more fully revealed since the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq. One assumption of those planning that war was that Iraq’s middle class would quickly recover from Saddam’s removal, and the economy would rapidly thrive. That assumption quickly met the brute force of the reality that there was no longer an Iraqi middle class, and no economy to speak of. Iraq’s non-oil economy had been more or less completely destroyed by the dozen years of sanctions that I, and others, had helped enforce. Anyone with the chance - mostly the educated and professional classes - had left. Within a year of the imposition of the sanctions, Iraq’s GDP had dropped by about three-quarters of its 1990 value to approximately that of the 1940s. By 1996, one million children under five were malnourished. In a country that had been cholera free, by 1994 there were 1,344 cases per 100,000 people. Even after the oil-for-food program came into operation, water treatment plants lacked the proper spare parts and maintenance; there were extended power cuts, The population had no choice but to obtain water directly from contaminated rivers, resulting in turn in massive increases in water-borne diseases such as typhoid and cholera. Though the statistics are debated still, and data from Iraq during this period are unreliable, a recent and thorough academic history of the sanctions era concludes from a review of epidemiological studies that for the period from 1990 to 2003, there was an “excess morality rate” of more than 500,000 for children under five. In other words, half a million children died. Though Saddam Hussein doubtless had a hand too, I cannot avoid my own responsibility. This was my work; this is what I did.
I have no way to assuage the shame I feel when I contemplate this episode.I was aware of the reports of humanitarian suffering, but I did little about them.
For years afterward, I wondered how this might have happened. Why did we permit this? Or rather, the actual direct but more uncomfortable question: Why did I do this? My colleagues and I were decent people, or so I preferred to think. Later, in recounting this story, my colleagues or friends would say, “You were doing what you were told,” implying thereby that I bore no guilt and, needless to say, that they bore none either.
—Cited Pages 125-127, The Leaderless Revolution.
(Carne Ross served as the UK delegation’s expert on the Middle East, but more specifically, Iraq. He worked on several important Security Council resolutions such as SCR 1284 which rewrote the Council’s Iraq policy and established UNMOVIC, the weapons inspection body. Ross testified during the Butler Review, which investigated intelligence blunders in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. He testified that at no time during his work on Iraq (1998-2002) did the UK or US assess that Iraq’s WMD posed a threat. He also argued that available alternatives to war, namely targeting Iraq’s illegal oil revenues, were ignored. Ross left the British foreign service in 2004.)
Of all the political movements out there, the Libertarians have the coolest rhetoric. No matter what the issue is, they get to talk about Freedom vs. Tyranny and quote all that rousing stuff the Founders said about King George.
It’s also the perfect belief system for a young male (and maybe, by now, young females too). You don’t need knowledge or experience of any specific situations, you just need to understand the One Big Idea That Solves Everything: Other than a small and appropriately humbled military and judicial establishment, government is bad. Protect life, protect property, enforce contracts — and leave everything else to the market.
I should know. Thirty-five years ago, I was a 19-year-old libertarian, and I learned all the arguments. Now I’m a progressive — a liberal, whatever — and these days even I have to shake my head at how often I’m tempted to quote Marx.
What happened? Well, I suppose I could stroke my white beard and pontificate vaguely about the benefits of 35 years of experience. But I’m thinking that a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires me to be a little more specific.
When you escape a sweeping worldview like Libertarianism, you usually don’t find an equally sweeping critique right away. A broad reframing may come later, but the transformation starts with a few things that stick in your craw and refuse to let themselves be swallowed.
For example, when I was leaving fundamentalist Christianity, one of the first things that bothered me was the genealogy of Jesus. The Bible contains two irreconcilable ones (in Matthew and Luke); they can’t both be the “gospel Truth”. Now, decades later, that issue is nowhere near the top of my why-I’m-not-a-fundamentalist list.
So let me start with some specific, simple things before I launch into more abstract philosophy.
Plague. I recommend that anyone thinking about becoming a Libertarian read The Great Influenza by John Barry. It doesn’t say a word about political philosophy, but it does compare how various American cities handled the Spanish Flu of 1918, which globally killed more people than World War I. The cities that did best were the ones that aggressively quarantined, shut down public meeting places, imposed hygiene standards, and in general behaved like tyrants.
As you read, try to imagine a Libertarian approach to a serious plague. I don’t think there is one. Maybe most people would respond to sensible leadership, but public health is one of those areas where a few people with the freedom to pursue screwy ideas can mess up everybody.
Global warming. There’s a reason why small-government candidates deny global warming: Denial is the only answer they have. Global warming is a collective problem, and there is no individualistic solution to it. Even market-based approaches like cap-and-trade require a massive government intervention to create the market that attacks the problem.
Property. Now let’s get to that more serious reframing.
I had to live outside the Libertarian worldview for many years before I began to grasp the deeper problem with it: property. Every property system in history (and all the ones I’ve been able to imagine) are unjust. So a government that establishes a property system, defends it, and then stops is an agent of injustice.
Libertarians tend to take property as a given, as if it were natural or existed prior to any government. But defining what can be owned, what owning it means, and keeping track of who owns what — that’s a government intervention in the economy that dwarfs all other government interventions. You see, ownership is a social thing, not an individual thing. I can claim I own something, but what makes my ownership real is that the rest of you don’t own it. My ownership isn’t something I do, it’s something we do.
[Aside: This is why it’s completely false to say that government programs primarily benefit the poor. Property is a creation of government, so the primary beneficiaries of government are the people who own things — the rich.]
Property and Labor. It’s worthwhile to go back and read the justifications of property that were given in the early days of capitalism. The most famous and influential such justification was in John Locke’s 1690 classic The Second Treatise of Civil Government. Locke admits that both reason and Christian revelation say that God gave the world to all people in common.
But I shall endeavour to shew, how men might come to have a property in several parts of that which God gave to mankind in common, and that without any express compact of all the commoners.
Locke argues that we individually own our bodies, and so we own our labor. So when our labor gets mingled with physical objects, we develop a special claim on those objects. The person who gathers apples in a wild forest, Locke says, owns those apples.
The labour that was mine, removing them out of that common state they were in, hath fixed my property in them. … Though the water running in the fountain be every one’s, yet who can doubt, but that in the pitcher is his only who drew it out? His labour hath taken it out of the hands of nature, where it was common, and belonged equally to all her children, and hath thereby appropriated it to himself.
But Locke attaches a condition to this justification: It only works if your appropriation doesn’t prevent the next person from doing the same.
No body could think himself injured by the drinking of another man, though he took a good draught, who had a whole river of the same water left him to quench his thirst
And that’s where the whole thing breaks down. Today, a baby abandoned in a dumpster has as valid a moral claim to the Earth as anybody else. But as that child grows it will find that in fact everything of value has already been claimed. Locke’s metaphorical water is all in private pitchers now, and the common river is dry.
When that individual tries to mingle labor with physical objects, he or she will be rebuffed at every turn. Gather apples? The orchard belongs to someone else. Hunt or fish? The forest and the lake are private property.
The industrial economy is in the same condition. You can’t go down to the Ford plant and start working on your new car. You have to be hired first. You need an owner’s permission before your labor can start to create property for you. If no owner will give you that permission, then you could starve.
Access to the means of production. In Locke’s hunter-gatherer state of Nature, only laziness could keep an able-bodied person poor, because the means of production — Nature — was just sitting there waiting for human labor to turn it into property.
Today’s economic environment is very different, but our intuitions haven’t kept up. Our anxiety today isn’t that there won’t be enough goods in the world, and it isn’t fear that our own laziness will prevent us from working to produce those goods. Our fear is that the owners of the means of production won’t grant us access, so we will never have the opportunity to apply our labor.
I meet very few able-bodied adults whose first choice is to sit around demanding a handout. But I meet a lot who want a job and can’t find one. I also meet young people who would be happy to study whatever subject and train in whatever skill would get them a decent job. I am frustrated that I can’t tell them what subject or what skill that is.
Justice. A Libertarian government that simply maintained this property system would be enforcing a great injustice. Access to the means of production should be a human birthright. Everyone ought to have the chance to turn his or her labor into products that he or she could own.
What’s more, everyone should get the benefit of the increased productivity of society. No individual created that productivity single-handedly. No individual has a right to siphon it off.
But instead, our society has a class of owners, and everyone else participates in the bounty of the Earth and the wealth of human progress only by their permission. Increasingly, they maneuver into a position that allows them to drive a hard bargain for that permission. And so higher productivity means higher unemployment, and the average person’s standard of living decreases even as total wealth increases.
The role of government. I anticipate this objection: “You want to go back to being hunter-gatherers. We’ll all starve.”
Not at all. I want a modern economy. But a lassez-faire economy that takes the property system as given is unjust. It is the proper role of government to balance that injustice, to provide many paths of access to the means of production, and to compensate those who are still shut out.
To prevent government from doing so, in today’s world, is no way to champion freedom. Quite the opposite, it’s tyrannical.
Pondering ambition and motivation. I had a conversation with someone that made me realize the importance of allowing young people to taste what life can be like if one works hard. A diversity of experiences at a young age can transform a young mind to expand the horizons what they imagined was possible for them.
At every juncture I was blessed to peer around the corners of life and see there are layers within layers, borders beyond borders, boundaries beyond boundaries. That in the grand scheme of things boundaries and borders, walls and obstacles, were fungible, scalable, that the seemingly immovable was movable by something as simple as a change of perspective. Sometimes we stare so hard into the wall in front of us, we miss the doorway or window laying just to the edges of our peripheral views.
The prisons of our mind are constructs of our minds and hence we are the architects of our own existence and of the spaces we inhabit. Our minds when married with our spirits and character can make the hardest steel malleable again through a form of persistent love- when our dreams inhabit every atom of our being. We are literally what we see. This makes it imperative to share our existence with others, especially those whose existence might not intersect with ours. In that intermingling of existence the very boundaries that define us become blurred and our world expands before our very eyes.
History repeating.
