I Write In Praise of Robert Reich, A Rare Thing!

I'm no big admirer of former Treasury Secretary Robert Reich, but I've gotta admit, he's hit a home run with his remedy for the worst depredations of the campaign finance system. Reich suggests a blind trust be set up for corporate, union and other interest group donations to PACs and other campaign finance instruments.

This is brilliant! In this way, the right to put your money where your political beliefs are is not infringed, and there's absolutely no way to tell which group gave how much and to whom!

All incentives for quid pro quo deals vanish under this splendidly common-sense solution (although there would have to be strict non-disclosure regulations,* to prevent back-stairs information on "who is Uncle Gotbucks this week?" from getting to candidates), while avoiding the very real constitutional problem of inhibiting political speech.

Well done, Mr. Secretary! Now, if you'd just get it through your extremely clever head that your much despised "tax breaks for the rich" translate, in real-world economics, into "lower interest rates on everything consumers finance from homes and cars to college loans and car insurance," we'd be agreeing nearly all the time!

* A word from the Department of Redundant Irony Department: This plan's obverse twin, the unfortunately Delay-Doolittle Bill, would have had equally strict disclosure requirements, by making the source of every single donation a matter of public record. These days, with the Internet running full throttle, this plan would work like a charm: I don't care how much money the candidate spends, I just want to know if Ayran Nation or Louis Farrahkan donated any of it ... Of course, Delay-Doolittle died in the mid 1990s, in committee if memory serves. Oh well, I'll take its evil twin, the Reich Solution, and be glad of the similar result.

Godzilla, global warming and the confederacy of the easily-freaked

Editor's note: This column was initially published in 2006. I have resurrected the puppy because I think the global warming debate is essentially over so we need to start thinking about real-world solutions instead of charging off in all directions to excoriate The Usual Suspects.

Just one ignorant, chicken-sucking Libertarian's opinion, but that's my story and I'm stickin' to it.

Last year, a couple of features on NPR celebrated the 50th anniversary of the first Godzilla movie. Godzilla was just one of a number of movie monsters created by, awakened by or empowered by atomic energy, usually in the form of an explosive device.

There’s a significant cultural coefficient factor attendant upon the mindset that produced those silly, cheesy flicks, and the NPR features were great fun to listen to. But I didn’t hear anyone mention the real-world downside to the Godzilla myth; the (pardon the expression) fallout of fear in the public imagination having to do with all things nuclear.

Those dratted, unpredictable, mutation-causing atoms! They were, in 1950s pop culture, the hack screenwriter’s catalyst of choice for creation of the new generation of Dr. Frankenstein’s monsters.

And that is unfortunate. Today, with world oil production nearing capacity, world petroleum resources undeniably finite, and formerly-slumbering giants like China and India waking up thirsty, there can be no rational doubt a bridge of fission-powered energy is the only sane way to get to our geothermal, solar and biomass-fueled energy future.

But public perception of nuclear energy has a lot of otherwise reasonable adults freaked out beyond all reason. As a result, no new nuclear power plant has been built in this country in decades.

Let’s talk facts: Coal mining has killed many thousands of times more workers than nuclear power facilities, even after figuring in the deaths from Chernobyl. And that disaster happened on a type of reactor not used in the U.S. … and only after its operators deliberately shut down a large number of built-in safety systems as part of an ill-advised drill.

Chernobyl also occurred in the absence of a free press and under a totalitarian government which didn’t care much about the lives or health of its citizens but was obsessed with catching up to the West at any cost.

In the worst U.S. incident, Three Mile Island, not a single death was recorded. And after all these years, I’ve never heard of any clustering of radiation-linked diseases in or around the areas where the vented, radioactive steam from the damaged reactor drifted. Compared to fatalities over the centuries due to coal mine cave-ins, explosions and the myriad of slow, awful deaths caused by black lung disease, nuclear power is incredibly safe.

The reason Three Mile Island was so scary was, for a couple of days, scientists thought a red-hot radioactive “bubble” was brewing, a bubble which could not be reduced and which might eventually cause an explosion. In the end it turned out their math was flawed; the bubble never existed.

But human memory is selective; no matter how objective we try to be, most of us don’t remember the few minutes of relief so much as the two days of terror that preceded them.

Accordingly, in the wake of the Three Mile Island incident, some highly-principled people staged a number of confrontational rallies aimed at stopping construction and/or startup of every new or proposed nuclear power plant in the country. When power companies decided it wasn't worth the bad publicity to even attempt to build any new ones, victory was complete for a hyperventilating confederacy of the easily-spooked.

Can we blame corporate America for deciding to build, instead of nuclear power plants, coal-fired plants? It’s too bad, since despite all the expensive and highly-effective upgrades in pollution control, worldwide burning of coal still spews tons of toxic heavy metal vapors into the atmosphere annually. Whether or not coal contributes to global warming, the official public record proudly proclaims each medium-sized plant is within state and federal compliance limits as it adds to the air over a dozen pounds of mercury each year. Then there's the lead, the cadmium, the nickel ...

Still, the decision-makers at the energy companies probably figure the coal-fired plants are not really safer, but people perceive them as safer. And who needs a lot of concerned citizens camping out next to a multi-billion dollar construction site, raising Cain in the media? If perception is reality, it must be safer to build and operate the much more harmful coal-fired plants. Of course perception and reality often have gaping, daylight filled gaps between them. But those who buy into the flawed perception/reality diad know what they think and choose to not be confused with facts.

It’s time for America to learn the facts about all the different energy alternatives, hire some French companies to safely dispose of nuclear waste (no fooling, they’re wizards at it, and have been for decades), and get back on the Sane Train.

All the facts on global warming aren't in yet, but if we wait until they are, it could be a little late to fix it. Let’s lay Godzilla and his imaginary friends to rest and turn our collective genius to dealing with the very real possibility of global warming. Godzilla only stomps on little-bitty special-effects buildings; a few dozen continuous years of El Nino would actually kill a lot of people while screwing up large portions of the planet we're trying to save.

Risks, rewards and reality

By Mark Dorroh

Editor's note: This essay was posted May 5th and re-edited for style May 18th.

In Anne Applebaum's column of May 4, 2007, she identifies a principle of human conduct which has been poorly served by the Social Democracies of Old Europe. Her column's main focus is the upcoming French national election in which a center-right candidate is saying the unsayable: that Britain is attracting hundreds and thousands of Frenchmen and -women, many of them the best and brightest, to live and work in the UK.

These born-and-bred Gallic cousins have become frustrated with their nation's removal of much of the risk-reward relationship from career choices, and they are voting with their feet and their pocketbooks.

Applebaum, writing for the Washington Post, notes that during Candidate Nicolas Sarkozy's recent visit to London, he called that ancient capital "one of the great French cities." He did so not just because of the military events of 1066, but also because so many modern French citizens, liberated by the economic consolidation of Europe, now choose to live somewhere other than France. They live instead in a nation where rewards are more commensurate with risk.

They have moved to the U.K. specifically, according to Sarkozy, because "they are risk-takers and risk is a bad word in France."

This is significant. It indicates that even the strongest and most stable of governments can be blinkered beyond all reason regarding the essential nature of the human animal. To pretend that risk and reward have no significant relationship is to ignore the entirety of human history. All great military, economic and political systems have been based on risking much to seek great rewards.

For specific instance: The U.S. Constitution, created by many of the greatest minds of the Age of Reason, was a huge gamble. Expecting a population of farmers and mechanics, many of them illiterate, to be capable of responsibly choosing their own leaders was an expectation which flew in the face of everything our European forebears believed. In place of the Divine Right of Kings, Americans believed the common man was every bit as able as ancient councils of elders and church bigwigs to discern leadership abilities.

The gamble paid off, and we're still reaping the rewards 15 and 20 generations later.

In the same spirit Americans believed that economic choice is as important as political choice. Thus was born the purest form ever of a government's acquiescence to and endorsement of Adam Smith's doctrine of the Invisible Hand of the Market.

The Framers' theory of economic liberty was based in the notion that a mostly unrestricted relationship between risk and reward should be protected as one of the chief duties of any responsible government. The wording of the Declaration of Independence which referenced "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" was originally "life, liberty and property." Thomas Jefferson was talked into editing in the more felicitous and poetic phrasing - which meant much the same thing - by delegate consensus at the 1776 Continental Congress.*

By way of contrast, Eurasian civilization in the 20th century went out of its way to select the alternative economic model. In place of risk and property protections, economic security funded by income redistribution became the highest national mission.

The results are manifest and not particularly good: France and Germany have frozen levels of unemployment between 7 and 9 percent, at least partly because employers are loath, for economic reasons, to hire more than the absolute bare minimum of workforce laborers, while their counterparts in this nation - and to a lesser extent in the UK - can risk hiring proportionally more employees in anticipation of growth. The deal is, for every franc or deutschmark paid out by an employer for labor and management, another franc or deutschmark must be paid to the welfare state. That money is them spent to minimize all conceivable risks to all workers.

By way of comparison, in the U.S., employers are required to pay about an additional 1/3 wages in matching payroll taxes. Curiously, our system seems to manage the security of workers rather well, although not at the extreme level of European worker protections.

Instead of 80 - 90 percent of working guaranteed pay upon dismissal, our employers pay about half. Human nature being what it is, the American worker, living on half-wages during a layoff, is more interested in getting back to his/her working rate of pay than the average Social Democracy worker.

This well-intentioned, draconian level of risk removal, coupled with the sky-high payroll taxes, has contributed to a barely sustainable level of unemployment for many of the Social Democracies. Having 1/11 to 1/13 of a nation's workforce on the dole is not a situation any government would see as salubrious, so nearly all the old-line Social Democracies are trying, against enraged popular opposition, to trim back the unintended consequences of their economic model.

Will the entrepreneurial class of Frenchmen ever return to France? Perhaps, but not with the French economy configured as it is now. Opinion polls tell the tale. In Applebaum's column, she quotes results of a poll taken by the French company TFN Sofres in which 93 percent of the two million-plus French expatriates say they are very satisfied with their lives abroad … and 25 percent of them believe their will never return to live in France.

As with the law of supply and demand, governments may seek to impose their will on the relationship between risk and reward. But such ignorance comes at a price, as those most likely to take risks will find places to live and work where such willful ignorance of natural principles is not enshrined in state code.

* The Framers also chose the alloidal system of property ownership, while most of Europe and Asia kept their feudal model. The difference is, in an alloidal system, property is owned by individuals and voluntary collectives such as corporations. In the feudal system, all property is owned by the sovereign, and all citizens reside upon it at the sufference of the sovereign. The alloidal system was enshrined in the original wording, "life, liberty and property" and remains in use, as a legal principle, today.

Racism For Dummies, Chapters "1" and "B"

Chapter One: "And everybody hates the Jews"

Racism, often thought of as a complex and multilayered thing, is actually easy to understand, even by someone as scatterbrained as I.

Forget the twisted rhetoric of David Duke, Louis Farrakhan, Elijah Muhammad and Strom Thurmond for a minute, and let's get down to cases.

People who have nothing else to recommend them invariably resort to the good people-bad people paradigm for a reason, essentially personal insecurity and feelings of helplessness and victimization. They are the good guys, easily identifiable by a bundle of characteristics topped by something ephemeral as skin color, gender, language, religion (or the lack thereof) and/or ethnicity.

So, in the immortal words of Tom Lehrer, "All the Protestants hate the Catholics and the Catholics hate the Protestants and the Hindus hate the Moslems and everybody hates the Jews."

Chapter Two: "White People Are Corny And Whack"

To further break it down, let's consider one prime racist personality type, which I shall label "Type One" and "Type B." We shall conduct our analysis with imagined, but not unimaginable, quotes.

Type One: "I may be a strung-out redneck who spends all my time tweaking on homemade meth, beating my old lady because she doesn't give me - in a timely fashion - her food stamps and cash from the tricks she turns in our trailer, beating my girlfriends because they get on my nerves, beating my kid for much the same reason and dealing tweak at a rate that has caused a localized cluster in the national health abstract of suicides, homicides and fatal overdoses in three counties … but at least I'm not a nigger."

Type B: "I may be a thugged-out pimp (for whom life is hard) who spends all my time snorting blow and smoking crack, beating my old lady because she doesn't give me - in a timely fashion - her food stamps and cash from the tricks she turns in our trailer, beating my girlfriends because they get on my nerves, beating my kid for much the same reason and dealing crack at a rate that has caused a localized cluster in the national health abstract of HIV, crack babies and turf-related drive-by killings in three cities … but at least I'm not a cracker."

The assumption in each case is that no matter how much another person might appear to be superior, the racist easily identifies that person as inferior if his/her skin is not pigmented in the same shade as one's own.

Ayn Rand correctly identified racism in the 1970s as "barnyard collectivism." It removes the necessity of having to consider each person on his/her objective merit and makes visual identification and classification the sole criteria of worth.

"It was impossible to distinguish man from pig, pig from man" indeed!*

Of course, there are the secondary characteristics of racist thought, and they do delve in to some complicated cultural and economic matters. A graffito I recently spotted on a men's room stall declares, "White people are corny and whack. The sooner we start killing them, the better."

Well, as a guy who not only is white but has been for a great number of years, I could only congratulate the young man on his perspicacity. Rather too many of us are corny and whack and he's got our number, fer sure.

But so what? We're also very creative and productive, and (unless we go nuts, as we periodically do, and start killing everyone in sight) on the whole, pretty good folks. We try to rear our children gently, leave them a better world than the one we inherited, care for the poor, the halt, the lame, the blind, and not cause too much of a fuss doing it.

Conversely, some soft-expectations pseudo-Liberal might gloatingly note that there are more young black men behind bars than in college. This (numerically accurate) observation fuels two inner needs: the need to feel superior and the need to blame somebody else for the misfortunes to which flesh is heir.

It's also great grist for a pity-party which combines both inner needs into a single strangled cry of anguish and rage. This process makes one feel even better about one's own precious little super-righteous self.

But how do these persons propose to improve on this thoroughly sick state of affairs? Are these Concerned Citizens out there tutoring young persons of color, teaching them to read for fun so that alternative career paths will not be barred to them?

Those of us who react to the pity-party in such a constructive way are the only ones with any moral authority to ever open our mouths on the subject. The rest are analogous to hypocrites who eat bacon for breakfast, a burger for lunch and a steak for dinner, then chastise hunters for killing little furry critters.

In the old days, it was the no-expectations pseudo-Conservative who thought this way. They cleverly constructed disincentives to all areas of personal improvement, up to and including blowing off your family's front porch some night to remind you that your "place" was not at the voting booth. Softer measures included rigged literacy tests, in which the white voter would be required to spell "cat" and get most of the letters right while a black voter would be expected to explain Newtonian physics, them compare and contrast them to Einstein's theories of special and general relativity. When the black voter failed the test, they said, "See? They're not bright enough to vote."

It was a snide, vicious little game, and it's no wonder so many black people think we're corny and whack. And since we killed barrels full of them when we had it all our own way, I can't really argue with the justice of killing as many of us as possible if and when this young man and his pals take over.

Sauce for the gander, you know.

* Many thanks to Eric Blair.

David Halberstam, R.I.P.

By Mark Dorroh

There have been rather a lot of people of my age and slightly older dying off lately, but the one I'll miss the most is David Halberstam.

He, William Manchester and a few other "pop historians" taught me new ways to look at complex stories, to find the precise angles of attack, the approaches to gathering and distributing information which are most logical, which serve the narrative best … and which are unquestionably the most fun to read.

As coincidence would have it, I had just finished re-reading (and passing along to a motorhead friend) "The Reckoning," chronicling the parallel fortunes of Nissan, Ford and other Japanese and American auto manufacturers beginning in the immediate postwar years and going through the mid-80s.

"The Reckoning" is as good a book as any for analyzing the author's strengths and savvy. Halberstam was able to take a number of years to gather the information and write it, and it shows. The depth and girth of the information provided (along with some very clever understandings of how people in different cultures handle similar problems) makes those years of (no doubt enjoyable) toil well worth the candle.

"The Reckoning" is a sprawling nonfiction saga of the sort, as Tom Wolfe warned so many years ago, which used to be the exclusive preserve of novelists.

Halberstam was not a New Journalist, but his narrative skills, coupled with his superb reportorial sensibility, made his work every bit as crisp and page-turningly readable as Gay Talese or Hunter Thompson. His characters said and did amazing things, things with a dramatic quality one would like to see employed in works of fiction, but which, as Wolfe famously observed, had been left out of so much of the navel-gazing fiction of the 1960s and -70s. Halberstam's use of natural drama and the telling detail indeed rivals Wolfe's own.

We'll not see his like again any time soon.

David Halberstam, rest in well-earned peace.

Nukes and National Prestige: The Lessons of History

By Mark Dorroh

Anyone who believes the US, UN or any other governmental body can or should prevent Iran from manufacturing nuclear weapons is misinterpreting that nation's motive.

Justifiably, we are concerned that a nation run by militant religious fanatics could use those weapons for aggression, not defense. Already Iran's president has declared his intention to destroy Israel, a politically motivated promise analogous to the late Egyptian politico Gamal Nasser's mid-century promise to "throw all the Jews into the sea."

The Arab and Persian states of the Middle East have spent the last half-century trying to do precisely that, so why would we take less seriously Iran's similar declared intention?

First, there is the matter of politics. Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, like Nasser before him, is telling his people what they want to hear. Whether the stated goal was rational or achievable has little to do with the reasons he identified it.

Consider: The US politicians of old, before radio and television made instant communication possible, would shape their message to whatever crowd they sought to impress. In states with wet and dry counties, such as Kentucky, it was not unusual for a candidate to make a prohibition speech in a dry county and an anti-prohibition speech in a wet one.

Secondly, for all his bloviating and saber rattling, Ahmadinejad knows full well that were Iran to actually attack with nuclear weapons Israel or any other nation, within an hour there would be massive retaliation from most if not all other nuclear nations.

So why bother to incur the levels of international outrage over Iran's incipient membership in the Nuclear Club? Why manufacture weapons you know you'll never dare use?

The answer has to do with prestige. Once again, turning to history, we see time and again that nations have engaged in undertakings which did them little if any actual good, but which identified them as big time players in global affairs.

The history of European colonization in Africa and Asia has been judged by historical economists, in some famous cases, as incurring net losses to the colonialists. But during the modern era, colonies were identified with visions of empire, regardless of their monetary value to the empire.

British possessions were the main example of colonies which actually paid for themselves and returned profits to the exchequer. The Dutch made smaller profits on smaller colonies, and the Spanish looted the precious metals of the New World to finance its endless wars, but on balance, these nations were the exceptions, not the rule.

The more usual case of European colonies was that of Italy, which colonized Ethiopia, especially Eritrea. The colony was a drain on the financial resources of Italians for the entire length of their stay in the Horn of Africa. But, under the Fascists especially, colonies were prestige possessions, holdings which said to the world that Italy had dreams of a recaptured Roman empire. The costs of garrisoning the colony, building public works (especially roads) and subjugating a proud and ancient people seemed worth it based not on actual return on investment, but rather upon the prestige conferred by colonial possessions.

Why do nations make such apparently irrational sacrifices? Perhaps for the same reason individuals buy bigger houses and cars than they actually need, spend more money on clothing and country club memberships than what they can truly afford, and send their children off to pricy, prestiege universities when their state schools would be not only cheaper, but often more appropriate to their kids' educational needs.

When the doctrine of "keeping up with the Joneses" goes nuclear, or subjects Third-World nations to the oppression of colonial rule, it is a sad thing.

But it is also human nature. In regard to Iran, the international community should keep the pressure on, since that nation is a well-known sponsor of state terrorism.

But worrying about a nuclear Iran daring to actually employ their nukes for anything but defense is wasted worry.

Suicide is not painless, and it is not what President Ahmadinejad seeks from his nuclear program. Noisy and demagogic he may be; nuts he is not.

Lawyers, Gang-Bangers and My Household Goddess

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Missions Accomplished, Civil Wars, Declaring Victory and Coming Home

Mark Dorroh

Back in 2003, I wrote a column which suggested that by 2005, America should begin seriously considering the option of withdrawing troops from Iraq through a simple, rhetorical expedient. My proposed end game to our nation's involvement in the conflict is borrowed from a 35-year-old remark made by US senator whose name I cannot recall (although I believe it was either Senator Fulbright or Senator Proxmire), on the subject of ending our involvement in the Vietnam War. That worthy legislator's suggestion was that we declare victory and bring our troops home.

His solution was not employed, or even taken very seriously at the time, but the military circumstances in Vietnam in 1970 and Iraq in 2006 are remarkably similar. Then, as now, a righteous effort to help facilitate freedom and self-determination in a small, divided nation gradually became a desperate - and failing - attempt to stop a civil war. The Iraqi civil war has already begun, and evidence on the ground suggests the world may be powerless to end it before the warring tribes exhaust themselves in slaughter.

Moreover, now that Saddam is deposed and on trial for his life, a new Iraqi constitution has been promulgated, a government formed and all Saddam's hidden WMD programs have been eliminated, is there any other realistic mission for America to attempt to accomplish in Iraq? I think not.

"Mission Accomplished?"

Whether or not some of us choose to believe it, the 2003 Coalition of the Willing's mission to Iraq has been accomplished.

That mission, to finally get weapons inspectors beyond the dozens of locked doors of suspected WMD sites - doors kept shut by the mad dictator in violation of the terms of his 1991 armistice and 17 UN Security Council resolutions - was accomplished none too soon.

The evidence of Saddam's continued treachery was plain to see in the news stories coming out of Iraq in late 2002. For instance, in the final months preceding the invasion (four years after WMD inspectors were unceremoniously tossed out of Iraq), the new round of inspections delivered to the UN Security Council the information that in one visit to a suspected WMD research and development lab, the "scientists" interviewed by Hans Blix's inspectors turned out to be security police wearing lab coats.

We now know, according to reports published by the Associated Press and Newsweek Magazine, that Saddam did indeed have good reason to keep those doors locked, those scientists on ice.*

Specifically, Saddam's researchers were actively engaged in programs seeking to employ dual-use technology and materials to create biological and chemical weapons. The reports I recall reading in Newsweek estimated that with the research and development substantially done, Saddam could have begun producing WMD stockpiles within a matter of months or even weeks. Thank heaven Hans Blix's advice to hang fire was disregarded by the Coalition of the Willing ...

This level of Iraqi readiness to begin manufacturing WMD should come as no surprise to anyone who takes the time to consider these facts: anthrax pathogens are readily available in the soil anywhere animals die of that infection, while the nerve gas Ricin is derived from the common castor bean. With the agents themselves easily produced, the primary goals of Saddam's WMD research were to weaponize the biological and nerve gas agents, figure out how to ramp up production on a large scale, then beg, borrow or steal delivery systems. His possession of ballistic missiles with ranges in excess of armistice limitations suggest he was well on his way to achieving those goals.

Mission Creep?

Among those insufficiently acquainted with the history of the 20th century, comparisons are frequently made between 1960 Vietnam and 2003 Iraq. Yet even though America's logical end game - declaring victory and coming home - applies to both conflicts, Iraq does not replicate the political circumstances of 1960 Vietnam so much as those of 1990 Yugoslavia.

Like Yugoslavia, Iraq has never been a real nation. It is a faux nation - a forced amalgamation of tribes who had never lived together in peace - cobbled together after WW I by Winston Churchill, the king-hell colonialist of his day. Like Yugoslavia under the dictatorship of Marshal Josip Broz Tito, Iraq is riven with religious and ethnic vendettas going back hundreds of years. And like Yugoslavia, in the absence of a "strong man" dictator, those conflicts will inevitably surface and play themselves out.

Like Yugoslavia, Iraq is on track to descend into a bloodbath which will only end when the indigenous ethnic tribes liberate themselves from the strictures imposed by Churchill's handiwork.

No number of coalition forces will prevent this from occuring; the best we can do is try to keep the killing down for the nonce ... and this modest goal may only be achieved through the continued sacrifice of blood and treasure by coalition nations.

Ergo, history suggests that we are left with one essential question: Is our nation's continued military presence in Iraq a classic case of the "mission creep" which needlessly cost American lives and sent us packing from Somolia? I believe it is.

I also believe that it is now, sadly, time for coalition forces to leave Iraq to her bloody, tragic, post-Saddam fate.

Will there ever again be a role for the international community to play in Iraq? Perhaps. After a few years of ethnic cleansing and genocide have been sufficiently well-documented, those non-coalition European nations who have evinced such tender concern for Iraqi civilians killed in the fog of a legal and utterly justified war will finally realize that they have a humanitarian duty, now that the initial heavy lifting has been done by member nations of the coalition, to replace those withdrawn forces and commit their own troops to be the new peacekeepers, ala NATO involvement in the former Yugoslavia.

It's a bitter pill to swallow, and we Americans will no doubt be blamed for the terror and murder to come. But it must be noted that the history of Iraq indicates the death toll from the 2003 invasion and Iraqi civil war combined will probably not exceed that inflicted by Saddam and his 30-year reign of terror. In those 30 years, Saddam involved Iraq in the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s - a genuine quagmire which went on twice as long as Operation Iraqi Freedom and which resulted in an estimated 1,000,000 Muslim casualties on both sides. Then, of course, there was Saddam's ill-advised invasion of Kuwait during which another 200,000 -300,000 Iraqi casualties were sustained, along with thousands of Kuwaitis killed, tortured, raped and looted.

Add those needless deaths to the evidence in post-invasion Iraq of mass graves, the exhaustively documented political terror and genocide perpetrated on dissenters and the non-Sunni Iraqi populations, and it would be hard to imagine that the costs of an all-out Iraqi Civil War could have worse human consequences than than those of Saddam's record of domestic terror and wars of aggression. One supposes it's possible, expecially with Syria and Iran playing puppetmasters and the Islamofascist revolution in full hue and cry. But the sad fact remains that, human nature being what it is, those bent on vendetta are seldom stopped by anything but the final judgment of their own people. Chances are good that when the colonial creation of the faux "nation" of Iraq morphs into three independent nations (possibly in some sort of mutual-defense, oil-revenue sharing federation) in the probable post-civil war resolution, the Iraqis will themselves call a halt to the killing.

To paraphrase the late, great Golda Mier, the Iraqi civil war will end when the tribes prosecuting it decide they love their children more than they hate each other.

*In fact, in Hans Blix's post-invasion report to the UN Security Council, based on his inspectors' final pre-invasion findings, the first few paragraphs contain the information that Saddam was still not obeying the mandates crafted by the UN in the aftermath of his invasion of Kuwait.

Also, tellingly, the 11,000 page "final report" submitted by the Iraqi government in 2002 still lacked comprehensive documentation of the destruction of the WMD stockpiles in his possession since 1991. It was, according the Blix's own experts, merely a rehash of documentation already submitted and found wanting.

Friction vs. Failure: "Wasteful Competition" and the Lessons of History

In an essay about the myth of oil corporation "price gouging" I wrote last year,* I alluded to the fact that the law of supply and demand is a lot like the law of gravity: Both laws will function with or without our recognition or approval; either law is ignored at one's own peril.

To that axiom might be added the observation that there are two models upon which a civilization may build its economic and political institutions. One is competitive with a bare minimum of authoritarian regulation, the other is authoritarian with a bare minimum of competition.

The thoroughly tragic history of the late U.S.S.R. demonstrates what happens to a modern society which adheres to the latter model. In absence of healthy competition between providers of goods and services (and providers of ideas), a nation is left with the unhealthy competition of warring cliques, each seeking power at any cost, each manifesting a singular disregard for the fortunes of the populations theoretically in their care.

Ayn Rand had an interesting take on this dynamic: She said in the absence of the "aristocracy of money" one could only be left with "the aristocracy of pull." As usual, her terms were carefully chosen and as usual her logic was unassailable.

Consider: In a post-feudal world, the "aristocracy of money" is founded upon creativity and productivity and thrives on competition.

The "aristocracy of pull" is founded on whom one knows, which favors may be called in - leveraged through bribery or blackmail - and whose backside it is advantageous to kiss on a quid pro quo basis. The "aristocracy of pull" rejects competition as "wasteful," then proceeds to squander the wealth of nations in eternal power struggles while the interests of the people languish, indeed, disappear altogether in the fog of perpetual wars between dueling oligarchies.

The result of years of national life under the aristocracy of pull is near-universal repression, barbarity, institutional cruelty on an unimaginable scale and, eventually, economic collapse followed closely by political collapse. So it was with the U.S.S.R.; So it will always be in those societies which assume competition is "wasteful" while overreaching governmental authority is "in everyone's best interests," even if "everyone" is unaware of the validity of that spurious supposition.

What does history say about government-protected private competition vs. top-down, command-and-control economic/political systems?

The answer is to be found in Paul Kennedy's landmark work, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers. Kennedy, who took a First in History at Oxford in his youth, has gone on to claim other signal honors. In 1983, he became Yale's J. Richardson Dilworth Professor of History, a position in which he has been able to focus his extreme discernment of the nature of history upon modern strategic and international affairs. He published The Rise and Fall in 1987, and it immediately shot to the top of every nonfiction best-sellers' list in the English-speaking world.

It also provoked a huge debate among those who had an interest in preserving the status quo of intellectual conventional wisdom.

Those intellectuals had good reason to dispute Professor Kennedy's claims. For within The Rise and Fall are many heretical notions, not the least of which is that at least one reason the great powers of Europe shot ahead of Asian civilizations which were older and, at the beginning of the modern era (1500 A.D.) in many ways more advanced, was that the geography of Europe forced competition upon those nations.

Kennedy posits that the great Mogul Empire of South Central Asia (including most of the Indian subcontinent) and the dynasties ruling China had employed government power to unify their diverse nations and thereby achieve a high degree of civilization while Europe was mired in the Dark Ages. Those great Asian civilizations had accordingly created better institutions with, on the whole, less internal warfare and greater degrees of progress and societal health.

The future great powers of Europe never had that option. Following the fall of Rome, there was no powerful unifying state to prevent constant competition between the warring kingdoms and principalities. Under those bloody, create-or-die circumstances, each language group and amalgamation of small powers was constrained to compete in military conflicts, and, logically, in the invention and creation of economic/political systems which would foster a maximum of arms-related research and development.

During the beginnings of the modern era, it became matter of brute fact that whichever coalition had the best armaments in a given conflict would have an advantage which, often as not, could not be overcome by substantially larger numbers of warriors fielded by its foe. From the English longbows of Agincourt to the Krupp Works cannon employed in the French-German war of 1870 and the American atomic bombs which ended the war in the Pacific Theater in 1945, superior firepower has had a huge influence over the winners and losers in any given conflict.

Moreover, economic systems which allowed more or less free investment opportunities, plus low tax burdens upon the investor classes (especially in England and in the Low Countries), helped foster the invention of the next generation of more powerful weapons systems.

Thus, even though the Chinese possessed gunpowder and primitive cannon long before, say, England, by the time of the great 18th and 19th century European colonial expansions into Asia, the conquerors possessed armament of far greater firepower and destructiveness.

In short, India and China, for all their superb civil and military organization, despite the gigantic armies they could field, never stood a chance against European warships, rifle and musket companies and artillery brigades. In both great Asian civilizations, the overreaching authority of the state had stifled the creation of new and better weapons by constraining the intellectual and scientific curiosity- and concomitant investment opportunities - which led to their invention.

Modern parallels?

My own observation, working from Kennedy's historical findings, is that a 20th century parallel to the success of the European "gunpowder empires" over older, better organized Asian empires might easily be identified in the history of Germany's National Socialism and the Communism of the U.S.S.R.

In the case of the Nazis, freethinking scientists and inventors, especially those of despised classes - including but not limited to the Jews of Central Europe - were actively discouraged from engaging in their life's work, indeed, they were persecuted and forced to flee to the West, especially America, where they were essential to the undertaking of creating the first controlled nuclear chain reaction … and the first atomic bombs.

The military research-and-development blunders of the U.S.S.R. were similar, but telling in their differences. Let's look at the U.S.S.R. at the beginning of the Cold War. At that time the victorious Red Army toted back to Stalin, as war trophies, a number of the V-2 rockets invented by Werner von Braun. As it happened, Stalin had on staff a brilliant scientist, one Sergei Korolev, whose understanding of rocketry was considerably more advanced than von Braun's, and this scientist begged Stalin to allow him to make improvements upon the V-2 template. Stalin, being Stalin, refused, and demanded the entire thrust of Soviet rocket science be focused upon making lots and lots of V-2s, exactly the way von Braun had designed them.**

It was not until the post-Stalin years of the mid-late 1950s that Soviet scientists and engineers, freed by Khrushchev from Stalin's artificial constraints upon their research options, were finally able to unleash their genius. Sputnik soon followed, and the Western powers were forced to play catch-up.

Which the Western powers did, and with a vengeance. And once again the principles of healthy competition of ideas, investments and workplace skills led to the downfall of the authoritarian model's ability to keep up with a capitalist democratic republic.

Even under Khrushchev's relatively benign rule, and certainly under the neo-Stalinist dictatorships of his successors, the inherent weaknesses of an anti-competitive system of economics, plus the state's repression of intellectual freedom, once again demonstrated the superiority of Western systems of "wasteful competition." When America put men on the moon in 1969 (using rocket, computer and other necessary components which were 100% designed and created by private companies which competed in the bidding process and were then required to perform to expectation)the proof was there for all to see … although too many otherwise perfectly intelligent professional thinkers ignored it.

Conventional Wisdom and the March of the Whorish Intellectuals

History shows, time and again, in century after century, civilization after civilization, that there is nothing wasteful about competition.

To the precise contrary, it is the super-regulatory state which impairs not only advances in societal health via new medicines, labor-saving machines and better understandings of the human condition in the humanities, but which also habitually presents obstacles to a nation-state's essential security and ability to defend itself from outside aggression.

For instance, Stalin's destruction of the upper echelons of his own officer corps during the paranoia-fueled purges of the 1930s was, in the opinion of many military historians, one of the primary reasons it took the Red Army as long as it did to prevail against the Nazi invaders.

And since warfare is, in many ways, an illustrative microcosm of all other collective undertakings of a given nation-state, it is reasonable to believe that while a certain amount of government regulation is necessary to discourage theft, fraud, unfair trade practices and the myriad of similar depredations of economic liberty which twisted, predatory minds may dream up, the proposition that competition, by creatively harnessing the profit motive, is essential to the survival (or at least the autonomy) of any nation-state is undeniable.

In the face of all this historical evidence, the fact that there are still Western intellectuals who defend authoritarian economic and political systems (including today's repressive theocracies of the Middle East) as being somehow equal to capitalism and republican democracy illustrates two important principles.

One is that in a culture of intellectual freedom, it is the inherent right of any person to believe any damn fool thing he wants to. I will defend to the death that right, because it's not for me (or the almighty state) to say what constitutes foolishness and what does not. Only the healthy competition of ideas and the measured outcomes of those competing ideas' execution can determine which are realistic and which are foolish.

The other thing proven here is that there are a great number of Western intellectuals who will, if given the chance, revere postmodern conventional wisdom ("capitalism is inherently evil," "competition is wasteful," "individuals cannot be expected to serve the greater good by being allowed to pursue their own goals for personal profit," etc.) the way a seasoned prostitute reveres her pimp.

Her pimp may inhibit her freedom, take away most of her money and periodically beat her senseless, but the co-dependant relationship between victim and victimizer is so emotionally important to both that they will tend to remain locked in their mutually-destructive death spiral until one or both shuffle off his/her mortal coil.

Lenin, for all his serial denial of objective reality and human nature, said a very true thing when he coined his famously pithy term for such whorish intellectuals. He called them "useful idiots."

* See Windfall profits, price gouging and wounded minnows (May 5, 2006).

** Stalin applied this anti-logic to other, non-military matters. For instance, he put in charge of the Soviet ministries of agriculture a committed Leninist from a politically correct family, one Trofim Denisovich Lysenko. This clever fellow believed Mendel was a charlatan and the science of genetics was "a bourgeois pseudoscience. Accordingly, Soviet agricultural yields were held at artificially low levels for many decades. In view of the fact that the West sold grain to Russia at bargain-basement prices for most of those decades, it is arguable that without the surpluses provided by wasteful competition between agricultural concerns in other countries, the U.S.S.R. would have been starved into collapse long before 1993.

Useful idiots, indeed.

An Open Letter to the Hon. Virgil H. Goode, Jr., U.S. House of Representatives

Dear Friends:

As you've probably already read or heard, yet another member of the Virginia delegation to the US Congress has gone off his chum in reference to the subject of foreign types with foreign belief systems.

Here is my response. It's been sent to the congressman's office and a few local news outlets. I thought you might get a kick out of it.

Dear Congressman Goode:

I read with interest your letter to constituents concerned with the use of the Koran in a swearing-in ceremony, and have done a bit of research. You will be proud to know there is evidence that you are not the first of your family to stand firm in defense of the True Faith of Our Fathers. This letter to constituents, authored three centuries ago, appears to be written by your distant ancestor (albeit one whose name-spelling was somewhat different, but being the descendent of an Irish immigrant from County Antrim who spelt his name, in 1793, "Daraugh," I know this sometimes happens). Read, enjoy and feel free to validate my research of the role of the state in religious belief systems in our fair Republic and the colonial possessions which gave it birth.

Very truly yours, Mark Dorroh Richmond, VA

From the Desk of His Majesty's Sheriff,

Prince George County

Virginia Colony

December 12, 1706

Thank you for your recent communication. When I raise my hand to take the oath on Swearing In Day, I will use Our Blessed Church's King James Bible and none other. I do not subscribe to using any other version of The Revealed Word, for is not our Gracious King the titular head of our own Church of England, Ordained by Bloodline and by the approval of God Almighty? Did some misguided lackwit repeal the Divine Right of Kings whilst we slept?

Is not His Gracious Majesty the final authority over all matters, secular and spiritual?

And yet we hear of those who seek public office who subscribe to neither the King James Bible nor the doctrinal purity of our Church of England; even in this fair county are we forced to share with them the air we breathe, our children's faith and our slaves, these atheists and devil-worshippers who say faith is merely a matter of personal choice (!), that the state must have no role in matters of personal conscience!

What godless madness is this? Are we to tolerate these serial heresies, and in our own County?

Nay, say I, and nay say all right-thinking Prince George subjects of His Most Gracious Majesty!

For it follows that if one loves one's Blessed Sovereign, one must love one's Blessed Sovereign's Bible and Church, does it not? And is to not love one's Sovereign, Bible and Church not treason most foul?

Verily, it cannot be otherwise!

Unless we stop the immigration of these heretics, these Quaking so-called "Friends" who possess not slaves, a proper church nor doctrine consistent with the only true version of the Bible, we shall, by the end of this century, have many more Quakers amongst us, perverting the Holy Word and making us sick and weak with their heresies!

And speak not to me of these so-called "Baptists," for they are greater heretics yet than even their Quaker co-conspirators! In the foolishness of their self-made faith, they claim their church has its origins not in the crucifixion and resurrection of our Lord and Savior, but in the teachings of an wandering prophet of the Judean wilderness, a man who met Our Savior once, baptized him, and was not even present at Golgotha when the miracles of the Passion occurred!

Shall we tolerate these madmen, these breakers of the faith, these witches, warlocks and their godless spawn?

Never, say I! Never so long as I am His Majesty's Sheriff!

Verily, we must run these dangerous lunatics over the borders of our fair county, send them to perdition (or at least New Kent County) and free ourselves of their pernicious beliefs and their anti-English ways. The Ten Commandments and "In God We Trust" are on the wall in my office. A Baptist student came by the office and asked why I did not have anything on my wall about St. John the Baptist. My response was clear, "As long as I have the honor of keeping the King's Law in this county, no mention of your mystical prophet is going to be on the wall of my office."

Then I ran him across the border to New Kent County. For this, by the grace of our Sovereign, I was rewarded with a goodly measure of choice tobacco, for such is the per-head bounty for removing heretics from His Majesty's County of Prince George.*

Let this be the way of things henceforth! Otherwise, within a few hundred years, we may well be inundated with these "Baptists" and their heretical ways!

Thank you again for your letters and thoughts.

God Save His Gracious Majesty and his Church of England for all time!

Sincerely yours, V.H. Goodie,Sr., County of Prince George, Virginia Colony

* Source: The Prince George-Hopewell Story by Francis Earle Lutz - Richmond, 1957. Copies may be accessed at The Library of Virginia.