The Limits of Capitalism

The emerging paradigm shift I mentioned a year ago is now in full flower.    The extremes are represented in today’s Post, as usual, by Robert Samuelson and E.J. Dionne.  Samuelson, an ardent conservative, argues that “the age of entitlements is over”, so get over it.  He says that the traditional belief that hard work and playing by the rules will yield prosperity and security no longer applies, but hey, that’s life. Sooner or later, the business cycle, which like Mother Nature, can’t be fooled will catch up with you and government action to provide entitlement safety nets will be too expensive and go to “undeserving” people (whoever they are.)  To expect fairness is unrealistic.

Dionne argues that conservatives’ arguments for deficit reduction and austerity only come out when their profits are threatened (they don’t mind deficits produced by tax reductions), and that their arguments for austerity have been proven to be both based on faulty data and wrong when viewed in the light of comparing results from stimulated versus austere economies.  To some extent then, Samuelson and Dionne are engaged in the usual economists’ mud fights.  Neither recognizes the limits of their own arguments or the validity in their opponent’s arguments.

The middle provides more interesting views.  Both sides recognize the reality of the problems, differing in how they should be treated.  Three weeks ago, eulogies for Margaret Thatcher were flying all over the press and the internet. I was taught as a child never to speak ill of the dead (Hitler and Vlad Dracul, the Impaler, being exceptions), but apparently, Thatcher was requiring a lot of help.  One of the more intriguing defenses, on April 12 in the Washington Post, was by Michael Gerson, and titled “Thatcher: the moral capitalist.”   Even more interesting was that 5 days later, the Post’s feature article in the Sunday Outlook section, by Steven Pearlstein, had the headline, “Is Capitalism Moral?”  Those two represent in differing ways the moderate middle in the battles raging over the truths and utility of classical economics versus “the social market.”  Gerson is one of those socially conscious conservatives whom I admire for his thoughtfulness, and his arguments this time show why. The thrust of Gerson’s article was that free-market capitalism can be value free only to the extent it exists within a society that has moral values to constrain it.  He quotes Edmund Burke, the revered father of conservatism (Gerson was speech writer for George Bush and is a traditional conservative) as saying"Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their appetites.”  Gerson amplifies that by stating that “Freedom requires virtues it does not produce and may even help undermine.”  He, as a conservative, believes that virtue must be provided by the individual, not imposed by government through regulation.  If results of the market are sick, it is because society is sick and must be cured, not the market.

The Pearlstein article argues that for free-market capitalism to defend itself validly as being moral in itself, as opposed to the value-free capitalism recognized by Gerson, capitalism must be able to demonstrate that economic outcomes to individuals are necessarily consistent with their economic contributions.  You are paid what you are worth, and the invisible hand of the market washes away all sin.  This capitalism cannot do.  Poverty does come upon hard working people, and the idle rich do prosper.  The child of a poor family, no matter how gifted, is less likely to succeed than an equally talented child of the wealthy.  Executives of failing companies are usually compensated just as well as those of successful ones.  As Joe Stieglitz, the Nobel Laureate economist, argues this is because the first thing that any person or company finding success in the market seeks to do is establish what economists call a “rent”, a lock on some kind of unearned income, and these rents inevitably produce skewed market outcomes.  As the rich get richer, the poor get poorer.  Thus, a totally free market inevitably produces immoral results.

Both Gerson and Pearlstein, and Stieglitz, essentially are agreeing that some third party outside the market must act to obtain virtuous outcomes.  Gerson, interestingly, is tacitly repudiating “the invisible hand of the market.”  Gerson identifies the required third party as the sense of moral responsibility of individual market participants; Pearlstein sees it as the regulatory function of government.  Gerson argues that reliance on anything but the internal moral norms of individuals erodes liberty, but agrees that liberty itself erodes moral norms by treating every value as equal.  Pearlstein argues that government necessarily must act to assure all citizens an equal chance for success that is dependent only on their effort and talents, but agrees that government too frequently regulates in favor of equal outcomes rather than equal opportunities.  Its outcomes too are flawed.  We are encountering here a fundamental paradox of democracy.  Free men, and their markets, detest regulation, but imperfect men, and their markets, require it.  As James Madison put it, “It is because men are not angels that government is necessary; it is because men are not devils that government is possible.”

Part of the problem may be the traditional view of regulation as a combination of severely worded “thou shalt not’s” and stern punishments for malefactors.  B.F. Skinner pointed out positive reinforcement as a better way over 50 years ago, but most regulation still has 19^th century roots.  J.D. Trout, a behavioral scientist, reports in The Empathy Gap that in the Amsterdam Airport for many years they had what were regarded as among the filthiest men’s rest rooms in Europe. Stern posters were of no avail and fines to international travelers impossible.  They solved the problem overnight by painting a fly in the center of each urinal. Now their rest rooms are among the cleanest. That approach represents the use of positive incentives for good behavior.  Another positive approach is barrier removal.  The assumption here is that people will want to do the right thing but find it easier to do the wrong thing; making it easier to do the right thing will point them in the right direction.  For example, a system of initial strict inspections then inspections scheduled more infrequently after a reasonable period of non-violation should encourage those really working “to do the right thing” by making regulation less of a burden. 

Of course there are always those who feel the need to “beat the system” or to “gain a competitive advantage.”  They will always require stern regulation.  The problem remains also of determining what exactly “the right thing.” is.  Here the best advice remains that given by a top corporation CEO:”If you can see the line, you’re too close to it.”  Competitive advantage has, for too many years, been the flimsy excuse given for unconscionable behaviors.  The solution resembles that used by an experienced teacher at the start of a new year: begin with strict rules and ease up as experience shows less strictness is needed.  Re-enact Glass-Steagall.  If it’s realistically too stern, then back off from there, very gradually.  Impose strict limits on fracking, then gradually back off if they’re not needed.  The key point in all these approaches is that they seek to recognize and reward good behaviors.   Free and responsible men know that capitalism is a tool, not an end in itself, and does not serve our needs unless handled with care.

Yearning to Breathe Free

A much younger friend of mine shares with me the experience of having worked during college in a restaurant, she as a waitress and I as a dishwasher.  Though from an affluent family, she had parents who wisely insisted that she get her college spending money by working. The most important thing she learned, she says, is how it feels to be treated like dirt.  I fully understand that, but find that another interesting outcome was that neither of us is resentful.  That, for us, is because in our separate times and places, we each knew that the experience was temporary, not a lifelong burden, and that better times were coming.  We had hope, and hope is the opposite of resentment.

After the Boston bombings, the newspapers are filled these days with analyses of just who the young bombers were.  The most colorful of these analyses is the one offered by “Uncle Ruslan”, their uncle and a fellow immigrant from Chechnya, who said among many other things that “they’re losers.”  In obvious ways, he’s right.  One is dead and the other likely faces, at best, life imprisonment, they’ll both be remembered not for accomplishments but for the pain they caused, and any dreams that they, particularly Dzhokhar, the younger brother, had for successful careers are vanished.  But in saying that, Uncle Ruslan misses a great truth of the American immigrant experience. That truth is the one found in Emma Lazarus’s poem on the base of the Statue of Liberty, “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore..”  Almost all our ancestors came to America because they were losers elsewhere.  The rich and successful stayed home.  All that our immigrant ancestors had were the clothes on their back and hope.  They came and had to start again from scratch, usually in a menial job, often having to learn a language entirely new to them, and bringing with them the memories of the wrongs and oppressions they had faced previously.  It was hope for a better future that sustained them.   America's great accomplishment was turning losers into winners.

The radicalization of the brothers, particularly the older one, which led to their reprehensible actions signals that the hope had been replaced by resentment.  That in no way excuses their actions; millions of immigrants before them have lost their hope, some returning in despair to the places they had left, without resorting to terrorism.  But it does point to ways we can better achieve our own dreams as a nation, to be the lamp beside the golden door.

At a talk I attended a few years ago by the director of a large home for troubled youth, he described how most of them, the products of alcoholic or drug-ridden families, had been shipped from foster home to foster home for years; they had lost all trust in others, acted out violently, and had no hopes. They are the losers.   It took an average of three years just for them to relearn trust.   That was in a carefully constructed, highly caring environment.  The pride of the home was in how many of them they turned into successful adults.  The real secret was that they cared about each one of them and refused to accept them as losers.  They restored hope, child by child.

We today as a nation face influxes of refugees from the troubled spots of the world, asylum seekers from political oppression, as were the Boston bombers.  They are our national “troubled youth” (though we have plenty that are fully home grown), and it is our responsibility as a nation to find ways that turn them into responsible citizens, not bombers.  Treating immigrants in general hostilely as crime-prone, untrustworthy losers will not do the job.  Doing so helps create bombers.  Again, most immigrants survive the experience of being treated hostilely as aliens and of having some of their dreams shattered, and go on to successful citizenship, but the less hostility and the more supportive care they face, the less likely we are to experience resentful bombers.  Radicalization, religious or otherwise, is a product of resentment.  We need to appreciate that the growing fragmentation of our country between the wealthy with unbounded hopes and the poor and marginalized who have none itself contributes to our terror.  We need to appreciate how it feels to be treated like dirt and to see no hope of ever doing better, enough to do things about it. 

Ernie's Mannequin

A recent article in the Washington Post noted that over the course of three decades, the NRA has succeeded in changing the Supreme Court’s understanding of the Second Amendment to the extent that the “orderly militia” clause which begins it has been effectively removed.  But the court otherwise seems to view an assault rifle as equivalent to an 18th century musket. On Wednesday, the Supreme Court ruled that securing a search warrant was required before a breathalyzer test of an apparently alcoholic motorist who refused it, even when it was possible that the time required to do so would make the test ineffective.  Drunken riders on horseback in 1789 had no such protection. Also on Wednesday, the Senate declared gun control legislation defeated because it lacked 60 votes.  While the Constitution specifies passage only “by the rules established by each house”, the historical interpretation has been passage by majority. The Court’s decision affirming Obama Care, which I agree with and support, was based on a transparently arbitrary decision by Justice Roberts to treat a penalty as a tax.  At a recent oral argument before the Court, Justice Scalia remarked that the issue being discussed had only been around 30 years and it was not clear whether it was ripe for decision; it was also not clear whether he was serious.  Under a Court ruling dating from the 1880’s, a corporation is a person just as are you and I, and that precedent is used today to justify unlimited campaign spending by corporations.  And so on.  It is becoming more and more obvious that the legal theories governing interpretation of the Constitution can no longer cope with the problems of the society around it.  The issue is not the Constitution itself, but the thicket of legal theory surrounding it.

We just returned after a few days visiting family in New Orleans, one of the most charming cities in the world; each time I’m there, the city remains the same, but a whole new flavor of it is revealed.   This time, a restaurant waiter recounted a vignette few outsiders know, but with which my family was fully familiar, regarding it as just part of the life of The Big Easy.  As the waiter told us, when Ernie K-Doe, a prominent jazz musician who led the Treme Brass Band and who was noted for his style at jazz funerals, passed away, his widow made a life-sized mannequin of him and planned to stand it beside his casket at the funeral. At the funeral, the mannequin was not yet ready, though the guests were expecting it, so K-Doe’s body was propped up beside the casket. Many guests thought the body was a mannequin.Later on until her death, she had the mannequin preside by the bar at her lounge and accompany her whenever she dined at the restaurant.   Subsequently, when it would be brought to the restaurant, the waiters would acknowledge the mannequin and talk to it, and generally accept it as just a routine visitor to the restaurant. Astounded at how routinely the restaurant staff treated it, I asked the waiter whether the lady was crazy, to which he smiled and replied, “You be the judge.”

The concepts behind our Constitution are not just the English ideas of John Locke. Another thinker important to the Constitution was Montesquieu, who published his The Spirit of the Laws in 1748.  Regarded by many as the father of political sociology, he wrote about types of government, due process, separation of powers and abolition of slavery, but equally importantly, about the relationships between a people and their laws which infuse the laws with the “spirit” of the people. The “spirit” is the overriding principle which is the basis for a people’s interaction with their government.  Montesquieu wrote that the spirit of a democratic republic is “virtue”, which he defines as the willingness to place the public interest above the private interests of the individual, and a shared political liberty which comes from a system of dependable and moderate laws. It is that spirit which energizes the law and makes the system work.  Without that spirit, the system of law fails.   And, most importantly, the laws are shaped by their interaction with the geography, climate and culture of the people.  I would add to that technology, a major shaper of our modern cultures.  As those things change, the laws must change with them, or that constant spirit which energizes the laws is lost.  Montesquieu  provided the framework by which De Tocqueville later analyzed American democracy, and we still cannot find a better understanding of what makes “we the people” just the way we are.

The legal theories of strict construction and original intent, and the thicket of precedent opinions that have grown around the Constitution over the last 220 plus years have sought to preserve as a holy document the Constitution in ways never intended by its authors. The founding fathers made it clear that they understood that interpretations would change as the times change. They wrote at a level of abstraction that would facilitate doing so. They had no intent of making 21st century telecommunications law fit within the framework of an 18th century law, except by the constancy of the spirit that infused it. Our Justices seek to carry around a mannequin, hoping it will be mistaken for the real thing, but what they, aided by all of us, carry about increasingly lacks the spirit. And we behave as though it is indeed the real thing. Are we crazy? You be the judge.

A Modest Proposal for Resolution of the Gun Control Controversy

The title of course alludes to Jonathan Swift’s essay, “A Modest Proposal for the Relief of the Famine in Ireland”.  Composed at the height of one of Ireland’s many famines, it was a savage satire in the form of a proposal that the Irish sell their most plentiful crop, their babies, for consumption by the English, who thought of the Irish as barely more than farm animals, in exchange for food.  My proposal is both less savage and more modest.  Whether you take it seriously or treat it as satire depends on you.  It merely relies on a common tool of laissez-faire capitalism to resolve the stormy gun control controversy.  My proposal is akin to a currently active immigration program enacted in 1990 by a Republican Congress and signed by George H. W. Bush and designed to cater to the wealthy, but it satisfies the Democratic goal of strong reduction in the availability of firearms, as it helped reduce immigration, so it should be welcomed by all.

The 1990 program was the EB-5 visa-for-dollars which set up 10,000 permanent residency visas per year granted to foreign applicants in exchange for investment in U.S. businesses.  The immigration quota line could be jumped to the front of immediately merely by a $500,000 investment.  What a deal! Oh, there are moral issues, but privileges to the wealthy always seem to bring those along.  My proposal doesn’t even have so many of those.  The wealthy benefit, but it's for the good of all of us.

I propose that private ownership and/or carrying of guns be prohibited unless the person bearing the weapon has a government permit to do so issued in strictly limited numbers and sold to the highest bidder or at an exorbitant price, say $500,000 or more. Possibly it could be marketed as a kind of tax on the wealthy.  Large corporations could purchase them for the bodyguards of the CEO, and paranoid billionaires could be reassured that not only do they have a weapon, but no angry pauper can afford to own one to use against them.  The NRA and gun manufacturers might object to the loss in sales volume, but they could compensate by raising the price of weapons to a level commensurate with their customers' ability to pay.  Profit and market share are what counts!

Perhaps 10,000 permits a year might be issued that way, with an equal number issued on a first-come first-served basis, perhaps with state-by-state quotas.  That way, the right to bear arms would not be affected, only the waiting time to get one.  If properly restricted in number, the first-come first-served permits might produce a waiting line of up to 20 years – just as in immigration - long enough to cool off the hottest urge to grab a gun and shoot someone. 

It would be laissez-faire capitalism at its finest.  Only the wealthy could really afford a weapon, and they are no harm to anybody.

The Stuff of Poetry

April, observed T.S. Eliot, is the cruelest month; that truth is attested to by the facts that March Madness produces, in April, 67 losers and only I winner and that April showers herald not only flowers but also sneeze-producing pollen.  Those sordid truths are of course not the kinds of truths with which Eliot’s poetry is concerned.  For the focus of poetry is not on fact but on the internal truths we commonly label authenticity.  My profile contains a set of facts about my life history which are true, but a far truer statement about how I view myself internally can be found in Yeats’ great poem, “Sailing to Byzantium”, which tops the list on “My Favorite Poems by Others” page.  For me, that is authenticity, in spades. 

The poet is less concerned with the kind of facts we call history than with conveying authenticity.  It is that authenticity that we honor in April, America's national poetry month.  But we Americans, despite the number of fine American poets, are uncomfortable with honoring poetry.  One of our poets wryly noted that “Somewhere today, in some newspaper, a poet will be written about, perhaps because he was shot in a lovers’ quarrel, or was in a tragic accident or was involved in a financial scandal, but not because of his poetry.”  This week the newspapers had several articles about the exhumation of the body of Pablo Neruda, but all were about the exhumation or about Chilean politics; none referred to any specifics of his poetry.

De Tocqueville, that French nobleman who was also the analyst of all things American, observed that under American democracy the arts, which include poetry, would suffer.  Democracy can stand the charge; it has enough virtues without adding poetic sensibility. But our inner life is lessened by its absence. Perhaps the problem is our practicality; an old friend of ours, a fine engineer, always professed hatred of poetry because “they never come out and say what they mean,” That poetry sometimes says things that just cannot be said in prose was of no account to him. 

Perhaps the discomfort is due to a democratic mistrust of elite skills.  If so, it is misplaced.  Poetry is a traditional voice of democratic protest.  Plato refused poets admittance into his authoritarian Republic because of the disruption they could create.  That nursery rhyme we learned as infants, “Three Blind Mice”, originally was a protest against Mary, Queen of Scots. Lorca died for his poetry as did numberless other great poets throughout history.

The greatest dishonor we can do to poetry is to ignore it.  That is what many do every day, and they, and the rest of us, are the worse for it.  Emma Lazarus' poem, carved into the base of the Statue of Liberty is an uncomfortable reminder of what should be done about immigration policy and isn't, so it is ignored.  "America the Beautiful", with its references to fruited plains and alabaster cities is an uncomfortable reminder of what we are not doing to make America the idyllic place it deserves to be, so it is ignored.  John Donne's "No man is an island..." is, though technically prose, a wonderfully poetic repudiation of the extreme individualism practiced by many, so it too is ignored.
It is good this national poetry month to remember that poetry is a humane voice that dictators hate, and that many have died for.  It, at its best, contains both wisdom and courage that reach across cultural boundaries to remind us of the many common bonds we share, and above all, it is authentic.
Don't ignore it.

Economics and Cosmology

I was reading this week of the excess positron findings reported from the detector on the International Space Station and it made me think of economics.  Not in the usual, “how much did you say that blasted contraption costs?” way, but more in the way of an “aha moment” it provided about a fundamental problem I have with standard economic thinking.  The positron findings have the cosmological physicists all excited because they might, they’re not certain yet, provide insights into the nature and extent of dark matter, which in turn could lead to understanding of the fundamental physical characteristics of the whole universe; the cost of the contraption is well worth it.  But one article reported as an aside that the detector was laboriously mapping the entire sky to produce a complete description of the gravitational interaction between masses all the way back to the Big Bang.  A continuing gravitational tussle is going on between ordinary matter and dark matter, and the net gravitational result determines the location of every particle in the universe.  That’s when the “aha” hit me: But we still fly!  Gravity is the most powerful physical force in the universe and determines everything, but we conquer it daily to go from the bottom to the top floor to Peoria to Mars.

What a wonderful metaphor that creates for explaining the problem I have with economic determinism and “the invisible hand of the market.”  Economists love to exclaim TANSTAAFL!, “There aint no such thing as a free lunch.”  They mean that economic relationships determine all our other relationships, and they make a powerful case for their point of view.  There is an element of economic self-interest even in our choice of who we love and what religion we follow. The invisible hand is at work everywhere; economic determinism is indeed a fact that we live with.  But the economists stop there. They act as if Economic Man is a complete description of all humanity and inescapably explains everything. And that’s like saying that gravity is so powerful, it’s not even worth the effort to attempt jumping.  It’s as if, following Newton’s discovery, we’d just sighed and given up.  If we had the same attitude about physics as economists do about economics, we’d still be hiding in caves.

Humanity has worked thousands of years to overcome gravity, from the invention of the inclined plane and the cart and the ladder to the design of the space rocket.  We’ve done it because there were worthwhile things that needed being done, that just couldn’t be done by accepting the inexorable victory of gravity. So we found ways, and continue to do so every day.  No one person did it; it’s been a joint effort for humanity over millennia.

The reason physicists search so hard for understandings about dark matter, stuff that isn’t even directly detectable by any scientific instrument, is that there is significantly more of it in the universe than there is ordinary matter.  Seeking, for example, to understand the structure and motion of galaxies using only calculations including ordinary matter leads to completely erroneous results.  Stretching that metaphor even farther, limiting our understanding of the possibilities for human behavior to behavioral  calculations involving only Economic Man is like calculating gravitational effects ignoring dark matter.  The dark matter of humanity is all the other stuff, from altruism to anger to kinship ties, that go together to define our full humanity.  It cannot be ignored.

So, what I’m trying to say is that yes, economic determinism is a legitimate fact of life to be dealt with. It too cannot be ignored.  Neither can the other components of our behavior. The problem arises when we organize our behavior around purely economic institutions and concepts, around corporations and rates of return on investment and self interest, and the invisible hand of the market becomes the scapegoat for behaviors that represent the worst, not the best, of our nature. As we have labored over millennia to elude the limits of gravity, and succeeded, so we need to work on social arrangements and institutions, from government regulation of unconscionable behaviors to “social markets” that take into account just pricing and needs.  The focus of our behavior needs to include achieving our best, not just our most profitable outcomes.  We will not understand or actualize our own universe within, or help the world around us become a better place, until we have learned to do so.

That Vision Thing

I’m just recovering from nine days of chasing a two-year-old (babysitting is much too mild a word to describe the experience), so my brain cells are still not fully settled back into place, but I did have the opportunity I sometimes don’t of reviewing several conflicting views on a topic that’s growing warmer by the minute in policy circles – the effect on U.S. policy of China’s growing presence in Africa.  A standard position among hawks is that China, for malevolent political vote-getting purposes in the UN and to exploit Africa’s huge mineral resources, is engaged in a carefully planned opportunistic  storming of the 57 African nations just now emerging from colonialism, to achieve political and economic dominance over them. Proof is offered in the emphasis of the Chinese on "get in - get out" infrastructure development.  A somewhat divergent view is expressed by Deborah Brautigam, a real expert on the topic and the director of the International Development Program at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.  Dr. Brautigam, in a talk delivered to our foreign policy discussion group back in January, seemed to be saying that China was really engaged in a rush toward globalization similar to that of the U.S. itself, with Chinese companies racing for business with only loose support of the Chinese government.  In many ways, Dr. Brautigam’s description of Chinese activity in Africa, though much more complex than I am making it out to be, was like viewing U.S. activity in a slightly warped mirror.

And the Chinese describe the scene from an entirely different angle.  Much more a picture of deliberate government action than Dr. Brautigam seemed willing to concede, it is also much more ideological than the hawks’ perception and based on a long-term explicitly stated vision, not of the 57 individual African nations but of Africa as a whole.  In several articles in the China Daily newspaper, admittedly a self-promoting exercise of the Chinese government, Chinese writers focus on the African infrastructure development, one of the more puzzling aspects of China’s African activities.  American hawks, wearing capitalist glasses, view the Chinese emphasis on infrastructure (versus the American emphasis on individual business building) only as a sign of China’s goal to build roads and bridges between mines and ports in order to cart away minerals as rapidly as possible.  The view stated in China Daily is a much longer term focus on creating a Pan-African network of roads and highways to stimulate overall economic growth of the continent.  China built the first between-country railroad in sub-Saharan Africa forty years ago.  It serves China’s needs to have Africa both as a source of imports and exports, and it is based on China’s self-evaluation of its development as a continent spanning nation.  Even if it is a self-serving depiction, the fact that it was arrived at in the first place is significant.

People forget China’s beginning as a conglomeration of “warring states”, the name given to the several-hundred year period when almost a billion people were killed by incessant warfare.  The conquest by the Mongols under Kublai Khan led to the first real unification, strongly promoted by the roads and postal services of the Mongols.  Then in the 20^th century, with the Communist Revolution, China was once again unified and modernized by infrastructure development.  The Chinese see infrastructure development as the key to development of stable economic and political arrangements over large areas, good both for them and for Africa.  It is that model that China looks to for its emphasis on African infrastructure.  China’s President Xi explicitly addressed this Pan-African vision at the recent summit of African leadership he attended, and his emphasis was warmly received.  Xi, like his predecessors, was visiting Africa as his first international visit after taking office.  People also forget that China has been working closely with African countries since the 1960’s, and a big part of the success of China in Africa results from the long-term “mutual benefit” relationships they have built.

So, which accounts of Chinese activities should we take seriously.  There is truth in all three competing visions.  China obviously wants to benefit politically and economically in Africa, and both the Chinese government and Chinese businesses are scrambling to do so.  The keys are the Chinese long-term relationships and their Pan-African vision, which American policy makers have not yet picked up on.  We tend still to focus on Africa’s past as a backward, fragmented colonial area of small nations with crippled economies.  We see a relationship mainly in selling them goods.  We need to shift our gaze away from seeing only Africa’s past.  Africa is emerging as a 21^st century giant, and without vision we risk losing participation in its future.

Searching for Nanny

Any big newspaper contains treasure troves of obscure little items, not important enough or too common for an individual article but bundled together by section of the newspaper as “shorts” or “digest” or “about town.”  I’m glancing over the financial section “digest” of the Washington Post this morning as my wife and I babysit a grandchild for several days, which definitely slows down, in an enjoyable way, my blogging.  Some of the items too common to merit serious attention by The Post this morning include: a suit by Freddie Mac of 15 of the largest banks for rigging the LIBOR interest rate  so as to cost Freddie Mac (and the U.S. taxpayer) over three billion dollars; JP Morgan Chase agrees to repay $546 million dollars to settle claims that it had wrongfully held the money for itself from deposits for investors by another investment company when the other company went bankrupt; Barclays Bank paid nine senior executives including its CEO, $61 million in bonuses less than a year after being fined for manipulating interest rates; nine key executives commute by plane at company expense  to J.C. Penney headquarters in Texas from their homes in California, New York and Boston, although the company is struggling to stay in business; and oil companies have agreed among themselves and with environmentalists to voluntary fracking standards which are tougher than those set by government regulators.  All this in one day in an obscure little section for items not important enough to notice.  What’s going on here?

Early in my career, I had a boss who was grudgingly beloved by all of us for making statements like, “I wouldn’t authorize that expenditure, even if it was my own money.”  He was always conscious that he was making choices about “someone else’s money”, with a responsibility to spend it properly on their behalf.  That introduced us to a view of fiscal integrity and fiduciary responsibility that stuck with us, even though now it seems almost quaintly Victorian.  What those news items show in common is an at least initial attitude on the part of someone (in the case of fracking, it was regulatory authority) that the consequences of their activities for someone else was not worth considering.  That someone else’s money is fair game.

I often mention the bubbles we all live in, rich,, professional, working class, poor, elderly, young, east coast, mid west, etc., etc.  We grow daily more remote from each other, not even sharing the same diet or shopping malls or schools or churches. That uncaring attitude about the consequences of our actions on others is in part a product of that remoteness.  Those executives who spend exorbitant amounts commuting by air probably could not name, or identify with, any of those who work for them in a retail store.  Those bank executives have probably never shared a lunch with any investor in that bankrupt company whose money they were trying to hang on to.  We turn fellow human beings into statistics we can manipulate without any consideration of our shared humanity.

The dehumanization of those for whom we bear some responsibility, like it or not, is probably not going to go away.  It is a consequence of life in any large society.  But something can be done.  And it is a role for government little thought about.  An interesting science fiction story I read years ago described a society where, when a person had committed a major crime, a conspicuous robot followed him everywhere, making his criminality obvious both to him and others, until it became obvious by his actions that he had internalized the moral norm that had been violated; at which point, the robot went away.  Obviously, such activity would be silly in real life.  But the appropriate role for government is possible in the form of strict and strictly enforced regulations, the “nanny state” so derided by conservatives.  A truth known to behavioral scientists is that values follow, not precede, habits.  The role of strictly enforced regulation is to strengthen values by making responsible behavior a habit.  We need much more, not less regulation.  We will all benefit, like it or not, just as a nanny sometimes makes us mad while teaching us basic life skills.  Now that those oil companies have agreed to at least some regulation, it is time for government to make it enforceable, for there will always be some who try to evade even their own rules.

Social Obligations

Occasionally, when we have to decline an invitation we’d love to accept because of a prior commitment we don’t really cherish, we console ourselves by muttering that there’s really no choice, it’s “a social obligation.”  That’s a small phrase that covers a lot of territory.  Sometimes it just means a cheerful chat when we’d love to walk away. Other times, it could stretch to substantial aid to family or friends who have suffered catastrophe.  Occasionally it could stretch all the way to disaster relief in Turkey or Indonesia.  In general, it’s a recognition that we owe our fellow human beings many things that go beyond the immediately agreeable or profitable, that we are all mutual participants in a network of humanity.  It’s something that the “only what’s in it for me” crowd would just as soon forget, unless of course they are the ones in distress.  Forgetting comes easiest when it can be done in the name of maximizing corporate profits and protecting individualism. 
Our national ideology of individualism, “beholding to no man and no man beholding to me”, obscures the natural human reciprocity that shows up in times of great trauma, and it makes us easy targets of the corporate warfare on our national interests.  One of the current major targets of that warfare is the obligation to care about those who did, but no longer work for you.  In these recessionary times, unemployment benefits are just too great a burden on the health of the corporation and the economy: so goes the screed.  And retirees are living ”too high off the hog” for corporate profits to bear because of Social Security cost of living increases, which must be trimmed for the seniors own moral good. That profits-only orientation is hidden in the argument made that senior retirement benefits prevent adequate care for the young.  Nonsense!  Both young and old must be cared for, even at the expense of corporate profit.  Harold Myerson commented in the Washington Post a few weeks ago that this currently fashionable rant ignores the fact that in the last 35 years, the working careers of most seniors, retirement incomes outside Social Security benefits have actually gone down, leaving more and more seniors unable to afford retirement – of course, that’s no concern to the corporations who “downsize” them anyway in favor of younger, cheaper workers; that massive senior “downsizing” is one of the invisible prices we are paying for rampant individualism. Older and younger workers both get laid off – no age discrimination there – but it’s the younger workers who get rehired.  Older workers are left to the early retirement they can’t afford.  That’s when the switch from defined benefit retirement plans to 401(K) plans initiated by corporations beginning in the 1970’s kicks in; in 1975, 88 percent of workers with retirement plans had defined benefit plans, while by 2010 that number had fallen to 35 percent. Corporations saved a lot of money that way, none of it going to the workers.  But a 2010 Federal Reserve survey found that retiring workers typically had only about a $100,000 IRA (which would yield at best about $5000 a year in current income, assuming no market crashes) with no other retirement income sources to supplement their Social Security benefits – totally inadequate for long-term retirement.  That’s the setting for the proposals to reduce Social Security cost of living increases.  Corporate interests and ideology are increasingly drowning out the voice of individuals, in the name of protecting laissez-faire individualism.

That’s where social obligation enters the picture.  Our retirement and our health care financing systems are based on employer and individual worker contributions; in an age where corporate ownership is increasingly remote from concerns over individual former workers, we must find alternatives.  In 1950, over half those Americans over 65 lived in poverty; pursuing our current course, we are headed back in that direction.  It would constitue a national tragedy, as well as countless personal ones.  Other nations not so blinded by rampant individualism as ours have developed public, not employer based, systems, a recognition on their part of an important social obligation.  We need to look to places like Germany for examples of what can be done while still prospering in a reasonable fashion.  What they do may or may not work for us, but something must be found.  Like it or not, it’s a social obligation.

Drawing the Line

One of my favorite British mystery series, shown several times on PBS but now seen only rarely, is Foyle’s War.  It relates the adventures of a police detective during World War II Britain, and continually combines wartime plot complications with old fashioned hunting down of malefactors.  One of the interesting plots involved a murderer from an aristocratic English family who turned out also to be a German secret agent.  That brings to mind one of the most obscure trivia of World War II, that German casualties included eight U.S. citizens who had become members of the German SS.  War has historically been a time of switching sides for some, and suffering the consequences, often without benefit of trial.

That is one of the often ignored complexities of the drone warfare issue.   Another is the “collateral damage” issue; from the burning of Washington by the British in the 1812 War to Sherman’s burning of Atlanta to the U.S. firebombing of Dresden to Hiroshima, death and injury to civilians has been a part of warfare.  The assumption has been that close association with the enemy brings you into the same crosshairs with him, whether you deserve it or not.  In that regard, targeted drone strikes are actually a more precise way of limiting “collateral damage” than has been available in the past.  And the argument that use of a new weapon like drones could be copied by some future adversary has never dissuaded us in the past: witness the Monitor/Merrimac battle, jet planes or Hiroshima.   The oddity of a new weapon does not mean its future misuse by the American government against the American people; jet planes are not a weapon of any U.S. police force.   So, does there remain a line that should not be crossed, and if so, where is it?

A clear line would be to avoid attacking U.S. citizens not part of an invading army on U.S. soil.  But that is already illegal, and, by the way, has been since 1812.  Even in the Civil War, solitary confederates off the battlefield were arrested, not shot on sight.  That is because adversaries on American soil fall under our police powers, and our whole justice system, including rights to trial and due process are based on the exercise of those powers.  Even on American soil, military justice requires a different system, with its own rules of procedure and penalties.  A clear difference is that police powers are exercised after commission of a crime, and not based only on intent, and that is not a limitation under military powers. Under military law a soldier can be punished for inaction, not the case in civilian law. Such differences are what declarations of martial law, rarely done and never lightly, are all about.

The absence then of police jurisdiction in an area of violent conflict is an indicator of the availability of drones.  The more complex issue is that of “targeted” drone strikes, i.e. strikes aimed at specific people, who may or may not be American citizens.  An obscure provision of the Constitution prohibits “bills of attainder”, warrants to arrest a person based only on his perceived bad character; that is the source of the prohibition under police powers against arresting someone before actual commission of a crime.  Again, that applies to those under our police jurisdiction.  Putting it all together then, the use of targeted drone strikes in parts of the world where we are engaged in armed military conflict is morally ugly, but legally acceptable.

The real question then is whether we morally can accept targeted drone strikes as ugly but necessary. Here we can fall back only on the old moral test regarding the lesser of evils:  is it the minimal bad thing we can do to avoid greater evils?  As I’ve noted, it involves actually more limited collateral damage than techniques used in the past; it does not require unusable advance planning in immediate action situations, and currently is suitable only for use in sparsely populated hostile terrain.  Its use is against those who have committed or clearly intend to commit great harm against the U.S., involving the loss of many lives.  So long as it involves the highly limited use made of it so far, then drone warfare appears to meet the “least of evils” test.  The real test will come when it becomes cheaper and still more tightly targetable.  War itself is the villain here.  It should be noted, by the way, that I am no lawyer, so my analysis involves only my version of common sense and cannot be blamed on any law school.  Then again, sometimes common sense applies even to the law.