This essay is based on the 2007 book The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Nassim Nicholas Taleb (1960 - ). It is hardly an obscure tome, having been on the New York Times bestseller list for several weeks. Before I get to the essence of this essay I believe explaining what the term “Black Swan” means and saying a few words about the author would be in order.
It was once thought in the Old World that only white swans existed. Then from Australia came the realization that there were black swans. And no, they were not white swans made black by bootblack or any other artificial coloring medium. After millennia of observations in the West of millions of white swans, the sighting of one black swan was enough to invalidate this long and firmly held belief. In a broader sense then A Black Swan is a sudden, monumental, and completely unexpected event. WWI, WWII, and 9/11 were Black Swans. If one were to win a multi-million dollars lottery that would be a personal Black Swan (Black Swans are not all negative, although given the troubles experienced by some of these huge lottery winners, this might also be negative).
But a Black Swan is more than this – it goes to the heart of and challenges the putative acceptance of Gaussian probabilities. Least you think Gaussian or bell shaped probability functions are theoretical only and not important in real life, then consider that not only mathematics, but engineering, medicine, social sciences, economomics, the insurance industry, Wall Street, and other fields of science and the arts use Gaussian probabilities in their calculations and predictions. I will get much deeper into this later in the essay.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb is an odd name to the Western ear. In fact he grew up in a family from the Greco-Syrian community from what was the last Byzantine outpost in northern Syria and which was incorporated into the country of Lebanon after the fall of the Ottoman Empire. This part of the Middle East was relatively stable until the last quarter of the 20th century. The mosaic of cultures and religions in this region consisted of Christians of all varieties – Maronites (The father of the reputed richest man in the world, Mexican Carlos Slim Helú, was a Maronite Christian who emigrated from Lebanon to Mexico), Armenians, Greco-Syrian Byzantine Orthodox, Byzantine Catholics, in addition to a few Roman Catholics left over from the Crusades; Muslims (Shiites and Sunnis); Druzes; and a few Jews. The Taleb family had been successful for generations. On his mother’s side both his grandfather and great-grandfather were deputy prime ministers of Lebanon and on his father’s side (his father was an oncologist) his grandfather was a Supreme Court Justice. In 1861 his four times great grandfather was a governor of the Ottoman semi-autonomous province of Mount Lebanon.
The Civil War between Christians and Muslims which began in 1975 came completely out of the blue and, although Taleb did not realize it at the time, would later contribute to his philosophy of the Black Swan. At that time people would say with seeming confidence that the war would last at most just a few weeks. It went on for 15 years.
Taleb holds an MBA from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and a Ph.D in management science from the University of Paris.
It is difficult to define the métier of Taleb. Clearly he is a polymath. He has worked as a securities analysis on Wall Street, a Visiting Professor of Marketing at the London Business School, the Dean’s Professor in the Sciences of Uncertainty at the Isenberg School of Management at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, Adjunct Professor of Mathematics at the Courant Institute of New York University, and affiliated faculty member at the Wharton Business School Financial Institutions Center. He previously authored a best selling book titled Fooled by Randomness which has been published in 20 languages.
Predicting the future based upon the past is universally done, yet there are pitfalls in this. Consider the turkey which has been fed for 1000 consecutive days. This avian creature has no logical reason to believe this pattern will not continue indefinitely. Think of the surprise awaiting the hapless bird when on Wednesday, day 1001, the process starts for making the turkey the center of attraction for the feast the next day. Sacre blu!
Explaining historical events in hindsight is facile and far from convincing since, for the most part, nobody could or does predict what eventually unfolds beforehand. In a very general way there may be some basis for assigning cause and effect to certain events. One may reasonably hold that the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 contributed to WWI which in turn led to WWII. The Prussians won that 1870 war, temporarily occupied Paris, extracted a billion dollars in reparations, and expropriated previously held French territory. After being on the winning side of WWI, the French imposed onerous conditions on the Germans at least partially because of what happened to them in 1870. In WWII the Germans reacted to what had happened to them after WWI with a fury that was unjustified, to say the least, yet without the dour economic conditions which occurred in Germany after WWI, WWII may not have happened.
Even so, after the Napoleonic conflicts, except for the 1870 Franco-Prussian casus belli, the European continent experienced a period of peace that would belie any anticipation of the carnage that would result in WWI, The Great War of 1914-19, that would be the deadliest conflict, until then, in the history of mankind.
In the summer of 1982 large American banks lost many billions of dollars as countries in South and Central America defaulted at the same time on loans made by these banks. The early 1990’s brought the now defunct savings and loan industry meltdown which required a taxpayer funded bailout of close to half a trillion dollars. Now in 2007 it is the turn of the home mortgage lenders and lendees in what is called the “sub-prime” market, to require many billions of dollars in another bailout. There are obviously serious problems with standard Gaussian risk assessment tools employed by the people in these industries.
With the following example many people would get it wrong: A town has one large hospital and one small one. On a given day in one of the hospitals 60% of the births were boys. Which one was it likely to be? The correct answer is that the smaller hospital would more likely have the bigger difference in parity of births because the sampling would more likely be smaller and therefore more prone to deviate from the average.
An acronym used in medical literature is NED (No Evidence of Disease). There is no such thing as END (Evidence of No Disease), yet Taleb related that during a routine cancer examination he was told by the doctor that “There is evidence of no cancer.” When Taleb asked him how he knew he said, “The scan is negative.” I have never heard a scientist or even a medical doctor make a claim that observational absence of something was evidence that it did not exist, yet who am I to say that Taleb remembered incorrectly?
We see the obvious and visible consequences of certain actions, not invisible and less obvious ones. When Islamic terrorists flew two airplanes into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, flew an airplane into the Pentagon, and caused an airplane to crashed in Pennsylvania, approximately 3000 people died. In the final three months or so of that year an estimated 1000 people also died as a result of the terrorist attack. How so? These were the people who, out of fear of flying, chose to drive on the country’s highways and because of the much higher mortality rate versus flying became additional casualties.
There are drugs which can prolong people’s lives, yet occasionally someone will have a fatal reaction to that drug. When this risk is known will doctors still prescribe this drug to their patients? Many will not because of the threat of lawsuits by the few thereby claiming invisible victims for the many.
A coin which we are told is “fair”, that is to say, it has an equal probability of either being heads or tails, is flipped and comes up heads 99 times in a row. What is the probability of it being heads on the 100th flip? Theoretically the odds would be 50%, but what would the practical answer be? Given that the coin has come up the same 99 times in a row it would be far more likely that the given initial conditions are wrong, i.e. the coin is not “fair” and therefore the probability of it being heads again is far more likely.
Three relatively recent technologies that have had the most impact on the world today are the computer, the internet, and the laser. They were all unpredicted, unplanned, and unappreciated – they were all Black Swans. In fact, in terms of their anticipation and utility, almost all of the great discoveries in the world were Black Swans. Occasionally there is a discovery which was predicted, although its use not even close to being fully realized. After the invention of the wireless (radio), in 1908 someone predicted that people would be able to carry around a device, a portable telephone, to communicate with each other over wide ranges of distances. That was remarkable insight given that earth satellites and microwave towers were not even dreamed of. It was the rare exception. It was what might be called a White Swan.
In 1928 Alexander Fleming noticed that one of his bacteria plates which had been contaminated with a mold had the odd effect of clearing a zone around itself in which the bacteria did not grow. He assigned so little importance to it that he turned to the then popular investigation of sulfa as an anti-bacterial drug. It wasn’t until years later that Fleming got interested in the strange properties of the mold. He received the Nobel Prize for medicine in 1945 for his contribution in the discovery of penicillin.
One of philospher Karl Popper’s central insights is that in order to predict historical events you need to anticipate technological innovation which is fundamentally unpredictable.
Henri Poincaré was one of the first mathematicians/philosphers to formulate the limits unlinearities put on forecasting.
Predicting the first impact of billiard balls on a table is not difficult given the initial state of the billiard balls, the table, and the impact of the cue. In predicting the 56th impact every single elementary particle in the universe needs to be accounted for in the calculations.
In the 1960’s an MIT meteorologist produced a computer model of weather dymanics that ran a simulation projecting a weather system a fews days in advance. Later he tried to repeat the same simulation with the same model and what he thought were the same input data. He got wildly different results. He initially thought he had a computer bug or a calculation error. Subsequently he realized the different results were caused by small roundings in the input parameters. This became known as the “butterfly effect” since a butterfly moving its wings in India could cause a hurricane in New York two years later.
In 1931 Belgian Roman Catholic priest/cosmologist, Georges Lemaître, postulated that the universe started as a primeval atom. Astronomer George Gamow expanded upon this idea and predicted in 1948 there should be background radiation left over from the Big Bang (The term was coined sardonically by Fred Hoyle who believed in the steady-state theory of the universe). In 1965 Arno Penzias and Robert Woodrow of Bell Telephone Laboratories were working on a radiometer to be used in radio astronomy and satellite communications. They kept getting an anomalous background noise which was of the same intensity wherever it was pointed in the sky. It turned out they had inadvertantly discovered the background radiation from the Big Bang. It was a Black Swan. In 1978 they received the Nobel Prize in physics.
Our intuition about nonlinear multiplicative effects is rather weak. According to the story (possibly apocryphal), the inventor of the chessboard requested the following compensation for his invention: one grain of rice for the first square, two for the second, four for the third, eight for the fourth, and so on. The king granted his request thinking he was asking for a mere pittance. The king was outsmarted because the total amount of rice was more than all of the possible rice reserves in the world (2 to the 63rd power = 9.2234….times 10 to the 18 power + 2 to the 62nd power = 4.6117….times 10 to the 18th power, etc.)!
The empirical methods of the Greeks of two millennia ago are being revived. Before the role of bacteria in disease was known, doctors distained hand washing because it made no sense to them despite the evidence of a meaningful decrease in hospital deaths when hygienic methods were used. Similarly it may not “make sense” that acupuncture works, but if pushing a needle into someone’s toe systematically produce relief from pain then it could be there are functions too complicated for us to understand, so why not do it while we keep an open mind on the subject.
The notion of asymmetric outcomes is central to the alternative of Gaussian probability. The unknown will always be by definition unknown. However one can guess how it might affect them and therefore base one’s decisions on that.
The mathematician and philospher Blasé Pascal proposed the following: I do not whether God exists, but I have nothing to gain by being an atheist if God does not exist, whereas I have a great deal to lose if He does exist. Hence this justifies my belief in God. Theologically this makes no sense because God would surely know if someone’s belief in Him were so contrived and self-serving. Outside of theology it makes a great deal of sense. It eliminates the need to understand the probabilities of a rare event; rather we can concentrate on the payoffs and benefits of an event if it takes place. The probabilities of very rare events are not computable; the effects of an event on us are considerably easier for us to ascertain. We can have a clear idea of the consequences of an event, even if we do not know how likely it is to occur. We don’t know the odds of an earthquake, but we can imagine the effects it would have on San Francisco.
Before the currency was replaced by the euro, the German 10 deutschmark bill contained a portrait of Carl Friedrich Gauss and a representation of his Gaussian bell shaped curve. There is irony here because the reichmark, as it was then called, went from four per dollar to four trillion per dollar in just a few years in the 1920’s. In the random fluctuations of currencies there is no possible accounting for such a colossal deviation from the norm with Gaussian probability distributions.
Casino owners understand the principle of not relying on Gaussian probability distributions by limiting the size of the bets for each gambler. They will take limited bets from many individuals while rejecting very large bets from a few. No casino is going to lose a billion dollars on a single bet.
Sir Francis Galton, Charles Darwin’s first cousin and Erasmus Darwin’s grandson, was blessed with no mathematical baggage, but he had a rare obsession with measurement. Galton applied the bell curve to areas like genetics and heredity, in which its use was justified. But his enthusiasm helped thrust nascent statistical methods into social issues.
Galileo Galilei said that the Great Book of Nature is written in mathematical language and the characters are triangles, circles, and other geometric figures. Taleb asks: “Was Galileo legally blind? Mountains are not triangles or pyramids; trees are not circles; straight lines are almost never seen anywhere.” I ask, how could such a normally perceptive and original thinker as Galileo be so self-deluded?
The problem of the circularity of statistics is as follows: How can we tell if we have enough data to put forth a hypothesis? From the probability distribution. If it is a Gaussian bell curve then a few points will suffice. And how do we know the distribution is Gaussian? Well, from the data. So we need the data to tell us what the probability distribution is, and a probability distribution to tell us how many data we need.
As measured by the S&P 500, by removing the 10 biggest one-day moves in the stock market in the last 50 years there is a huge difference in returns – and yet conventional financial analysis interprets these one-day jumps as mere anomalies. Similarly if the top 40 best single market days were missed in the last 10 years one’s market returns would be greatly reduced even though 21 of those days came during the brutal 2000-2002 bear market. The equities market is too dominated by Black Swans to allow successful market timing.
The entire statistical business confuses absence of proof with proof of absence. You need only one single observation to reject the Gaussian, but millions of observations will not fully confirm the validity of a Gaussian distribution. Why? Because the Gaussian bell curve disallows large deviations, but non-Gaussian distributions, the alternative, do not disallow long quiet periods.
“Forget everything you have ever heard in college statistics or probability theory. If you never took such a class, even better. Let us start from the very beginning.”
“If you ever took a (dull) statistics class in college, did not understand much of what the professor was excited about, and wondered what “standard deviation” meant, there is nothing to worry about. The notion of standard deviation is meaningless…..”
“Standard deviations do not exist outside the Guassian, or if they do exist they do not matter and do not explain much. But it gets worse. The Guassian family (which includes various friends and relatives, such as the Poisson Law) are the only class of distributions that the standard deviation (and average) is sufficient to describe. You need nothing else. The bell curve satisfies the reductionism of the deluded.”
“This monstrosity called the Gaussian bell curve is not Gauss’s doing. Although he worked on it, he was a mathematician dealing with a theoretical point, not making claims about the structure of reality like statistical-minded scientists. The bell curve was mainly the concoction of a gambler, Abraham de Moivre (1667-1754), a French Calvinist refugee who spent much of his life in London, though speaking heavily accented English.”
These are the words of Taleb. He has a point, but in my opinion he goes a bit too far in rejecting Gaussian probability functions. Where there are extreme deviations from the normal as in the examples of currency inflation or in single day stock market moves clearly Gaussian distributions are useless, but if, for example, one would measure the length of squirrel tails, there would be a standard bell shaped Gaussian curve. Nature does not always reject Gaussian distributions. However, Taleb is certainly correct in aserting that overwhelmingly most monumental events are Black Swans.
Wednesday, December 12, 2007
Monday, November 19, 2007
Free Speech – Free For Whom? 41
In the wake of the inane and insane writings of the beyond egregious University of Colorado professor, the ersatz American Indian, Ward Churchill, the issue of “free speech” has been freely, so to speak, bandied about by commentators on the right, left, and in the middle. Interestingly, although this story had been all over talk radio, the internet, Fox News, and in many newspapers, there was only one brief mention on ABC television and none at all on CBS and NBC. To paraphrase Adlai Stevenson: The mainstream news media have an absolute talent separating wheat from chaff, then throwing away the wheat and planting the chaff.
Fact is there is no such thing as “free speech”, nor should there be. A rather provocative statement would you not say? Especially for one who thankfully and appreciatively lives in a representative democratic society – the greatest one on earth in my opinion. Yet, it is a statement I think I can rationally and logically defend. I must say I agree with Thomas Jefferson when he said, “There is not a truth I fear or wish unknown to the world.”
For openers let’s consider the U.S. Constitution. That is the basis for our freedom of speech is it not? Well, what does the constitution actually say? The 1st Amendment to the Constitution (the first ten amendments were ratified in 1791 and are called the Bill of Rights) states, “Congress shall make no law…….abridging the freedom of speech…….” Congress is defined as the United States House of Representatives and the Senate. There is no mention in the Constitution about states, counties, municipalities, businesses, associations, universities, etcetera being circumscribed in limiting someone’s speech.
As a matter of course most of us, as a society, tend to ignore the constitution when it suits our purpose. For example, Article I, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution states: “Congress shall have power to declare War…..” The United States has fought the Korean War, Vietnam War, First Iraq War, Afghanistan War, and now Second Iraq War, yet Congress has not declared war since December 8, 1941 ( the vote was unanimous except for pacifist Representative Jeannette Rankin [1880-1973] of Montana who was the first woman elected to Congress). Representative from Texas Dr. Ron Paul (obstetrics/gynecology) is the only current member to object to Congress having abrogated its authority to declare war to the president. And I don’t see people demonstrating in the streets over this issue the way the Ukrainians did when their democratic election for prime minister was in the process of being stolen.
At other times some people invoke what they perceive to be in the Constitution when it is convenient for them whether it is done ipse dixit or not. Unfortunately and importantly many of these people are judges; especially federal judges.
For those who still insist there are practically, short of endangering public safety, no limits on speech without consequence, even if it is only implicit in the Constitution, you should consider the sanctions and/or contumely which were imposed or heaped on the following: Trent Lott, Robert Byrd, Al Campanis, Jimmy Breslin, Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, Don Imus, Jimmy “The Greek” Snyder, Andy Rooney, Bill Maher, and Larry Summers (It is notable there is nary a woman on the list. An amalgam of Al Campanis and Larry Summers might say women lack the “necessities” to be top notch mathematicians or physicists, but I would say when it comes to discretion and good sense in speech women apparently have a distinct advantage over Neanderthals; that is to say men). There was no deus ex machina to save these men from discomfiture and embarrassment and I for one do not believe they were treated too harshly, possibly excepting Trent Lott. Even he may have deserved it on the basis of stupidity – after all he is a professional and long time politician and decidedly should have known better.
Then there is the aphorism spoken by former four term governor of New York and unsuccessful 1928 Democratic presidential candidate, Al Smith, “There ain’t no free lunch.” There might be a lesson in there as applied to speech.
By all means indulge yourself in the exercise of free speech. Your lot might be to gather scorn and pejorative comment. Still, consider it a fair bargain for the sheer joy of saying what you want, however dopy or misguided. What curmudgeonly lexicographer Dr. Samuel Johnson had to say on the subject seems a bit harsh, yet may be realistic: “Every man [person] has the right to utter what he thinks truth, and every other man [person] has a right to knock him down for it.”
Fact is there is no such thing as “free speech”, nor should there be. A rather provocative statement would you not say? Especially for one who thankfully and appreciatively lives in a representative democratic society – the greatest one on earth in my opinion. Yet, it is a statement I think I can rationally and logically defend. I must say I agree with Thomas Jefferson when he said, “There is not a truth I fear or wish unknown to the world.”
For openers let’s consider the U.S. Constitution. That is the basis for our freedom of speech is it not? Well, what does the constitution actually say? The 1st Amendment to the Constitution (the first ten amendments were ratified in 1791 and are called the Bill of Rights) states, “Congress shall make no law…….abridging the freedom of speech…….” Congress is defined as the United States House of Representatives and the Senate. There is no mention in the Constitution about states, counties, municipalities, businesses, associations, universities, etcetera being circumscribed in limiting someone’s speech.
As a matter of course most of us, as a society, tend to ignore the constitution when it suits our purpose. For example, Article I, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution states: “Congress shall have power to declare War…..” The United States has fought the Korean War, Vietnam War, First Iraq War, Afghanistan War, and now Second Iraq War, yet Congress has not declared war since December 8, 1941 ( the vote was unanimous except for pacifist Representative Jeannette Rankin [1880-1973] of Montana who was the first woman elected to Congress). Representative from Texas Dr. Ron Paul (obstetrics/gynecology) is the only current member to object to Congress having abrogated its authority to declare war to the president. And I don’t see people demonstrating in the streets over this issue the way the Ukrainians did when their democratic election for prime minister was in the process of being stolen.
At other times some people invoke what they perceive to be in the Constitution when it is convenient for them whether it is done ipse dixit or not. Unfortunately and importantly many of these people are judges; especially federal judges.
For those who still insist there are practically, short of endangering public safety, no limits on speech without consequence, even if it is only implicit in the Constitution, you should consider the sanctions and/or contumely which were imposed or heaped on the following: Trent Lott, Robert Byrd, Al Campanis, Jimmy Breslin, Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, Don Imus, Jimmy “The Greek” Snyder, Andy Rooney, Bill Maher, and Larry Summers (It is notable there is nary a woman on the list. An amalgam of Al Campanis and Larry Summers might say women lack the “necessities” to be top notch mathematicians or physicists, but I would say when it comes to discretion and good sense in speech women apparently have a distinct advantage over Neanderthals; that is to say men). There was no deus ex machina to save these men from discomfiture and embarrassment and I for one do not believe they were treated too harshly, possibly excepting Trent Lott. Even he may have deserved it on the basis of stupidity – after all he is a professional and long time politician and decidedly should have known better.
Then there is the aphorism spoken by former four term governor of New York and unsuccessful 1928 Democratic presidential candidate, Al Smith, “There ain’t no free lunch.” There might be a lesson in there as applied to speech.
By all means indulge yourself in the exercise of free speech. Your lot might be to gather scorn and pejorative comment. Still, consider it a fair bargain for the sheer joy of saying what you want, however dopy or misguided. What curmudgeonly lexicographer Dr. Samuel Johnson had to say on the subject seems a bit harsh, yet may be realistic: “Every man [person] has the right to utter what he thinks truth, and every other man [person] has a right to knock him down for it.”
Friday, November 9, 2007
Too Much Freedom? You Bet! 40
At the start I want to make it clear that I am talking about the West and especially the good old USA, not countries in general, especially Islamic or other totalitarian societies where there are indeed deficiencies of freedoms.
And let’s dispose of the mantras where security/safety and freedom are positioned as polar opposites. An example is the aphorism attributed to Benjamin Franklin: “They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” Liberals might posit it advantageous that absolute freedom was preserved for everyone, including the brigands who would dispatch them to the “undiscovered country”, but I would think it a poor bargain. Give me not “liberty or death”; give me life and a little less liberty for those who would do us ill.
Liars (sorry, I mean lawyers, I seem to frequently confuse those two words – I wonder why?) who claim their clients were innocent yesterday, are innocent today, and will certainly be innocent tomorrow are not doing the law abiding, decent, and considerate rest of us any favors. We pay in treasure and blood when criminals are either not convicted or subjected to shorter incarceration than they deserve and which is not conducive for the non commission of crime.
How many people are actually assaulted, restrained, or even incommoded by law enforcement other than felons and malefactors? I have been on this planet for more than four score minus ten years and not only have I not been harassed or harangued by the gendarme, but I do not know anyone who was unjustly subjected to same. The ones who seem to suffer or feign suffering the most in regard to what they interpret as overzealous laws and law enforcement are the lachrymose, hand wringing, hysterical social liberals. For witnessing such an entertaining spectacle as these posturing wimps I would almost, but not quite, be willing to endure a really overly aggressive or even repressive regime.
In 2004 there were approximately 16,500 people murdered in the United States. That does not include the hundred of thousands who were senselessly and unjustifiably beaten and crippled by criminal cretins. True, some of those were miscreants who received proper punishment; still the large majority was innocent men, women, and children who were blameless and tragic victims. Does anyone seriously doubt that with fewer nonsensical restraints on law enforcement and indeed on individuals in their own or someone else’s defense these numbers would be reduced? I thank God I live in Texas where one may dispatch to inferno home intruders intent on larceny and mayhem. There are some states where, as difficult as it is to believe, the home occupants are first legally required to try to flee rather than confront these vandals and villains before attempting to send them to perdition. How do you like them apples? From the foregoing one might conclude that I am advocating for more freedom not less. Yes, more freedom in defense of life, limb, and property, but certainly less freedom and fewer rights for the criminally inclined. Least you think I am exaggerating on this point about criminals being emboldened by lax laws and insufficient law enforcement then let me relate the following stories which were in the news in 2006: (1) In London, England there are gangs of juvenile punks, called “hoodies” because they wear hooded sweatshirts, who rampage through suburban parks destroying property, knocking down bike riders, and threatening picnickers. On buses they laugh while punching passengers in the face and recording the attack on their mobile phones. In some cases they were imitating such extreme-stunt shows as MTV’s Jackass. They beat a 16 year old girl unconscious while recording the attack on a mobile phone and messaging it to their friends. A 41 year old man who had fallen asleep at a bus stop was permanently disfigured and burned over 22% of his body when these punks set him on fire. A 5 year old boy escaped death after being lured from his yard by these teen age cretins who placed a noose around his neck and attempted to hang him. A 49 year old man was left brain damaged and in a coma after he challenged the gang youths who were throwing stones at his car. A Manchester schoolteacher used a pellet gun to fire warning shots at teens that had repeatedly harassed her family and were vandalizing her son’s car. The schoolteacher was fired from her job which she had held for 25 years and received a 6 month prison sentence for the illegal use of a firearm! Is this an “Alice in Wonderland” reality or what?
(2) There is a video game called Grand Theft Auto which has sold 35 million copies and grossed $2 billion worldwide to date. The objective of this interactive “game” is to commit as much virtual murder, mayhem, robbery, and violent anti-social acts as possible. Included in the interactive activities are forcibly stealing cars; decapitating people, complete with simulated squiring blood; beating people to a pulp; and shooting gaping holes in cops. One virtual scene is a police station where the “fun” is to kill as many cops as are encountered and then escaping by stealing a police cruiser. The defense the producers of these abominable videos games fall back on is the claim that it does not cause people to actually commit these acts in real life. What is beyond dispute is that kids with other at-risk factors, e.g. being from dysfunctional families, absent parents, delinquent friends with the same background, and the offspring of criminals, among other risks, are negatively influenced by repeatedly playing this video. There are examples of kids who after being arrested admitted they were influenced by this video game.
(3) Young male motorcyclists travel at high speeds and perform acrobatic stunts on public highways while being video taped by their friends. The videos or DVD’s are then sold. Incredibly there seems to be a market for this insane and criminal spectacle. Often these stunts are done in traffic, putting motorists at high risk and scaring the hell out of them as any sensible person would be. Additionally these motorcyclists challenge the police in their police cars. At times with the motorcyclists traveling well over 100 miles per hour, sometimes the police abandon the chase because not to do so would not only put their own lives at risk, but other motorists as well. In an interview with a television journalist one of these lame-brained motorcycle morons allowed as how he thought, if one could call it thinking, that nobody had the right to set speed limits on public highways. And he said that he didn’t believe any motorist would get hurt when a motorcycle occasionally got out of control. Of course there are motorists who have gotten killed or seriously injured when the motorcycles sans rider have gone careening and careering out of control, but that idiot could not or would not admit it.
(4) In 2006 the US Supreme Court voided two death penalty convictions – one in Texas. There was never any doubt about the guilt of these two murderers. The court ruled that they did not receive a “fair” trial. These decisions were widely applauded by liberals. Neither they nor the court commented on whether the murdered victims received a “fair” hearing from their vicious murders. At the risk of sounding highly provocative and perhaps to some even unhinged, I must say I do not give a damn whether anyone gets a “fair” trial so long as there is no rational and reasonable doubt as to their guilt.
In 2007 the US Supreme Court, in effect, put a hold on executions until it could render a decision on whether the method of execution by states using fatal chemical injection was “cruel and inhumane.” As could be expected, one of the plaintiffs in this case was the ACLU (American Criminal Liberties Union). No decision has yet been made, but I wonder if whether the victims of these heinous criminals were treated in a “cruel and inhumane” manner will be considered.
Whether the robbers barons Bernie Ebbers of WorldCom; John Rigas & son of Adelphia; Gary Winnick of Global Crossing; and Ken Lay, Jeff Skilling, and Andrew Fastow of Enron had “fair” trials troubles me not a whit. These crooks have stolen from and caused equity prices of their companies to decrease by billions of dollars inflicting financial pain and woe on hundreds of thousands of employees and shareholders. I am an unaffected and impartial bystander, yet I would punish them with the maximum fines and prison sentences possible by law. The 80 year old cancer patient John Rigas was given 15 years by the judge with the proviso that if, at any point, medical authorities told the judge that Rigas had only 3 months or so to live he might be released from prison. I would have given that old bastard 30 years in the slammer and if he said he could not do it because of his advanced age and ill health I would have told him then he must do as much as he can.
If anyone wants to disagree with my thesis that we in the West have too much rather than too little freedom or I am engaging in a bit too much Sturm und Drang, then by all means respond with your arguments. The only caveat I would make is that your response be well reasoned with valid examples.
And let’s dispose of the mantras where security/safety and freedom are positioned as polar opposites. An example is the aphorism attributed to Benjamin Franklin: “They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” Liberals might posit it advantageous that absolute freedom was preserved for everyone, including the brigands who would dispatch them to the “undiscovered country”, but I would think it a poor bargain. Give me not “liberty or death”; give me life and a little less liberty for those who would do us ill.
Liars (sorry, I mean lawyers, I seem to frequently confuse those two words – I wonder why?) who claim their clients were innocent yesterday, are innocent today, and will certainly be innocent tomorrow are not doing the law abiding, decent, and considerate rest of us any favors. We pay in treasure and blood when criminals are either not convicted or subjected to shorter incarceration than they deserve and which is not conducive for the non commission of crime.
How many people are actually assaulted, restrained, or even incommoded by law enforcement other than felons and malefactors? I have been on this planet for more than four score minus ten years and not only have I not been harassed or harangued by the gendarme, but I do not know anyone who was unjustly subjected to same. The ones who seem to suffer or feign suffering the most in regard to what they interpret as overzealous laws and law enforcement are the lachrymose, hand wringing, hysterical social liberals. For witnessing such an entertaining spectacle as these posturing wimps I would almost, but not quite, be willing to endure a really overly aggressive or even repressive regime.
In 2004 there were approximately 16,500 people murdered in the United States. That does not include the hundred of thousands who were senselessly and unjustifiably beaten and crippled by criminal cretins. True, some of those were miscreants who received proper punishment; still the large majority was innocent men, women, and children who were blameless and tragic victims. Does anyone seriously doubt that with fewer nonsensical restraints on law enforcement and indeed on individuals in their own or someone else’s defense these numbers would be reduced? I thank God I live in Texas where one may dispatch to inferno home intruders intent on larceny and mayhem. There are some states where, as difficult as it is to believe, the home occupants are first legally required to try to flee rather than confront these vandals and villains before attempting to send them to perdition. How do you like them apples? From the foregoing one might conclude that I am advocating for more freedom not less. Yes, more freedom in defense of life, limb, and property, but certainly less freedom and fewer rights for the criminally inclined. Least you think I am exaggerating on this point about criminals being emboldened by lax laws and insufficient law enforcement then let me relate the following stories which were in the news in 2006: (1) In London, England there are gangs of juvenile punks, called “hoodies” because they wear hooded sweatshirts, who rampage through suburban parks destroying property, knocking down bike riders, and threatening picnickers. On buses they laugh while punching passengers in the face and recording the attack on their mobile phones. In some cases they were imitating such extreme-stunt shows as MTV’s Jackass. They beat a 16 year old girl unconscious while recording the attack on a mobile phone and messaging it to their friends. A 41 year old man who had fallen asleep at a bus stop was permanently disfigured and burned over 22% of his body when these punks set him on fire. A 5 year old boy escaped death after being lured from his yard by these teen age cretins who placed a noose around his neck and attempted to hang him. A 49 year old man was left brain damaged and in a coma after he challenged the gang youths who were throwing stones at his car. A Manchester schoolteacher used a pellet gun to fire warning shots at teens that had repeatedly harassed her family and were vandalizing her son’s car. The schoolteacher was fired from her job which she had held for 25 years and received a 6 month prison sentence for the illegal use of a firearm! Is this an “Alice in Wonderland” reality or what?
(2) There is a video game called Grand Theft Auto which has sold 35 million copies and grossed $2 billion worldwide to date. The objective of this interactive “game” is to commit as much virtual murder, mayhem, robbery, and violent anti-social acts as possible. Included in the interactive activities are forcibly stealing cars; decapitating people, complete with simulated squiring blood; beating people to a pulp; and shooting gaping holes in cops. One virtual scene is a police station where the “fun” is to kill as many cops as are encountered and then escaping by stealing a police cruiser. The defense the producers of these abominable videos games fall back on is the claim that it does not cause people to actually commit these acts in real life. What is beyond dispute is that kids with other at-risk factors, e.g. being from dysfunctional families, absent parents, delinquent friends with the same background, and the offspring of criminals, among other risks, are negatively influenced by repeatedly playing this video. There are examples of kids who after being arrested admitted they were influenced by this video game.
(3) Young male motorcyclists travel at high speeds and perform acrobatic stunts on public highways while being video taped by their friends. The videos or DVD’s are then sold. Incredibly there seems to be a market for this insane and criminal spectacle. Often these stunts are done in traffic, putting motorists at high risk and scaring the hell out of them as any sensible person would be. Additionally these motorcyclists challenge the police in their police cars. At times with the motorcyclists traveling well over 100 miles per hour, sometimes the police abandon the chase because not to do so would not only put their own lives at risk, but other motorists as well. In an interview with a television journalist one of these lame-brained motorcycle morons allowed as how he thought, if one could call it thinking, that nobody had the right to set speed limits on public highways. And he said that he didn’t believe any motorist would get hurt when a motorcycle occasionally got out of control. Of course there are motorists who have gotten killed or seriously injured when the motorcycles sans rider have gone careening and careering out of control, but that idiot could not or would not admit it.
(4) In 2006 the US Supreme Court voided two death penalty convictions – one in Texas. There was never any doubt about the guilt of these two murderers. The court ruled that they did not receive a “fair” trial. These decisions were widely applauded by liberals. Neither they nor the court commented on whether the murdered victims received a “fair” hearing from their vicious murders. At the risk of sounding highly provocative and perhaps to some even unhinged, I must say I do not give a damn whether anyone gets a “fair” trial so long as there is no rational and reasonable doubt as to their guilt.
In 2007 the US Supreme Court, in effect, put a hold on executions until it could render a decision on whether the method of execution by states using fatal chemical injection was “cruel and inhumane.” As could be expected, one of the plaintiffs in this case was the ACLU (American Criminal Liberties Union). No decision has yet been made, but I wonder if whether the victims of these heinous criminals were treated in a “cruel and inhumane” manner will be considered.
Whether the robbers barons Bernie Ebbers of WorldCom; John Rigas & son of Adelphia; Gary Winnick of Global Crossing; and Ken Lay, Jeff Skilling, and Andrew Fastow of Enron had “fair” trials troubles me not a whit. These crooks have stolen from and caused equity prices of their companies to decrease by billions of dollars inflicting financial pain and woe on hundreds of thousands of employees and shareholders. I am an unaffected and impartial bystander, yet I would punish them with the maximum fines and prison sentences possible by law. The 80 year old cancer patient John Rigas was given 15 years by the judge with the proviso that if, at any point, medical authorities told the judge that Rigas had only 3 months or so to live he might be released from prison. I would have given that old bastard 30 years in the slammer and if he said he could not do it because of his advanced age and ill health I would have told him then he must do as much as he can.
If anyone wants to disagree with my thesis that we in the West have too much rather than too little freedom or I am engaging in a bit too much Sturm und Drang, then by all means respond with your arguments. The only caveat I would make is that your response be well reasoned with valid examples.
Friday, October 26, 2007
WOMEN’S SUFFRAGE AND VOTING 39
This essay may raise a few hackles, especially on the distaff side of the human spectrum. Don’t blame the messenger – I just try to go where the data lead.
For a long time there has been speculation by economists such as Dr. John Lott and others why the government began growing when it did. Excluding wartime, the federal government comprised 2% to 3% of GDP (Gross Domestic Product) until WWI. In the 1920’s non-military federal spending began steadily growing. There is a widely held premise that the growth of the federal government was caused by the Franklin Roosevelt administration to counter the Great Depression of the 1930’s. This is demonstrably not true (see my essay FDR). What can be logically postulated is that the growth of federal spending was triggered by women’s suffrage. Let me attempt to make that case.
In his 2007 book FREEDOMNOMICS: Why the Free Market Works and Other Half-Baked Theories Don’t, economist Dr. John R. Lott states that women have voted differently from men as has been shown by polls for many decades. In the presidential elections from 1980 to 2004 the difference in the political parties men voted for compared to women was in double digits in six of those seven elections, culminating in a 22% margin in 2000. Naturally women voted for Democrats and men for Republicans for reasons I will explain. If women’s votes had been excluded (perhaps a not unwarranted pretermitted action – don’t get riled, just joking) Republicans would have won every presidential election but one from 1968 – 2004 (1996 being the exception).
On average women are more risk averse than men and therefore they are more supportive of government programs to attempt to insure against certain risks. Yes, we all know women who don’t hesitate to take chances in sports and other aspects of life far more than some wimpy men, but I am referring to averages. Single women whose income is lower than their single male counterparts tend to vote for the political party (Democrat) which favors higher income taxes. When these same women marry and their husband’s or their combined incomes rise, they tend to shift to the Republican Party.
The 19th amendment to the U.S. Constitution giving women the right to vote was ratified on August 18, 1920. That is not when the majority of women in this country was allowed to vote. Women’s suffrage was first granted in some Western states (Wyoming 1869; Utah 1870; Colorado 1893; Idaho 1896). Eight more states granted this right from 1910 to 1914, and another 17 states from 1917 to 1919. Therefore women in 29 states could vote before the 19th amendment became the law of the land.
As women voted in greater and greater numbers the size of government expanded. The question is did women’s suffrage cause the expansion of government or did some other political or social change cause government to expand? Happily there is a circumstance which provides a unique answer. Of the 19 states which had not passed laws granting women the right to vote, nine approved the constitutional amendment while ten had it imposed upon them. If some other factor caused both a desire for larger government and a desire for women’s suffrage, then government should have grown only in states that voluntarily adopted suffrage. But this was not the case – after the approval of women’s suffrage, a similar growth pattern was seen in both groups. This is an important point so allow me to elaborate. Assume an unknown event ‘A’ causes both the presumed independent events of ‘B’ a desire for women’s suffrage and ‘C’ a desire for an expansion of government. If this situation occurred then for the states which did not exhibit a compelling velleity for suffrage there would be no logical reason for a concomitant expansion of government.
There is a great deal of genuine confusion and indeed obfuscation concerning the 2000 presidential election. The Democrat left came out with the mantra that ‘Bush was selected, not elected.’ That is bogus; however it is legitimate to say that Bush was an accidental president. I will explain. The Bush/Cheney ticket won Florida by 537 votes and therefore all of Florida’s electoral votes and with it the presidency. In my opinion the Al Gore team made a strategic mistake in calling for three heavily Democrat voting precincts for recounts instead of opting for a recount in the whole state. Their idea was that they would have a better chance of gaining the necessary votes in the selected precincts rather than in all precincts – still if they had called for a complete state recount, after all, every vote in Florida was equal, the Republicans could hardly have objected and, who knows, the outcome might have been different.
After several weeks of ill tempered arguing, quibbling, quarrelling, hassling, name calling, and unseemly ad captandum vulgus between the Republicans and Democrats the Florida Republican Secretary of State, Katherine Harris, declared the recount over according to her interpretation of Florida law with the vote margin down to, if I remember correctly, 367 in favor of Bush/Cheney. Quite naturally the Democrats appealed to the Democrat dominated Florida Supreme Court which ruled that the recount should go on. The Republicans in turn appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court which, and this is what many people forget, voted 7-2 (with only the doctrinaire liberals Ruth Bader Ginsburg and John Paul Stevens descending) to remand the case, Bush v. Gore, back to the Florida Supreme Court for that court to uphold Florida law. Despite a warning by the Democrat Chief Justice of the Florida Supreme Court, the full court ignored what the U.S. Supreme Court had said and ruled that the recounting could go on.
When the case was again appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court this time the ruling was to end the recount with the breakdown 5 to 4 on a political basis with the four liberal members, Stevens, Ginsburg, Souter, and Breyer voting to allow the recount to go on. The official vote count difference then went back to 537. A month or two after the final Supreme Court decision, the Miami Herald, CBS, and the New York Times reviewed the results of the election in Florida and could find no evidence that either there was widespread fraud or that a recount would have given the election to the Gore/Lieberman ticket. Therefore the original voting result, the recount, and a postmortem by a hardly conservative news media consortium all gave the election to Bush/Cheney. It may be fairly stated that Bush was an accidental president in that the vote difference in over 7,000,000 votes cast was within the margin of error by any system of voting, be it paper ballots, punch cards, optical scan ballots, or electronic machine voting.
Did voter fraud and voter discrimination occur during the 2000 election in Florida? The answer is yes. There has never been a national election or perhaps any state or local election where voter fraud has not occurred. And in Florida in 2000 it did, although it was not what you may think.
In every election there is a problem called “non-voted” ballots. This is where there is either a vote for more than one candidate in a single race or for none. In Florida’s 2000 election, among others, the Reverend Jesse Jackson and Mary Francis Berry, then chairwoman of the U.S. Civil Right Commission, claimed there was a clear pattern of suppressing the African-American vote. They were right, but not in the way they alleged. There were 22,270 registered African-American Republicans voters in Florida in 2000 - about one for every 20 registered African-American Democrats. The African-American Republicans were 54% to 66% more likely than the average African-American voter to have a ballot declared invalid. Additionally, the over-all rate of non-voted ballots was 14% higher when the county election supervisor was a Democrat and 31% higher when the supervisor was an African-American Democrat. It would appear that George W. Bush was hurt more by the loss of African-American votes than was Al Gore.
The news media made early presidential calls in 1980, 1996, and 2000. During the Republican landslide victory in 1980, NBC named Reagan the winner well before voting was closed on the West Coast. In the 1996 election contest between Clinton/Gore and Dole/? (Who was the Republican vice-presidential candidate? Yes, it was Jack Kemp), now it was the Republicans turn to cry foul because the TV networks called the elections for Clinton before the pools closed on the West Coast. Given the size of both election victories it is highly unlikely that the outcome of either was affected. In the 2000 election all of the major networks erroneously declared that the Democrats had won Florida and further stated that the polls in Florida were closed. But all of the polls were not closed. The 10 counties of the western Florida Panhandle were on Central time, not Eastern time like the rest of Florida. Calling the Florida election an hour before those polls were closed doubtless caused some voters in the heavily Republican western Panhandle to forgo voting. Democrat strategist Bob Beckel estimated that the early news media call cost Bush 8000 votes. Comparing the drop off rate in voting in that last hour in the western Panhandle counties with the rest of Florida and with past elections yields an estimated loss of circa 7500 votes for Geo. W. Bush. As in 1980 and 1996 the result of the election in 2000 was not altered by the early calling of voting by the news media, but the margin of victory might have been large enough to have spared the country and the political parties the anguish which resulted. I rest my case.
For a long time there has been speculation by economists such as Dr. John Lott and others why the government began growing when it did. Excluding wartime, the federal government comprised 2% to 3% of GDP (Gross Domestic Product) until WWI. In the 1920’s non-military federal spending began steadily growing. There is a widely held premise that the growth of the federal government was caused by the Franklin Roosevelt administration to counter the Great Depression of the 1930’s. This is demonstrably not true (see my essay FDR). What can be logically postulated is that the growth of federal spending was triggered by women’s suffrage. Let me attempt to make that case.
In his 2007 book FREEDOMNOMICS: Why the Free Market Works and Other Half-Baked Theories Don’t, economist Dr. John R. Lott states that women have voted differently from men as has been shown by polls for many decades. In the presidential elections from 1980 to 2004 the difference in the political parties men voted for compared to women was in double digits in six of those seven elections, culminating in a 22% margin in 2000. Naturally women voted for Democrats and men for Republicans for reasons I will explain. If women’s votes had been excluded (perhaps a not unwarranted pretermitted action – don’t get riled, just joking) Republicans would have won every presidential election but one from 1968 – 2004 (1996 being the exception).
On average women are more risk averse than men and therefore they are more supportive of government programs to attempt to insure against certain risks. Yes, we all know women who don’t hesitate to take chances in sports and other aspects of life far more than some wimpy men, but I am referring to averages. Single women whose income is lower than their single male counterparts tend to vote for the political party (Democrat) which favors higher income taxes. When these same women marry and their husband’s or their combined incomes rise, they tend to shift to the Republican Party.
The 19th amendment to the U.S. Constitution giving women the right to vote was ratified on August 18, 1920. That is not when the majority of women in this country was allowed to vote. Women’s suffrage was first granted in some Western states (Wyoming 1869; Utah 1870; Colorado 1893; Idaho 1896). Eight more states granted this right from 1910 to 1914, and another 17 states from 1917 to 1919. Therefore women in 29 states could vote before the 19th amendment became the law of the land.
As women voted in greater and greater numbers the size of government expanded. The question is did women’s suffrage cause the expansion of government or did some other political or social change cause government to expand? Happily there is a circumstance which provides a unique answer. Of the 19 states which had not passed laws granting women the right to vote, nine approved the constitutional amendment while ten had it imposed upon them. If some other factor caused both a desire for larger government and a desire for women’s suffrage, then government should have grown only in states that voluntarily adopted suffrage. But this was not the case – after the approval of women’s suffrage, a similar growth pattern was seen in both groups. This is an important point so allow me to elaborate. Assume an unknown event ‘A’ causes both the presumed independent events of ‘B’ a desire for women’s suffrage and ‘C’ a desire for an expansion of government. If this situation occurred then for the states which did not exhibit a compelling velleity for suffrage there would be no logical reason for a concomitant expansion of government.
There is a great deal of genuine confusion and indeed obfuscation concerning the 2000 presidential election. The Democrat left came out with the mantra that ‘Bush was selected, not elected.’ That is bogus; however it is legitimate to say that Bush was an accidental president. I will explain. The Bush/Cheney ticket won Florida by 537 votes and therefore all of Florida’s electoral votes and with it the presidency. In my opinion the Al Gore team made a strategic mistake in calling for three heavily Democrat voting precincts for recounts instead of opting for a recount in the whole state. Their idea was that they would have a better chance of gaining the necessary votes in the selected precincts rather than in all precincts – still if they had called for a complete state recount, after all, every vote in Florida was equal, the Republicans could hardly have objected and, who knows, the outcome might have been different.
After several weeks of ill tempered arguing, quibbling, quarrelling, hassling, name calling, and unseemly ad captandum vulgus between the Republicans and Democrats the Florida Republican Secretary of State, Katherine Harris, declared the recount over according to her interpretation of Florida law with the vote margin down to, if I remember correctly, 367 in favor of Bush/Cheney. Quite naturally the Democrats appealed to the Democrat dominated Florida Supreme Court which ruled that the recount should go on. The Republicans in turn appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court which, and this is what many people forget, voted 7-2 (with only the doctrinaire liberals Ruth Bader Ginsburg and John Paul Stevens descending) to remand the case, Bush v. Gore, back to the Florida Supreme Court for that court to uphold Florida law. Despite a warning by the Democrat Chief Justice of the Florida Supreme Court, the full court ignored what the U.S. Supreme Court had said and ruled that the recounting could go on.
When the case was again appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court this time the ruling was to end the recount with the breakdown 5 to 4 on a political basis with the four liberal members, Stevens, Ginsburg, Souter, and Breyer voting to allow the recount to go on. The official vote count difference then went back to 537. A month or two after the final Supreme Court decision, the Miami Herald, CBS, and the New York Times reviewed the results of the election in Florida and could find no evidence that either there was widespread fraud or that a recount would have given the election to the Gore/Lieberman ticket. Therefore the original voting result, the recount, and a postmortem by a hardly conservative news media consortium all gave the election to Bush/Cheney. It may be fairly stated that Bush was an accidental president in that the vote difference in over 7,000,000 votes cast was within the margin of error by any system of voting, be it paper ballots, punch cards, optical scan ballots, or electronic machine voting.
Did voter fraud and voter discrimination occur during the 2000 election in Florida? The answer is yes. There has never been a national election or perhaps any state or local election where voter fraud has not occurred. And in Florida in 2000 it did, although it was not what you may think.
In every election there is a problem called “non-voted” ballots. This is where there is either a vote for more than one candidate in a single race or for none. In Florida’s 2000 election, among others, the Reverend Jesse Jackson and Mary Francis Berry, then chairwoman of the U.S. Civil Right Commission, claimed there was a clear pattern of suppressing the African-American vote. They were right, but not in the way they alleged. There were 22,270 registered African-American Republicans voters in Florida in 2000 - about one for every 20 registered African-American Democrats. The African-American Republicans were 54% to 66% more likely than the average African-American voter to have a ballot declared invalid. Additionally, the over-all rate of non-voted ballots was 14% higher when the county election supervisor was a Democrat and 31% higher when the supervisor was an African-American Democrat. It would appear that George W. Bush was hurt more by the loss of African-American votes than was Al Gore.
The news media made early presidential calls in 1980, 1996, and 2000. During the Republican landslide victory in 1980, NBC named Reagan the winner well before voting was closed on the West Coast. In the 1996 election contest between Clinton/Gore and Dole/? (Who was the Republican vice-presidential candidate? Yes, it was Jack Kemp), now it was the Republicans turn to cry foul because the TV networks called the elections for Clinton before the pools closed on the West Coast. Given the size of both election victories it is highly unlikely that the outcome of either was affected. In the 2000 election all of the major networks erroneously declared that the Democrats had won Florida and further stated that the polls in Florida were closed. But all of the polls were not closed. The 10 counties of the western Florida Panhandle were on Central time, not Eastern time like the rest of Florida. Calling the Florida election an hour before those polls were closed doubtless caused some voters in the heavily Republican western Panhandle to forgo voting. Democrat strategist Bob Beckel estimated that the early news media call cost Bush 8000 votes. Comparing the drop off rate in voting in that last hour in the western Panhandle counties with the rest of Florida and with past elections yields an estimated loss of circa 7500 votes for Geo. W. Bush. As in 1980 and 1996 the result of the election in 2000 was not altered by the early calling of voting by the news media, but the margin of victory might have been large enough to have spared the country and the political parties the anguish which resulted. I rest my case.
CRIME AND PUNISHMENT 38
This essay is about crime and punishment, but it has nothing to do with the novel Crime and Punishment by 19th century Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky. Rather it is based on the 2007 book FREEDOMNOMICS: Why the Free Market Works and Other Half-Baked Theories Don’t by American economist Dr. John R. Lott.
A fundamental tenet of economics is that if something is made more expensive, people will do less of it and conversely, if cheaper, more of it. There is no earthly reason this principle should not apply to crime and punishment. The more certain and harsher the punishment, the less likely the crime will be committed and vice-versa. An example from professional baseball is that the American League has more hit batsmen that the National League, but this only occurred after 1973. Why? The answer is that was the year the American League went to designated hitters for the pitchers. When the American League pitchers had no fear of being hit with a baseball being thrown by the opposing pitchers, they started throwing more beanballs. Of course there were some constraints – the pitcher might be confronted by the hit batsman using his bat to treat the pitcher’s head as a baseball and the pitcher’s team-mates might take exception to being served up a bean ball in retaliation for the pitcher on his team beaning an opposing player. Still, the direct jeopardy to the pitcher was removed.
Speaking of baseball, why are there no women players in the major leagues in this the 21st century? Surely a woman Olympian track star such as Marion Jones-Thomson, a dual citizen of the USA and Belize, could compete with men. And she would be right at home in the steroid milieu of professional baseball.
Violent crime in the United States increased from 1960 to 1991 by an astonishing 372%, well outstripping the population gain. Then just when some academics had predicted even more accelerated rates of additional violent crime, a strange thing happened. The rate of violent crime dropped by 33% from 1991 to 2000 and a similar pattern occurred in Canada. Why the rate of violent crime decreased after 1991 is the subject of this essay.
In their 2005 book FREAKONOMICS (see my essay: FREAKONOMICS – WHAT IS THAT?), Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner theorized that the drop in the violent crime rate after 1991 was largely due to the 1973 U.S. Supreme Court Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion. They posited that many of the abortions after 1973 were performed on young intercity unmarried minority women. Had these unwanted babies been born, by 1991 a disproportion of them would become young violent criminals. This thesis is disputed by John Lott who offers his own views on the reasons for the decrease in violent crimes.
If, as Dr. Lott asserts, abortion and affirmative action policies increased crime, then what decreased it in the 1990’s? There are a number causative factors; one of the main ones could be the U.S. Supreme Court decision to rescind the death penalty ban in 1976. Although ¾ of the states re-imposed the death penalty soon after the Supreme Court ruling, it wasn’t until the early 1990’s that significant numbers of criminals started being executed.
Yes, I know that it is a mantra (Hinduism: A word or formula to be recited or sung - from the Sanskrit word for speech) of the left that the death penalty does not deter murderers. That has long been said, is still being said, and will be said in the future. But what is the truth of it? Capital punishment clearly increases the risk to murderers, but is it a deterrent? It is singular is it not that when criminals are convicted of murder, their lawyers, with the concurrence of the convicted, go to great effort in the sentencing phase of the trial to get long term confinement in prison rather than a death sentence?
One of the most dangerous widespread jobs is that of police officer. In 2005 of the nearly 700,000 full-time law enforcement officers in the United States, 55 were murdered on the job and 67 were killed accidentally. This murder rate is one in 12,500 and one in 5,600 including accidentally deaths. A variety of steps are taken to reduce this risk such as the wearing of bullet-proof vests, development of special procedures in approaching stopped cars, and sometimes waiting for backup even if it increases the chance of the suspect escaping. Police officers undertake these and other measures to avoid or mitigate the risks of their profession. This self preservation rule applies to criminals just like everyone else – it is human nature. The risk of execution for a violent criminal is greater than the risk of a police officer being killed. In 2005 there were about 16,700 murders in the United States and 60 executions which gives a rate of one execution for every 278 murders. In 2005 criminals were approximarely 20 times more likely to be executed than policemen were to be deliberately or accidentally killed.
A New York Times study of murder rates in 1998 compared states with and without the death penalty. The Times concluded tendentiously and, as it turned out, with dispositive paralogism, that capital punishment was ineffective in reducing crime, noting that 10 out of 12 states without capital punishment had homicide rates below the national average while ½ the states with capital punishment had homicide rates above the national average. This overly simplistic study was disingenuous at best and intellectually dishonest at worst, but seems to be de rigueur for social issue stories by the NYT. The 12 states with the death penalty have long had low murder rates due to factors unrelated to the death penalty. When the death penalty was suspended in the interval of 1968-1976 those 12 states still had murder rates lower than most other states. More definitive is that by 1998 the states that reinstituted the death penalty had a 38% larger drop in murder rates than states that didn’t. During the 1968-1976 period when executions were proscribed, murder rates generally skyrocketed in the United States.
After 1976 a young assistant professor at the University of Chicago, Isaac Ehrlich, began studying the death penalty issue and concluded that each execution deterred as many as 20 to 24 murders. The liberal academics, which include most academics, found his results anathema. Those outraged academicians condemned his work and he was denied tenure at the University of Chicago. He even had difficulty finding employment at other universities. However his work sparked new research into the effectiveness of the death penalty. This research was conducted in the 1990’s as violent crime was plummeting and executions were rising. Between 1991-2000 there were, on average, 9100 fewer murders per year while the number of executions per year rose by 70. Those new studies resurrected Ehrlich’s earlier conclusion that the death penalty significantly deters murder. The consensus of the newer studies estimated that each execution saved the lives of 15 to 18 potential murder victims. I would propose that if executions were carried out say within 5 minutes of guilty verdicts being rendered (more reasonably, make that six months) instead of the 12 to 20 years delay we now have, capital punishment would be even more of a deterrent because a specific violent crime would be more easily correlated with a specific execution in the minds of criminals. Not every type of murderer is deterred by the death penalty of course, serial killers for example and other psychopathic degenerates who seem to enjoy killing.
Incarcerations increased in this country during the 1990’s while crime rates decreased. Is that so surprising? Apparently it is to those criminologists who don’t believe people respond to incentives and to writers of the New York Times. Those deluded souls somehow doubt that locking up criminals deter crime, yet many studies indicate that the more certain the punishment, the fewer the crimes committed. The arrest rate of criminals is one of the most important factors in reducing every type of crime. During the 1990’s, increases in the arrest rate account for 16% to 18% of the drop in the murder rate. Conviction rates explain another 12% of the drop.
The right-to-carry concealed hand gun laws have increased over the past 20 years, adding 30 states and bring the total right-to-carry states to 40 by 2007. Is this a deterrent to crime? There are over 4,000,000 concealed hand gun permits in the country today. It is interesting to note that not one state that has passed right-to-carry laws has ever rescinded that right. This would indicate to me that, at the very least, no bad outcomes have resulted from these laws.
Texas passed a right-to-carry concealed hand gun law, taking effect in January 1996. You have heard the clichés about there are lies, there are damnable lies, and then there are statistics; and statistics don’t lie, but liars use statistics, and so on. Statistics, if used honestly and properly, provide useful data, however, if misused, statistics can lead to downright false conclusions. Here is an example from Texas: At the end of 1997 a staff writer for the Dallas Morning News wrote a front page story about the first two years of the right-to-carry law in Texas. He pointed out that at the end of the 1st year (1996) there were 114,500 permit holders who were charged with 431 felonies or misdemeanors during that year. At the end of the 2nd year there were 161,702 permit holders charged with 666 felonies or misdemeanors – a 54.5% increase ([666-431]/431 = 54.5%). He quoted opponents of the concealed carry law saying the numbers prove the need for increasing restrictions on handgun permits.
Consider what those data actually show. At the start of the 1st year (1996) there were, apodictically, zero permit holders; at the start of the 2nd year there were 114,500 permit holders. I do not know what the distribution of permits was on a month-to-month basis, but surely a more valid comparison would be to take the average number of permit holders during 1996 ([0 + 114,500]/2 = 57,250) and during 1997 ([114,500 + 161,702]/2 = 138,101). Using the data in a statistically more meaningful and logical way would yield a normalized decrease in the rate of crimes committed during the 2nd year (431/57,250 = .7528% [1st year] & 666/138,101 = .4823% [2nd year]; then ([.7528%-.4823%)]/.7528% = 35.9%). Of course there were more felonies/misdemeanors during the second year – there were more permit holders on a month-to-month basis, but if the number of permit holders is normalized, the rate of crimes committed by permit holders decreased by 35.9% in the second year. The clueless Dallas Morning News writer, Scott Parks, should have taken an elementary course in probability and statistics before he wrote his article. If I had been in a letter-to-the-editor writing mode at that time I would have set the DMN straight. Nevertheless I kept the article for future comment, as, for example, now.
While the use of concealed hand guns allows people to protect themselves from criminals, there are potential drawbacks of increasing the number of gun carriers. People can accidentally shoot themselves or others or they may use their guns irresponsibly. The pertinent question is: do they save more innocent lives than they put at risk? Most legal gun owners pose few risks to themselves or other law abiding people. They are overwhelmingly conscientious and careful people by nature, unlike criminals who generally obtain their guns illegally.
The finding of the U.S. Dept. of Justice’s National Crime Victimization Survey, an annual survey that has been conduction since 1973, was that having a gun is the most effective deterrent to being victimized by violent criminals. During the 1990’s, assault victims who used a gun for self-protection were injured 3.6% of the time; 5.4% of those who ran or drove away were injured; 13.6% of those who threatened the attacker without a weapon were injured; and those who undertook no self-protection fared the worst, they were injured 55.2% of the time. Mahatma Gandhi’s philosophy of peaceful resistance may have worked against British imperialists who could be embarrassed by public opinion, but criminals require more forceful opposition.
Economists Stephen Bronars and Lott found significant evidence that criminals move out of areas where concealed handguns are legalized. Their study analyzed counties that border each other on opposite sides of a state line. In such cases, counties in states that adopt right-to-carry laws see a drop in violent crime that was about four times larger than the simultaneous increase in violent crime in the adjacent counties without such laws. However violent some criminals are, they are not necessarily self-destructively stupid. At least some of them are smart enough to leave towns where they risk being confronted by law abiding citizens carrying concealed handguns.
According to Dr. Lott, overall, there are three crime fighting techniques: increased use of the death penalty; rising arrest and conviction rates; and the passage of right-to-carry laws which collectively account for 50% to 60% of the drop in murder rates in the 1990’s. Although Dr. Lott does not think so, I believe that abortion is also a contributing factor in the reduction of violent crime, even though I can not quantify it.
Gender and age are important factors in crime statistics and despite the risk of sounding politically incorrect, it must be said that race is also. African-Americans are the most likely perpetrators of crime as well as the most common victims. The national murder rate was 5.6 per 100,000 people in 2002, while the rate for African-American males between the ages of 17 to 25 was 78 per 100,000 or 14 times the national rate. It should also be noted that young African-Americans males (17 to 25 years old) committed murder at a much higher rate than African-Americans in general which was 24.1 per 100,000 in 2002. Murderers overwhelmingly kill people of their own race. Of the African-Americans who are murdered, 91% are by other African-Americans; and 84% of white murder victims are murdered by other whites.
Gun control advocates predicted that when the federal assault-weapons ban expired on September 13, 2004, 10 years after taking effect, gun crimes would surge out of control. Among those advocates were Sarah Brady who said the ban’s termination would effectively “arm our kids with Uzis and AK-47s” and Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY) who ratcheted up the rhetoric, labeling the banned guns “the weapon of choice for terrorists.” The gun control advocates warned that only states with their own assault-weapons bans would escape the coming bloodbath. So what actually happened? FBI statistics showed that nationally the murder rate fell by 3% in 2004, the first drop since 2000, with firearms deaths dropping by 4.4%. Even more confounding for the gun control advocates, after the ban expired, the monthly murder rate plummeted 14% during September through December.
The murder rate for the seven states with their own assault-weapons ban declined by 2% in the same time period that the 43 states without a ban experienced a 3.4% decline in their murder rate. One can not claim with a great degree of certainty that these murder rate reductions were due wholly or partially to the assault-weapons ban or lack thereof, but it does seem clear that the ban did nothing to reduce crime. The “gun grabbers” have not proven their case.
A fundamental tenet of economics is that if something is made more expensive, people will do less of it and conversely, if cheaper, more of it. There is no earthly reason this principle should not apply to crime and punishment. The more certain and harsher the punishment, the less likely the crime will be committed and vice-versa. An example from professional baseball is that the American League has more hit batsmen that the National League, but this only occurred after 1973. Why? The answer is that was the year the American League went to designated hitters for the pitchers. When the American League pitchers had no fear of being hit with a baseball being thrown by the opposing pitchers, they started throwing more beanballs. Of course there were some constraints – the pitcher might be confronted by the hit batsman using his bat to treat the pitcher’s head as a baseball and the pitcher’s team-mates might take exception to being served up a bean ball in retaliation for the pitcher on his team beaning an opposing player. Still, the direct jeopardy to the pitcher was removed.
Speaking of baseball, why are there no women players in the major leagues in this the 21st century? Surely a woman Olympian track star such as Marion Jones-Thomson, a dual citizen of the USA and Belize, could compete with men. And she would be right at home in the steroid milieu of professional baseball.
Violent crime in the United States increased from 1960 to 1991 by an astonishing 372%, well outstripping the population gain. Then just when some academics had predicted even more accelerated rates of additional violent crime, a strange thing happened. The rate of violent crime dropped by 33% from 1991 to 2000 and a similar pattern occurred in Canada. Why the rate of violent crime decreased after 1991 is the subject of this essay.
In their 2005 book FREAKONOMICS (see my essay: FREAKONOMICS – WHAT IS THAT?), Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner theorized that the drop in the violent crime rate after 1991 was largely due to the 1973 U.S. Supreme Court Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion. They posited that many of the abortions after 1973 were performed on young intercity unmarried minority women. Had these unwanted babies been born, by 1991 a disproportion of them would become young violent criminals. This thesis is disputed by John Lott who offers his own views on the reasons for the decrease in violent crimes.
If, as Dr. Lott asserts, abortion and affirmative action policies increased crime, then what decreased it in the 1990’s? There are a number causative factors; one of the main ones could be the U.S. Supreme Court decision to rescind the death penalty ban in 1976. Although ¾ of the states re-imposed the death penalty soon after the Supreme Court ruling, it wasn’t until the early 1990’s that significant numbers of criminals started being executed.
Yes, I know that it is a mantra (Hinduism: A word or formula to be recited or sung - from the Sanskrit word for speech) of the left that the death penalty does not deter murderers. That has long been said, is still being said, and will be said in the future. But what is the truth of it? Capital punishment clearly increases the risk to murderers, but is it a deterrent? It is singular is it not that when criminals are convicted of murder, their lawyers, with the concurrence of the convicted, go to great effort in the sentencing phase of the trial to get long term confinement in prison rather than a death sentence?
One of the most dangerous widespread jobs is that of police officer. In 2005 of the nearly 700,000 full-time law enforcement officers in the United States, 55 were murdered on the job and 67 were killed accidentally. This murder rate is one in 12,500 and one in 5,600 including accidentally deaths. A variety of steps are taken to reduce this risk such as the wearing of bullet-proof vests, development of special procedures in approaching stopped cars, and sometimes waiting for backup even if it increases the chance of the suspect escaping. Police officers undertake these and other measures to avoid or mitigate the risks of their profession. This self preservation rule applies to criminals just like everyone else – it is human nature. The risk of execution for a violent criminal is greater than the risk of a police officer being killed. In 2005 there were about 16,700 murders in the United States and 60 executions which gives a rate of one execution for every 278 murders. In 2005 criminals were approximarely 20 times more likely to be executed than policemen were to be deliberately or accidentally killed.
A New York Times study of murder rates in 1998 compared states with and without the death penalty. The Times concluded tendentiously and, as it turned out, with dispositive paralogism, that capital punishment was ineffective in reducing crime, noting that 10 out of 12 states without capital punishment had homicide rates below the national average while ½ the states with capital punishment had homicide rates above the national average. This overly simplistic study was disingenuous at best and intellectually dishonest at worst, but seems to be de rigueur for social issue stories by the NYT. The 12 states with the death penalty have long had low murder rates due to factors unrelated to the death penalty. When the death penalty was suspended in the interval of 1968-1976 those 12 states still had murder rates lower than most other states. More definitive is that by 1998 the states that reinstituted the death penalty had a 38% larger drop in murder rates than states that didn’t. During the 1968-1976 period when executions were proscribed, murder rates generally skyrocketed in the United States.
After 1976 a young assistant professor at the University of Chicago, Isaac Ehrlich, began studying the death penalty issue and concluded that each execution deterred as many as 20 to 24 murders. The liberal academics, which include most academics, found his results anathema. Those outraged academicians condemned his work and he was denied tenure at the University of Chicago. He even had difficulty finding employment at other universities. However his work sparked new research into the effectiveness of the death penalty. This research was conducted in the 1990’s as violent crime was plummeting and executions were rising. Between 1991-2000 there were, on average, 9100 fewer murders per year while the number of executions per year rose by 70. Those new studies resurrected Ehrlich’s earlier conclusion that the death penalty significantly deters murder. The consensus of the newer studies estimated that each execution saved the lives of 15 to 18 potential murder victims. I would propose that if executions were carried out say within 5 minutes of guilty verdicts being rendered (more reasonably, make that six months) instead of the 12 to 20 years delay we now have, capital punishment would be even more of a deterrent because a specific violent crime would be more easily correlated with a specific execution in the minds of criminals. Not every type of murderer is deterred by the death penalty of course, serial killers for example and other psychopathic degenerates who seem to enjoy killing.
Incarcerations increased in this country during the 1990’s while crime rates decreased. Is that so surprising? Apparently it is to those criminologists who don’t believe people respond to incentives and to writers of the New York Times. Those deluded souls somehow doubt that locking up criminals deter crime, yet many studies indicate that the more certain the punishment, the fewer the crimes committed. The arrest rate of criminals is one of the most important factors in reducing every type of crime. During the 1990’s, increases in the arrest rate account for 16% to 18% of the drop in the murder rate. Conviction rates explain another 12% of the drop.
The right-to-carry concealed hand gun laws have increased over the past 20 years, adding 30 states and bring the total right-to-carry states to 40 by 2007. Is this a deterrent to crime? There are over 4,000,000 concealed hand gun permits in the country today. It is interesting to note that not one state that has passed right-to-carry laws has ever rescinded that right. This would indicate to me that, at the very least, no bad outcomes have resulted from these laws.
Texas passed a right-to-carry concealed hand gun law, taking effect in January 1996. You have heard the clichés about there are lies, there are damnable lies, and then there are statistics; and statistics don’t lie, but liars use statistics, and so on. Statistics, if used honestly and properly, provide useful data, however, if misused, statistics can lead to downright false conclusions. Here is an example from Texas: At the end of 1997 a staff writer for the Dallas Morning News wrote a front page story about the first two years of the right-to-carry law in Texas. He pointed out that at the end of the 1st year (1996) there were 114,500 permit holders who were charged with 431 felonies or misdemeanors during that year. At the end of the 2nd year there were 161,702 permit holders charged with 666 felonies or misdemeanors – a 54.5% increase ([666-431]/431 = 54.5%). He quoted opponents of the concealed carry law saying the numbers prove the need for increasing restrictions on handgun permits.
Consider what those data actually show. At the start of the 1st year (1996) there were, apodictically, zero permit holders; at the start of the 2nd year there were 114,500 permit holders. I do not know what the distribution of permits was on a month-to-month basis, but surely a more valid comparison would be to take the average number of permit holders during 1996 ([0 + 114,500]/2 = 57,250) and during 1997 ([114,500 + 161,702]/2 = 138,101). Using the data in a statistically more meaningful and logical way would yield a normalized decrease in the rate of crimes committed during the 2nd year (431/57,250 = .7528% [1st year] & 666/138,101 = .4823% [2nd year]; then ([.7528%-.4823%)]/.7528% = 35.9%). Of course there were more felonies/misdemeanors during the second year – there were more permit holders on a month-to-month basis, but if the number of permit holders is normalized, the rate of crimes committed by permit holders decreased by 35.9% in the second year. The clueless Dallas Morning News writer, Scott Parks, should have taken an elementary course in probability and statistics before he wrote his article. If I had been in a letter-to-the-editor writing mode at that time I would have set the DMN straight. Nevertheless I kept the article for future comment, as, for example, now.
While the use of concealed hand guns allows people to protect themselves from criminals, there are potential drawbacks of increasing the number of gun carriers. People can accidentally shoot themselves or others or they may use their guns irresponsibly. The pertinent question is: do they save more innocent lives than they put at risk? Most legal gun owners pose few risks to themselves or other law abiding people. They are overwhelmingly conscientious and careful people by nature, unlike criminals who generally obtain their guns illegally.
The finding of the U.S. Dept. of Justice’s National Crime Victimization Survey, an annual survey that has been conduction since 1973, was that having a gun is the most effective deterrent to being victimized by violent criminals. During the 1990’s, assault victims who used a gun for self-protection were injured 3.6% of the time; 5.4% of those who ran or drove away were injured; 13.6% of those who threatened the attacker without a weapon were injured; and those who undertook no self-protection fared the worst, they were injured 55.2% of the time. Mahatma Gandhi’s philosophy of peaceful resistance may have worked against British imperialists who could be embarrassed by public opinion, but criminals require more forceful opposition.
Economists Stephen Bronars and Lott found significant evidence that criminals move out of areas where concealed handguns are legalized. Their study analyzed counties that border each other on opposite sides of a state line. In such cases, counties in states that adopt right-to-carry laws see a drop in violent crime that was about four times larger than the simultaneous increase in violent crime in the adjacent counties without such laws. However violent some criminals are, they are not necessarily self-destructively stupid. At least some of them are smart enough to leave towns where they risk being confronted by law abiding citizens carrying concealed handguns.
According to Dr. Lott, overall, there are three crime fighting techniques: increased use of the death penalty; rising arrest and conviction rates; and the passage of right-to-carry laws which collectively account for 50% to 60% of the drop in murder rates in the 1990’s. Although Dr. Lott does not think so, I believe that abortion is also a contributing factor in the reduction of violent crime, even though I can not quantify it.
Gender and age are important factors in crime statistics and despite the risk of sounding politically incorrect, it must be said that race is also. African-Americans are the most likely perpetrators of crime as well as the most common victims. The national murder rate was 5.6 per 100,000 people in 2002, while the rate for African-American males between the ages of 17 to 25 was 78 per 100,000 or 14 times the national rate. It should also be noted that young African-Americans males (17 to 25 years old) committed murder at a much higher rate than African-Americans in general which was 24.1 per 100,000 in 2002. Murderers overwhelmingly kill people of their own race. Of the African-Americans who are murdered, 91% are by other African-Americans; and 84% of white murder victims are murdered by other whites.
Gun control advocates predicted that when the federal assault-weapons ban expired on September 13, 2004, 10 years after taking effect, gun crimes would surge out of control. Among those advocates were Sarah Brady who said the ban’s termination would effectively “arm our kids with Uzis and AK-47s” and Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY) who ratcheted up the rhetoric, labeling the banned guns “the weapon of choice for terrorists.” The gun control advocates warned that only states with their own assault-weapons bans would escape the coming bloodbath. So what actually happened? FBI statistics showed that nationally the murder rate fell by 3% in 2004, the first drop since 2000, with firearms deaths dropping by 4.4%. Even more confounding for the gun control advocates, after the ban expired, the monthly murder rate plummeted 14% during September through December.
The murder rate for the seven states with their own assault-weapons ban declined by 2% in the same time period that the 43 states without a ban experienced a 3.4% decline in their murder rate. One can not claim with a great degree of certainty that these murder rate reductions were due wholly or partially to the assault-weapons ban or lack thereof, but it does seem clear that the ban did nothing to reduce crime. The “gun grabbers” have not proven their case.
Friday, September 28, 2007
A PERSONAL VIGNETTE 37
The following is a personal vignette from yesteryear. I have told this story to my grandchildren as it illustrates what I believe is a useful moral or two:
In 1966 after being transferred to the Geophysical Services Laboratory in Dallas, TX from my initial Mobil Oil assignment in Libya, North Africa I joined a group doing geophysical testing and research. The other members of this small group had either PhD’s or Master Degrees in science and since I had only an undergraduate degree in geological engineering, I reasoned that I would benefit from expanding my formal mathematics education. Therefore I enrolled in night school at Southern Methodist University. Even though I had been out of school for 10 years I was impatience to immediately take advanced mathematics courses, so instead of taking a review course in calculus, I started with a course called Advanced Calculus.
There was a problem from the outset. I was studying from not only the course textbook, but also from two calculus books, an algebra book, and a trigonometry book. Mathematical theories, formulae, and principles easily slip from one’s memory. On the first test I received an F. And this was not just a run-of-the-mill F. It was a low F; call it an F-. My next test score was better – it was an F+; the third was a D. Naturally my mid-term grade was an F. At this point, after recovering from the shock (I was an A student in mathematics in high school and B student in college which was not bad in an engineering school), I figured it was time to talk to the professor.
In the next class after the mid-term grades came out, the professor, anticipating our concerns, told us he knew many of us had been out of school for 10 to 15 years and were struggling. He said if we kept getting better scores on the tests he would discount the earlier scores, but if we were up and down on each test, he would have no choice other than to weight each test equally. I and the rest of the students thought that was fair.
Mobil Oil would pay for the course tuition, but only if I passed, and much more importantly my final grade would be sent to my supervisor. It would certainly not help my career if I did not receive a respectable grade. However, I was reasonably confident that I could keep getting better test scores and indeed I did. On the next three tests I received a C, C+, and B. On the final test I received a C+ and so my final grade was a solid C.
Intrepidly, I took the next semester continuation of Advanced Calculus from the same professor and received a B-. My third mathematics course at SMU was called Probability and Statistics taught by a graduate student. There was something about this subject that I found much easier to comprehend than the arcane principles of advanced calculus. Queuing Theory and the Rule of Bayes-Laplace, or as it is also called the inverse probability theorem, are logical and easier to follow than trying to grasp the advanced calculus concept of poles in a complex plane. C’est pas?
Not only did I get an A in the course, but of the circa 30 people in the class I received the top grade. A fellow Mobil Oil employee I knew, although had never worked with, received a B. He told me now he knew why I was a supervisor and he was not.
The graduate student instructor was not only an outstanding teacher, but a great guy as well. He had done consulting work for an oil exploration company and he explained to us that lease block bids fit nicely on a log-log plot – valuable information for any oil exploration company interested in oil/gas lease blocks.
There is a saying, aphorism, cliché, or whatever you want to call it, that you should quit when you are ahead. I did not follow that sound advice. For a fourth course I took linear algebra. My luck ran out in getting good teachers. This SMU professor apparently had psychological problems. At any rate he seemed determined to make the course material and tests as abstract and difficult as he could. I actually did not know what final grade I would get beyond knowing it would be somewhere between a D and a B. Most of the students were as mystified as I was. We only knew that he marked on a curve so one’s final grade depended upon its relative to the other scores in the class.
Late in the course one of the students told the professor, in front of the class, that he was a poor teacher. The professor responded incredulously, “I am a poor teacher?” I never knew what the motive was of that student, whom I had talked to a few times. He may have given up getting a passing grade by then or perhaps he was just the type of impulsive person who says what he thinks - the consequences be damned. After that I cowardly or wisely, depending upon your perspective, refrained from being seen talking to him in view of the professor. I received a C in the course.
What are the moral precepts of this story? (1.) It may sound trite, but whatever endeavor you are engaged in, always give it your best effort and do not get discouraged if you initially fail. There is no guarantee that you will eventually succeed, but if you quit you will always fail. (2.) When someone tells you of their successes, be it in financial investing, job achievements, academics, or whatever, ask them about their failures. If they can not come up with any tell them you just remembered that you have something important to do – you have to watch the grass on your lawn grow. Unless they are stone-stupid they will get it.
In 1966 after being transferred to the Geophysical Services Laboratory in Dallas, TX from my initial Mobil Oil assignment in Libya, North Africa I joined a group doing geophysical testing and research. The other members of this small group had either PhD’s or Master Degrees in science and since I had only an undergraduate degree in geological engineering, I reasoned that I would benefit from expanding my formal mathematics education. Therefore I enrolled in night school at Southern Methodist University. Even though I had been out of school for 10 years I was impatience to immediately take advanced mathematics courses, so instead of taking a review course in calculus, I started with a course called Advanced Calculus.
There was a problem from the outset. I was studying from not only the course textbook, but also from two calculus books, an algebra book, and a trigonometry book. Mathematical theories, formulae, and principles easily slip from one’s memory. On the first test I received an F. And this was not just a run-of-the-mill F. It was a low F; call it an F-. My next test score was better – it was an F+; the third was a D. Naturally my mid-term grade was an F. At this point, after recovering from the shock (I was an A student in mathematics in high school and B student in college which was not bad in an engineering school), I figured it was time to talk to the professor.
In the next class after the mid-term grades came out, the professor, anticipating our concerns, told us he knew many of us had been out of school for 10 to 15 years and were struggling. He said if we kept getting better scores on the tests he would discount the earlier scores, but if we were up and down on each test, he would have no choice other than to weight each test equally. I and the rest of the students thought that was fair.
Mobil Oil would pay for the course tuition, but only if I passed, and much more importantly my final grade would be sent to my supervisor. It would certainly not help my career if I did not receive a respectable grade. However, I was reasonably confident that I could keep getting better test scores and indeed I did. On the next three tests I received a C, C+, and B. On the final test I received a C+ and so my final grade was a solid C.
Intrepidly, I took the next semester continuation of Advanced Calculus from the same professor and received a B-. My third mathematics course at SMU was called Probability and Statistics taught by a graduate student. There was something about this subject that I found much easier to comprehend than the arcane principles of advanced calculus. Queuing Theory and the Rule of Bayes-Laplace, or as it is also called the inverse probability theorem, are logical and easier to follow than trying to grasp the advanced calculus concept of poles in a complex plane. C’est pas?
Not only did I get an A in the course, but of the circa 30 people in the class I received the top grade. A fellow Mobil Oil employee I knew, although had never worked with, received a B. He told me now he knew why I was a supervisor and he was not.
The graduate student instructor was not only an outstanding teacher, but a great guy as well. He had done consulting work for an oil exploration company and he explained to us that lease block bids fit nicely on a log-log plot – valuable information for any oil exploration company interested in oil/gas lease blocks.
There is a saying, aphorism, cliché, or whatever you want to call it, that you should quit when you are ahead. I did not follow that sound advice. For a fourth course I took linear algebra. My luck ran out in getting good teachers. This SMU professor apparently had psychological problems. At any rate he seemed determined to make the course material and tests as abstract and difficult as he could. I actually did not know what final grade I would get beyond knowing it would be somewhere between a D and a B. Most of the students were as mystified as I was. We only knew that he marked on a curve so one’s final grade depended upon its relative to the other scores in the class.
Late in the course one of the students told the professor, in front of the class, that he was a poor teacher. The professor responded incredulously, “I am a poor teacher?” I never knew what the motive was of that student, whom I had talked to a few times. He may have given up getting a passing grade by then or perhaps he was just the type of impulsive person who says what he thinks - the consequences be damned. After that I cowardly or wisely, depending upon your perspective, refrained from being seen talking to him in view of the professor. I received a C in the course.
What are the moral precepts of this story? (1.) It may sound trite, but whatever endeavor you are engaged in, always give it your best effort and do not get discouraged if you initially fail. There is no guarantee that you will eventually succeed, but if you quit you will always fail. (2.) When someone tells you of their successes, be it in financial investing, job achievements, academics, or whatever, ask them about their failures. If they can not come up with any tell them you just remembered that you have something important to do – you have to watch the grass on your lawn grow. Unless they are stone-stupid they will get it.
MOURNING DOVE TALES 36
So far this spring and summer (2007) we have had four nests of mourning doves (Zenaidura macroura) in three different hanging flower baskets in our patio. The hanging basket which was occupied twice was the one nearest (and very near) the patio door. It would appear to me that in the trade off between being wary of humans versus the protection of their eggs and hatchlings from predators by having their nests near humans, the mourning doves have chosen the latter. Are their little “bird brains” capable of making such intelligent decisions? Whether by instinct or conscious choice, it would appear these avian folks are sufficiently sophisticated to effectuate the proper course of action.
What I can say by virtue of observation is the following: Building the nest is a cooperative effort between the male and female mourning doves. The one bird (presumably the male) brings small sticks, twigs, and what other building material he can find to the female who, mostly using her beak, weaves these into a nest. Of course these nests were in hanging baskets so they did not have to be outstandingly structurally sound. Still they were constructed with interlaced materials without the use of proper five fingered hands – remarkable. I don’t know where the male got his material, but it must have not been far away because he made round trips in just a couple of minutes or less. The whole nest building activity was completed in a couple of hours. A short time later the female sat in the nest and must have laid her eggs soon after.
In the last mourning dove brood there were two eggs (as there were in the other three) which took 15 days to hatch. This is a bit tricky to determine as the parent birds not only sit on the eggs, but sit on and conceal the squabs, as they are called after they are hatched. I detected when the two eggs were hatched by getting so close to the nest that the parent bird flew away. Not to worry. After I moved away from the nest the adult bird returned in less than one minute.
The encyclopedia states that the male bird incubates the eggs from the morning to the afternoon; the female at night and the rest of the day. I observed that the first change occurs an hour so after sunrise, again circa an hour after noon, and an hour or less before sundown. The timing was so consistent from day to day that I almost suspected they both possessed Rolex timepieces. The changing of places on the nest contained a bit of variability. Sometimes the bird on the nest would fly away a second before the other came to the nest. More frequently the incoming bird would land on a ledge above the patio door and wait for the nesting bird to depart – usually in less than one minute. Only rarely did the incoming bird land directly in the nest before the other departed. Perhaps how soon the bird on the nest left was a function of how cramped he/she felt. I listened carefully, but could not hear any recriminations about “Where have you been all this time?” But that may have been because I don’t understand mourning dove talk.
The chicks are fed by both of the adults with what is called pigeon’s milk (dove milk) which is partially digested food (the diet of mourning doves is normally 99% seeds) in the adult bird’s crop. This food which has the consistency of cottage cheese, is regurgitated (Medieval Latin regurgitatus meaning to engulf) into the beaks of the chicks, ugh! It makes the human mammary system of feeding babies downright civilized and sanitary by comparison.
Mourning dove chicks are altricial (from Latin altric meaning nourish) at birth as opposed to precocial (from Latin praecoci, the same root as the word precocious); that is to say they are born blind and helpless instead of being capable of defending themselves or fleeing. The parents do not voluntarily leave the chicks alone for one minute until they are eight or nine days old. During this rapid growth period the chicks become too big to be concealed by the adult bird sitting on the nest and also the chicks appear to be curious about their immediate environment so they want to see what is going on. As the chicks mature they are left alone for an hour, then for a couple of hours and an increasing number of times per day until they are two weeks old. At that point the chicks were left alone all night for the first time after being on their own almost all that day. The next day (the 15th day after being hatched) first one, then several hours later, the other chick left the nest. An adult mourning dove (probably the mother) was perched nearby watching and seemingly encouraging the chicks as they left the nest. Even a couple of days later the mother was with the chicks as they appeared to be hanging around our enclosed backyard although they were fully capable of flying.
It takes a certain amount of courage for the chicks to attempt to fly out of the nest after being confined there during their maturing stage. In the first brood the chick stood on the edge of the hanging basket for several minutes before trying out his wings all the while the adult bird was perched on the backyard fence as if to say “come on youngling, you can make it.” The second chick in the last brood actually flew up to the ledge above the patio door before flying down to the patio floor. The mother mourning dove was on our house roof where the chick soon joined her. With seemingly simple minded mourning doves being so solicitous and protective of their offspring, what is the excuse for a few humans who carelessly or deliberately endanger their children?
What I can say by virtue of observation is the following: Building the nest is a cooperative effort between the male and female mourning doves. The one bird (presumably the male) brings small sticks, twigs, and what other building material he can find to the female who, mostly using her beak, weaves these into a nest. Of course these nests were in hanging baskets so they did not have to be outstandingly structurally sound. Still they were constructed with interlaced materials without the use of proper five fingered hands – remarkable. I don’t know where the male got his material, but it must have not been far away because he made round trips in just a couple of minutes or less. The whole nest building activity was completed in a couple of hours. A short time later the female sat in the nest and must have laid her eggs soon after.
In the last mourning dove brood there were two eggs (as there were in the other three) which took 15 days to hatch. This is a bit tricky to determine as the parent birds not only sit on the eggs, but sit on and conceal the squabs, as they are called after they are hatched. I detected when the two eggs were hatched by getting so close to the nest that the parent bird flew away. Not to worry. After I moved away from the nest the adult bird returned in less than one minute.
The encyclopedia states that the male bird incubates the eggs from the morning to the afternoon; the female at night and the rest of the day. I observed that the first change occurs an hour so after sunrise, again circa an hour after noon, and an hour or less before sundown. The timing was so consistent from day to day that I almost suspected they both possessed Rolex timepieces. The changing of places on the nest contained a bit of variability. Sometimes the bird on the nest would fly away a second before the other came to the nest. More frequently the incoming bird would land on a ledge above the patio door and wait for the nesting bird to depart – usually in less than one minute. Only rarely did the incoming bird land directly in the nest before the other departed. Perhaps how soon the bird on the nest left was a function of how cramped he/she felt. I listened carefully, but could not hear any recriminations about “Where have you been all this time?” But that may have been because I don’t understand mourning dove talk.
The chicks are fed by both of the adults with what is called pigeon’s milk (dove milk) which is partially digested food (the diet of mourning doves is normally 99% seeds) in the adult bird’s crop. This food which has the consistency of cottage cheese, is regurgitated (Medieval Latin regurgitatus meaning to engulf) into the beaks of the chicks, ugh! It makes the human mammary system of feeding babies downright civilized and sanitary by comparison.
Mourning dove chicks are altricial (from Latin altric meaning nourish) at birth as opposed to precocial (from Latin praecoci, the same root as the word precocious); that is to say they are born blind and helpless instead of being capable of defending themselves or fleeing. The parents do not voluntarily leave the chicks alone for one minute until they are eight or nine days old. During this rapid growth period the chicks become too big to be concealed by the adult bird sitting on the nest and also the chicks appear to be curious about their immediate environment so they want to see what is going on. As the chicks mature they are left alone for an hour, then for a couple of hours and an increasing number of times per day until they are two weeks old. At that point the chicks were left alone all night for the first time after being on their own almost all that day. The next day (the 15th day after being hatched) first one, then several hours later, the other chick left the nest. An adult mourning dove (probably the mother) was perched nearby watching and seemingly encouraging the chicks as they left the nest. Even a couple of days later the mother was with the chicks as they appeared to be hanging around our enclosed backyard although they were fully capable of flying.
It takes a certain amount of courage for the chicks to attempt to fly out of the nest after being confined there during their maturing stage. In the first brood the chick stood on the edge of the hanging basket for several minutes before trying out his wings all the while the adult bird was perched on the backyard fence as if to say “come on youngling, you can make it.” The second chick in the last brood actually flew up to the ledge above the patio door before flying down to the patio floor. The mother mourning dove was on our house roof where the chick soon joined her. With seemingly simple minded mourning doves being so solicitous and protective of their offspring, what is the excuse for a few humans who carelessly or deliberately endanger their children?
Friday, September 21, 2007
FREE ENTERPRISE VS. BIG GOVERNMENT 35
Former Florida Governor Jeb Bush said don’t blame FEMA (the Federal Emergency Management Agency) for the delays in getting relief supplies to victims of Hurricane Wilma, blame me. Why should any government official at the local, state, or federal level be blamed for not anticipating or responding with complete efficiency to natural disasters such as hurricanes which are by their nature capricious and unpredictable? For that matter why, quo jure, should the survival or deliverance from these disasters not devolve as the prime responsibility to the individuals and families of the people affected? This is not to say that succor, from governments and from private charities, should not be provided to the unfortunate people who find themselves in those circumstances, but where is individual responsibility? People were told prior to the arrival of Hurricane Wilma, as well as the other hurricanes, by federal/state/local officials to lay in at least a three days supply of nonperishable food and potable water, but many did not. It should not have been necessary to so instruct people, say nothing of them ignoring sound advice and for the ones who would choose to leave the area there was sufficient time to plan that. Free to Choose – that’s the ticket. The Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson from Chicago wrote eloquently on the subject of personal responsibility including for the people caught up in hurricane disasters this season.
The implicit assumption among the general population and certainly the mainstream news media now seems to be that it is the primary responsibility and imperative of first, the national, then the state, and finally local government to take care of people caught up in natural disasters. It would make more sense if our form of governance were like the old Soviet Union, although I would not put much faith, so to speak, in an entity like that. It makes absolutely much less sense for people living in a free society to so think. In September 2005 in a repeat of a C-SPAN Book-TV program originally telecasted in 1994 on the 50th anniversary of the publication of the F.A. Hayek book The Road to Serfdom, economist Dr. Milton Friedman explained what it means to function and live in a free society. Hayek, an Austrian economist, won the Nobel Prize for economics in 1974 – Friedman won the Nobel Prize for economics in 1976. Friedman wrote an introduction to the 50th anniversary edition of the 1944 book The Road to Serfdom, a slightly expanded version of the introduction he wrote for the German 25th anniversary edition.
In his 1994 C-SPAN interview, Friedman went on to expound that all over the world socialism had failed and everywhere it was tried, capitalism had succeeded. He said that everyone admitted it (perhaps that was a slight exaggeration – the hard left, in this country and elsewhere, would not admit anything of the kind) and yet free enterprise/capitalism has been losing ground for some time. When Friedman was born in 1912 the percentage of the GDP by the federal government in this country was approximately 15% - 85% was due to private enterprise. In the immediate years after WWII, 1947-50, the government’s portion had grown to 25% and by 1994 it was 45%. And considering the controlling effect of governmental regulation on private business, the percentage realistically was over 50%. The good Dr. Freidman seemed as bemused and perplexed at this illogically continuing trend as any savant or ordinary clear thinking folk would be.
Yet this growth of government, especially at the federal level, seems inexorable, be it under control of Democrats or Republicans. What are we to make of this? If economic history has taught anything it is that economic wellbeing for most people is best served by as free an economic system as it is possible to create and encourage. I am not advocating license for an absolutely laissez-faire system without regard for laws or morality. The brigands of WorldCom, Global Crossing, Arkadelphia, Enron, et.al. were not engaged in free enterprise. They were particularly immoral and destructive thieves who undermined a true free enterprise system with their unconscionable deception and fraud. A possible punishment, although perhaps considered immoderate by a few, would be to subject them to the same extreme treatment that the Sindero Luminoso (Shining Path) guerillas perpetrated in Peru a number of years ago. To prove they could it and to terrorize and intimidate the people, they decorated Lima by hanging half of a dozen black dogs from lampposts around the city. It may prove unsettling to some and I would not recommend it, but the sight of the aforementioned thieves swinging from lampposts in New York, Philadelphia, Houston, etc. should, quod erat demonstrandum, have a deterring and salutary effect on would-be future corporate malefactors.
In his 1962 book Capitalism and Freedom, Milton Friedman states: “Few trends could so thoroughly undermine the very foundations of our free society as the acceptance by corporate officials of a social responsibility other than to make as much money for their stockholders as possible. This is a fundamentally subversive doctrine.” He goes on to explain why that is so. It is my observation that many (perhaps most) people think that ExxonMobil is in the business of selling gasoline, motor oils, and elastomers and other petroleum derived packaging materials; Proctor & Gamble is in the business of selling soaps and household cleaners; and General Electric is in the business of selling electrical appliances. They are not. These corporations are in business to make money and the more the better – so long as they play by the rules by engaging in open and free competition, without deception and fraud. These companies and others make money by supplying their customers with goods and services to the best of their ability. If they satisfy their customers they will succeed and make money. If not they will go out of business. Clueless Bill O’Reilly and people of his ilk are in dire need of a course in Economics 101. O’Reilly had repeatedly said on his television show, The O’Reilly Factor, that “greedy” major oil companies should give back a portion of their profits to their customers. His arrogance is exceeded only by his ignorance.
As the price of gasoline kept increasing this year what was the result? After a slow reaction until it was obvious that higher prices were not transient, drivers began changing their habits by driving less and opting, in some cases, for more fuel efficient vehicles. And in the past couple of weeks gasoline prices began to abate. This is exactly what should happen. Price is the most efficient mechanism ever conceived for regulating supply. What if, under public pressure, government intervenes in this price/supply regulating couplet? By the imposition of a price ceiling on gasoline set below the natural market price, shortages would ensue. This is not mere speculation – it has happened with commodities, services, and labor all through history. I remember WWII price and wages controls and concomitant rationing. Of course war time has special exigencies from peace time as the country went into survival mode for the preservation of freedom. Still economic laws were not repealed – shortages or rationing inexorably follow price controls and during non war times there are no survival excuses.
Again quoting Milton Friedman: “[Price and wages controls] clearly would produce [commodity] shortages, labor shortages, grey markets, and black markets. If prices are not allowed to ration goods and workers, there must be some other means to do so. Price controls, whether legal or voluntary, if effectively enforced would eventually lead to the destruction of the free-enterprise system and its replacement by a centrally controlled system.” There are those to whom a centrally controlled system sounds splendid. I for one believe that the examples of Albania, Angola, Cambodia, Cuba, Eastern Europe, Vietnam, et al. and, the most striking of all, the 70 year miserably failed experiment of the Soviet Union are definitive. It is hardly accidental that mainland China has become and is increasingly so an economic colossus when they set out on the road to capitalism starting in 1979 under the leadership of Deng Xiaoping.
It is not only in the sphere of economics that big government is inimical to personal wellbeing. As government grows its influence intrudes into non economic areas such as personal freedoms of speech and actions. Differentiating between necessary laws for the preservation of public safety/welfare and excessively restrictive or intrusive laws is a whole topic which needs extensive elaboration. The recent Supreme Court decision allowing local government to use the constitutional right of eminent domain for seizing land for non exclusive public works such as shopping malls or sports arenas is but one of the latest intrusions. Such actions may not directly affect everyone, but to paraphrase 16th & 17th century English poet and clergyman John Donne: Do not send to know for whom those tenets affect, they will eventually affect you.
The implicit assumption among the general population and certainly the mainstream news media now seems to be that it is the primary responsibility and imperative of first, the national, then the state, and finally local government to take care of people caught up in natural disasters. It would make more sense if our form of governance were like the old Soviet Union, although I would not put much faith, so to speak, in an entity like that. It makes absolutely much less sense for people living in a free society to so think. In September 2005 in a repeat of a C-SPAN Book-TV program originally telecasted in 1994 on the 50th anniversary of the publication of the F.A. Hayek book The Road to Serfdom, economist Dr. Milton Friedman explained what it means to function and live in a free society. Hayek, an Austrian economist, won the Nobel Prize for economics in 1974 – Friedman won the Nobel Prize for economics in 1976. Friedman wrote an introduction to the 50th anniversary edition of the 1944 book The Road to Serfdom, a slightly expanded version of the introduction he wrote for the German 25th anniversary edition.
In his 1994 C-SPAN interview, Friedman went on to expound that all over the world socialism had failed and everywhere it was tried, capitalism had succeeded. He said that everyone admitted it (perhaps that was a slight exaggeration – the hard left, in this country and elsewhere, would not admit anything of the kind) and yet free enterprise/capitalism has been losing ground for some time. When Friedman was born in 1912 the percentage of the GDP by the federal government in this country was approximately 15% - 85% was due to private enterprise. In the immediate years after WWII, 1947-50, the government’s portion had grown to 25% and by 1994 it was 45%. And considering the controlling effect of governmental regulation on private business, the percentage realistically was over 50%. The good Dr. Freidman seemed as bemused and perplexed at this illogically continuing trend as any savant or ordinary clear thinking folk would be.
Yet this growth of government, especially at the federal level, seems inexorable, be it under control of Democrats or Republicans. What are we to make of this? If economic history has taught anything it is that economic wellbeing for most people is best served by as free an economic system as it is possible to create and encourage. I am not advocating license for an absolutely laissez-faire system without regard for laws or morality. The brigands of WorldCom, Global Crossing, Arkadelphia, Enron, et.al. were not engaged in free enterprise. They were particularly immoral and destructive thieves who undermined a true free enterprise system with their unconscionable deception and fraud. A possible punishment, although perhaps considered immoderate by a few, would be to subject them to the same extreme treatment that the Sindero Luminoso (Shining Path) guerillas perpetrated in Peru a number of years ago. To prove they could it and to terrorize and intimidate the people, they decorated Lima by hanging half of a dozen black dogs from lampposts around the city. It may prove unsettling to some and I would not recommend it, but the sight of the aforementioned thieves swinging from lampposts in New York, Philadelphia, Houston, etc. should, quod erat demonstrandum, have a deterring and salutary effect on would-be future corporate malefactors.
In his 1962 book Capitalism and Freedom, Milton Friedman states: “Few trends could so thoroughly undermine the very foundations of our free society as the acceptance by corporate officials of a social responsibility other than to make as much money for their stockholders as possible. This is a fundamentally subversive doctrine.” He goes on to explain why that is so. It is my observation that many (perhaps most) people think that ExxonMobil is in the business of selling gasoline, motor oils, and elastomers and other petroleum derived packaging materials; Proctor & Gamble is in the business of selling soaps and household cleaners; and General Electric is in the business of selling electrical appliances. They are not. These corporations are in business to make money and the more the better – so long as they play by the rules by engaging in open and free competition, without deception and fraud. These companies and others make money by supplying their customers with goods and services to the best of their ability. If they satisfy their customers they will succeed and make money. If not they will go out of business. Clueless Bill O’Reilly and people of his ilk are in dire need of a course in Economics 101. O’Reilly had repeatedly said on his television show, The O’Reilly Factor, that “greedy” major oil companies should give back a portion of their profits to their customers. His arrogance is exceeded only by his ignorance.
As the price of gasoline kept increasing this year what was the result? After a slow reaction until it was obvious that higher prices were not transient, drivers began changing their habits by driving less and opting, in some cases, for more fuel efficient vehicles. And in the past couple of weeks gasoline prices began to abate. This is exactly what should happen. Price is the most efficient mechanism ever conceived for regulating supply. What if, under public pressure, government intervenes in this price/supply regulating couplet? By the imposition of a price ceiling on gasoline set below the natural market price, shortages would ensue. This is not mere speculation – it has happened with commodities, services, and labor all through history. I remember WWII price and wages controls and concomitant rationing. Of course war time has special exigencies from peace time as the country went into survival mode for the preservation of freedom. Still economic laws were not repealed – shortages or rationing inexorably follow price controls and during non war times there are no survival excuses.
Again quoting Milton Friedman: “[Price and wages controls] clearly would produce [commodity] shortages, labor shortages, grey markets, and black markets. If prices are not allowed to ration goods and workers, there must be some other means to do so. Price controls, whether legal or voluntary, if effectively enforced would eventually lead to the destruction of the free-enterprise system and its replacement by a centrally controlled system.” There are those to whom a centrally controlled system sounds splendid. I for one believe that the examples of Albania, Angola, Cambodia, Cuba, Eastern Europe, Vietnam, et al. and, the most striking of all, the 70 year miserably failed experiment of the Soviet Union are definitive. It is hardly accidental that mainland China has become and is increasingly so an economic colossus when they set out on the road to capitalism starting in 1979 under the leadership of Deng Xiaoping.
It is not only in the sphere of economics that big government is inimical to personal wellbeing. As government grows its influence intrudes into non economic areas such as personal freedoms of speech and actions. Differentiating between necessary laws for the preservation of public safety/welfare and excessively restrictive or intrusive laws is a whole topic which needs extensive elaboration. The recent Supreme Court decision allowing local government to use the constitutional right of eminent domain for seizing land for non exclusive public works such as shopping malls or sports arenas is but one of the latest intrusions. Such actions may not directly affect everyone, but to paraphrase 16th & 17th century English poet and clergyman John Donne: Do not send to know for whom those tenets affect, they will eventually affect you.
Friday, September 14, 2007
FREE ENTERPRISE VS. THE WELFARE STATE 34
Can anyone imagine what would happen to any politician who even vaguely intimated that the victims of Hurricane Katrina themselves bear some responsible for their plight? After the mainstream media and the left-wing Democrats were through with him/her for even daring to suggest that the people of New Orleans were partly to blame for not reacting collectively with responsibility and unselfishness he/she could forget about ever running for elective office again. There are some differences between what happened to the people in New Orleans and the ones in Australia, yet there are also important similarities. Would you ever expect the left in this country to admit fallibility of their overweening assumption that only government can help people despite all the evidence extant that private enterprise and self-reliance will always be more efficient and effective? The welfare state has hurt the very people it was suppose to help, yet there is not the proverbial chance of a snowball in hell of getting any meaningful change in that flawed philosophy.
There are too many assumptions which are never challenged, especially by the left. This is one example which is that in an emergency ordinary people are helpless and must depend 100% upon government for their salvation. In the constant drumbeat of the affluent Western democracies having a moral responsible to share their wealth with the poorer countries of the world when have you heard the question asked about what is wrong with these countries anyway? Just why do so many people from Mexico and Central America feel compelled to illegally enter the USA in order to have an economically decent income. The same question should be asked about the people from Northern and Eastern Africa, as well as Eastern Europe illegally entering Western Europe. A more permanent, equitable, and stable solution to this problem might eventuate if the UN would seriously address and act upon it in conjunction with the countries themselves – assuming a majority of the people in those countries want change and after the UN is reformed because as currently constituted and working the UN is so bureaucratic, inefficient, and corrupt as to make it useless.
Speaking of false assumptions, there is a great 2004 book titled How Capitalism Saved America by Thomas J. DiLorenzo which challenges some of those assumptions. Among the issues and historical examples he dissects are these:
1.) The common belief is that the British settlers at the Jamestown (Virginia) colony in 1609 (the second group to go there) and the Plymouth (Massachusetts) colony in 1620 were kept from complete starvation by the largesse of the Indians. That is not what happened. Of the original 104 Jamestown settlers in 1607 all but 38 died - most by starvation. A second group of 500 came in 1609 and 440 of those died of starvation and disease. The problem was the lack of private property. Everything that was produced went into a common pool for the community and to repay the investment and generate profits of the Virginia Company back in England. In 1611 a “high Marshall”, Sir Thomas Dale, went to the colony and quickly diagnosed and corrected the problem. He gave each man three acres and required only that each would have to work for one month a year to repay the Virginia Company. The colony soon began to prosper since each was benefiting from his own labor and there was no more free riding. Whereas the Indians were originally implored to sell the colonists corn, after the transformation of the colony into an individual enterprise system the Indians bought corn from the colonists in exchange for furs and other items. Thus mutually beneficial trading and bartering between the colonists and Indians occurred. Similar conditions existed with the Plymouth colony. Originally there was collective land ownership and pooled output for the entire colony. Approximately half of the 101 Pilgrims who arrived in 1620 were dead within a few months. Another 100 arrived in the next three years and were barely able to survive. The governor of the Plymouth Colony, William Bradford, solved the problem of low productivity by introducing individuality owned land, the same policy as was pursued in the Jamestown Colony and the result was the same. The Plymouth colonists prospered. It is clear that collectivization fails every time it is tried and free enterprise succeeds. Why is it that each generation has to learn this lesson anew? It would seem that as Henry Ford said, “History is bunk.”
2.) The so called “robber barons” in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, John D. Rockefeller, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Grenville Dodge, Henry Villard, James J. Hill and others are generally considered to be no more than greedy, exploitative capitalists. In truth they supplied goods and services through a competitive economical system, created many jobs, and increased the economic prosperity of the country.
3.) Herbert Hoover is forever remembered as a “do nothing” president who allowed the country to go into and remain in a protracted economic depression. The facts are different. Hoover was a hyper-interventionist who instituted many federal government programs which made the economic depression worse. The Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act greatly restricted imports to America and predictably also greatly restricted American exports after other nations retaliated against us and further hurt our and other countries' economies. This act should more accurately be called the Smoot-Hawley-Hoover Act as Hoover strongly supported it.
4.) Franklin Delano Roosevelt is celebrated as the champion of the people who brought the country out of the worst economic depression in history through the creation of myriad federal bureaucracies and work programs. In fact although WWII brought on nearly full employment through production of war materials and millions of people being employed in the military, the depression ended only after the end of the war. There was a shortage of consumer goods during the war years (most production was directed towards materials of war) with inflation held in check by wage and price controls and rationing. During the depression years of the 1930’s the unemployment rate did not decline despite the federal spending of the Roosevelt administration. The USA unemployment rate was 16% in 1931 and 19% in 1938 after nine years of the New Deal – three under Hoover and six under Roosevelt. The unemployment rate in 1929 just prior to the depression was 3.2%. It is true, for instance, that the TVA (Tennessee Valley Authority) program brought electrification to many rural American homes and small business and employment to thousands of others, yet it was at the expense of other Americans. It is always the problem that the spending on government programs robs the private sector of funds and opportunity. Who is more efficient in spending – government or private enterprise? There is seldom proper accounting for waste and inefficiency in government spending while the viability factor and profit incentive of business keeps down waste and inefficiency. Pay attention to the upcoming expenditures in the rebuilding of the Gulf Coast and especially New Orleans for a further lesson in government waste, corruption, and ineptitude.
5.) Despite claims to the contrary by agitprop liberals the energy crisis of the 1970’s was corrected by deregulation formulated by the Reagan administration in the 1980’s. The recent blackouts in California and the Northeast were not caused by deregulation, but by restrictive federal and state government policies which curtailed exploration, production, refining, and transmission of multifold forms of energy. Artificially restrict supply and shortages ensue – wow, what a novel concept.
That above mentioned book is excellent I highly recommend it. I did not discuss all of the issues such as the differences of mercantilism vs. true free market capitalism, but it is in the book.
There are too many assumptions which are never challenged, especially by the left. This is one example which is that in an emergency ordinary people are helpless and must depend 100% upon government for their salvation. In the constant drumbeat of the affluent Western democracies having a moral responsible to share their wealth with the poorer countries of the world when have you heard the question asked about what is wrong with these countries anyway? Just why do so many people from Mexico and Central America feel compelled to illegally enter the USA in order to have an economically decent income. The same question should be asked about the people from Northern and Eastern Africa, as well as Eastern Europe illegally entering Western Europe. A more permanent, equitable, and stable solution to this problem might eventuate if the UN would seriously address and act upon it in conjunction with the countries themselves – assuming a majority of the people in those countries want change and after the UN is reformed because as currently constituted and working the UN is so bureaucratic, inefficient, and corrupt as to make it useless.
Speaking of false assumptions, there is a great 2004 book titled How Capitalism Saved America by Thomas J. DiLorenzo which challenges some of those assumptions. Among the issues and historical examples he dissects are these:
1.) The common belief is that the British settlers at the Jamestown (Virginia) colony in 1609 (the second group to go there) and the Plymouth (Massachusetts) colony in 1620 were kept from complete starvation by the largesse of the Indians. That is not what happened. Of the original 104 Jamestown settlers in 1607 all but 38 died - most by starvation. A second group of 500 came in 1609 and 440 of those died of starvation and disease. The problem was the lack of private property. Everything that was produced went into a common pool for the community and to repay the investment and generate profits of the Virginia Company back in England. In 1611 a “high Marshall”, Sir Thomas Dale, went to the colony and quickly diagnosed and corrected the problem. He gave each man three acres and required only that each would have to work for one month a year to repay the Virginia Company. The colony soon began to prosper since each was benefiting from his own labor and there was no more free riding. Whereas the Indians were originally implored to sell the colonists corn, after the transformation of the colony into an individual enterprise system the Indians bought corn from the colonists in exchange for furs and other items. Thus mutually beneficial trading and bartering between the colonists and Indians occurred. Similar conditions existed with the Plymouth colony. Originally there was collective land ownership and pooled output for the entire colony. Approximately half of the 101 Pilgrims who arrived in 1620 were dead within a few months. Another 100 arrived in the next three years and were barely able to survive. The governor of the Plymouth Colony, William Bradford, solved the problem of low productivity by introducing individuality owned land, the same policy as was pursued in the Jamestown Colony and the result was the same. The Plymouth colonists prospered. It is clear that collectivization fails every time it is tried and free enterprise succeeds. Why is it that each generation has to learn this lesson anew? It would seem that as Henry Ford said, “History is bunk.”
2.) The so called “robber barons” in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, John D. Rockefeller, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Grenville Dodge, Henry Villard, James J. Hill and others are generally considered to be no more than greedy, exploitative capitalists. In truth they supplied goods and services through a competitive economical system, created many jobs, and increased the economic prosperity of the country.
3.) Herbert Hoover is forever remembered as a “do nothing” president who allowed the country to go into and remain in a protracted economic depression. The facts are different. Hoover was a hyper-interventionist who instituted many federal government programs which made the economic depression worse. The Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act greatly restricted imports to America and predictably also greatly restricted American exports after other nations retaliated against us and further hurt our and other countries' economies. This act should more accurately be called the Smoot-Hawley-Hoover Act as Hoover strongly supported it.
4.) Franklin Delano Roosevelt is celebrated as the champion of the people who brought the country out of the worst economic depression in history through the creation of myriad federal bureaucracies and work programs. In fact although WWII brought on nearly full employment through production of war materials and millions of people being employed in the military, the depression ended only after the end of the war. There was a shortage of consumer goods during the war years (most production was directed towards materials of war) with inflation held in check by wage and price controls and rationing. During the depression years of the 1930’s the unemployment rate did not decline despite the federal spending of the Roosevelt administration. The USA unemployment rate was 16% in 1931 and 19% in 1938 after nine years of the New Deal – three under Hoover and six under Roosevelt. The unemployment rate in 1929 just prior to the depression was 3.2%. It is true, for instance, that the TVA (Tennessee Valley Authority) program brought electrification to many rural American homes and small business and employment to thousands of others, yet it was at the expense of other Americans. It is always the problem that the spending on government programs robs the private sector of funds and opportunity. Who is more efficient in spending – government or private enterprise? There is seldom proper accounting for waste and inefficiency in government spending while the viability factor and profit incentive of business keeps down waste and inefficiency. Pay attention to the upcoming expenditures in the rebuilding of the Gulf Coast and especially New Orleans for a further lesson in government waste, corruption, and ineptitude.
5.) Despite claims to the contrary by agitprop liberals the energy crisis of the 1970’s was corrected by deregulation formulated by the Reagan administration in the 1980’s. The recent blackouts in California and the Northeast were not caused by deregulation, but by restrictive federal and state government policies which curtailed exploration, production, refining, and transmission of multifold forms of energy. Artificially restrict supply and shortages ensue – wow, what a novel concept.
That above mentioned book is excellent I highly recommend it. I did not discuss all of the issues such as the differences of mercantilism vs. true free market capitalism, but it is in the book.
Friday, September 7, 2007
DO AS I SAY NOT AS I DO 33
A 2005 book Do As I Say (Not As I Do) by the conservative Hoover Institute’s Peter Schweizer exposes the hypocrisy of sanctimonious and prevaricating liberals such as:
►Michael Moore insists that corporations are evil and claims he doesn’t invest in the stock market due to moral principle. But Moore’s IRS forms show that over the past five years he has owned shares in such corporate giants as Halliburton (Can you imagine that – the company of the arch enemy, Dick Chaney, the bete-noire of liberals and according to them the apex of evil humans and corporations), Merck, Pfizer, Sunoco, Tenet Healthcare, Ford, General Electric, and McDonald’s.
►Staunch union supporter Nancy Pelosi has received the Cesar Chavez Award from the United Farmworkers Union, but the $25 million Northern California vineyard she and her husband own is a non-union shop. The hypocrisy doesn’t end there. Pelosi has received more money from the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees union than any other member of congress in recent election cycles. The Pelosis own a large stake in an exclusive hotel in Rutherford, Calif. It has more than 250 employees. None of them is in a union according to Schweizer. The Pelosis are also partners in a restaurant chain called Piatti, which has 900 employees. The chain is – you guessed it – a non-union shop.
►Ralph Nader claims that unions are essential to protect worker rights, but when an editor of one of his publications tried to form a union to ameliorate miserable working conditions, the editor was fired and the locks changed on his office door.
►Linguist and socialist Noam Chomsky has described the Pentagon as “the vilest institution on the face of the earth” and has lashed out against tax havens and trusts that benefit only the rich. However over the last 40 years Chomsky has been paid millions of dollars by the Pentagon (one has to wonder why) and he used a venerable law firm to set up his irrevocable trust to shield his assets from the IRS.
►Al Franken says that conservatives are racist because they lack diversity and oppose affirmative action, but less than 1% of the people he has hired over the past 15 years have been African-Americans.
►Ted Kennedy has fought for the estate tax and spoken out against tax shelters, but he has repeatedly benefited from an intricate web of trusts and private foundations that have shielded most of his family’s fortune from the IRS. One Kennedy family trust wasn’t even set up in the U.S. – it’s in the Fiji Islands.
►Another Kennedy, environmentalist and congressman Robert Kennedy Jr. has said that it is not moral to profit from natural resources, although he receives an annual check from the family’s large holdings in the oil industry.
►Barbra Streisand has talked about the necessary of unions to protect a “living wage.” As for herself, she prefers to do her filming and postproduction work in Canada where she can pay less than American union wages.
►Bill & Hillary Clinton have spoken out in favor of the estate tax, and in 2000 Bill Clinton vetoed a bill seeking to end it. Yet the Clintons have set up a contract trust that allows them to substantially reduce the amount of inheritance tax their estate will pay when they die. Hillary, for her part, has written and spoken extensively about the right of children to make major decisions regarding their own lives, including having abortions without parental notification, but she barred 13 year old daughter Chelsea from getting her ears pierced and forbid the teen from watching MTV or HBO. Good for Hillary for making responsible decisions about her daughter – too bad she is such a hypocrite when it comes to other people’s children
►Billionaire Hungarian-American businessman and money exchange manipulator George Soros says the wealthy should pay higher, more progressive tax rates, but he holds the bulk of his money in tax-free overseas accounts in Curacao, Bermuda, and the Cayman Islands.
Schweizer writes: “Liberals claim to support affirmative action, but don’t practice it. They support higher taxes, but set up complicated tax shelters to avoid paying them. They claim to be ardent environmentalists, but abandon their cause when it impinges on their own property rights. The reality is that liberals like to preach in moral platitudes. They like to condemn ordinary Americans and Republicans for a whole host of things: racism, lack of concern for the poor, polluting the environment, and greed. But when it comes to applying the same standards to themselves, liberals are found to be shockingly guilty of hypocrisy.
Interestingly Peter Schweizer was served legal papers demanding to know where he obtained his information about some of the people he targets. Note there was no allegation of slander or false information in his book. His critics simply wanted to know how he found out about them. Fortunately there is this important document which states that: “Congress shall make no law….abridging the freedom of speech or of the press…..” Liberals might want to review our Constitution occasionally.
►Michael Moore insists that corporations are evil and claims he doesn’t invest in the stock market due to moral principle. But Moore’s IRS forms show that over the past five years he has owned shares in such corporate giants as Halliburton (Can you imagine that – the company of the arch enemy, Dick Chaney, the bete-noire of liberals and according to them the apex of evil humans and corporations), Merck, Pfizer, Sunoco, Tenet Healthcare, Ford, General Electric, and McDonald’s.
►Staunch union supporter Nancy Pelosi has received the Cesar Chavez Award from the United Farmworkers Union, but the $25 million Northern California vineyard she and her husband own is a non-union shop. The hypocrisy doesn’t end there. Pelosi has received more money from the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees union than any other member of congress in recent election cycles. The Pelosis own a large stake in an exclusive hotel in Rutherford, Calif. It has more than 250 employees. None of them is in a union according to Schweizer. The Pelosis are also partners in a restaurant chain called Piatti, which has 900 employees. The chain is – you guessed it – a non-union shop.
►Ralph Nader claims that unions are essential to protect worker rights, but when an editor of one of his publications tried to form a union to ameliorate miserable working conditions, the editor was fired and the locks changed on his office door.
►Linguist and socialist Noam Chomsky has described the Pentagon as “the vilest institution on the face of the earth” and has lashed out against tax havens and trusts that benefit only the rich. However over the last 40 years Chomsky has been paid millions of dollars by the Pentagon (one has to wonder why) and he used a venerable law firm to set up his irrevocable trust to shield his assets from the IRS.
►Al Franken says that conservatives are racist because they lack diversity and oppose affirmative action, but less than 1% of the people he has hired over the past 15 years have been African-Americans.
►Ted Kennedy has fought for the estate tax and spoken out against tax shelters, but he has repeatedly benefited from an intricate web of trusts and private foundations that have shielded most of his family’s fortune from the IRS. One Kennedy family trust wasn’t even set up in the U.S. – it’s in the Fiji Islands.
►Another Kennedy, environmentalist and congressman Robert Kennedy Jr. has said that it is not moral to profit from natural resources, although he receives an annual check from the family’s large holdings in the oil industry.
►Barbra Streisand has talked about the necessary of unions to protect a “living wage.” As for herself, she prefers to do her filming and postproduction work in Canada where she can pay less than American union wages.
►Bill & Hillary Clinton have spoken out in favor of the estate tax, and in 2000 Bill Clinton vetoed a bill seeking to end it. Yet the Clintons have set up a contract trust that allows them to substantially reduce the amount of inheritance tax their estate will pay when they die. Hillary, for her part, has written and spoken extensively about the right of children to make major decisions regarding their own lives, including having abortions without parental notification, but she barred 13 year old daughter Chelsea from getting her ears pierced and forbid the teen from watching MTV or HBO. Good for Hillary for making responsible decisions about her daughter – too bad she is such a hypocrite when it comes to other people’s children
►Billionaire Hungarian-American businessman and money exchange manipulator George Soros says the wealthy should pay higher, more progressive tax rates, but he holds the bulk of his money in tax-free overseas accounts in Curacao, Bermuda, and the Cayman Islands.
Schweizer writes: “Liberals claim to support affirmative action, but don’t practice it. They support higher taxes, but set up complicated tax shelters to avoid paying them. They claim to be ardent environmentalists, but abandon their cause when it impinges on their own property rights. The reality is that liberals like to preach in moral platitudes. They like to condemn ordinary Americans and Republicans for a whole host of things: racism, lack of concern for the poor, polluting the environment, and greed. But when it comes to applying the same standards to themselves, liberals are found to be shockingly guilty of hypocrisy.
Interestingly Peter Schweizer was served legal papers demanding to know where he obtained his information about some of the people he targets. Note there was no allegation of slander or false information in his book. His critics simply wanted to know how he found out about them. Fortunately there is this important document which states that: “Congress shall make no law….abridging the freedom of speech or of the press…..” Liberals might want to review our Constitution occasionally.
Friday, August 31, 2007
HURRICANE KATRINA 32
I am not sanguine about us being any more prepared for the next disaster than we were for Hurricane Katrina. There simply has been and is increasingly now too much bureaucracy and too many centers of power and authority in the various levels of government trying to respond to disasters.
Who is to blame for the catastrophe that befell New Orleans and the Gulf Coast? Where to start? The then and still, mayor of N.O., Ray Nagin, can be faulted for not responding fast enough (the order of response should local, state, then the federals) and not following his own disaster plan by supplying transportation (school and city buses) for the people who could not get out of their neighborhoods. And once people were in the Superdome, according to the plan, they were supposed to be given water, RTE meals, and security. None of these was provided.
We are a nation of laws and the law states that the governor has to request help from the federal government in the form of disaster aid and the military before the federal government can legally act. Louisiana Governor Kathleen Babineaux Blanco bears a great deal of blame for not ordering the state national guard into N.O. sooner and not allowing Bush to send in federal and other state guard units to help. The Red Cross was standing by to go to the Superdome with supplies, but was not allowed in by the Governor’s homeland security dept. because the governor felt that people would then go to the Superdome in greater numbers and she and the mayor did not want that. Where the hell were people supposed to go? Bush actually called Blanco and urged her to act, but she still dithered another 24 hours. Incidentally there was bad blood between Blanco and Nagin even before the hurricane because Nagin supported Blanco’s moderate Republican opponent, current Louisiana congressman, Bobby Jindal, for governor in the last race (I don’t know why). Blanco’s performance as governor is in contrast to Haley Barbour in Mississippi who acted quickly and decisively even allowing that his problems were not of the same magnitude as Blanco’s.
When Bush saw that the mayor and the governor were not up to the monumental task they faced he should have acted and the law and precedent be damned – lives and the suffering of many people were at stake. Bush was 24 hrs. late in acting. He did not come through with the same stellar performance he did after 9/11. Even though FEMA was not set up as a first responder in a disaster it is a hopelessly inept bureaucracy and Michael Brown was an archetypical bureaucrat. He deserved to be canned and Bush showed bad judgment in appointing him in the first place. The type of person who is needed in a job like that is Lt. Gen. Russel Honore. The wife of one of the firefighters from McKinney (a city just north of Plano) said on the radio here that when her husband’s unit volunteered and went to New Orleans a FEMA official there gave them the job of passing out FEMA flyers and told them there would not be doing any firefighting and rescue work because he knew they were just there for the glory! That SOB should have been fired on the spot, but of course was not.
The politicians are not covering themselves in glory with their carping and unseemly criticizing even as the rescue effort was ongoing. For the egregious Howard Dean to say that the slow federal response was racially motivated is just plain nuts and divisive. The tendentious remarks of the insane Nancy Pelosi were inane. Hillary Clinton while more restrained in her criticizing came out with the same old canard of calling for a bipartisan commission. Good lord, doesn’t that woman have any imagination or originality? Who remembers what even the recent 9/11 commission said or accomplished? Name just one thing. I can not. Among others, two Louisiana politicians, Mary Landreau and Bobby Jindal have bitterly complained about the response of the federal government. It is as if they have been complete outsiders and not influential politicians in Louisiana. Landreau is a United States senator, her brother was the Lt. governor, and her father was a long time powerful politico in Louisiana. To paraphrase what Dr. Samuel Johnson said about the American colonialists, Landreau and Jindal should be thankful for any punishment for their culpability for this catastrophe - short of hanging.
What does come through is the generosity and just plain goodness of so many ordinary Americans. There are always the scam artists (according to the FBI there were 2300 phony Hurricane Katrina disaster relief web sites – some came from overseas) and as we all saw there were looters in New Orleans and Mississippi. When the massive amount of government and private relief monies came flooding in, so to speak, there were the inevitable stealing and ‘misappropriation’ of some of the funds.
Who is to blame for the catastrophe that befell New Orleans and the Gulf Coast? Where to start? The then and still, mayor of N.O., Ray Nagin, can be faulted for not responding fast enough (the order of response should local, state, then the federals) and not following his own disaster plan by supplying transportation (school and city buses) for the people who could not get out of their neighborhoods. And once people were in the Superdome, according to the plan, they were supposed to be given water, RTE meals, and security. None of these was provided.
We are a nation of laws and the law states that the governor has to request help from the federal government in the form of disaster aid and the military before the federal government can legally act. Louisiana Governor Kathleen Babineaux Blanco bears a great deal of blame for not ordering the state national guard into N.O. sooner and not allowing Bush to send in federal and other state guard units to help. The Red Cross was standing by to go to the Superdome with supplies, but was not allowed in by the Governor’s homeland security dept. because the governor felt that people would then go to the Superdome in greater numbers and she and the mayor did not want that. Where the hell were people supposed to go? Bush actually called Blanco and urged her to act, but she still dithered another 24 hours. Incidentally there was bad blood between Blanco and Nagin even before the hurricane because Nagin supported Blanco’s moderate Republican opponent, current Louisiana congressman, Bobby Jindal, for governor in the last race (I don’t know why). Blanco’s performance as governor is in contrast to Haley Barbour in Mississippi who acted quickly and decisively even allowing that his problems were not of the same magnitude as Blanco’s.
When Bush saw that the mayor and the governor were not up to the monumental task they faced he should have acted and the law and precedent be damned – lives and the suffering of many people were at stake. Bush was 24 hrs. late in acting. He did not come through with the same stellar performance he did after 9/11. Even though FEMA was not set up as a first responder in a disaster it is a hopelessly inept bureaucracy and Michael Brown was an archetypical bureaucrat. He deserved to be canned and Bush showed bad judgment in appointing him in the first place. The type of person who is needed in a job like that is Lt. Gen. Russel Honore. The wife of one of the firefighters from McKinney (a city just north of Plano) said on the radio here that when her husband’s unit volunteered and went to New Orleans a FEMA official there gave them the job of passing out FEMA flyers and told them there would not be doing any firefighting and rescue work because he knew they were just there for the glory! That SOB should have been fired on the spot, but of course was not.
The politicians are not covering themselves in glory with their carping and unseemly criticizing even as the rescue effort was ongoing. For the egregious Howard Dean to say that the slow federal response was racially motivated is just plain nuts and divisive. The tendentious remarks of the insane Nancy Pelosi were inane. Hillary Clinton while more restrained in her criticizing came out with the same old canard of calling for a bipartisan commission. Good lord, doesn’t that woman have any imagination or originality? Who remembers what even the recent 9/11 commission said or accomplished? Name just one thing. I can not. Among others, two Louisiana politicians, Mary Landreau and Bobby Jindal have bitterly complained about the response of the federal government. It is as if they have been complete outsiders and not influential politicians in Louisiana. Landreau is a United States senator, her brother was the Lt. governor, and her father was a long time powerful politico in Louisiana. To paraphrase what Dr. Samuel Johnson said about the American colonialists, Landreau and Jindal should be thankful for any punishment for their culpability for this catastrophe - short of hanging.
What does come through is the generosity and just plain goodness of so many ordinary Americans. There are always the scam artists (according to the FBI there were 2300 phony Hurricane Katrina disaster relief web sites – some came from overseas) and as we all saw there were looters in New Orleans and Mississippi. When the massive amount of government and private relief monies came flooding in, so to speak, there were the inevitable stealing and ‘misappropriation’ of some of the funds.
Friday, August 24, 2007
SEN. JOE MCCARTHY – A BALANCED ACCOUNT 31
I will attempt to do the impossible. Not literally, of course, because the impossible is by definition impossible. I will try to do the extremely difficult, which is to summarize a balanced story of the late junior Republican senator from Wisconsin – Joseph Raymond McCarthy.
There are few Americans who have been criticized, maligned, marginalized, shunned, demonized, disparaged, and just plain reviled as much as Joe McCarthy – not completely without cause I might add. If one wants to bludgeon opponents just accuse them of “McCarthyism” which to imply they use tactics of smear, deception, lying, demagoguery, and guilt by association to destroy a person’s good name and reputation. McCarthy was sometimes guilty of doing that and so were his opponents – in spades. The word “McCarthyism” has long ago become an obscenity; however with some exceptions (Stalin, Hitler, Mao Tse-tung, and Pol Pot [born Saloth Sar] for example) people are the sum of their parts. It is not useful or accurate to completely demonize or deify them.
Kvetching writers such as Richard Rovere, Ellen Schrecker, and David Caute compared McCarthy and his anti-Communist crusades to Hitler and Stalin’s Great Terror. Hitler was responsible for the deaths of millions, including an estimated 6 million innocent Jews, and the suffering of tens of millions of blameless people. Soviet Union scholar Robert Conquest estimates that Stalin was responsible for the deaths of 14 ½ million Soviets from 1930 to 1937. Millions more were killed or caused to die by Stalin in the years of WWII and after, continuing until his death in 1953.
Author Arthur Herman says in his 2000 book Joseph McCarthy: Reexamining the Life and Legacy of America’s Most Hated Senator “We need to remember that during the entire period, from 1947-58, no American citizen was interrogated without benefit of counsel, none was arrested or detained without due process, and no one went to jail without trial.” Who was way over the top, McCarthy or his critics?
It is interesting to contrast the disrepute McCarthy is held in with the respect given to the Kennedy family despite the friendship and support given to McCarthy by the Kennedy clan. Joseph Kennedy Sr. greatly admired and agreed with McCarthy about the threat to America by Communists. He was delighted that during his bachelorhood McCarthy dated two of Joe’s daughters, Patricia and Eunice; Robert Kennedy served as assistant counsel on McCarthy’s Subcommittee on Investigations until a personal quarrel with chief counsel, Roy Cohn, caused him to quit. McCarthy was the godfather of Robert and Ethel’s first child; and John F. Kennedy’s views on Communism and the Soviet threat were not much different from McCarthy’s. Author Arthur Herman recounts how one night in February 1952 when he heard one speaker at Harvard’s Spree Club denounced McCarthy in the same breath as Alger Hiss, Kennedy shot back, “How dare you couple the name of a great American patriot with that of a traitor!” Herman states that Kennedy backed the Communist Control Act, a measure that went far beyond anything McCarthy ever proposed by virtually outlawing the Communist party in the United States (good for Kennedy for doing that).
Conservative Republicans were also supporters and admirers of McCarthy. Among theses were William F. Buckley and his brother-in-law, L. Brent Bozell jr. (the father of the founder and publisher of the Media Research Center, L. Brent Bozell III) and currently the comely columnist Ann Coulter.
There is confusion in many people’s minds about investigation of Communists in the United States by McCarthy and by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). McCarthy essentially searched for Communist spies, Communist non-spies, and Communist dupes, security risks all, in the U.S. government as the chairman of a Senate sub-committee starting in 1951. HUAC was formed in 1937, but started interrogating Communists outside the government under its chairman Martin Dies (D-TX) in 1947. It was HUAC, not McCarthy, which compelled the entertainment elite, including the infamous “Hollywood Ten”, to testify under oath whether they, “are now or ever have been a member of the Communist party?” It made those Hollywood snobs very cross to have to admit whether they were supporters of the evil regime of Joseph Stalin – one of history’s most villainous mass murders. The mainstream media, apologists then as now for malevolent groups and governments, were beside themselves with indignation over the treatment of those traitorous or complicitous buffoons.
McCarthy investigated the State Department for Communist spies or communist sympathizers and, contrary to popular belief, found some. Also there is confusion about the Army – McCarthy hearings of 1954. It was not McCarthy who was investigating the Army, it was the Senate who was investigating McCarthy for his charges that the Army was infiltrated with Communists spies and was covering up. It was those hearings starting on June 9th, 1954 which sank old Joe (actually he wasn’t old – McCarthy died at age 48 in 1957). Weepy old (he really was old) Joseph Welsh, the lead lawyer for the Army, put on a thespian performance that should have won an Academy Award. When Welsh repeatedly baited and ridiculed McCarthy’s lead counsel, Roy Cohn, about revealing the names of any real Communists, “before sundown” McCarthy could take it no longer and told Welsh that he should look to his own staff if he wanted to find Communists in the form of one of Welsh’s young assistant lawyers by the name of Fisher. That revelation became a trap and the sly old fox Welsh sprang it. With words that are remembered to this day Welsh told McCarthy: “Until this moment Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness. Fred Fisher is a young man who went to the Harvard Law School and came into my firm and is starting what looks to be a brilliant career with us…..Little did I dream you could be so reckless and so cruel [he repeated the words ‘reckless’ and ‘cruel’ just to make sure nobody missed them] as to do injury to that lad……Let us not assassinate this lad further. Senator you have done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?” From that moment McCarthy’s anti-Communist crusade was effectively over. And it wasn’t long before his senate career and his life too were over. After the exchange between Welsh and McCarthy the committee chairman, Carl Mundt quickly called an adjournment. Outside the hearing room Welsh, with tears streaming down his face, repeated his oration in front of television cameras. When he finished and rounded a corner, out of sight of reporters and cameras, he asked a colleague: “Well, how did it go?”
Edward R. Murrow’s television broadcast, See It Now, on March 9th, 1954 inflicted a serious wound to the reputation of McCarthy. Like the performance of the sanctimonious fraud, Joseph Welsh, three months later, Murrow’s broadcast was intellectually dishonest. According to Arthur Herman, Murrow and his staff spent two months cutting and editing film clips to put McCarthy in the worst possible light. Murrow added his own sardonic commentary: “Upon what meat does Senator McCarthy feed?” The answer: “Two of the staples of his diet are investigations (protected by immunity) and the half-truth.” The broadcast was a hatchet job without any pretense of being fair and balanced. Murrow himself had engaged in innuendoes and half-truths. Liberals loved it of course. I have not seen it, but just as a wild guess I am willing to bet that the movie good night, and good luck produced by clueless liberal George Clooney is a paean to Murrow showing him to be a paragon of virtue and McCarthy the personification of evil. Any takers? Has anyone heard of Lawrence Duggan? Ann Coulter says that Duggan was a close friend of Murrow. Duggan was also a Soviet spy who did great harm to the security of the United States. After being questioned by the FBI, Duggan leapt to his death from an office window. His death was ruled a suicide, but as Coulter said, given the people he was doing business with, he might have been pushed. Murrow, along with others in the news media, vehemently denied that Duggan was a spy. So much for the perception skills of Murrow and his cronies – decrypted Soviet cables (the Venona Project) and documents from the Soviet archives have since proved beyond any doubt whatsoever the culpability of Duggan.
Arthur Herman tells how in 1953 the former McCarthy critic Alistair Cooke noted “a developing discrepancy between ‘McCarthyism’ and McCarthy.” The cultured Cooke, a graduate of Cambridge and a naturalized American and political liberal was famed for his radio program Letter from America which was broadcasted on the BBC (I remember listening to it when I was in Libya from 1957-65) and lasted for 58 years being the longest running series in history to be presented by a single person. Cooke and others realized that McCarthy was proceeding “with careful planning and masterful discretion. He is patient with witnesses whose FBI files would give ordinary citizens the creeps. He has consistently protected the anonymity of highly suspect witnesses.” This judicious and discreet McCarthy was “a new turn which,” Cooke added, “liberals are loathe to acknowledge.”
Asking how many spies McCarthy exposed in his anti-Communist crusade is to ask the wrong question. A more important and pertinent question is to ask whether McCarthy helped or hurt the cause of identifying and rooting out Communist spies, dupes, and sympathizers from the federal government. The 1930’s and 1940’s were lax times as far as awareness of Communists was concerned and certainly many people did not consider them security risks. After Alger Hiss in 1949 and the Rosenbergs in 1950 were charged with espionage the mood in the country changed even if the major news media did not. That there were numerous Communist spies or people otherwise favorably disposed toward the Soviet Union in the Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman administrations is beyond dispute. How much harm they did to the United States and how enthusiastic an effort was made to identify and excise these people from their sensitive positions in the government is a matter of a great deal of dispute. Who were these Communist spies and fellow travelers (a term coined by Stalin himself)?
The departments of State, the Treasury, and Interior harbored the most of these Reds. Prominent among the ones at State were Alger Hiss, John Stewart Service, and the aforementioned friend of Edward R. Murrow, Lawrence Duggan. At Treasury were scofflaws Harry Dexter White, Lauchlin Currie, and Solomon Adler. Owen Lattimore (the hypocritical creep who coined the term ‘McCarthyism’) while never an actual employee at the Department of State was any extremely influential consultant. There were dozens of others in the government, including Noel Field, Frank Coe, Harold Glasser, who were either outright Communists spies or who were so enamored with Communism that they put the interests of the Soviet Union ahead of the United States. Of course there were many more agitprop people outside of government - authors, university professors, Hollywood writers, directors, producers, and actors who adhered to the Communist line.
It is sometimes claimed by people on the right that Eastern Europe was ceded to Stalin after WWII and China was “lost” to Mao Tse-tung in 1949 because of the influence of Communists in our government. This charge seems extreme and logically indefensible to me. There is no doubt that as an important State Dept. official in both the Roosevelt and Truman administrations, Alger Hiss, especially while attending the Yalta Conference in early February 1945, tried to expedite the takeover of the Eastern European countries by the Soviets, but since the Red Army occupied those countries at the end of WWII, short of starting WWIII nothing could have prevented the hegemony of Eastern Europe by the Soviets – it was a fait accompli. Harry Dexter White and Owen Lattimore along with John Steward Service worked diligently to prevent or delay the funding of the Nationalist government of Chiang Kai-shek by the United States and otherwise promoted the interests of Mao Tse-tung and the Chinese Communists. While their efforts may have accelerated the downfall of the Nationalist government it is highly unlikely that even without their sabotaging machinations the Chinese Communists could have been defeated.
On December 2, 1954 the Senate voted 67 to 22 to censure Joe McCarthy. Joining the majority was moderate Republican senator Prescott Bush of Connecticut – father of future president George Herbert Walker Bush and grandfather of current president George Walker Bush. Senator John F. Kennedy did not vote on the resolution as he was having a back operation at the time. Some say he scheduled it so as not to have to cast a vote. Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona said “Of course Joe McCarthy has made mistakes…… Let the members of this body search their consciences and say whether or not they themselves have made mistakes equally regrettable.” Or did the Senate vote to censure McCarthy? Actually the senate resolution did not contain the term ‘censure’, rather it said ‘condemn’. It is an interesting sidelight, but perhaps not an important distinction.
The censure committee considered five categories of charges against McCarthy ranging from contempt of the Senate, abusing colleagues (he had once told a reporter that Senator Hendrickson of New Jersey was “a living miracle, without brains or guts”), and encouraging government employees to violate the law. Even so, abuse of senate colleagues was a time honored practice. Every senator could remember when former majority leader Tom Connally said of Michigan’s Homer Ferguson that “everything he touches is covered with the vomit of his spleen.” Some could even remember when another Wisconsin senator, Robert La Follette, said on the senate floor that God had given one of his colleagues “a hump on his back” because he was “by nature a subservient, cringing creature.” A total of 46 separate counts were considered, but in the end only one count was agreed to. So what was McCarthy censured, or more accurately condemned, for? For lying, perjury, reckless behavior, and without any foundation, falsely accusing innocent people brought before his committee of being Communists? No. The senate resolution charged him with insulting some of his fellow senators by calling them “handmaidens of the communist Party.” McCarthy had hurt their feelings. One is reminded of the incident where Rep. Jean Schmidt (R-Ohio) implied that Rep. John Murtha (D-Pa) was behaving in a cowardly fashion by calling for the immediate withdrawn of American troops from Iraq. The Democrats on the House floor began braying like, well donkeys, in their feigned indignation. Never mind that Murtha, a former marine colonel who served in Vietnam, had not only lost his nerve, but seemed to have lost a few marbles as well.
Did Senator McCarthy make positive contributions towards raising awareness of Communist activity in our government which was detrimental to the country? And did he wreak havoc on and trample the civil rights of innocent citizens? I believe the first answer is yes and the second is a qualified no. Even some of McCarthy’s friends and supporters admitted he was occasionally too ardent in his zeal to rout out Communists and fellow travelers from the government and his excesses lowered his effectiveness as an anti-Communist fighter and gave ammunition to his enemies to use against him. In his 1964 presidential nomination speech Barry Goldwater famously (or infamously – depending upon your viewpoint) said: “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice and moderation in the defense of liberty is no virtue.” Words to ponder when considering the reputation and legacy of Joseph McCarthy. And if the following words apply to Joe McCarthy then they are even more appropriate for his critics: “O shame! Where is thy blush?” Hamlet III, iv.
There are few Americans who have been criticized, maligned, marginalized, shunned, demonized, disparaged, and just plain reviled as much as Joe McCarthy – not completely without cause I might add. If one wants to bludgeon opponents just accuse them of “McCarthyism” which to imply they use tactics of smear, deception, lying, demagoguery, and guilt by association to destroy a person’s good name and reputation. McCarthy was sometimes guilty of doing that and so were his opponents – in spades. The word “McCarthyism” has long ago become an obscenity; however with some exceptions (Stalin, Hitler, Mao Tse-tung, and Pol Pot [born Saloth Sar] for example) people are the sum of their parts. It is not useful or accurate to completely demonize or deify them.
Kvetching writers such as Richard Rovere, Ellen Schrecker, and David Caute compared McCarthy and his anti-Communist crusades to Hitler and Stalin’s Great Terror. Hitler was responsible for the deaths of millions, including an estimated 6 million innocent Jews, and the suffering of tens of millions of blameless people. Soviet Union scholar Robert Conquest estimates that Stalin was responsible for the deaths of 14 ½ million Soviets from 1930 to 1937. Millions more were killed or caused to die by Stalin in the years of WWII and after, continuing until his death in 1953.
Author Arthur Herman says in his 2000 book Joseph McCarthy: Reexamining the Life and Legacy of America’s Most Hated Senator “We need to remember that during the entire period, from 1947-58, no American citizen was interrogated without benefit of counsel, none was arrested or detained without due process, and no one went to jail without trial.” Who was way over the top, McCarthy or his critics?
It is interesting to contrast the disrepute McCarthy is held in with the respect given to the Kennedy family despite the friendship and support given to McCarthy by the Kennedy clan. Joseph Kennedy Sr. greatly admired and agreed with McCarthy about the threat to America by Communists. He was delighted that during his bachelorhood McCarthy dated two of Joe’s daughters, Patricia and Eunice; Robert Kennedy served as assistant counsel on McCarthy’s Subcommittee on Investigations until a personal quarrel with chief counsel, Roy Cohn, caused him to quit. McCarthy was the godfather of Robert and Ethel’s first child; and John F. Kennedy’s views on Communism and the Soviet threat were not much different from McCarthy’s. Author Arthur Herman recounts how one night in February 1952 when he heard one speaker at Harvard’s Spree Club denounced McCarthy in the same breath as Alger Hiss, Kennedy shot back, “How dare you couple the name of a great American patriot with that of a traitor!” Herman states that Kennedy backed the Communist Control Act, a measure that went far beyond anything McCarthy ever proposed by virtually outlawing the Communist party in the United States (good for Kennedy for doing that).
Conservative Republicans were also supporters and admirers of McCarthy. Among theses were William F. Buckley and his brother-in-law, L. Brent Bozell jr. (the father of the founder and publisher of the Media Research Center, L. Brent Bozell III) and currently the comely columnist Ann Coulter.
There is confusion in many people’s minds about investigation of Communists in the United States by McCarthy and by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). McCarthy essentially searched for Communist spies, Communist non-spies, and Communist dupes, security risks all, in the U.S. government as the chairman of a Senate sub-committee starting in 1951. HUAC was formed in 1937, but started interrogating Communists outside the government under its chairman Martin Dies (D-TX) in 1947. It was HUAC, not McCarthy, which compelled the entertainment elite, including the infamous “Hollywood Ten”, to testify under oath whether they, “are now or ever have been a member of the Communist party?” It made those Hollywood snobs very cross to have to admit whether they were supporters of the evil regime of Joseph Stalin – one of history’s most villainous mass murders. The mainstream media, apologists then as now for malevolent groups and governments, were beside themselves with indignation over the treatment of those traitorous or complicitous buffoons.
McCarthy investigated the State Department for Communist spies or communist sympathizers and, contrary to popular belief, found some. Also there is confusion about the Army – McCarthy hearings of 1954. It was not McCarthy who was investigating the Army, it was the Senate who was investigating McCarthy for his charges that the Army was infiltrated with Communists spies and was covering up. It was those hearings starting on June 9th, 1954 which sank old Joe (actually he wasn’t old – McCarthy died at age 48 in 1957). Weepy old (he really was old) Joseph Welsh, the lead lawyer for the Army, put on a thespian performance that should have won an Academy Award. When Welsh repeatedly baited and ridiculed McCarthy’s lead counsel, Roy Cohn, about revealing the names of any real Communists, “before sundown” McCarthy could take it no longer and told Welsh that he should look to his own staff if he wanted to find Communists in the form of one of Welsh’s young assistant lawyers by the name of Fisher. That revelation became a trap and the sly old fox Welsh sprang it. With words that are remembered to this day Welsh told McCarthy: “Until this moment Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness. Fred Fisher is a young man who went to the Harvard Law School and came into my firm and is starting what looks to be a brilliant career with us…..Little did I dream you could be so reckless and so cruel [he repeated the words ‘reckless’ and ‘cruel’ just to make sure nobody missed them] as to do injury to that lad……Let us not assassinate this lad further. Senator you have done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?” From that moment McCarthy’s anti-Communist crusade was effectively over. And it wasn’t long before his senate career and his life too were over. After the exchange between Welsh and McCarthy the committee chairman, Carl Mundt quickly called an adjournment. Outside the hearing room Welsh, with tears streaming down his face, repeated his oration in front of television cameras. When he finished and rounded a corner, out of sight of reporters and cameras, he asked a colleague: “Well, how did it go?”
Edward R. Murrow’s television broadcast, See It Now, on March 9th, 1954 inflicted a serious wound to the reputation of McCarthy. Like the performance of the sanctimonious fraud, Joseph Welsh, three months later, Murrow’s broadcast was intellectually dishonest. According to Arthur Herman, Murrow and his staff spent two months cutting and editing film clips to put McCarthy in the worst possible light. Murrow added his own sardonic commentary: “Upon what meat does Senator McCarthy feed?” The answer: “Two of the staples of his diet are investigations (protected by immunity) and the half-truth.” The broadcast was a hatchet job without any pretense of being fair and balanced. Murrow himself had engaged in innuendoes and half-truths. Liberals loved it of course. I have not seen it, but just as a wild guess I am willing to bet that the movie good night, and good luck produced by clueless liberal George Clooney is a paean to Murrow showing him to be a paragon of virtue and McCarthy the personification of evil. Any takers? Has anyone heard of Lawrence Duggan? Ann Coulter says that Duggan was a close friend of Murrow. Duggan was also a Soviet spy who did great harm to the security of the United States. After being questioned by the FBI, Duggan leapt to his death from an office window. His death was ruled a suicide, but as Coulter said, given the people he was doing business with, he might have been pushed. Murrow, along with others in the news media, vehemently denied that Duggan was a spy. So much for the perception skills of Murrow and his cronies – decrypted Soviet cables (the Venona Project) and documents from the Soviet archives have since proved beyond any doubt whatsoever the culpability of Duggan.
Arthur Herman tells how in 1953 the former McCarthy critic Alistair Cooke noted “a developing discrepancy between ‘McCarthyism’ and McCarthy.” The cultured Cooke, a graduate of Cambridge and a naturalized American and political liberal was famed for his radio program Letter from America which was broadcasted on the BBC (I remember listening to it when I was in Libya from 1957-65) and lasted for 58 years being the longest running series in history to be presented by a single person. Cooke and others realized that McCarthy was proceeding “with careful planning and masterful discretion. He is patient with witnesses whose FBI files would give ordinary citizens the creeps. He has consistently protected the anonymity of highly suspect witnesses.” This judicious and discreet McCarthy was “a new turn which,” Cooke added, “liberals are loathe to acknowledge.”
Asking how many spies McCarthy exposed in his anti-Communist crusade is to ask the wrong question. A more important and pertinent question is to ask whether McCarthy helped or hurt the cause of identifying and rooting out Communist spies, dupes, and sympathizers from the federal government. The 1930’s and 1940’s were lax times as far as awareness of Communists was concerned and certainly many people did not consider them security risks. After Alger Hiss in 1949 and the Rosenbergs in 1950 were charged with espionage the mood in the country changed even if the major news media did not. That there were numerous Communist spies or people otherwise favorably disposed toward the Soviet Union in the Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman administrations is beyond dispute. How much harm they did to the United States and how enthusiastic an effort was made to identify and excise these people from their sensitive positions in the government is a matter of a great deal of dispute. Who were these Communist spies and fellow travelers (a term coined by Stalin himself)?
The departments of State, the Treasury, and Interior harbored the most of these Reds. Prominent among the ones at State were Alger Hiss, John Stewart Service, and the aforementioned friend of Edward R. Murrow, Lawrence Duggan. At Treasury were scofflaws Harry Dexter White, Lauchlin Currie, and Solomon Adler. Owen Lattimore (the hypocritical creep who coined the term ‘McCarthyism’) while never an actual employee at the Department of State was any extremely influential consultant. There were dozens of others in the government, including Noel Field, Frank Coe, Harold Glasser, who were either outright Communists spies or who were so enamored with Communism that they put the interests of the Soviet Union ahead of the United States. Of course there were many more agitprop people outside of government - authors, university professors, Hollywood writers, directors, producers, and actors who adhered to the Communist line.
It is sometimes claimed by people on the right that Eastern Europe was ceded to Stalin after WWII and China was “lost” to Mao Tse-tung in 1949 because of the influence of Communists in our government. This charge seems extreme and logically indefensible to me. There is no doubt that as an important State Dept. official in both the Roosevelt and Truman administrations, Alger Hiss, especially while attending the Yalta Conference in early February 1945, tried to expedite the takeover of the Eastern European countries by the Soviets, but since the Red Army occupied those countries at the end of WWII, short of starting WWIII nothing could have prevented the hegemony of Eastern Europe by the Soviets – it was a fait accompli. Harry Dexter White and Owen Lattimore along with John Steward Service worked diligently to prevent or delay the funding of the Nationalist government of Chiang Kai-shek by the United States and otherwise promoted the interests of Mao Tse-tung and the Chinese Communists. While their efforts may have accelerated the downfall of the Nationalist government it is highly unlikely that even without their sabotaging machinations the Chinese Communists could have been defeated.
On December 2, 1954 the Senate voted 67 to 22 to censure Joe McCarthy. Joining the majority was moderate Republican senator Prescott Bush of Connecticut – father of future president George Herbert Walker Bush and grandfather of current president George Walker Bush. Senator John F. Kennedy did not vote on the resolution as he was having a back operation at the time. Some say he scheduled it so as not to have to cast a vote. Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona said “Of course Joe McCarthy has made mistakes…… Let the members of this body search their consciences and say whether or not they themselves have made mistakes equally regrettable.” Or did the Senate vote to censure McCarthy? Actually the senate resolution did not contain the term ‘censure’, rather it said ‘condemn’. It is an interesting sidelight, but perhaps not an important distinction.
The censure committee considered five categories of charges against McCarthy ranging from contempt of the Senate, abusing colleagues (he had once told a reporter that Senator Hendrickson of New Jersey was “a living miracle, without brains or guts”), and encouraging government employees to violate the law. Even so, abuse of senate colleagues was a time honored practice. Every senator could remember when former majority leader Tom Connally said of Michigan’s Homer Ferguson that “everything he touches is covered with the vomit of his spleen.” Some could even remember when another Wisconsin senator, Robert La Follette, said on the senate floor that God had given one of his colleagues “a hump on his back” because he was “by nature a subservient, cringing creature.” A total of 46 separate counts were considered, but in the end only one count was agreed to. So what was McCarthy censured, or more accurately condemned, for? For lying, perjury, reckless behavior, and without any foundation, falsely accusing innocent people brought before his committee of being Communists? No. The senate resolution charged him with insulting some of his fellow senators by calling them “handmaidens of the communist Party.” McCarthy had hurt their feelings. One is reminded of the incident where Rep. Jean Schmidt (R-Ohio) implied that Rep. John Murtha (D-Pa) was behaving in a cowardly fashion by calling for the immediate withdrawn of American troops from Iraq. The Democrats on the House floor began braying like, well donkeys, in their feigned indignation. Never mind that Murtha, a former marine colonel who served in Vietnam, had not only lost his nerve, but seemed to have lost a few marbles as well.
Did Senator McCarthy make positive contributions towards raising awareness of Communist activity in our government which was detrimental to the country? And did he wreak havoc on and trample the civil rights of innocent citizens? I believe the first answer is yes and the second is a qualified no. Even some of McCarthy’s friends and supporters admitted he was occasionally too ardent in his zeal to rout out Communists and fellow travelers from the government and his excesses lowered his effectiveness as an anti-Communist fighter and gave ammunition to his enemies to use against him. In his 1964 presidential nomination speech Barry Goldwater famously (or infamously – depending upon your viewpoint) said: “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice and moderation in the defense of liberty is no virtue.” Words to ponder when considering the reputation and legacy of Joseph McCarthy. And if the following words apply to Joe McCarthy then they are even more appropriate for his critics: “O shame! Where is thy blush?” Hamlet III, iv.
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