Justice, Freedom and Iraq

I’ve been reading ‘The Better Angels of our Nature’ by Steven Pinker.

He marshals facts clearly and with authority. He makes many powerful arguments including, above all, this:  EVERY party in a dispute genuinely feels themselves to be the more aggrieved, to be the greater victim.

The only way to avoid escalating “retaliation” is to cede resolution to a neutral third party. Pinker names the growing authority of the state and with it state-mediated justice; He credits this with the global decline in violence over the last century or two.

On this, the tenth anniversary of the Iraq invasion, it is worth applying this lesson to what happened there (Pinker’s book does not talk about politics. These are my opinions now).

When the Americans invaded Iraq in 2003 they could have removed specific individuals at the heads of institutions and left those institutions of state intact. Instead, driven by a naïve belief that their own civil society was somehow the default if government just “got out of the way”, they destroyed not only Saddam’s administration, but the very state itself.

When you turn “justice” over to gun-toting, inherently self-interested individuals this is what you get: a crippled economy, rampant corruption and, always, greater violence. Anarchy is not democratic. Anarchy is not freedom. Anarchy resolves itself into tribalism and feudal society.

Even the least inhibited (they would call themselves the “strongest”) do not have the opportunities afforded by a controlled environment; Even they are not free as they crouch, armed and trapped in their own defensive postures.

Meanwhile, the civilized cannot function in the absence of functioning civil institutions.

The state does not impede commerce and freedom, it ENABLES them. The state does not, as John Boehner recently would have it, “steal” money from its citizens.

The state delivers back tenfold and more every tax dollar gathered: By creating choices and opportunities that would otherwise not exist; By delivering peace and prosperity, safety and justice.

Fascism is too much state control; Anarchy is too little. Both defeat individual initiative. In the vast space dividing these two extremes we have many, many examples of democratic states that work well for the benefit of their people. Robust institutions legitimatized by democracy, honoring democratically formulated laws, are not enemies of freedom but the very source of freedom itself.

American guns

The best kept stats seem to be for lethal gun use. Using these as a rough proxy for the ratio of times that guns are used in a non-lethal way we find that defense counts for less than 1 in a thousand times that guns are used. For example, here are some numbers from 2010:

    

There were 30,470 deaths by firearm in USA in 2010

• 19,392 suicides  and
• 11,078 homicides, including:
• 1,923 instances of killing during the commission of a felony, of which a mere 236 were the killing of a felon, during the commission of a felony, by a private citizen

You are 14 times more likely to use your gun to kill someone you know during an argument than you are to use it to defend your home.

 

A child in your house is more likely to use that gun to kill himself or another child than you are to use it defensively.

 

And you are about a hundred times more likely to use it to kill yourself during a bad moment than you are to use it against an intruder.

 

Over the last week I've been checking the claims that gun proliferation reduces violent crime and find them to be unfounded; The reductions in violent crime following introduction of "right-to-carry" and other state laws to encourage gun presence are no greater (actually marginally less) than year-by-year reductions in crime that had already been occurring everywhere in the US since 1990. More guns are not correlated with less crime.

 

Civilization "would be a good idea" but cannot stop massacres. That can only come from limiting civilian access to weapons of extraordinary destructive power.

 

Tweeting guns

So I finally broke down and posted my first tweet just now.

I wanted to encourage the excellent reporting by DonLemonCNN. He is at the site of the Sandy Hook school massacre and is holding the line against the "Guns don't kill people..." bullshit. Good for him.

I cannot just wrap Christmas presents while this is going on. I challenge myself to find the stats (FBI?) and discover the ratio of crimes committed with a gun to "self defense" (if such a thing actually exists) using a gun.
 
This is especially real to me because my personnal ancestry investigations turned up birth registries for ancestors of mine in Sandy Hook hundreds of years ago, along with expense claims for militia call-up of other ancestors. We are a records-keeping people! It should be possible to introduce some facts to the guns control "debate" about to happen.

Cut-and-paste lies did not work!!

Why the next four years would be different

because the next four years would not start with the economy in free-fall

If only Obama

From the transcript, about a quarter of the way through the Presidential debate October 3rd:

MR. ROMNEY: Number two, let's look at history. My plan is not like anything that's been tried before. My plan is to bring down rates but also bring down deductions and exemptions and credits at the same time so the revenue stays in, but that we bring down rates to get more people working.

 

If only Obama had pointed out that Romney's plan to "bring down rates to get more people working" HAS in fact been tried before. Regan tried it (remember the 'Laffer curve'?) and Bush tried it. They have also tried it in recent years in Britain and elsewhere.

Every time it has been tried, the policy of cutting taxes or tax rates has resulted in ballooning deficits.  Even when accompanied by savagely reduced government spending, as in Britain, reducing taxes DOES NOT result in compensating higher growth of the economy. This is supply-side "fairy dust" and it does not work.

If the new wrinkle is that the existing "revenue stays in" then how, exactly, is that supposed to put more money in people's pockets to create the predicted economic growth? How does that "get more people working"? It doesn't !
 
How can you cut rates by 20 percent and keep the same revenue anyway? Eliminating deductions can't do it. There simply are not enough deductions available to compensate for a 20 percent drop. Deficits increase,  rolling into an INCREASINGLY inflated debt.
 
 

Rep vs Dem model of how economy works

The pending American election poses one big question:

How to strengthen the economy ?

The answer depends on how you think the economy works.


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Republicans think it all comes down to motivation: They believe that many people will work hard and be productive if, and only if, the alternative is starvation. According to this world view BOTH eventual success AND opportunity in the first place are created by effort alone.

In this model of the world the Haitian economy is a mess because people have found a way to subsist with minimal effort. Stop enabling this and everyone will get up off their ass and get to work.

Romney’s magic formula for economic recovery is to make real the threat that your children will starve if you don’t hustle; In his worldview, that hustle is the ONLY missing element for economic recovery.

  

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Democrats have a different model: They believe that effort, though necessary, is not sufficient. Building a business also requires access to consumers, to a workforce with relevant skills, to affordable credit, to usable public infrastructure and to physical security.

Most of all it requires a functional education.
 
Democrats believe that government has a unique role to play in removing barriers to entry to the world of productive activity. Locked doors stand between many people and the marketplace; Government unlocks them.