Terror and American Justice

Conservatives have their knickers in a twist over the decision by the Obama administration to try terror mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and associates in civil court. Consider the 11/14/2009 editorial in the Wall Street Journal:

Attorney General Eric Holder... called his decision to move their trial on war crimes from a military courtroom at Guantanamo Bay to American soil "the toughest" he has had to make. Other words come to mind. For starters, intellectually and morally confused, dangerous and political to a fault.

The Journal's editors sneer at the idea that trying KSM & Co in a NY courtroom has anything to do with returning to the rule of law after Bush illegalities. After all, the Obama administration finds it OK to try the USS Cole bombers with military tribunals. The decision flies in the face of common sense.

Most Americans, we suspect, can overlook the legal niceties and see this episode through the lens of common sense. Foreign terrorists who wage war on America and everything it stands for have no place sitting in a court of law born of the values they so detest. Mr. Holder has honored mass murder by treating it like any other crime.

But if you read The New York Times editorial of 11/13/2009 you get the reverse argument.

Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. took a bold and principled step on Friday toward repairing the damage wrought by former President George W. Bush with his decision to discard the nation’s well-established systems of civilian and military justice in the treatment of detainees captured in antiterrorist operations.

From that entirely unnecessary policy (the United States had the tools to detain, charge and bring terrorists to justice) flowed a terrible legacy of torture and open-ended incarceration. It left President Obama with yet another mess to clean up on an urgent basis.

You get the point.

Of course, as a card-carrying conservative, I'm with the Journal on this. I think that the trial is political, in that the Obama administration, after riding liberal outrage all the way to the White House, needs to give its supporters the red meat they desire. In my view the Democrats were probably in on the early decisions on the treatment of unlawful combatants in 2001-2002 and probably nodded them through. But then they changed their minds.

Nevertheless, I think that we need this trial. There are a number of issues on which liberals are determined to disagree with conservatives, among them the argument over Keynesian or supply-side economics for fighting recession and growing a healthy economy, the argument over the use of US military power, and the argument over the welfare state and its compulsion.

In my view, the conservative side on these great issues has been proved again and again. Keynesian economics is rubbish; it merely rubber stamps what politicians like to do: spend money and play favorites. US military power is a force for good, and we want it to promote democratic capitalism against its enemies. The welfare state is a murrain upon the poor and one of the greatest injustices of all time.

But liberals clearly have not been won over by argument, or by the successes of conservative government in recent years: the Reagan boom, the end of the Cold War, the success of welfare reform. Therefore I think that they need to be able to implement policy their way one more time and then let the American people judge the worth their ideas and their governance, one more time.

It will cost a fortune; it will cause untold misery in the world. But I just don't see any other way. And it looks like the Obama administration is shaping up as a gift to America, a stark demonstration of the folly of liberalism.

In my view, the American people are in the middle of a huge reassessment about the nature of the political parties in the USA, and they are discovering that they never liked liberals. I think we may be heading towards a staggering mid-term election in 2010 that will blow the doors off politics-as-usual.

But first liberals have to have their civil trial in New York to demonstrate their opposition to torture and Bush lawlessness. And their corrupt stimulus. And their unjust health care reform bill. Then we shall see.

Government Can't Be Trusted

Here are two stories that illustrate perfectly the limits of government.

In the Washington Post the edit page is taking Congress to task for smoke and mirrors in its administration of Medicare. To make the budget figures look good, Congress has legislated a program to cut reimbursments to doctors. But every year, Congress rescinds the cuts.

This is the so-called doc fix, to prevent scheduled cuts in Medicare reimbursements to physicians from taking effect.

In other words, Congress is kidding itself that it actually intends to run a serious program for senior health care. It makes promises to seniors about glorious health care, then it tries to figure out how to prevent the program from eating the budget. But whenever it is time to take a scalpel to the program, Congress chickens out.

Then there is the reckless monetary policy of the Federal Reserve Board. According to the Wall Street Journal edit page President Obama on his Asian tour is getting an earful from Asian governments upset over the easy money sloshing into their economies from the US quantitative easing (i.e., money printing).

President Obama is getting an earful from leaders this week about what all those greenbacks are doing to their economies.

Many of these nations peg their currencies, formally or informally, to the greenback. So they are getting a huge dollar liquidity kick from the carry trade, in which people borrow U.S. dollars at exceptionally low U.S. interest rates and invest them for higher returns elsewhere.

Now that the government has successfully rescued the banks it is time to tighten up the money supply and resume normal operations. But the Fed won't do this because politicians don't want to get blamed for high unemployment.

The simple fact is that government cannot be trusted to run a health program and it cannot be trusted to run economic policy. That's because the government is run by politicians. They are not interested in what is good for the nation's health care or the nation's economy. They are interested in buying support for reelection, and they are interested in papering over the previous disaster with no thought at all for what their actions are doing to set up the next one.

There's a simple moral to learn from all this. Government is force; politics is conflict. You cannot trust government for anything beyond wars and policing. In just about everything that government touches it substitutes for peaceful and voluntary cooperation the club of force. Politicians tax, they spend, they waste. They play favorites, they divide people. They do it because that is what politicians do.

If you don't like force, if you don't like privilege, if you don't like playing favorites then you won't vote for government programs.

Because government is waste. Government is force. Government divides.

Humans are social animals. We just want to get along, right? So we do, unless someone gives us a chance to lord it over our fellow humans and make them pay to support us in the way we deserve.

Government Healthcare is Force

This morning, the WSJ text is the government's health care rationing commission, Sarah Palin's famous death panel.

It turns out that the commission is not quite as fearsome as Palin predicted. But that's because the commission won't have all the powers it was supposed to. Not yet. The Baucus committee in the Senate defanged it a little.

To avoid a senior revolt, Finance Chairman Max Baucus decided to bar his creation from reducing benefits or raising the eligibility age, which meant that it could only cut costs by tightening Medicare price controls on doctors and hospitals. Doctors and hospitals, naturally, were furious.

So the Montana Democrat bowed and carved out exemptions for such providers, along with hospices and suppliers of medical equipment. Until 2019 the commission will thus only be allowed to attack Medicare Advantage, the program that gives 10 million seniors private insurance choices, and to raise premiums for Medicare prescription drug coverage, which is run by private contractors.

Notice what is happening? The commission will only penalize Republicans, who presumably are the chaps using Medicare Advantage.

The issues on health care aren't that complicated. If you want to lower health care costs you have to get the government out of it and find out what people are willing to pay for.

Obviously some people are going to make no provision at all and they will be charity cases. We could have the government do this, but I suspect we would get better results if private givers and foundations did the work.

For the rest of us, we need to ante up and pay for our own care. The issue is simple:

The core problem with government-run health care is that it doesn't make decisions in the best interests of patients, but in the best interests of government.

If you want health care in your own best interest you are going to have to pay for it yourself. If you are willing to put up with the care that the government provides then good luck to you.

What we need to do in this nation is create webs of support so that when people need medical care they either have the support of their own resources or their family.

If we are really ambitious we could learn a lesson from our great grandparents. Back in the 19th century ordinary people created an artificial extended family for themselves, the fraternal association. It provided basic social benefits such as sick pay and death benefits.

All the rest is force. Government is force; government health care is force. And when politicians, the agents of force, make decisions about health care they will make decisions, using the many weapons of force available to modern governments, that benefit themselves and their immediate supporters.

Politicians don't care what happens to you. They don't care what happens to the nation in ten years. They just care about what benefits them in the next electoral cycle.

Our Behind-the-curve President

Oh Goody. Faced with rising unemployment, President Obama is going to hold a "jobs summit" next month.

Obama said the White House forum will gather CEOs, small business owners, economists, financial experts and representatives from labor unions and nonprofit groups "to talk about how we can work together to create jobs and get this economy moving again."

Usually, Mr. President, it works the other way around. First the economy gets moving, and then employers start to create new jobs. Then we get together and talk about it.

But Democrats can't wait. They are talking about Stimulus 2.0 to be announced at the State of the Union in January. Writes James Pethokoukis:

How much money are we talking about? Alec Phillips of Goldman Sachs calls $250 billion over three years a “conservative” estimate. And what might be in the bill? Look for more highway spending, more aid to state and local governments and some sort of business hiring tax credit.

I'll tell you what I think. I think the president is way behind the curve. He's wasted his entire first year priming the pump for Democrats and pushing unpopular programs that the American people don't want. Now all of a sudden he's worried that the economy is going to be hurting Democrats in 2010. Not to mention 2012.

Well, it's about time that the president and his party got with the program.

The Democrats and their willing accomplices in the media have spent the last generation sneering at the common-sense economic policies of the Republicans. They don't want to listen when Republican presidents lower tax rates. The don't want to hear about the damage caused by meddling with regulations, subsidies, and cheap credit. They don't care about the simple weight of government that hinders all productive effort.

Well now we are in a serious recession. Now it's time for serious policy to get the economy moving. Now Democrats need real economic ideas instead of cheap talking points. But they are politicians. They want a cheap fix so they can go back to politics as usual in a year or two.

Here's an example of the mess we are in--because of Democratic programs. For the poor, tax rates are about 100 percent. Huh? Check out the Taxprof Blog. He's got a chart of pre-tax against post-tax income for a family of three.

It shows income after taxes and transfers as a function of earned income. Notice that as earned income rises from about $15,000 to $30,000, income after taxes and transfers is roughly flat. Indeed, it could even fall. The bottom line: If you are poor, the government is inadvertently ensuring that you have little incentive to try to improve your condition.

In other words, up until about $40,000 of earnings, you face a marginal tax rate of 100%. As you earn more, you lose benefits from the government that roughly match your additional earned income.

Conservatives and Republicans have been whining about this for decades. Even liberal economists have got into the game. They call it The Poverty Trap. But they don't do anything about it.

Well, now it's gut-check time. The president needs some serious policy. But he has a problem. He leads a party that has refused to get serious for a generation or more.

Are you feeling confident that the nation is in good hands? Or do you think that the president is way behind the curve--on this and a lot of other things?

The Liberals' "Other" Problem

For the last decade or two liberals have been lecturing us on the "Other." The narrative goes something like this.

The reson there is domination, conflict and oppression in the world is that some people (not liberals, of course) stigmatize and marginalize people who aren't like "Us." The people that are different are the frightening, dangerous "Other."

Sexists relegate women to the "Other;" racists condemn blacks and minorities to the "Other." Homophobes gay-bash gays as the "Other." Because they are different, because they are not like "Us."

In its finest versions, e.g., Charles Taylor's version in Sources of the Self, it is incandescent:

Perhaps the most urgent and powerful cluster of demands that we recognize as moral concern the respect for the life, integrity, and well-being, even flourishing, of others... Of course the scope of the demand notoriously varies: earlier societies, and some present ones, restrict the class of beneficiaries to members of the tribe or race and exclude outsiders... But they all feel these demands laid on them by some class of persons, and for most contemporaries, this class is coterminous with the human race (and for believers in animal rights it may go wider).

In a practical world, there are people who are legitimately outside the pale. There are foreign governments that actually wish us ill. And there are domestic enemies: robbers, rapists, killers, who we hunt down and imprison.

But liberals go to extremes. They are unwilling to regard domestic enemies as the "Other." They "blame America first" because they believe that criminals act out their violence because of their poverty. That's why liberals are big on police brutality and on "racial profiling."

Liberals are unwilling to regard foreign enemies as the "Other." They "blame America first" because they believe that America provokes enemies with its imperialist foreign policy. That is why liberals were so contemptuous of President Bush and his forward policy against the terrorists, and why President Obama is "resetting" our relationship with Russia and Iran through negotiations.

This philosophy works well as long as you don't have a conflict with anyone. When you have a genuine disagreement then you have a conflict and then you start to divide the world into "Us" and "Them."

It is in domestic politics that liberals find their enemies, and where they draw the line and declare that people opposed to their politics are the enemy. This is not surprising. Politics is civil war by other means. Government is force. Whenever you propose a new government program you are proposing a new expansion of force and compulsion. Not surprisingly, the people that are going to be subject to force as a result of the new program object to their marginalization. Then out come the political rottweilers, the Rahm Emanuels and the Nancy Pelosis and they start to demonize the opposition.

Here's a good argument for limited government. The more the government does, the more that the American people are pitted against each other, and the more they stigmatize people that don't agree with them as the "Other," outside the boundaries of Taylor's moral concern.

It was easy for President Clinton to blame talk radio for the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, although there is no evidence that the bombers were influenced by talk radio. It was effective politics though, and started Clinton on the road back to reelection.

But President Obama and the mainstream media find it hard to blame Islamic jihadism for the Ft. Hood shooting. They would rather it was all a case of post-traumatic stress syndrome. And we know why. Liberals are desperate to avoid anti-Muslim violence. They are afraid that if we call Maj. Hasan a terrorist then angry Americans will turn on Muslims all across America.

It may be, of course that liberals are right, and that if Maj. Hasan is identified as a terrorist that no Muslim in America will be safe. But the trouble is that their belief system is encouraging them to deny reality. Islamic jihadism is real. It proposes to annihilate the culture of the west. It may be, of course, that it is not a serious movement, not world-historical, but just a bunch of hot-heads in Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Or maybe not.

Whatever it is, liberals need to get back to reality. They are wrong to make everything domestic into a political issue, because when they do that they divide the American people. They are wrong to hide from the fact that there really are enemies out there, and we ought to be serious about them.

Otherwise they will do this nation enormous harm.

Ft. Hood and Reality

There's a huge chasm between what is and what we want to be, Call it the Reality Canyon.

But in our personal lives we must constantly adjust our lives to deal with the reality of reality. We can't dream our lives away pining for what life ought to be. We can look across Reality Canyon and dream of what we yearn for. But we know we must live in the Land of "Is." We must live life as it is.

It is in politics and religion that we get to build Bridges to Nowhere. Why? Because we can. In religion we can imagine a hereafter of eternal peace and love. In politics we can try to create that heaven on earth.

So politics is a process of building castles in the air and then cleaning up the mess afterwards.

The reaction to the Ft. Hood shooting is a prime example. Our liberal friends are terrified of the American people. They are convinced that, without the intervention of wise liberals, American would put on white sheets and proceed to annihilate the "Other," meaning blacks, gays, and any traditionally marginalized group.

Ever since 9-11 liberals have been terrified that Americans would burst out and victimize Muslims in a new eruption of the Ku Klux Klan or right-wing militias.

That's why nothing was done about Maj. Nidal Hasan, Army psychiatrists and presumed Ft. Hood mass murderer. That's why we've had a week of the mainstram media muddling on about post-traumatic stress syndrome, and why the president has said that it is inevitable that someone, somewhere will "crack."

But truth has a way of shouldering its way to the front, in the end. It seems pretty clear that Maj. Hasan was a "jihadist." He was angry about US policy in the Middle East and admired the tactics of jihadi terrorists. He talked about terrorism; he interacted with terrorist sympathizing imams.

The government did nothing. We can easily speculate why. Anyone bringing an accusation against Maj. Hasan would find himself pushing against the huge weight of the liberal diversity culture. His report would be sidelined. He might even be sanctioned for insensitivity, or sent for diversity training. He might even get a bad performance review.

So who would step out of line to finger Maj. Hasan? Nobody.

People are once again raising the meme of 9-11. They are asking why the government didn't "connect the dots."

The answer today is the same as it was 8 years ago. People in government didn't connect the dots because they knew it would hurt their careers.

You could say: liberals lied; people died. And you'd be right.

Eventually, the liberal Bridge to Nowhere across Reality Canyon will collapse from the overwhelming weight of contradictions and hypocrisies.

Meanwhile, America suffers under the corrupt, cruel, unjust, wasteful, and deluded rule of its unaccountable liberal elite.

"Some Subterfuge is Historically Necessary"

It's one thing when President Bush "lies" about WMD. Actually he didn't lie. He stated that, on the most reliable information, Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.

But it's another thing when it comes to pushing through a massive new government program which will be almost impossible to "rescind." In that case, according to John Cassidy at the New Yorker:

"Putting on my amateur historian's cap, I might even claim that some subterfuge is historically necessary to get great reforms enacted."

So. It's OK for liberals to lie about a massive upheaval, a seizure of one sixth of the nation's economy. That's OK because it is historically necessary.

But woe betide if Republican President Bush puts a bit of polish on his argument for invading Iraq.

The real reason for ObamaCare, according to John Cassidy, is that achieves two political goals for Democrats. It makes "the United States a more equitable country" and it helps keep Democrats in power, long term.

Well, looking really long-term, government mandated equality doesn't improve equality and meanwhile destroys "civil society," the web of voluntary organizations that is the real warp and weft of human sociability.

Anyway, the question really becomes: What do the American people want, and how hard are we willing to push to get what we want? We'd better face facts. The educated and cultural elite are perfectly happy with increasing government power. In fact, they want more more for the government. They think it means more power for the elite.

Properly, the national elite, through their domination of the aristocratic branch of government, the judiciary, should have stopped the expansion of government power. But they didn't. They have stood by for a century and applauded, and rumbled about historical necessity while politicians have steadily increased government power and piled taxes, regulations, and restrictions on the American people. We cannot look to the national elite to protect freedom.

So it's up to the American people. Do we care that we are going to be shoved into government health care, designed for the convenience of the governing elite? Do we care that we are being manipulated into a grateful dependency which will more or less force us to vote our corrupt masters into power again and again rather than risk the horror of losing our benefits?

Democrats either hope or believe that they can get this cram-down through and make most of it stick even if they lose their majorities in Congress in 2010.

Maybe they are right. After all, their experience is that you can always ratchet up government spending with another government program. Once you have got your program in place then you can get to work expanding it.

But then maybe they are wrong. Maybe the US has reached the tipping point on government programs. Maybe we are reaching a historical turning point, and the Democrats have gone a bridge too far.

The only way to find out is to find out.

But whatever happens it has to start with a massive off-year election in 2010 with at least a 50 seat pickup in the House of Representatives for the GOP.

Anything less than 35 seats means that the Democrats have won and that the American people want more benefits rather than more freedom.