The article explains that,

"This will require the company to abide by the rules of the world's most restricted internet environment. China is thought to have 30,000 online police monitoring blogs, chatrooms and news portals. The propaganda department is thought to employ even more people, a small but increasing number of whom are paid to anonymously post pro-government comments online. Sophisticated filters have been developed to block or limit access to 'unhealthy information', which includes human rights websites, such as Amnesty, foreign news outlets, such as the BBC, as well as pornography. Of the 64 internet dissidents in prison worldwide, 54 are from China.

"Google has remained outside this system until now. But its search results are still filtered and delayed by the giant banks of government servers, known as the great firewall of China. Type 'Falun Gong' in the search engine from a Beijing computer and the only results that can be accessed are official condemnations.

"Now, however, Google will actively assist the government to limit content. There are technical precedents. In Germany, Google follows government orders by restricting references to sites that deny the Holocaust. In France, it obeys local rules prohibiting sites that stir up racial hatred. And in the US, it assists the authorities' crackdown on copyright infringements."

. . .

"In an attempt to be more transparent than its rivals, Google said it would inform users that certain web pages had been removed from the list of results on the orders of the government."

Many thoughts come to mind.

I wonder whether Google informs users in Germany and France that certain web pages have been removed from the list of results on the orders of their respective governments, and, if not, why not. Copyright infringement is a whole other (fascinating and worthy) issue so I’m discussing only German and French censorship of opinion. I appreciate, of course, that Chinese censorship is a lot more onerous and extensive than any that occurs in Europe but I suggest the principle remains the same.

I also observe that since Google will continue to provide users with the option of searching via the original US-based website, it has—admittedly in perhaps a rather limited sense—not compromised its mission statement, which is to make all possible information available to everyone who has a computer or mobile phone. And that, if setting up google.cn does compromise its mission statement, it had already done so—albeit on a much smaller scale—when it cooperated with the European states.

The article continues,

"Executives have grudgingly accepted that this is the ethical price they have to pay to base servers in mainland China, which will improve the speed - and attractiveness - of their service in a country where they face strong competition from the leading mandarin search engine, Baidu."

Thereby illustrating that non-legally binding ethical imperatives usually (almost always?) take second place to the demands of profit maximization—at least for most businesses, and especially so for publicly-listed corporations. That said, is this in fact a bad outcome?

Google"acknowledged that this ran contrary to its corporate ethics, but said a greater good was served by providing information in China."

So does the policy run contrary to its corporate ethics or not?

"'In order to operate from China, we have removed some content from the search results available on google.cn, in response to local law, regulation or policy. While removing search results is inconsistent with Google's mission, providing no information (or a heavily degraded user experience that amounts to no information) is more inconsistent with our mission.'"

Is it? And even if it is, I observe the happy coincidence that Google finds its profit-maximizing strategy consistent with its mission.

"Local bloggers were already wearily resigned to the change. 'What Google are doing is targeting commercial interests and skirting political issues,' said one of the country's most prominent, who writes under the name Black Hearted Killer. 'That by itself is no cause for criticism, but there is no doubt they are cowards.'"

Are they? And if they are, what does courage require of those who own Google stock? Should they sell their holdings? Or should they retain those holdings and campaign for a change in corporate policy? Or need they do nothing?

To set"America free of its dependence on oil."

And why do we need to do that?"Because we in the United States and industrialized world more generally, are funding both sides in the War for the Free World. On the one hand, since we consume far more oil than is available here at home, we are obliged to import most of what we need from abroad. As a practical matter that means enriching with wealth transfers those who are the principal financiers of Islamofascist terror -- notably, Saudi Arabia and Iran. And, on the other, we are paying vast sums to protect ourselves against such terror."

Moreover,"our transportation sector remains reliant upon oil -- 60 percent of it imported -- for the gasoline and diesel fuel on which it runs almost exclusively. This creates a dependency that is as unsustainable as it is strategically perilous, especially as the appetite for oil of our emerging rival, Communist China, continues to skyrocket."

So, according to Gaffney, we need intervention in the domestic economy because of our dependence on oil. And how did we come to be dependent on oil? Through previous government intervention. A good deal of U.S. foreign policy has had the effect (and usually the intention) of subsidizing the American oil companies. Involvement in the Middle East, going back at least to the end of World War II, has, via the taxpayers,  externalized the costs of assuring a stable source of oil for ostensibly private companies. In other words, socialized costs, privatized profits. No wonder the left despises the oil companies. They have a point.

We don't know what the energy and transportation industries would look like without this subsidy, not to mention all the other subsidies and cartelizing regulations and taxes they enjoy. But we do have reason to think they would look a lot different than they do today. Government intervention distorts risk, prices, investment, economic calculation, and the resulting consumer choices. If unsubsidized oil companies had had to face the turmoil in the Middle East at their own risk, they would have acted differently than they have: they would have looked for safer sources of supply and/or developed entirely different forms of energy. We don't know what we're missing, but we are likely missing something good. Maybe we'd all be driving clean, high-mileage electric cars by now.

Of course, if the U.S. government had not intervened in the Middle East, there would have been much less turmoil there (and here) in the first place. We wouldn't be fighting a"war on terror" or changing regimes. So maybe we'd be using oil from there anyway. We'll never know. But we do know that the policy has imposed untold costs and hardship on American taxpayer-consumers--and the people of the Middle East. For more, see my 1991 paper, published by the Cato Institute, "'Ancient History': U.S. Conduct in the Middle East Since World War II and the Folly of Intervention."

Cross-posted at Free Association.

In contrast to the anti-globalist modern left and the protectionist right, Frederick Douglass rejected the negative sum view of the world. Like many abolitionists, he understood and appreciated the insights of Adam Smith on this issue:

The old doctrine that the slavery of the black, is essential to the freedom of the white race, can maintain itself only in the presence of slavery, where interest and prejudice are the controlling powers, but it stands condemned equally by reason and experience. The statesmanship of to-day condemns and repudiates it as a shallow pretext for oppression. It belongs with the commercial fallacies long ago exposed by Adam Smith. It stands on a level with the contemptible notion, that every crumb of bread that goes into another man’s mouth, is just so much bread taken from mine. Whereas, the rule is in this country of abundant land, the more mouths you have, the more money you can put into your pocket, the more I can put into mine. As with political economy, so with civil and political rights (Frederick Douglass, November 17, 1864).

The number of attacks against coalition troops, Iraqi security forces and civilians increased 29% last year, and insurgents are increasingly targeting Iraqis, the U.S. military says. Insurgents launched 34,131 attacks last year, up from 26,496 the year before, according to U.S. military figures released Sunday. Insurgents are widening their attacks to include the expanding Iraqi forces engaged in the fighting, said Brig. Gen. Donald Alston, a coalition spokesman. He added,"It tells me the coalition and the Iraqi forces have been very aggressive in taking the fight to the enemy."

Hat tip Chris Bray at Cliopatria.

In this Freeman article from 2000, Levy quoted Carlyle's 1849 Fraser's Magazine article,"Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question":

Truly, my philanthropic friends, [anti-slave] Exeter Hall Philanthropy is wonderful; and the Social Science—not a “gay science,” but a rueful [one]—which finds the secret of this universe in “supply-and-demand,” and reduces the duty of human governors to that of letting men alone, is also wonderful. Not a “gay science,” I should say, like some we have heard of; no, a dreary, desolate, and indeed quite abject and distressing one; what we might call, by way of eminence, the dismal science. These two, Exeter Hall Philanthropy and the Dismal Science, led by any sacred cause of Black Emancipation, or the like, to fall in love and make a wedding of it,—will give birth to progenies and prodigies; dark extensive moon-calves, unnameable abortions, wide-coiled monstrosities, such as the world has not seen hitherto!

Too often soft-pedaled by those who admire his attack on economics, Carlyle was the premier theorist of the idealized slave society. In opposition to the economists’ supply-and-demand model of human society, he put forward the doctrine of obedience to one’s betters. While he had been making such arguments through the 1840s, it wasn’t until the “Negro Question” that he realized that all white people are"better" than all black people. This certainly made the idealized slavery more attractive for white Britons than one in which they might be on the cutting end of the"beneficent whip." . . .Carlyle idealized slavery in the same way economists idealized markets. To match the economists’ claim of mutual gain from exchange, Carlyle put forward the doctrine of the joys of service to one’s betters. And according to the way things were supposed to work, the common religion would give the details of the hierarchy.

If a student knows the Carlyle-Mill debate, it is impossible to think of the classical economists as taking the reactionary side in the Victorian debate over social organization. The alternative to markets was not socialism. There were socialist experiments, but there were no socialist economies. The alternative to market organization was slavery. Teachers have to work rather hard to hide this fact. For instance, when students in classes in British literature encounter Charles Dickens’s 1854 Hard Times, with its savage attack on markets and market economics, teachers wishing to present Dickens as"progressive" have to be careful. When they explain why it is"inscribed to Thomas Carlyle," it is probably helpful to their cause if they not mention that in 1853 Carlyle republished an expanded version of his part of the exchange with Mill under the title Occasional Discourse on the Nigger Question. What would modern students think if they knew that the attack on market transactions came from those who idealized slavery for black people?

The Carlyle-Mill debate was a theoretical debate. Ideas do have consequences. The issues stopped being purely theoretical in what historians call the “Governor Eyre controversy” of mid-1860s Britain. What ought we to do about those responsible for an administrative massacre of nonwhite Jamaicans? On the side demanding colorblind justice we find the old coalition Carlyle opposed, antislave Evangelicals and economists now joined by Charles Darwin and T. H. Huxley. In opposition we find all the major antimarket voices in Victorian literature—Dickens, John Ruskin, Charles Kingsley, and Alfred Tennyson—joining Carlyle in making the case that it could not be murder to kill Jamaicans of color because one could only murder people. The defeat of the Evangelical-economic coalition was complete. Eyre walked; Mill lost his seat in Parliament; the century of administrative massacre began. And the episode is never mentioned when in English classes the stories of the progressive literary figures and the heartless economists are retold.

I will always be grateful to Lysander Spooner for his essay Vices Are Not Crimes: A Vindication of Moral Liberty because it so thoroughly refutes the claim that the prohibition of drugs is a moral policy. Written at a time when the temperance movement was increasingly turning to coercion by the state as a means to their ends the work speaks to all forms of prohibition and I consider it to be the most important argument for the legalization of drugs. Besides the facts that drug prohibition is expensive beyond reason, destructive of our basic liberty preserving institutions, racist in practice, and totally ineffective in achieving its stated goals, it is also a fundamentally immoral endeavor. If you do not believe the last part of the above sentence then read the essay.

Vices Are Not Crimes is also important as a policy proposal. If our government would act on Spooner’s ideas and stop treating vices, which are matters of concern only to the individual, as though they were crimes, which are matters of public concern, then we would all live in much happier, safer, and more peaceful world.