Right Reason

Our Lawless Police

 

 

 

Yesterday, Officer Jeronimo Yanez was acquitted of all charges, including second-degree manslaughter, in the shooting of Philando Castile. Mark Berman of The Washington Post reports:

The Minnesota police officer who fatally shot Philando Castile during a traffic stop was acquitted on all charges by a jury Friday, a decision that came nearly a year after the encounter was partially streamed online to a rapt nation in the midst of a painful reckoning over shootings by law enforcement.

Officer Jeronimo Yanez pulled Castile’s car over in Falcon Heights, a suburb near Minneapolis and St. Paul, and the officer later said he thought Castile matched the description of a suspect in a robbery. The stop quickly escalated.

Yanez fired into the car, saying later he thought Castile was going for his gun, a claim Castile’s girlfriend, sitting in the seat next to him, disputed. She began streaming the aftermath of the shooting on Facebook Live.
…
During the trial, jurors heard testimony from dozens of witnesses, including Yanez, who cried on the stand while saying he did not want to shoot Castile. Yanez testified that he thought his life was in danger at the time, and attorneys for Yanez have argued that Castile caused his own death because of his actions during the traffic stop.
…
Yanez approached the car window and asked Castile for his license and proof of insurance, which the driver handed over, the complaint states. Castile also told Yanez he had a firearm on him, and seconds later, the officer told the driver not to pull out the gun. Castile said he was not taking out the gun, which Reynolds echoed. Yanez screamed, “Don’t pull it out” and pulled his own gun out, firing seven shots at Castile, the complaint states.
…

When Yanez spoke to state investigators a day after the shooting, he told them he was “in fear for my life and my partner’s life.” Yanez told them that he thought Castile was reaching for the gun.

“I thought I was gonna die,” he told investigators, according to the complaint.

Given the salient role that Mr. Yanez’s fear has played in the trial, it is important to keep in mind the words of Ramsey County Attorney John Choi when he decided to charge Mr. Yanez 

When evaluating the reasonableness of a police officer's use of deadly force, we must take into account that police officers are often required to react quickly—in tense, uncertain and rapidly evolving situations. To justify the use of deadly force, it is not enough, however, for the police officer to merely express a subjective fear of death or great bodily harm. Unreasonable fear cannot justify the use of deadly force. The use of deadly force must be objectively reasonable and necessary, given the totality of the circumstances.Based upon our thorough and exhaustive review of the facts of this case, it is my conclusion that the use of deadly force by Officer Yanez was not justified and that sufficient facts exist to prove this to be true. Accordingly, we filed a criminal complaint this morning in Ramsey County District Court charging Officer Yanez with Second Degree Manslaughter in the death of Philando Castile and two felony counts of Dangerous Discharge of a Firearm that endangered the safety of Diamond Reynolds and her four-year-old daughter, the two passengers in the car.

 

I fear that the jury’s findings only corroborate that the American people do not mind that their police frequently act lawlessly. Moreover, I fear that the American people do not mind, even more, that their police frequently act even more lawlessly to the black community in their nation.

Tom Kelly, who represented Mr. Yanez in court, has defended the killing, arguing: “This incident had nothing to do with race. It had everything to do with the presence of a gun. Race did not play a part in the use of deadly force at all. It was the presence of a gun.”

However, the presence of a gun alone should not be considered a just reason for violence, for if it were the police would have a just reason for shooting at a large fraction of the Americans they interact with. In Washington DC v. Heller, the Supreme Court has upheld that the Second Amendment protects an individual’s right to bear arms entirely unconnected with service in a militia. As a result of the Second Amendment, American police must frequently interact with people who lawfully carry firearms.

If Attorney Kelly is right that Mr. Yanez’s actions were just because there was a gun present, then no American who lawfully owns and carries a firearm would be safe interacting with the police. The law, which is supposed to guarantee domestic tranquility and the blessings of liberty among other things, would therefore no longer be doing anything of the sort. Law-abiding Americans would no longer be protected by their law and their interactions with the police are made just that more anarchic. 

In this case, Mr. Yanez is ultimately more than a private citizen. Instead, he is an agent of the state and a member of the police-force in a nation in which the police have frequently chosen to defend their own interests above the general welfare. The shooting of a black man only puts these roles in greater clarity.

The problems are then much wider in scope than Mr. Yanez himself. These problems highlight that there is a structural problem with the police, including the heinous war on drugs, that have frankly given them the power to oppress the black community. Given Attorney Kelly’s defense of Mr. Yanez’s actions, blacks can no longer be confident that they even have Second-Amendment rights.

To me, the jury's decision is clear: The police have a license to kill in this country. That affects blacks much, much more than it does whites. For durable progress to be made on race in this nation, we, the people, need to rescind that license to kill. The police must be made accountable to those that they are said to serve, and right now, they have given American blacks every reason to believe their interests ultimately conflict.

What to do, you ask? The first thing that should be done is to immediately end the war on drugs, which disproportionately harms the black community and which has given the police so many opportunities to exercise unlawful power over the black community.


Addendum:
David French, of The National Review, has commented on the case in "The Philando Castile verdict was a miscarriage of justice":

In recent months we’ve seen a number of cases where courts have excused police for shooting citizens even after the police made mistakes — and the citizens were doing nothing wrong — simply because these citizens were exercising their Second Amendment rights. This is unacceptable, and it represents the most extreme possible deprivation of civil rights and civil liberties.

I understand the inherent danger of police work. I also understand the legal responsibilities of men and women who volunteer to put on that uniform, and the legal rights of the citizens they’ve sworn to protect and serve. I’m aware of no evidence that Yanez panicked because Castile was black. But whether he panicked because of race, simply because of the gun, or because of both, he still panicked, and he should have been held accountable. The jury’s verdict was a miscarriage of justice.

The Blood of Martyrs Irrigates the Egyptian Soil

 

St. Mark's Cathedral in Alexandria, outside of which a bomb exploded.

 

2017 Holy Week is a Holy Week of Christian unity. More often than not, the Western and Eastern churches celebrate Easter on different dates and so their respective Holy Weeks do not coincide. It is not the case in 2017, in which both the East and the West will celebrate Easter on April 16th. It is thus particularly tragic for Christians that there were two terrorist attacks orchestrated against the Coptic Church on Palm Sunday, yesterday.

The Economist reports:

 

WHEN Islamic State (IS) claimed responsibility for the bomb that killed nearly 30 worshippers at the Coptic cathedral in Cairo in December, it vowed to continue its “war against apostates”. When IS murdered seven Copts, as members of Egypt’s main Christian sect are known, in northern Sinai earlier this year, the group said there would be “many more [attacks] to come”.

So there was little doubt who was responsible for the explosions that tore through two Coptic churches on April 9th, as worshippers celebrated Palm Sunday, a week before Easter. Within hours, IS claimed responsibility for the attacks. The first blast hit St George’s church in the city of Tanta, 80km (50 miles) north of Cairo, killing at least 27 people and injuring 78 more. Hours later a second blast hit the main church in Alexandria, where Pope Tawadros, the leader of the Copts, had just celebrated mass. At least 18 people died and dozens were wounded in that attack, according to the health ministry. Pope Tawadros was unharmed.

'The Copts make up about 10% of Egypt’s population, which is mostly Sunni Muslim. Tension between the communities has long been high. After Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi, then a general, now president, booted the Muslim Brotherhood from power in 2013, the Islamist group’s supporters burned dozens of churches. Mr Sisi, a devout Muslim, promised to heal the wounds, and he has even attended Christmas mass. But the violence has not stopped. Last year Pope Tawadros, who supports Mr Sisi, said Copts were attacked about once a month. Others say that the rate is higher.

The attacks on Palm Sunday come at a particularly bad time for Mr Sisi. On April 28th the president is scheduled to welcome Pope Francis to Cairo. The visit was meant to show progress in the relationship between Christians and Muslims and, according to the Catholic archbishop of Egypt, act as a sign that Egypt is safe.

 

After the supposed Arab Spring, the Levant has become a land irrigated with the blood of minority martyrs. Maybe Western commentators shouldn't have been so blindly in love with their obedience to democracy and so willing to foment revolt in nations with entirely different histories than those of Western commercial societies.

However, even as Arab Spring has turned to to Arab Winter, Westerners’ willingness to foment revolt has continued in the form of sympathy towards the rebels in Syria and talk of régime change in the nation. However, if we are to learn from the history of the Middle East and the experience of the Copts in Egypt, it’s that the military may be a force for liberalism in the region and that military-dictatorships may be a progressive force. Western commentators need to take seriously the fact that Arab Spring may have done more harm than good by stirring up illiberal movements in the region.

Liberalism is not democracy and democracy is not liberalism. Democracy may be a necessary ingredient to a robust liberal society, but it can also generate illiberal outcomes. Western citizens do not enjoy the liberty they do because they get to elect their leaders. They have liberty because of the rule of law, the protection of individuals’ private spheres against encroachment, and the enforcement of commutative justice in general. In short, they are free because of the idea of Adam Smith’s”obvious and simple system of natural liberty.” Democracy is a means towards that end, not an end per se.

Furthermore, this is this about the treatment of Christians in particular. If we are to take John Stuart Mill’s argument in On Liberty seriously, then one of the barometers of liberalism in any nation is how freely minorities may go about their lives. The violence against Chrsitians, Yazidis, and even Shi’a in the aftermath of so many Arab-Winter revolutions evidence their illiberal nature.

 

The West can actually do something here for Western nations are not entirely innocent of foul play in the region. To help the region, Western nations can stop supporting Saudi Arabia and House of Saud. The problem isn’t ‘radical Islam,’ the problem is the Wahhabist and Salafi factions that House of Saud has actively supported in the region. Due to their support of a, frankly, evil régime, Western nations therefore deserve some of the blame in the rise of Wahhabism in the region. Even Canada’s politically correct Trudeau-administration has not refrained from selling weapons to the nation. Making matters even worse is that the hostility that should be pointed towards Saudi Arabia is instead pointed towards Iran, further cementing Western support for the Wahhabist régime.

Rather than actively trying to make the situation across the Levant better, Western nations should think about removing the harmful impact they now have on the region. 

What Is Liberalism's Triumph?

 

This sociability… or this Care of maintaining Society in a Manner conformable to the Light of human reason Understanding, is the Fountain of Right, properly so called; to which belongs the Abstaining from that which is another’s…
-Hugo Grotius, On the Rights of War and Peace

 

The Economist has recently had a double book-review of Roger Scruton’s On Human Nature and Rod Dreher’s The Benedict Option. Both books deal with the problems that, say, a reader of Fr. Z’s WDTPRS have with the modern world we live in. In the book review, The Economist characterizes liberalism’s ascendancy as follows:

It was a liberal achievement to push faith and private morality out of politics. Cultural conservatism would put them back. These two books suggest how hard that is to bring off in a liberal society. Liberals can raise one cheer, not more. On Human Nature shows the difficulties of matching political camps with those of faith and morality.

I think that this statement isn’t exactly right. Talking merely about “faith and private morality” makes it all too easy for a modernist to believe that liberalism is simply an anti-clerical creed and that, once a nation had done away with Christian private morality, that the state can finally start to look after, for a lack of a better term, public morality. From this point of view, it is wrong for a state to take measures to preach Christianity, but right for the state to take measures to fight inequality. After all, whereas Christianity is a matter of faith and private morality, inequality is a public evil that the state can legitimately fight against. Ditto for it being wrong for the state to ban contraception as a matter of faith and private morality, but right for the state to subsidize it in order to promote women’s flourishing.

To avoid these errors, I think it is better to look at liberalism as arguing that the coercive powers of the state should only be applied towards man’s lower nature. Here, we can trace the history of liberalism from the proto-liberal ideas of Hugo Grotius in Mare Liberum, to the Scottish Enlightenment thought of David Hume and Adam Smith, to John Stuart Mill, onto Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek et certera. (I pray readers will forgive me for not mentioning their own favorite thinkers decorating the tree of liberal thought!)

Liberalism’s victory is a victory of placing the higher ideals of human nature in a private sphere in which people are free to pursue those ideals, but they cannot arrogate for themselves the authority to impose those ideals upon other people. The difference isn’t between ‘private morality’ and some other thing, but between the animal nature we all need to sustain in order to live and then the higher ideals we seek in our pursuit of virtue and human flourishing. To borrow a metaphor from Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments, the rule of law defines the grammar by which people can pursue the higher ideals of human nature, but it cannot tell people what ideals to compose with their lives.

This is essentially John Stuart Mill’s line of argument in On Liberty: Let the state exercise it’s powers of coercion only where it is necessary to prevent harm to another. ‘Harm’ here is clearly understood in terms of the animal properties of another human being, not in terms of the higher properties. It is not defined by another blaspheming or by posting sexist memes, both activities that might offend somebody’s higher ideals, that one person harms another, it is by striking him or by imposing laws that might impede his liberty through the threat of violence.

A Short Meditation on Yesterday's Inauguration

 

One of the interesting aspects about the inauguration yesterday is that the United States has now elected two presidents in a row because of their ability to communicate, experience for the office notwithstanding. These are also two communicators who have employed entirely different styles, have entirely different intended audiences, but have yet been similarly elected because of their persuasive prowess.

Γνῶθι σαυτόν: I think people who have voted for either can do themselves a great service by understanding why the rhetorical technique of one has succeeded on oneself and why the technique of the other worked on another person.

A Campaign of Identity Politics?

From "The Democrats Screwed Up" by Frank Bruni:

Other factors conspired in the party’s debacle. One in particular haunts me. From the presidential race on down, Democrats adopted a strategy of inclusiveness that excluded a hefty share of Americans and consigned many to a “basket of deplorables” who aren’t all deplorable. Some are hurt. Some are confused.

Liberals miss this by being illiberal. They shame not just the racists and sexists who deserve it but all who disagree. A 64-year-old Southern woman not onboard with marriage equality finds herself characterized as a hateful boob. Never mind that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton weren’t themselves onboard just five short years ago.

Political correctness has morphed into a moral purity that may feel exhilarating but isn’t remotely tactical. It’s a handmaiden to smugness and sanctimony, undermining its own goals.

Much like any other year in politics, 2016 will not be understood until a generation out. Only then will have future events revealed the year's long-term consequences and only then will have historians studied the events and personalities involved in sufficient detail. Alas, as Søren Kierkegaard once wrote: “It is perfectly true, as the philosophers say, that life must be understood backwards. But they forget the other proposition, that it must be lived forwards.”

With that caveat, I quite like Mr. Bruni’s post-mortem on the strategy and fortunes of the Democratic party in 2016.

 

One has to wonder how this devastating defeat will affect people’s estimation of Barack Obama’s legacy. For the past couple of years, he has been as smug as they come. Yes, his smugness has appealed to people who sympathize with him and who learn Democrat. For other people, that smugness has been quite vexing and has served to alienate many of the voters Mrs. Clinton would have needed to win. As Jonah Goldberg has noted: “One of the central insights of both the Obama campaign and administration (the difference is subtle but real) is that Obama benefits when his critics overreact.”

The strategy of trolling conservatives, however entertaining it may have been, has the necessary effect of making a portion of America a butt of a joke. By attacking the prestige of many of the White working-class workers who once provided the winning coalition of Roosevelt’s New Deal or Johnson’s Great Society, Mr. Obama may have done his party long-term harm for short-term praise from its more vocal segments and all for next to no gain in terms of actual policy. Yes, there is the Affordable Care Act, but let’s not forget that the legislation was so popular in 2010, when it still had yet to be voted on in the Senate, that Massachusetts voters voted a Republican vocally opposed to the bill to succeed Ted Kennedy upon the late senator’s death. Obamacare has not gotten any more popular since then. When he leaves office, the unofficial leader of the Democratic party shall be turning over all three branches of the federal government to a Republican majority.

Still, even GQ, otherwise a magazine of fashion, was quick to acclaim Mr. Obama earlier this year as being “Mt. Rushmore great”. One has to wonder how such a manifestly great president could hand over all three branches of government to his opponents. I think the answer comes down to identity politics and to the fact that, during his administration, President Obama raised the social prestige of the kind of people who tend to read magazines such as GQ. 

JS Mill's Significance in an Age of Trumpism

 

 

Whatever crushes individuality is despotism, by whatever name it may be called, and whether it professes to be enforcing the will of God or the injunctions of men.

-John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

 

 

The idea of liberty is difficult to pin down with a single system. Whenever we try, many of liberty’s salient aspects inevitably slip from our account, however well-formulated it may have been. To paraphrase Walt Whitman, liberty is large, it contains multitudes.

Liberty must therefore be appreciated and studied from many perspectives, such as a birthright that must be defended against encroachment or as the rule giving rise to the division of labor benefiting all of humanity. But none of those perspectives alone can suffice. To defend liberty, we must be catholic in how we approach the idea of liberty, fitting our perspective to the challenges we face. In the midst of Donald Trump’s ascendance in the Republican primary, inebriated on a dangerous cocktail of nativism and economic nationalism spiked with blind anger, we can advance liberty in our day best through the perspective of John Stuart Mill.

 

Unlike many other philosophers of liberty, Mill was never satisfied with characterizing liberty simply as a force for circumscribing the power of the state. In On Liberty, he emphatically argued that there was a wider role for liberty than constraining leviathan. He singled out individuality as an essential ingredient to human flourishing and reasoned that liberty must serve as a force that promotes the individuality each person in society. After all, to be able to make one’s own opinions about the good life and to act upon them was a part of a life worth living.

Liberty, Mill contended, must justify the right of each person to cultivate their own individuality and provide them with a social space for doing so. It is more than a bulwark against the political class, it is also a bulwark against prevailing opinion and the tyranny of the majority. If it is to truly contribute to human flourishing, liberty must safeguard experiments in living against whomever would aggressively interfere with them.

 

Trumpism is an explicit rejection of Mill’s philosophy of liberty. Donald Trump’s successful coup of the Republican party demonstrates why a robust defense of liberty must extend beyond ideas of limiting the political class and that it must also extend to protect people against prevailing opinion. One of the greatest advantages that Trump has had so far in that endeavor has been that his brand directly appeals to the white-identity politics with the party that most other Republicans only flirt with. Rather than validating the dignity of people at the margins of prevailing opinion, Trump belittles them in order to raise the prestige of the prevailing white identity.

A sizable fraction of his voters believe that they—the white, Christian, non-college educated portion of the American population—are the ones under threat and need protection from the government—protection that Trump is selling. The American National Election Studies’ The 2016 Pilot Study attests that independent and Republican voters who esteem their white racial identity as important are 30 points more likely to support Trump than those who do not similarly esteem it. These are the people who believe that they have been left behind as they watch both manufacturing jobs go overseas and their status in their status in society be diminished.

 

In his campaign, Trump has gleefully exploited their fears and apprehensions. His appeal transcends matters of policy and revolves around an unapologetic affirmation of his supporters white identities. Trumpism isn’t a collection of ideas, it is a force for white identity consolidated under the cult of personality of its leader: The Donald, who with his WWE appearances and his hard-constructed aura of capitalistic success, immediately appeals to disaffected whites within the Republican party.

‘Make America great again’ can be translated as ‘make the white identity prestigious again.’ Whether it’s bringing back jobs from China, negotiating with Iran or passing a new health-care plan, Trump is simply going to make his followers important again in the world. He is going to ensure that they should be respect, and feared, the world over. How is Trump going to do this? If what he has said is to be believed, he’s going to triumph because he’s the winniest winner who has ever won. Being the consummate alpha male, the strength of Trump’s will shall simply overwhelm all who oppose him.

Suiting the style of identity politics, Trump’s rhetoric has demonized those who do not neatly fit into Trumpism’s notion of whiteness. Muslim refugees are branded as terrorists. Mexican immigrants are reviled as drug-mules and rapists. Of course, when Trump was confronted with a question about David Duke and the Ku Klux Klan, he had to do some research before repudiating them, later rationalizing the entire incident as being caused by a faulty earpiece, even though he had repeated Duke’s name to the reporter. All in all, Trumpism seeks to retreat Americans back behind the walls of a secure white identity and to raise the drawbridge up behind them.

 

John Stuart Mill’s philosophy of liberty is a useful, and much needed, palliative against Trumpism and its prejudiced emphasis on white identity as being the sole identity to be esteemed in society. Mill’s philosophy teaches how a drawbridge-down approach to the world is how we come to learn more about ourselves and the world around us. Against Trumpism’s confidence in the superiority of a single identity, On Liberty reveals how openness to the wider world, not hostility towards it, is how we achieve virtue and flourishing. Even Pope Francis has expressed a similar opinion when said that no one who only thinks of building walls, rather than bridges, could be a Christian.

Liberty also wasn’t an academic curiosity to Mill. During his life, he championed the individuality and dignity of the people at the margins of his own society, including women, slaves and religious nonconformists. As a Member of Parliament, he advocated women’s suffrage and the legalization of contraceptives. Today, he would certainly be writing about how black lives matter, speaking out against those disparaging Mexican immigrants and advocating the cause of Muslim refugees. Against Trumpism, Mill would defend a robust drawbridge-down stance as a force that benefits and enriches the societies that adopt it.

 

Liberty flourishes in an environment in which people are free to cultivate their own individuality. Trumpism, with its unmitigated glorification of white identity at the expense of those at the margins, represents a threat to that environment. To palliate Trumpism, those who love liberty need to inject some of the themes of Mill’s On Liberty into their political discourse. We need to emphasize that theme in Mill’s On Liberty that liberty is about more than just constraining the state, that it is also about justifying those at the margins of prevailing opinion, whether they be Mexican immigrants, Muslim refugees or just those who do not conform to the white identity at the heart of Trumpism.

Suiting the style of John Stuart Mill’s philosophy of liberty, all lovers of liberty, whatever political labels they may take, need to condemn those who would raise the drawbridge behind a single comfortable identity, even if it may be their own. To once again quote Walt Whitman, they must take seriously that “whoever degrades another degrades me.”

Zubik v Burwell, the Oppressed and Allodial Ownership

 

The legal drama surrounding the Affordable Care Act continues. Once again, it’s the Department of Health and Human Service’s contraceptive mandate that is once again in the cross-hairs.

The Supreme Court had already expanded the exemption to the mandate in Burwell v Hobby Lobby Store where it ruled, by the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, that a closely held corporation could not be compelled to provide contraceptive services. Zubik v Burwell seeks to expand that exemption for a whole host of plaintiffs who state that the mandate consists of a dire threat to their ability to practice their religious beliefs in their lives.

The case is controversial, to say the least. The Economist’s S.M. has even gone as far as to say that the mandate does not commandeer people’s property in “A pious hijacking at the Supreme Court”:

When the government arranges for contraceptive coverage with the insurance company used by the religious charity, it is not commandeering anybody’s property. Nor is it taking metaphorical control of the group’s health insurance plan. Instead, the government is seeking to fulfill Obamacare’s near-universal guarantee to female employees by working with the same insurance company or third-party plan administrator that provides the rest of the employee’s health benefits.

I consider S.M.’s statement here to be rather curious. He seems to be denying that there is any coercion going on with the contraceptive mandate as if the government accomplishing its guarantees is, by definition, non-coercive. It’s almost as if we’ve all agreed to accomplishing those goals by a hive mind. Yet the government is clearly messing with the plaintiff's stuff. The plaintiffs of the case vary in this case, but I shall here write of the Little Sisters of the Poor for both the case of simplicity and to reduce the gender politics as much as possibly by focusing on an all-woman plaintiff. The Little Sisters of the Poor are clearly being compelled to do what they do not want to. Their case rests on the principle of whether they can be lawfully compelled to do so. S.M.’s reasoning denies their case largely by redefining the nun’s right to their property along feudal lines.

Daniel Klein has written about the return to a feudal notion of ownership within the social democratic state in “Social-Democratic Feudalism and Its Upper Paleolithic Impetus” and other articles in the same symposium. He has compared the liberal notion of property, which is allodial and independent of the consent of any superior landlord, with the social-democratic notion of property rights as being a bundle of permissions that the government, maybe I should say the social contract, allows for. On the social democratic framing of coercion in a feudal context, Professor Klein writes:

But in the feudal context, if we grant the lord’s ownership of his lands, we cannot say that he coerces the peasants who live on them. Assuming that the peasants are free to leave and that the lord sticks to agreed terms, the peasants are dependent, and probably servile, but not coerced. It is a terrible situation, but the problem is that society is enveloped by the feudal lord, not that the lord coerces. A better situation would come from voluntarily subdividing the land, giving rise to many competing owners.

S.M.’s defense of the mandate is such a return to a feudal notion of property in which people own their property conditional to the desires of the landlords. The Little Sisters of the Poor own their property, but only conditional upon the government achieving the ends of the Affordable Care Act, and the contraceptive mandate is a part of achieving those ends. The Little Sisters of the Poor therefore are not coerced into buying contraception as part of their insurance because it’s part of the rules of the game of the nation they live in. It’s a tortured series of deductions that can justify all sorts of tyranny. It fundamentally denies that the Little Sisters of the Poor have any ownership of their property beyond what the government allows them. S.M.’s reasoning denies the act of coercion by saying that the government can simply set the rules of the game, as if the government were God.

 

An allodial concept of property is a sine qua non for ensuring people’s autonomy. Keeping within the oppressor-oppressed axis, it is an oppressed person’s allodial claim to do whatever he wants with his stuff that can help him overcome oppression around him and to make what he wishes of his own life.

The entire mandate is a way of peering into a central contradiction in the modern Left today and why that contradiction is bound to emerge if politics isn’t constrained by an allodial notion of property. I think the most generous assessment of the modern Left is that they strive to protect people’s autonomy. From the point of view of Arnold Kling’s three axes of politics, this struggle can be understood in context of the oppressor-oppressed axis in which the modern Left sees itself as fighting for the autonomy of the little guy against an oppressive society. Its proud tradition of standing up for civil rights, whether it’s for the civil rights of blacks in the 1960s or for those of homosexuals today, corroborates that claim.

 

The case Little Sisters of the Poor demonstrates a blindside in that oppressor-oppressed rhetoric among the Left.

After all, the Little Sisters of the Poor are now the oppressed. The Little Sisters of the Poor largely contradict the Left’s notion of the summum bonum just as homosexuals contradict the Christian Right’s notion of the summum bonum. When one reads, say, Sandra Fluke’s defense of the contraceptive mandate, her rhetoric is frames the issue of contraception as a matter of human flourishing. The Little Sisters of the Poor, as any virginal ministry dedicating itself to a higher power would, contradicts that notion of the summum bonum so well captured in Lena Dunham’s, who also supported the contraceptive mandate, Girls. As is often the case, ideology trumps concern for others. That the contraceptive mandate reduces the autonomy of the Little Sisters of the Poor goes entirely unnoticed as the Left trumpets the mandate as a victory for its summum bonum in American society.

 

And here is one of the most significant problem with the Left today: They actually have very little policies that protect a robust protection of autonomy in today’s society. The Left’s fight to protect the autonomy of a marginalized portion of society increasingly serves to marginalize another portion of society. The contraceptive mandate is only one example, the case of a bakery being forced to bake a cake for a gay marriage its management wanted nothing to do with is another. To paraphrase the Marian Gospel canticle, the Left has marginalized the mighty from their thrones and have made mainstream the lowly. Without a notion of allodial property, the Left cannot guarantee the autonomy of everyone in society. Only the autonomy of those whose summum bonum it favors.

Herein lies the reason why liberals including Adam Smith and Friedrich Hayek wanted to make politics simply about the lowly matters of human nature, such as the protection of one’s animal body, rather than the high matters, such as the summum bonum. After all, if the summum bonum is to be the guiding principle of politics, then the question immediately becomes whose summum bonum shall be the guiding principle of politics. Somebody is bound to be the loser.

 

On a final note, that the Left is marginalizing the portion of the population that is actually replenishing the population is one of the most significant political trends happening today. However, since it is a tectonic trend that shall only reveal itself across multiple generations, it is very easy to cast aside that concern as being irrational. Everything of interest that happens in civilization, though, happens in the time-span of generations. Our own experiences of days, months, and years being the time-span of the human life can make it difficult to appreciate that fact.

The European Union Isn't a Polity

 

A flag intellectuals and bureaucrats alike can delude themselves into thinking people are loyal to it.

 

 

In “The Problem with the Euro Fix: What’s in It for the Dutch,” Josh Barro discusses the problems lying in the development of a European fiscal union, despite the beneficial effects it could have for monetary stability across the Continent: 

Large, economically diverse areas can successfully share a single currency if they have deep economic links that make it possible for troubled regions to ride out crises. That means shared bank regulation and deposit insurance, so banks don’t face regional panics; a labor market that lets people move from places without jobs to places with them; and a fiscal union, which allows the government to collect taxes wherever there is money and spend it wherever there are needs.

The United States shows that this approach can work: America’s 50 economically diverse states share a currency quite comfortably, in part because of our banking union (Washington State did not have to bail out Washington Mutual on its own when it failed), our fluid labor market (as oil prices rise and fall, workers move in and out of North Dakota) and our fiscal union (states in economic pain benefit from government programs financed by all states). Nevada does not need to devalue its currency to restore its competitiveness relative to California in a severe recession; instead, Nevadans can collect federally funded unemployment insurance and, if necessary, move to California. 

In the course of the article, Mr. Barro misses the point. He focuses on economics and on cool-minded cost-benefit analysis whereas the problem in Europe is a matter of political identity. The Euro Crisis is showing the weaknesses of the dream of a more centralized Europe not because of the fact that some nations will be worst off, but because of the fact that centralization has been pursued furtively at the scale of national governments and beyond without a corresponding shift in the national identities of Europeans. 

 

The United States of America has, for the most part, grown organically as a single nation since 1776. Unlike the European Union, it is a natural policy. Americans largely share the same religion, tongue, and nation mythology. When an American takes out a piece of money from his wallet, on the bill will be a figure that all Americans can recognize as part of his national heritage. The same can be said of the Britons and their pound. Nothing of the sort can be said of the Euro. In the United States, no one even has to ask the question: “What’s in it for Connecticut?” It’s simply a matter of understood duty that the federal government will pursue policies that will eventually favor some states over others. The growth of centralization has been supported by the growth a single national identity. 

The European dream is fundamentally a desire for a United States of Europe. The need for greater fiscal links between nations in order to sustain the Euro Zone isn’t a bug, it’s a feature. It’s a feature that has been hiding in plain sight for the past couple of decades until a crisis such as the one Europe is in right now makes centralization a mainstream talking point rather than an extremist conspiracy theory. The national identity, just like the European flag, isn’t been grown, it’s being constructed through the vehicle of the European Union.  

 

Nevertheless, that is not what the European Union has been sold as. It has been sold as both a necessary mechanism for stopping a Third World War and as an open market. In Germany, voters went separate ways with their beloved Deutsche Mark because Bundeskanzler Kohl took exploited the only things German fear more than inflation: European war. In Britain, joining the European Union was sold as entering a trade pact with Britannia’s largest trade partner. Unlike Germany, the United Kingdom didn’t go as far as to jettison its national 

The European project is unrealistic, but it is unrealistic less for the economic reasons pointed out by Mr. Barro as much as for political ones. He mentions the gradualistic centralization of the United States of America as a possible model for the United States of Europe, but that gradualistic centralization isn’t a mere model, it’s the way that polities evolve. 

An Impending Divorce?

Grexit may be upon us. At first Greece's exit would be a calamitous event that could take down the entire European Union, then it was something that was just a little bit too costly considering the possibilities of renegotiating their debt and now the costs of Greece leaving are still terrible, but just a little bit less terrible than Greece staying. Even Lawrence Summers has come to accept that, after much ado, Greece and the Eurozone may be finally getting to their divorce:

When, as now appears likely, Greece financially separates from Europe, it will at one level be no one’s fault. The Greek leaders will rightly explain that having imposed more austerity on themselves than any industrial country has suffered since the Depression, they could not do more without light at the end of tunnel in the form of a clear commitment to debt relief. European leaders will rightly explain that they adjusted their positions repeatedly to accommodate the Greeks. They will stress that their publics would not permit Greece to play by different rules than the rest of Europe. And the International Monetary Fund will rightly explain that it would have blessed any plan agreed to by Greece and Europe that added up.

...

Make no mistake about the consequences of a breakdown. With an end to European support and consequent bank closures and credit problems, austerity will get far worse in Greece than it is today, and Greece will likely become a failed state, to the great detriment of all its people and their leadership. Once Greece fails as a state, Europe will collect far less debt repayment than it would with an orderly restructuring. And a massive northern out-migration of Greeks will strain national budgets throughout Europe, not to mention the challenges that will come as Russia achieves a presence in Greece. The IMF is looking at by far the largest nonpayment by a borrower in its history. True, there are good reasons to think enough foam has been placed on the runway to prevent financial contagion. Yet, this was asserted with respect to Long-Term Capital Management, subprime mortgages and the fall of Lehman Brothers.

But he makes a critical error in his overall judgment of the situation, betrayed by the title of his article: "The consequences of Greece's impending breakdown."

To keep things pithy: Greece isn't going to become a failed state. It already is a failed state and has been so for decades. For its own good, Greece is a failed state with no business in being in the same currency area as Germany. The divorce isn't the disaster. Mr. Summers may write of Greece's impending breakdown, but the truth is Greece is already broken. There is simple no way, let alone politically possible way, for Greece to pay back its debts.

The disaster isn't Greece leaving the Euro Zone. The disaster was Greece joining the Eurozone in the first place. Unfortunately, the longer it takes for politicians to admit that, the more unnecessary suffering before the ties are finally cut.

Against the Helicopter Paternalists

In “The Right Food Fight,” Kenneth Rogoff provides yet another argument that governments should do more to fight the prevalence of obesity in rich societies around the world. Alleviating the problems of obesity, Mr. Rogoff argues “poses much more difficult challenges than the kind of successful public-health interventions of the last century, including near-universal vaccination, fluoridation of drinking water, and motor-vehicle safety rules.” Due to the prevalence of large corporations creating incentives for people to consume ever large quantities of unhealthy and often extremely sugary food, Mr. Rogoff argues that education will not be sufficient to curtail the excessive consumption causing the obesity epidemic. 

Praising Michael Bloomberg’s attempt to limit the sale of sugary beverages in the article, Mr. Rogoff calls for public policy to impose measures to counteract the incentives toward consumption created by Big Food. Alas, Mr. Rogoff’s commentary suffers from a misdiagnosis of the problems of obesity from the point of view of public policy. For one thing, obesity isn’t a public-health concern proper, since obesity lacks the externalities characteristic of other public-health concerns, such as ebola and MERS. Furthermore, although obesity may be a problem, it is a problem that comes from the choices of individuals who are fully informed about the consequences of their actions. Like most other paternalists, Mr. Rogoff simply assumes that governments would just in imposing the needed incentives on their citizens and ignore that a presumption of liberty should hold in matters such as what a person decides to eat or drink. 

 

Although it is all too common for commentators and politicians alike to refer to obesity as a public-health issue, obesity really isn’t a public-health concern, properly understood. Language matters, especially when language has been shaped in order to precisely describe an array of phenomena. Technical terms should be respected lest we lose the ability to speak to each other in the light of the disciplines that birthed them. ‘Public’ is one such word. Using it to describe any phenomena we see important to the general welfare, much as people use the adjective ‘social,’ would be to drain the word of its very specific meaning that economics has given it. As a technical term, it tells us that the costs and benefits of an action aren’t restricted to the person who decided to take that action. ‘Public’ signals the existence of externalities and preferably of significant externalities. 

After all, there are very few actions that perfectly restrain the costs and benefits to its originator. There does have to be some prudence to the identification of certain externalities as matters of political concern. The wardrobe decisions that Ryan Gosling made any day have certain had external effects to women and fashion commentators the world over, yet it would certainly be curious to refer to those decisions as aa ‘public-wardrobe concern.’ 

The threats to public health are those contagious diseases that can spread between people. Someone afflicted with such a disease can spread it with interaction with other people. We only need to look at the outbreak of MERS in South Korea or the devastating Ebola epidemic in West Africa to recognize the danger that contagious diseases can pose. When people live together in as close proximity as they do in modern urban environments, conditions can be perfect for contagious disease. Without an organized effort, such diseases can kill thousands before they finally burn themselves out.  That the government is concerned with the containment of MERS and ebola makes sense due to the nature of those diseases. 

 

However, it doesn’t make sense in the case of obesity. No one will get fat by sitting next to an obese person. Nor will sitting in the theatre next to someone indulging in an extravagantly large slurp. Thankfully, the only person in control of whether any capable adult gets fat is the person in question. In the case of children, that responsibility is shifted to their parents. Although the responsibility is shifted it retains its private form. Yes, children may be all too willing to eat whatever junk food is available to them; nevertheless, their primary diet will be determined by their parents’ choices.   

“But food is so addictive, and the environment so skewed toward unhealthy outcomes, that it is time to think about broader government intervention.” At first it was alcohol and heroin, now it’s root beer. Why is the government concerned with one person’s gluttony and not another’s addiction to pornography or addiction to video games? Surely those addictions are both widespread and have hurt people’s lives. Maybe they haven’t had as much of an impact in mortality figures, but man does’t live on bread, or for that matter Big Macs, alone. 

Yet if a person isn’t allowed to eat the bread of their own choosing, why should they be confident that they can live their lives as they see fit? Although the helicopter paternalists may hide behind the thin veil of science, in truth they are making decisions about virtue and vice, even if they are unwilling to use such a moral language. The phenomena in question aren’t a matter of individual choice, but of deterministic relations. Instead, of discussing each person’s decision to diet and exercise, Mr. Rogoff hides behind about unsettled science: “The causes of obesity are complex, the science of understanding human behavior is embryonic…” 

 

Really, though, the causes of obesity aren’t all that unsettled nor are new scientific discoveries needed for people to live healthier lives. The age-old wisdom of eating well and exercising would alleviate the problem for the vast majority. The simple practice of cutting out refined sugar from one’s diet and to exercise a couple hours already has sufficient corroboration. We don’t need cutting-edge science to figure that out. The thing is, though, is such practices are a matter of choice and the fact is a good fraction of the population doesn’t want to give up soda or to commit themselves to an exercise regimen, especially when their lives are already as busy as it is.  

Just like so much else in human society, the obesity epidemic can’t be separated from the individual-level choices that have made it possible. To understand the causes of the epidemic, we have to understand it in terms of the choices that people make. For policy, that makes a difference, since it makes us understand the causes of obesity in terms of what people do rather than what is done to them. Mr. Rogoff argues against the critics of Michael Bloomberg’s bad on large sugary drinks: “Many commentators, even those sympathetic to Bloomberg’s goal, argued that it was wrong to try to legislate consumer behavior so bluntly. Yet, when one considers other successful efforts to improve public health over the last five decades – for example, smoking bans, seat-belt laws, and speed limits – one finds that legislation typically supplemented education.” 

 

At the center of the helicopter paternalists’ case against sugar drinks is a vision of human life. Obesity itself is a neutral fact of the world. It’s only obesity’s interaction with human flourishing that makes it good or bad, but morality is no where to be found in their case. Instead, people are treated as pieces on a chess board that move according to how the external world moves them. A moral language reveals that the nudgers are just paternalists who had abrogated for themselves a position to tell others to live as the nudgers see it. 

People do make informed decisions, it's just that their decisions just aren’t what the helicopter paternalists want them to be. So instead of accepting this difference in lifestyle, they blame Big Food and a consumeristic society, as if Big Food is shoving unhealthy food down unwilling throats. But if one goes to a 7-Eleven, one sees people willingly filling up a Big Gulp with soda and if one goes to a McDonald’s, one sees people willingly waiting in line for the food offered there. Even if Mr. Rogoff and the other paternalists may not understand such a desire, the evidence is that people really do think what 7-Eleven and McDonald’s offers them improves their lives. 

 

The paternalists then talk about addiction, but when we cut to the heart of the matter, anything that’s enjoyable is addictive. That’s just how the human mind operates. People will develop inordinate habits around all of the pleasures of life, whether it be food, sex, partying or video games. Given the fact that, in the case of food, those decisions primarily affect the person who makes them, the government should leave those questions alone and leave each person alone. The obesity epidemic simply isn’t a threat to somebody who has a good diet and exercise regimen. Rather than treating people as particles to be moved this way and that, governments should trust their citizens as the people who know best how to achieve their own welfare. 

In the case of obesity, there is no grave threat to the general interest that overcomes the presumption of liberty that should inform public policy. Paternalists have no business hovering about people like helicopter parents. If somebody wants to eat a sugary donut, the Leviathan really have no good reason to interfere with that decision.