Malthusian lament

More People, Please

BY CHARLES KENNY

Acolytes of Thomas Malthus -- the prudish 18th-century parson whose influence has considerably outlasted the accuracy of his predictions -- are generally predisposed toward gloom-and-doom, but their hand-wringing has been especially intense the past several weeks. With its latest population forecasts predicting the world population may surpass 10 billion people by the end of the century, the United Nations has stoked age-old fears that the planet may not be able to sustain all of the human beings trying to live on it. As the number of souls on the planet ticks ever higher, the Malthusians lament, misery will flourish.

But for selfish and altruistic reasons alike, we should be delighted that there are more people on the planet than ever before -- and billions more to come. Yes, there are problems to remedy as the world population continues to rise: Not least, many women still lack freedom to decide how many children to have and the lifestyles of rich people living in places like the United States, Europe, and Japan threaten global sustainability. Yet as we get ready to welcome the birth of the seven billionth person later this year, the mood should be celebratory, not dour.

Why is a growing population a good thing? For a start, most people seem to be pretty happy to be alive. The tragedy of suicide remains a comparatively rare cause of death worldwide, thankfully. And only in a very few countries across the globe do most respondents suggest in polls that they are unhappy: in Bangladesh, despite low incomes and poor health, 85 percent of the population suggests they are happy, and in Nigeria and China that number is nearly three quarters. Simply put, having the opportunity to be alive is a good thing, and the more such opportunity exists, the better. (Another bit of good news from the U.N. projections -- average global life expectancy will rise from around 68 years today to 81 in 2100, so we'll all have a little bit longer to enjoy it.)

So why all the anxiety about a growing population? We all enjoy friends and family, and generally the more, the merrier -- but our friendliness toward humanity can be selfishly local: when it comes to people we don't know, some argue less is more. Fewer teeming masses in Africa (the population of which the U.N. projects will triple by 2100) would be a good for our fragile planet, according to people in the United States. More people today means a worse life for tomorrow, and more people tomorrow means a catastrophe the day after.

Such thinking has persisted despite being fundamentally misguided. Malthus sparked these concerns 200 years ago when the global population was around a billion, and frankly it's easy to see why he was depressed: back then, rising populations really were often associated with declining health and incomes. But the centuries in the interim have seen the global abolition of slavery, advances in communication that render the vast majority of the planet instantaneously interconnected, stunning improvements in global health, the unprecedented spread of education and political and civil rights -- and the most dramatic expansion of global population, to boot. Even at the family level, the evidence for a "quantity-quality tradeoff" -- more kids meaning a worse life for each one of them -- appears weak.

Yes, threats to global sustainability are clear and present dangers. But the 10,760-fold increase in aluminum production reported by environmentalist Clive Ponting, or the 380-fold increase in oil production, or even the 24-fold increase in global GDP over the course of the last century isn't driven by population growth. It is growing consumption per person that is the problem. And that, of course, is not the fault of Africans. The blame lies with wealthy countries that do nearly all of the consuming. The poorest 650 million people on the planet live on about 1 percent of the income of the richest 650 million. Each year, we add 1 percent or more to the incomes of those richest people - GDP per capita growth rates in wealthy countries are at least that high.  And that 1 percent growth has the same impact on global consumption as woulddoubling the number of people living on the income of that bottom 650 million of the world's population. So, those people sitting in rich countries pontificating on unsustainable global populations might want to start off with the bit of that population they see in the mirror every morning.

Of course, while people are generally a positive addition to the world, women should undoubtedly have a choice about how many children they want. Every year, about 80 million women face an unwanted pregnancy, 20 million risk an unsafe abortion rather than carry their pregnancy to term and 68,000 die as a result, part of a half-million annual toll of maternal mortalities. Safe and confidential access to modern methods of contraception can and should be a right -- it is a cheap enough intervention to be affordable worldwide.

And for those who remain committed misanthropes, if you really want fewer people around, there are ways to reduce population growth while improving the quality of life for everyone. For a start, high mortality and fertility rates are related. Parents have more kids when there's a higher risk of them dying, so one of the most direct routes to reduced fertility is progress in child health. And girls' schooling is related to improvements in both. So support aid programs or increased immigration or pro-poor trade policies that will provide disadvantaged people the resources they need to keep kids alive and educated.

Still, for those who claim to be acting in the interests of future generations, "making them smaller" isn't the answer.  Go out and campaign against urban sprawl, Hummers, coal power plants, and whaling -- but leave people alone.

The burden of privilege

The Perils of 'Accidental' U.S. Citizenship

by Mark Nestmann

Compared to most other countries, it’s comparatively easy to acquire U.S. citizenship.

You become a U.S. citizen merely by birth within the geographic boundaries of the United States. In most cases, you’re also a U.S. citizen if you were born outside the United States, and at least one parent was a U.S. citizen or green card holder. In both these examples, citizenship is automatic. Generally, you need not take any affirmative action in order to acquire or retain U.S. nationality. Only in the case of naturalization after an extended period of legal residence in the United States do you need to make a petition for U.S. citizenship and passport.

The ease of acquiring U.S. citizenship by birth means that there are hundreds of thousands of “accidental” U.S. citizens roaming the world. Many of these individuals don’t realize they’re U.S. citizens.

Nonetheless, because the United States, alone among major nations, imposes income tax, capital gains tax, gift tax, and estate tax based on citizenship, accidental U.S. citizens have the same fiscal responsibilities as U.S. citizens resident in, the United States. Among other obligations, they must file a U.S. personal tax return annually and pay any tax due. They must also file a gift tax return to report details of any gifts they make in any one year that exceed $13,000. If they make lifetime gifts more than $5 million, they must pay gift tax on the excess.

Finally, at death, their heirs must file a U.S. estate tax return and pay estate tax at a top rate of 35% (increasing to 55% in 2013). The estate tax applies to all property owned by the deceased U.S. citizen, valued at its “highest and best use.” (An estate tax treaty or credit for estate tax paid in another jurisdiction may reduce this burden.)

Numerous additional obligations also come with U.S. citizenship. For instance, all U.S. citizens must disclose any investments in non-US “bank, financial, or other financial accounts.” Failure to make this disclosure is punishable with a fine up to $250,000 and a five-year prison sentence.

A Principle without Principle

The Problems with Precaution

‘Better safe than sorry’ isn’t always safer. In fact, when it comes to policies to protect public health and the environment, this type of thinking could harm us.

By Jonathan H. Adler 

It’s better to be safe than sorry. We all accept this as a commonsense maxim. But can it also guide public policy? Advocates of the precautionary principle think so, and argue that formalizing a more “precautionary” approach to public health and environmental protection will better safeguard human well-being and the world around us. If only it were that easy.

Simply put, the precautionary principle is not a sound basis for public policy. At the broadest level of generality, the principle is unobjectionable, but it provides no meaningful guidance to pressing policy questions. In a public policy context, “better safe than sorry” is a fairly vacuous instruction. Taken literally, the precautionary principle is either wholly arbitrary or incoherent. In its stronger formulations, the principle actually has the potential to do harm.

Efforts to operationalize the precautionary principle into public law will do little to enhance the protection of public health and the environment. The precautionary principle could even do more harm than good. Efforts to impose the principle through regulatory policy inevitably accommodate competing concerns or become a Trojan horse for other ideological crusades. When selectively applied to politically disfavored technologies and conduct, the precautionary principle is a barrier to technological development and economic growth.

It is often sound policy to adopt precautionary measures in the face of uncertain or not wholly known health and environmental risks. Many existing environmental regulations adopt such an approach. Yet a broader application of the precautionary principle is not warranted, and may actually undermine the goal its proponents claim to advance. In short, it could leave us more sorry and even less safe.

The Precautionary Principle Defined

According to its advocates, the precautionary principle traces its origins to the German principle of “foresight” or “forecaution”—Vorsorgeprinzip.1 This principle formed the basis of social democratic environmental policies in West Germany, including measures to address the effects of acid precipitation on forests.² Germany was not alone, as other nations also adopted precautionary measures to address emerging environmental problems. So did various international bodies.³

No comment

Caveman's economics

The Problem Began When the Invention of the Spear Reduced the Price of Food

by DON BOUDREAUX

Speaking on this morning’s program about prices in Japan, the BBC’s Roland Buerk opined that “it really becomes a habit for people. You know, companies start to pander to people’s needs to pay less.  McDonald’s for example introduced a 100 yen – just over $1 – menus a few years ago.  There’s a battle between companies to make jeans for the cheapest possible price.  You can buy a pair of jeans for about $5 now in Japan.  Once you’re in that downward spiral, it’s very hard to pull out of it.”

Huh??

Mr. Buerk’s knee-jerk hostility to deflation leads him to lament thefundamental source of economic growth and widespread prosperity: efficiencies and innovations driven by competition.

Deflation is harmful if caused by a contracting money supply.  But when prices fall because competition drives firms to operate more efficiently and pass along these efficiencies to consumers in the form of lower prices, economies grow.  Resources once needed to feed and clothe people become available to produce other goods and services.  Consumers once unable to afford other goods and services can now do so.  And so it goes, and grows, as competition incessantly prods producers to “pander” (as Mr. Buerk sneeringly refers to this engine of economic growth) to consumers.

Does Mr. Buerk believe that Japan’s economy will recover faster and thrive better if producers stop such “pandering”?  Do competition-sparked efficiencies really cause a “downward spiral” from which the Japanese should seek to escape?

Defining reality

The "Fair" Trade Delusion

by Richard Epstein

In the sprawling field of international relations, few debates are as persistent and acrimonious as the one between the advocates of "free trade" and "fair trade." The fair trade position takes the view that a wide range of tariffs, duties, and other conditions may be used to restrict the flow of goods and services across national or state boundaries. The free trade position, which I heartily endorse, holds that national trade policy should allow goods and services to move fluidly across national borders—just as if those borders did not exist. One way to achieve this end is to sign bilateral free trade accords with other nations, with an eye to reducing tariff barriers and other impediments to the free flow of goods and services.

Illustration by Barbara Kelley

Right now, the United States has three pending free trade agreements with South Korea, Colombia, and Panama. Signing them just as they are will expand growth and lead to more opportunities for all parties. Although the economics of free trade are straightforward, its politics are not.

Last week, that sometime friend of free trade, President Barack Obama, announced that he would not submit any of these three free trade agreements to Congress unless and until Congress decided to reauthorize and extend the Trade Adjustment Assistance ("TAA") program that offers a rich package of financial benefits to various workers whose jobs are lost as a result of imported goods and services.

The president’s political logic is depressingly clear. He is willing to hold hostage the large overall gains from free trade to his renewed demand for economic assistance to those individuals, often union members, who are dislocated by the onslaught of new goods and services into the United States. Those parties, like the Chamber of Commerce, which should know better, have supported the president with the pragmatic argument that it is better to yield on the TAA, and move forward on the mentioned free trade agreements, than to come away empty handed.

That pragmatic compromise will, however, strangle free trade. Once it is accepted that all free trade agreements can be tied to other demands, the sky is the limit. For instance, labor groups have long insisted on the fair trade provision that we can only have free trade agreements with those nations whose labor laws look remarkably like our own. Their intention is to use these conditions to hobble their foreign competitors by forcing the competitors to abandon their own low-cost practices, thereby depriving free trade of much of its punch. Environmental groups have also joined the fair trade fray by insisting that poorer countries must have public amenities that only rich countries can afford, so that they too become weakened competitors in the American market.

All of these clever maneuvers should be stoutly resisted as a matter of first principle. Quite simply, the label "fair trade" in the hands of its advocates is a snare and delusion. My objection to fair trade does not rest on the absurd proposition that "fairness" is irrelevant to market transactions. It is the broad definitions of both fair trade and "unfair competition" that turns them into the enemy of growth and competition properly understood.

Although the economics of free trade are straightforward, its politics are not.

What exactly is unfair competition? The differences between the narrow classical liberal definition and much broader progressive definition are too vivid to deny. To truly understand unfair competition, we should step back from international disputes over free trade and ask how the notion of unfair competition plays out in the context of domestic trade. Classical liberal theory does not dismiss "unfair competition" as an oxymoron. Quite the opposite, it develops a set of rules that isolate for attack cases where one competitor uses force and fraud to upset the balance in a competitive market.

Consider this example: well before the eighteenth century, a suit for unfair competition lay against one schoolmaster who fired shots across the path of students who were making their way to a rival school. As the students dispersed, the rival was allowed to sue his mischievous competitor even though he and his school were never in the line of fire. The point here is that no individual student could be expected to mount this costly effort against the aggressor—each student’s stake is too small. But the competitor who lost customers to force surely did care about the collapse of his business. Allowing such a suit advances social welfare by forcing people to compete solely on quality and price.

"War is the health of the State."

The Brilliance of Randolph Bourne

by Jeff Riggenbach 

Randolph Bourne was an American intellectual journalist who flourished for a few years in the second decade of the 20th century — in the Teens, the decade that ran from 1910 to 1920. Bourne wrote mostly for magazines during this period. His byline was particularly familiar to readers of The New Republic — until his radically antiwar views on the eve of the US government's intervention in World War I got him fired.

He moved over to The Seven Arts, a newly launched magazine with a smaller circulation than The New Republic and one less well suited to Bourne's particular talents and interests, since its primary focus was the arts, rather than social and political issues. He was able to publish only six antiwar articles in The Seven Arts before its doors were closed by an owner fearful of the Wilson administration and its  Sedition Act of 1918, which made it a crime to criticize the Constitution, the government, the military, or the flag.

Only a few months after The Seven Arts ceased publication, Randolph Bourne died, a victim of the flu epidemic that killed more than 25 million people in 1918 and 1919, nearly a million of them in the United States. That was 1 percent of the population 90 years ago. One percent of the present US population would be more than 3 million Americans. Imagine what it would be like to live through a flu epidemic that killed more than 3 million people in the space of little more than a year. That's what it was like for Americans living 90 years ago, at the end of World War I.

Most of the people that flu virus killed have long been forgotten — except, of course, by members of their own families. But Randolph Bourne has not been forgotten, not completely. People are still reading his work. They're still talking about his ideas and about his memorable phrases. The most famous of these has gradually become so widely quoted in our culture that millions of people have heard it, even heard it repeatedly, without ever learning who originally wrote or said it: "War is the health of the State."

Randolph Silliman Bourne first emerged into the light of day on May 30, 1886 in Bloomfield, New Jersey, a small town fewer than 20 miles from Manhattan. His family was comfortably middle-class, and he was the grandson of a respected Congregational minister. But he seems to have been born unlucky all the same. First, his head and face were deformed at birth in a bungled forceps delivery. Then, at the age of four, after a battle with spinal tuberculosis, he became a hunchback. Then, when he was seven, his parents lost everything in the Panic of 1893, and he and his mother were abandoned by his father and left to live in genteel poverty on the charity of his mother's prosperous (if somewhat tightfisted) brother. Meanwhile, his growth had been permanently stunted by the spinal tuberculosis of a few years before, so that by the time he graduated from high school at the age of 17, in 1903, he had attained his full adult height of five feet.

Bourne was an exemplary student. His academic record in high school earned him a place in the class of 1907 at Princeton, but by the time he was supposed to appear on campus to register for classes in the fall of 1903, it was evident that he couldn't afford to attend. He could barely afford books. He was flat broke. And his mother needed his financial help if she was going to go on living the decent, middle-class lifestyle to which she had become accustomed. So Bourne postponed college and went to work. He knew his way around a piano, so for the next six years he worked as a piano teacher, a piano tuner, and a piano player (accompanying singers in a recording studio in Carnegie Hall). He also cut piano rolls. On the side he freelanced for book publishers as a proofreader. Now and then, when musical work was harder to find, he did secretarial work.

By 1909, when he was 23 years old, Bourne had saved enough to cut back on his working hours and try to catch up on the college experience he'd been putting off. He enrolled at Columbia, where he fell under the sway of historian and political scientist Charles Beard and philosopher John Dewey, and began publishing essays in the Dial, the Atlantic Monthly, and other magazines. His first book,Youth and Life, a collection of his magazine essays, was published the year he graduated from Columbia, 1913. And that fall, the now 27-year-old Bourne set out for Europe. In his senior year he had been awarded the Gilder Fellowship for travel abroad, which the historian Louis Filler has called "Columbia's most distinguished honor" during that period. Bourne spent a year travelling around Europe and pursuing such independent study as interested him.

Urgent

Cuban opposition leader Yris Tamara Pérez Aguilera beaten by police and missing

By Alberto de la Cruz

Diario Las Americas is reporting that Cuban opposition leader Yris Tamara Pérez Aguilera was brutally beaten and knocked unconscious by Castro security agents before taking her into custody on May 25th. As of today, her whereabouts are unknown.

translation:

Opposition Leader on the Island Disappears

Defenders of human rights in Cuba are alarmed by the beating and disappearance of opposition leader Yris Tamara Pérez Aguilera on the morning of May 25th during activities that ended the opposition conference Boitel y Zapata Viven. 

According to Adriano Castañeda Meneses, executive member of the National Front for Civic Resistance Orlando Zapata Tamayo, two activists from Placetas: Donaida Perez Paseiro and Yaimara Reyes Mesa were released from prison around 11 pm the night of May 25. They had been arrested and beaten when they went to the Placetas General Hospital to inquire about Yris Tamara Pérez Aguilera, who had been detained and then transferred to the hospital after losing consciousness. 

“After that they were released at around 11 pm, they saw a small bus from the specialized brigades take Idania Yanes Contreras and her husband Alcides Rivera. They also saw when another police car took a handcuffed Yris Tamara Pérez Aguilera after having received a beating. It is not known if she is at the Santa Clara hospital because here in Placetas we cannot find her. Her brothers have been searching for any information and have assumed she is missing," declared Castañeda Meneses from Placetas. 

The activist explained that it was known that Jorge Luis Garcia Perez "Antúnez" was detained in the jail of the political police in Placetas, but that Yris and the other detained activists were not there.

"Yris was subjected to a brutal beating by a member of State Security that goes by the alias "El Pesista." While in a jail cell, they took her again from the hospital to jail. Her hands were numb, she felt nauseous, had a headache, dizziness, she is epileptic, has diabetes, asthma. We don't know where they have taken her. We don't know if she died, or what condition she was in when they took her," Donaida Perez Paseiro added via a telephone call to the Cuban Democratic Directorate in Miami.

Monsters vs Giants

52 years of Oppression

Former Cuban prisoner of conscience Ariel Sigler Amaya when he arrived in Miami on July of 2010, after being released from Castro's Gulag and 10 months later, under freedom and decent health care

The Betrayal of Elián González

10 years after Elian, US players mum or moving on

By JENNIFER KAY and MATT SEDENSK 

MIAMI (AP) - When federal agents stormed a home in the Little Havana community, snatched Elian Gonzalez from his father's relatives and put him on a path back to his father in Cuba, thousands of Cuban-Americans took to Miami's streets. Their anger helped give George W. Bush the White House months later and simmered long after that.

Ten years later, the Little Havana home - for weeks the epicenter of a standoff that divided the U.S. - is a museum dedicated to Elian's brief time in this country, but visitors are rare. Almost no one involved in the international custody case wants to talk about Elian, who is now a teenager back in Cuba.

Even most Cuban-Americans have moved on.

"It was a very sour taste left in their mouths," said Andy Gomez, a senior fellow at the University of Miami's Institute for Cuban and Cuban-American Studies. "But, realistically, it was a battle to be lost."

Elian was just shy of his sixth birthday when a fisherman found him floating in an inner tube in the waters off Fort Lauderdale on Thanksgiving 1999. His mother and others drowned trying to reach the U.S.

Elian's father, who was separated from his mother, remained in Cuba, where he and Fidel Castro's communist government demanded the boy's return.

Elian was placed in the home of his great-uncle, Lazaro Gonzalez, while the Miami relatives and other Cuban exiles went to court to fight an order by U.S. immigration officials to return him to Cuba. Janet Reno, President Bill Clinton's attorney general and a Miami native, insisted the boy belonged with his father.

When talks broke down, she ordered the raid carried out April 22, 2000, the day before Easter. Her then-deputy, current U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, has said she wept after giving the order.

Associated Press photographer Alan Diaz captured Donato Dalrymple, the fisherman who had found the boy, backing into a bedroom closet with a terrified Elian in his arms as an immigration agent in tactical gear inches away aimed his gun toward them. The image won the Pulitzer Prize and brought criticism of the Justice Department to a frenzy.

No one answered the AP's repeated calls to a number listed for Dalrymple in the Miami area, and there was no response to interview requests sent through intermediaries.

Lazaro Gonzalez declined to comment, as did his daughter, Marisleysis, who became Elian's surrogate mother during his U.S. stay. The Justice Department has never released the identity of the agent and did not immediately respond to an AP request this week for the agent's name.

Clinton, who was in Miami last weekend, said he would still make the same decision because it conformed with international child custody law.

"I did everything I could to try to have this resolved in a peaceful way," he said. "Believe me, I hated what happened because I thought we would be able to do it in a different way."

More than 300 protesters were arrested in the hours after the raid, and the community's outrage did not subside. Al Gore, the sitting vice president, lost Florida that November to George W. Bush by a mere 537 votes, and with it the White House. Many pundits said the Elian debacle made the difference.

They are not secret

Hidden in plain sight

   by Richard 

Seeing as we are in "snarl mode" – our default position – let's have a go at Guido Fawkes, and the latest of his asinine comments, as he laps up the Mandelson "drama". "It is a fascinating world inside the ruling elite isn't it?" twitters Guido:

Rupert Murdoch parks his yacht offshore from Nathaniel Rothschild's sunshine estate and drops in. Mandelson and Osborne take a ride in the same billionaire's boat when not dining together. All very cosy, enough to turn you into one of those crazy conspiracy theorists ...

What does make his comments particularly facile is that, when it comes to looking for (or hinting at – as Guido does) secret conspiracies to dominate the world, there aren't any. That doesn't mean conspiracies don't exist. The thing is, they are not secret.

They are there, they are real, they are visible and (relatively) easy to find, if you know where to look – and can be bothered. But, because they are so visible, no one takes a blind bit of notice of them, instead preferring to look for fantasy conspiracies of their own making.

The most obvious and visible "conspiracy", of course, is the European Union. It has its agenda, it makes no secret of it, it has been steadily pursuing that agenda for the best part of fifty years and, over that period, has had a modicum of success.

Yet, there is perhaps a bigger conspiracy here – the "conspiracy of silence" amongst our own ruling elite and chatterati, who will simply not talk about the European Union and its ambitions. Guido, of course, does not expose this – he is part of the conspiracy.

But this is boring. If you want a real conspiracy, go for that shadowy group of anonymous bankers, who meet in secret to hatch up plans to control the world's financial system. You want it? You got it! It is called the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision (BCBS).

“A clue to what’s ahead”

Betting the Farm . By Mark Steyn  I enjoy Victor Davis Hanson best when he’s writing about the California he loves and which his family has farmed for generations. Okay, “enjoy” isn’t exactly the word; it’s ineffably sad stuff. But he’s covering something that’s as relevant to the future of this nation as deficits and debt ceilings. “Where Dreams Die” concludes with a bleak list of some recent visitors to the Hanson homestead in “the center of our cry-the-beloved state”: May 2011: two males drive in “looking to buy scrap metal.” They are politely told to leave. That night barn is burglarized and $1200 in property stolen. Later May 2011: a female drives in van into front driveway with four males, “just looking to rent” neighbor’s house. They leave. Only later I learn they earlier came in the back way and had forced their way in, prying the back driveway gate, springing and bending armature. Later May 2011: shop is burglarized — both bolt and padlock knocked off. Shelves stripped clean. Victor adds: It is the little things like this that aggravate Californians, especially when lectured not to sweat it by the academics on the coast and the politicians in Sacramento. I can believe it. That “cry-the-beloved” line is an allusion to Alan Paton’s now mostly unread novel about South Africa. But my thoughts strayed further north, to the white farmers in post-independence Zimbabwe. First, you get some oddly determined visitors and attendant burglaries. Then, the intimidation gets ratcheted up. Your farmhands get beaten. The local authorities take down the details and do nothing. Then you or your wife and kids get beaten, or shot. You sell your land for a fraction of what you would have got a few years earlier. And, if you don’t, you get driven off it anyway. Or killed. White Rhodesians were the planet’s favorite pariahs for a long time, so nobody cares what happens to them. But it’s strange to see the same scenario starting to play out in the Golden State – and in parts of Arizona, too. Where next? Texas? Border immigration on the scale of the south-west is not about people moving but about borders moving. Less enlightened regions of the world understand this as they understand the sun rising in the morning, but it all seems too complicated for Californian sophisticates. Victor calls what’s happening to him “a clue to what’s ahead”. It certainly seems a safe bet that these trends will not diminish over the course of the next decade in an ever more debt-ridden state ruled by kleptocrat commissars far from the sharp end of their policy consequences. When widespread impoverishment meets demographic transformation, you’re not going to want to be standing anywhere near. I suppose his friends on the Stanford campus 180 miles away assume, consciously or otherwise, that, when it comes to their own neighborhood, they’ll be able to hold the line. But, of course, that in turn assumes there is a line. And, as a matter of government policy, there isn’t.