Benjamin Strong on World War I

I ended up cutting an interesting passage about New York Federal Reserve governor Benjamin Strong's views on World War I from my paper on the 1920-21 depression because it added length without contributing much to the discussion. It seems worth posting on Veteran's Day, though. This is the lead in sentence and the quote:

*****

For Strong, financing World War I took on Manichean dimensions. In an address to Liberty Bond salesmen in 1917, he declared:

"Four hundred years ago the Anglo-Saxon race received the first great bill of rights upon which their personal liberties were founded, when King John of England signed the great Magna Charta at Runnymede. For two hundred and fifty years that race in England has been engaged in building up constitutional government... It was bequeathed to us one hundred and fifty years ago by Great Britain, and for substantially four hundred years we English-speaking people, and those from other countries whom we have adopted, have been developing our institutions based upon that foundation of constitutional law. For forty years, since the war between Prussia and France, a military autocracy in Germany, filled with lust for power, has been building up a great military structure on an entirely different theory of personal or autocratic government, and now they have come into conflict – so the question is, Which is going to win? That is the greatest problem the human race has ever faced – constitutional government against personally organized military government… The subscription to these bonds is simply the beginning of the contest, so far as this country is concerned."

Given these stakes, the prospect of an artificial inflation struck Strong as entirely justified.

Calling BS on "Taxation as Theft"

On several occasions, I've noted to Evan that I think people who refer to abortion as a "holocaust" are being disingenuous. Nobody actually thinks that at all - they don't draw the moral equivalence, although they find it politically useful to claim they do (or psychologically settling to convince themselves they do). But ultimately they don't. If you actually thought a holocaust worse than the Nazi Holocaust was occurring (at least four times worse), not in isolated secret camps but in clinics in your neighborhood, you would not stand idly by for decades. If people actually believed what they said about it being a holocaust, they would rise up violently against the practice. So I'm convinced there are a few clinic bombers and doctor-murderers who do actually believe it's a holocaust, but most don't. Most implicitly admit that the abortion of fetuses - even if it does raise real moral problems - is by no means the moral equivalent of killing fully developed and born human beings. It would simply be unconscionable for the pro-life movement to actually believe that but act the way they've acted. When tens of millions are slaughtered in a holocaust, you don't just picket the Supreme Court once a year. So I like to call BS every once in a while on that one.

A similar instance I've been thinking of recently is the tendency of some libertarians to refer to taxation as theft. Modern citizens of just about any state pay a lot of money in taxes. Several thousand, if not tens of thousands for many Americans. If people honestly considered this "theft", it's more than enough cause to react violently. If a thief enters your home in an attempt to steal thousands of dollars, you would be well within your rights to respond violently to expel the thief, and given the means most Americans would. One response may be that the government itself is a criminal organization that makes resistance futile. Maybe, but this counter-point is riddled with problems. When well armed criminal organization like the mafia or drug cartels infest an area, victims demand some sort of response from other organizations. Sometimes rival gangs are formed, of course. But the law is also called in. Even if people did not openly revolt out of fear of the power of the state, there would be some action to put together a countervailing organization to fight the state. You would have relatively expansive rebel groups, even if they had little chance of success. The other problem with this explanation is that even if the state were a criminal organization, it would be a criminal organization where millions of taxpayers vote at regular intervals for the leadership. If people honestly believed that taxation was theft, you would see some sign of in the polls, or you would see plummeting voter turnout accompanied with plummeting legitimacy of the government. No gang or mafia where the victims had a say in the leadership and where the mafia don had to regularly pander to his victims and had to leave after eight years would commit theft on a mass scale. The idea is absurd.

The only conclusion I can draw is that libertarians (much less some broader community of Tea Partiers or conservatives) don't actually believe that taxation is theft, no matter how many times they may tell you they do. They may not realize they don't believe this - they may have convinced themselves that they believe this. But they don't. Just like pro-lifers who refer to the holocaust to make their points, if libertarians did believe it, they would behave very differently. Since they don't behave how you would expect them to behave if they actually believed taxation was theft, it's reasonable to infer they don't believe it.

So what do we conclude? Americans broadly agree that taxation of citizens is an entirely legitimate and appropriate action. There is nothing criminal or inherently illegitimate about it. We may disagree on what the right level of taxation is, but nobody (aside from a few nuts) actually believe it is theft. It is not a reasonable moral equivalence.

As an aside, I thought of this last night when I was thinking about Jefferson (after commenting on this post and this post) and specifically the points Jefferson raised to justify the revolution against England. I thought "what would justify, or specifically what would libertarians think of as a justification for armed revolt against the federal government today?". Because it seems that whatever may theoretically justify armed revolt in the minds of libertarians hasn't occurred in the United States yet, because they haven't revolted.

I think these previous posts of mine on libertarianism and state violence and on the idea of "the empire of liberty" (which was a very well received post) are probably relevant to this point as well.

Musings on the Empire of Liberty

What would you advocate doing if a criminal organization took control of an American city or state by force, imposed their own illiberal laws brutally, and suspended or made a sham of elections? Well first, of course, the courts and the police would battle this organization throughout it's rise to power - but let's say it ended up taking power anyway. The federal government would come down on it with overwhelming physical force. Not only would this organization inevitably stumble into some sort of inter-state or otherwise federal crime justifying federal involvement, but any sort of dictatorial power-grab would be a violation of the Constitution which guarantees a republican form of government at the state level. This sort of thing seems and probably is inconceivable for the time being, but if it came to that we would see overwhelming force from the federal government. And rightly so.

When I read things like Matt Yglesias's post sharing evidence that Dick Cheney wanted to invade Syria after Iraq, my first reaction is further revulsion at the man I already found repulsive. I did support the war in Afghanistan, but I was strongly opposed to the Iraq war from day one, so needless to say I would have been opposed to a Syrian war too. But why? Why is this sort of neo-conservative "empire of liberty" mindset so problematic for us? It is for one reason: nationalism. The concept of the nation-state. If we had what H.G. Wells called a World State, adventures like a Syrian war would be considered entirely justifiable - as readily supported as a campaign against a crime syndicate taking over New York or Los Angeles would be supported. The only thing standing in the way of this sort of thing is the perseverance of the nation-state and the conceptualizations of sovereignty that come with it. When you think about it, this is an extremely unsettling realization. There's something deeply unsatisfying and arcane about the very idea of "national sovereignty". At one time, one must admit, nation-states, sovereignty, and self-determination served a valuable purpose in the struggle against autocracy and imperial oppression. But now national sovereignty seems to also conceal great evils. We acknowledge what we call "universal" and "human" rights - mostly standard civil liberties that are recognized in the U.S. - but although we nominally recognize their universality, these rights are easily discarded if a nation-state makes it its business to ignore them. Such rights, then, aren't in practice universal at all. I think it's plausible and perhaps even good that we are moving towards a World State and away from national sovereignty. It will be slow, and it will probably evolve from some sort of confederacy and collection of international institutions that already exist or that will be created. But because it is in all likelihood coming, I don't think we can just dismiss these neo-conservative wars. They are here to stay, I think they will increase, and I think they will become more palatable. We have a framework for acknowledging universal rights, and within that framework military action to stop genocide or terrorism has already become palatable - again, as it should be probably. As the universality of these rights is accepted more broadly, and as it is formalized, it will be harder and harder to justify intervening in the case of genocide but not, say, dictatorship. Many neo-conservatives lament the criminalization of terrorism in the sense of terrorists being treated as criminals rather than enemy combatants. Ironically, though, it is this very process of criminalization that is going to make it possible to forcefully pursue a broader and broader array of international bad guys. At first glance this is very troubling. I haven't abandoned my opposition to the Iraq war, after all, so its unsettling to think about it in these terms. But if I think about what we would do if someone like Saddam set himself up with a similar outfit in a U.S. state, what I would consider to be the appropriate reaction would be entirely justified by the most basic understanding of domestic law enforcement. An easy-out might be rejection of the idea of a World State that would make this change of perspective possible (because it would essentially turn all acts of military and state aggression into criminal acts). It's not quite as much of an easy-out for me because I actually embrace the idea of an eventual World State. But even if I were to use a rejection of the idea of a World State to assuage my opposition to the Iraq war, I would still have to accept that all of this opposition to the invasion of Iraq is predicated on an embrace of the abstraction that is nationalism.

And that's not very satisfying either.

So where do we go with this? Anarchism seems like the only way to consistently avoid such wars and avoid the World State or nationalism. But anarchism isn't personally satisfying to me. Libertarianism won't do the trick - libertarians certainly support the protection of civil liberties by law and basic policing powers. So a libertarian that wants to reject both pure anarchism and these neo-conservative wars (and most do) would have to be a pacifist nationalist (because as I said, libertarian principles applied in a World State would accept the necessity of using the force of law to guarantee civil liberties). But I don't think a pacifist nationalist libertarianism really works. Any libertarian principled enough to be a pacifist is unlikely to be a nationalist.

So, unless we embrace anarchism we seem to be stuck with either neo-conservatism or nationalism (or, if we elect neo-conservatives before we institute a World State, both). This is troubling to me. I suppose it shouldn't be surprising. Man is a violent and divisive species. This is not news. And if we want a liberal society we may need more than sugar and spice and dreams and hopes to get it. As you all know - I'm not a libertarian or an idealist and I don't mind it when things are ambiguous, messy, or indeterminate - so I can accept this. But it's still all fairly depressing.

Guantanamo Prisoners

Andrew Sullivan points out an incredible resource: a full list of all 779 detainees at Guantanamo Bay. For those of you not interested in purchasing a book on this, a great deal of information is available here, here, here, and here. All prisoners are listed on these links with their country of origin and release date (for those that have been released). Most prisoners also have links associated with them to earlier posts on the author's blog, or relevant news items. This obviously isn't comparable to the Gulags or anything like that. We can't forget that these prisoners were captured precisely because there was reason to believe they were committing heinous crimes against the U.S. and against humanity. They needed to be imprisoned and interrogated. At the same time, a lot of what happened at Guantanamo does soil the reputation of the U.S., and went beyond what was needed to effectively prosecute the War on Terror. Indeed, some of the harsher methods used at Guantanamo made the fight against terrorism less effective; this was the very basis for most of the opposition.

The prison's operation was also of dubious constitutionality and legality. What is the purpose of fighting an enemy that is trying to destory our institutions if we abandon those institutions ourselves? Guantanamo's legacy is complex. I have a lot of reservations about what went on (and is going on) there, although I don't have a problem with it's mere existence. This complexity requires sober deliberation, and sober deliberation requires access to information. This compilation of information on the detainees is ample fodder for the sort of deliberation we need. Let's learn who these men were.