The U.S. government has promised that in just over two months’ time it will hand over sovereignty to an interim Iraqi government. Earlier this week, on Tuesday, April 27, in an interview with Reuters news agency, Secretary of State Colin Powell said that while the new government would take full sovereignty over the country, it would have to give some of it back to the Americans so that the US would still be in command of its own troops."I hope they will understand that in order for this government to get up and running - to be effective - some of its sovereignty will have to be given back, if I can put it that way, or limited by them," Mr. Powell said."It's sovereignty but [some] of that sovereignty they are going to allow us to exercise on their behalf and with their permission." Yeah, right.
And for how long will U.S. forces remain in Iraq? Do any readers seriously think they will all have left by 2010 or even 2014?
As readers are aware, there's much discussion and no little concern about the prospective bankruptcy of Social Security in the U.S. and comparable unfunded state pension schemes in other countries. Self-proclaimed advocates of the free market have often invoked such fears to argue for some measure of privatization, usually a mandatory requirement that people invest some stipulated percentage of their wages in funded private pension schemes. I've long thought that the more dire predictions were overstated and their exposure as such would very likely discredit the cause of liberalization and liberty itself.
Economist Phil Mullan is the author of The Imaginary Time Bomb: Why an Ageing Population Is Not a Social Problem (I. B. Tauris, 2000). Last week he published
"Ageing: the future is affordable", in which he persuasively argues against the prognostications of the doomsayers. Although Mullan is not a libertarian and assumes that the state should continue to provide a substantial basic pension and healthcare for retirees, he makes some good points that are well worth reading by anyone who wishes to understand what is going on. The principled libertarian case for individuals taking care of their own pensions and healthcare remains just as valid as ever.
Although proponents of the free market usually dismiss the doom and gloom forecasts of global warming, many continually harp on the worst-case scenarios regarding the future bankruptcy of government pension and healthcare schemes. Skepticism is in order in both cases.
What is worse, however, is intentional or unintentional obfuscation of the issue. An egregious example is Professor David Bernstein's recent article (January 29) in the St. Paul Pioneer Press. Unlike Professor Richard Epstein of the University of Chicago Law School, author of Forbidden Grounds: The Case against Employment Discrimination Laws (Harvard University Press, 1992), Bernstein isn't prepared--at least not in this article--to defend the right of individuals to discriminate in their own time on their own property. That's his choice as a writer. But what he does write is very misleading.
As most readers are no doubt aware, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 made discrimination illegal--both by federal and state governments and by private persons and organizations. In his article Bernstein not only fails to distinguish between discrimination by government and discrimination by private individuals but also fails to explain that"public facilities such as restaurants, hotels and theaters" were mainly private property. Yet he writes,"While the civil-rights laws of the 1960s were generally sensitive to civil libertarian concerns, contemporary anti-discrimination laws often are not." The truth of the matter is that the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1967, which outlawed discrimination on grounds of race, national origin, religion and sex by the owners of restaurants, hotels and theaters and in employment in any business exceeding twenty-five people, had already undermined freedom of association in the United States before further legislation and court decisions extended the scope of the law in the way he describes. How can an avowedly libertarian law professor, and at George Mason University of all places, not understand that point? And if he's prepared to defend the 1964 Act, including its regulation of private behavior, without qualification, how can he make a principled objection to extending the scope of the law?
The policy of including everyone who was in the old DNB is in welcome contrast to that followed by OUP in New York when in 1999 it published the American Dictionary of Biography under the auspices of the American Council of Learned Societies as a replacement for the Dictionary of American Biography. The editors chose to exclude a good many people whom they deemed were no longer important enough to be included. Such was the fate of Lysander Spooner (1808-1887), Benjamin Tucker (1854-1939), and other principled individualists and many more not-so-principled politicians who were swept aside to make room for a host of newcomers, including a great many women and minorities, some of whom certainly deserved to be included for their contributions to American life and some of whom may eventually be discarded when a new edition is commissioned and the particular sort of political correctness that currently rules academia is no longer fashionable.
All of you who are interested in intellectual dissent should search out Joseph McCabe's A Biographical Dictionary of Modern Rationalists (1920/1998). There you can read fascinating entries on the freethinking views of celebrated and not-so-celebrated men and women and refutations of those alleged deathbed conversions with which priests would harangue their congregations. McCabe (1867-1955) was a former Jesuit who renounced his faith to become a leading propagandist for secularism. Perhaps his most celebrated book is Twelve Years in a Monastery (1897, 2nd edition 1903). As you might imagine, his intellectual conversion didn't make his fortune but rather led to his penury. But it also led him to write hundreds of books and pamphlets on every subject, including numerous Little Blue Books published by Emanuel Haldeman-Julius (1889-1951), a journalist and publisher in Girard, Kansas, and a celebrated translation of Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919)'s The Riddle of the Universe (1900).
Having mentioned Joseph McCabe, I should now make reference to John Mackinnon Robertson (1856-1933), a self-educated scholar, whose books A History of Freethought, Ancient and Modern, to the Period of the French Revolution, 4th ed. (1936) and A History of Freethought in the Nineteenth Century (1929) remain unsurpassed for their comprehensive and erudite coverage of courageous individuals and their writings.
Today Counterpunch carries an article by Sam Husseini--Same Skeletons, Different Closet: How Many People Will Die Because of This"Mistake", Senator Kerry?--which conveniently lists a great many questions that David Beito can ask of John Kerry.
Good luck, David, in your efforts to reveal the real John Kerry.
There is wide agreement that the Hutton report whitewashed Blair and his cronies. At The Independent Andrew Grice reports the words of Austin Mitchell, the Labour MP for Great Grimsby, who says:"It is a whitewash, basically. The danger is that it is so one-sided a report that it is going to lose credibility. People just aren't going to believe it." And over at the Daily Telegraph Boris Johnson, the Conservative MP for Henley and editor of The Spectator, writes: "Blair, Hoon, Scarlett, the whole lot of them, have been sprayed with more whitewash than a Costa Brava timeshare. Hutton has succumbed to blindness of Nelsonian proportions. As snow-jobs go, this beats the Himalayas. "With unerring inaccuracy, he has trained his guns at exactly the wrong target. He has blasted the BBC when, as I will repeat to my dying day, it was Blair, Campbell and Hoon who were the guilty men. "How, you may be asking, do I dare to dissent from the opinions of the judge? I dissent because I have read the evidence presented to Hutton, and I put it to you that the judge is noble, learned and talking through the back of his neck."
As you might expect, I'm not in the habit of defending the nationalized British Broadcasting Corporation but there is no doubt that it certainly does seek to maintain its independence from the government of the day, be that Labour or Conservative, that it has played a creditable part in investigating the truth behind the decision to go to war, and that it does not deserve the sort of vendetta that some commentators are now waging.
STATE JUDGE BACKS GOVERNMENT: WELL I NEVER!
"In the end what it comes down to is a judgement by Lord Hutton - who he believes, whose motives he trusts most and in that, again and again, he comes down on the side of politicians and officials, who by and large he believes and whose story, whose narrative he accepts and he comes down against Andrew Gilligan, and journalism, I have to say generally, and against the BBC."
-- Andrew Marr, BBC political editor
The London papers come online the previous evening on the East Coast so you can read them before you go to bed. Unfortunately you have to subscribe to The Times online edition but access to The Guardian, The Independent and the Daily Telegraph is free, at least at the time of publication and for a short while afterwards. These, together with the Financial Times, are the so-called (up-market) broadsheets. (Two -- The Times and The Independent -- are now published in tabloid form as well). The FT prints few obituaries but it does offer what is arguably the best foreign news coverage in any English language newspaper.
Navigating the sites is pretty straightforward. Obituaries are under"People" at The Independent. Obituaries in the UK are often more candid than those that appear in the U.S. For example, the anonymous author of The Times obituary of Pamela Harriman identified her as a courtesan, which, of course, she was. Since this obituary is no longer accessible for free, see a short and candid account of her life and loves at Misfit Women. Although Times obituaries are anonymous, the other three newspapers provide the authors' names.
For those who don't know me, I've been a libertarian for well over thirty years. I was born in Windsor and grew up in Egham, a small town southwest of London and very near Runnymede, where King John signed the Magna Carta in 1215. I have resided in the U.S. for twenty of the past twenty-five years. For many years I taught economics in schools, colleges and universities in Britain, Ireland and California. More recently I was a program officer at the Institute for Humane Studies, where I organized and directed student seminars, evaluated fellowship applications and mentored students. Now I work primarily in the private sector with high-school students. Since my childhood I have enthusiastically collected books and have even found time to read some of them.
It's been a while since I last looked at Milton Friedman's Capitalism and Freedom (1962). Yesterday afternoon I had occasion to return to this book and was immediately reminded of how much better it is than Free to Choose (1980). Much better because, whatever Friedman's inconsistencies from the perspective of hard-core libertarianism (and I suggest he has fewer than F. A. Hayek), it remains a succinct statement of the case for individual liberty and the free market. Indeed, I heard Friedman once say that he thought it was the better book because it was shorter.
Chapter VII on Capitalism and Discrimination is in many respects an excellent treatment of the topic. He concludes (pp.117-18) with a discussion of whether the state should enforce segregation or integration in public schools (and thus addresses the more general question of what real liberals should want the government to do if it already exists). If forced to choose, he states that he would opt for enforced integration. He then makes the case for vouchers that would permit parents to select a segregated school for their child if this were their choice. I got to speculating whether Friedman would be prepared to make this argument (about vouchers) today. I wasn't surprised to find that the Milton & Rose D. Friedman Foundation at www.friedmanfoundation.org doesn't address this issue. And I haven't come across anyone currently campaigning for school vouchers who has endorsed Friedman's 1962 statement. But I'd like to think Friedman would not repudiate his original position if asked. He might say that it isn't so much of an issue now as it was in 1962. That's probably true but I guess it's more of an issue than some defenders of vouchers would have us believe.
Chapter VIII on Monopoly and the Social Responsibility of Business and Labor is also well worth reading. (So for that matter is the entire book, whatever criticisms libertarians would make of his advocacy of government intervention in money, school finance, etc.) This chapter got me thinking about how self-identified libertarian, classical liberal and conservative organizations inside and outside the Beltway tap corporate sponsors for contributions. Friedman writes (p.133):
Few trends could so thoroughly undermine the very foundations of our free society as the acceptance by corporate officials of a social responsibility other than to make as much money for their stockholders as possible. This is a fundamentally subversive doctrine.
Later he writes (p.135):
One topic in the area of social responsibility that I feel duty-bound to touch on, because it affects my own personal interests, has been the claim that business should contribute to the support of charitable activities and especially to universities. Such giving by corporations is an inappropriate use of corporate funds in a free-enterprise society.
He concludes (p.136):
[T]he direction in which policy is now moving, of permitting corporations to make contributions for charitable purposes and allowing deductions for income tax, is a step in the direction of creating a true divorce between ownership and control and of undermining the basic nature and character of our society. It is a step away from an individualistic society and toward the corporate state.
I suppose Friedman might temper his strictures against corporate donations to charities and universities -- and, by extension, public policy institutes, advocacy groups and PACs and political candidatures -- in the case of private corporations where the owners unanimously agree on the donations. That said, I don't see that contributing to policy institutes, pressure groups and political campaigns is profit-maximizing behavior in a way that making other sorts of contribution is not. And certainly both donors and beneficiaries strenuously deny the fact. There now arises an interesting question. I'm not aware that avowedly free-market institutes refrain from soliciting funds from public or private corporations where charitable contributions are decided by majority vote of the board of directors. The question, dear readers, is should they? And what about charitable foundations, where a board of trustees may fail to implement deceased donors' wishes?
