Spending other people's money

Αγανακτισμένοι

Απο τον Τάκη Μίχα

Που ήσουνα  Αγανακτισμένε να διαμαρτυρηθείς:

• Όταν εσύ (και/ή οι γονείς σου)  κατανάλωνες  12% πάνω από τον μέσο όρο της ΕΕ, ενώ το εισόδημά σου ήταν 5% κάτω του μέσου όρου και η  παραγωγικότητα της εργασίας σου  20% χαμηλότερη;
• Όταν εσύ (και/ή οι γονείς σου) άρχισες να παίρνεις σύνταξη στα 55 σου παίρνοντας το σκανδαλώδες  ποσοστό του 96% των μέσων αποδοχών και επιβαρύνοντας το ΑΕΠ με 13,5% –ενώ αντίστοιχα οι “μη αγανακτισμένοι” μαλάκες στις χώρες του ΟΟΣΑ άρχιζαν να παίρνουν σύνταξη στα 63, έπαιρναν μόλις το 61% των αποδοχών τους και επιβάρυναν το ΑΕΠ με 10%; 
• Όταν εσύ(και/ή οι γονείς σου) είχατε στήσει την μεγάλη φιέστα των απεργιών την δεκαετία του 80 υπονομεύοντας έτσι την ανταγωνιστικότητα της χώρας; Σύμφωνα με στοιχεία  του Διεθνούς Οργανισμού Εργασίας  κατά την περίοδο 1976-1988 χάθηκαν, εξαιτίας νομίμων απεργιών και μόνο 0,36 εργάσιμες μέρες ανά 1 εκατομμύριο κατοίκων στην Ελλάδα έναντι 0,06 στις ΗΠΑ και 0,14 στην Ιταλία και την Ισπανία.
• Όταν ο Ανδρέας έπαιρνε το δημόσιο χρέος της Ελλάδας στις αρχές της δεκαετία του 80 στο 20% και το ανέβαζε μέσα σε μια δεκατία σε 80%;-το μεγαλύτερο μέρος του οποίου δαπανήθηκε όχι σε επενδύσεις αλλά για τους μισθούς και συντάξεις των «πρασινοφρουρών » με τους οποίους γέμισε το δημόσιο;
• Όταν  Παγκόσμια Τράπεζα κατέτασσε την Ελλάδα 81η από 202 χώρες στην πάταξη της διαφθοράς και  η Διεθνής Διαφάνεια την ταξινομούσε το 2009  σαν την χώρα με τον πιο διεφθαρμένο δημόσιο τομέα μεταξύ των EΕ-27;
• Όταν οι συντεχνίες επέβαλλαν κάθε είδους εμπόδια στην αγορά εργασίας που καταλαμβάνει τη χειρότερη 5η θέση στον ΟΟΣΑ; Με αποτέλεσμα η ανεργία μεταξύ των νέων να φτάνει στο 20%, και να αποθαρρύνονται οι ξένες επενδύσεις;
• Όταν  στην Ελλάδα οι «προοδευτικές δυνάμεις» οικοδομούσαν ένα νομικό πλαίσιο που στοχεύει στην εξόντωση των επενδυτών: Σύμφωνα με την μελέτη Doing Business 2011 της Παγκόσμιας Τράπεζας, η Ελλάδα αξιολογείται  154η μεταξύ 183 χωρών ως προς την ποιότητα και εφαρμογή των νόμων που αφορούν την προστασία των επενδυτών.
• Όταν οι δημόσιοι υπάλληλοι έστηναν το μεγαλύτερο φαγοπότι που γνώρισε ο πλανήτης δημιουργώντας έναν δημόσιο τομέα όπου οι δαπάνες μισθών και συντάξεων του δημοσίου τo 2009 απορροφούν το 55% των εσόδων του δημοσίου σε σχέση με το 38% αντίστοιχα που απορροφούν στην υπόλοιπη Ευρώπη;
• Όταν χτιζόταν το τεράστιο Ελληνικό κράτος-δεύτερο σε μέγεθος μετά την Πορτογαλία στην ΕΕ (με βάση τις δημόσιες δαπάνες ως ποσοστό του ΑΕΠ σε σχέση με το κατά κεφαλή ΑΕΠ);
• Όταν η Ελλάδα δαπανούσε για την δημόσια διοίκηση το μεγαλύτερο ποσοστό του ΑΕΠ απ όλες τις χώρες του ΟΟΣΑ -19.7%-με μέσο όρο ΟΟΣΑ 13,5%(2004)
• Όταν η αποτελεσματικότητα των υπηρεσιών του δημόσιου τομέα στην  Ελλάδα ήταν στον πάτο μεταξύ των  23 χωρών της ΕΕ (2000);
• Όταν στην Ελλάδα το κράτος/συντεχνίες  ύψωναν τους περισσότερους φραγμούς στην επιχειρηματικότητα  σε σχέση με τις άλλες χώρες της ΕΕ;
• Όταν στην Ελλάδα το κράτος/συντεχνίες επέβαλλαν την μεγαλύτερη χρήση διοικητικών μέτρων εναντίων των επιχειρήσεων στην ΕΕ;
• Όταν στην Ελλάδα το κράτος/συντεχνίες επέβαλλαν το μεγαλύτερο διοικητικό βάρος (κόστος κρατικής γραφειοκρατίας)  στις επιχειρήσεις μεταξύ των χωρών της ΕΕ(το 2003 εκτιμάτο μεταξύ 5,4%-6,8% του ΑΕΠ);
• Όταν τα τελευταία οκτώ χρόνια η Ελλάδα βρίσκεται  όσον αφορά την ανταγωνιστικότητα της οικονομίας  της στην  προτελευταία θέση μεταξύ των χωρών της ΕΕ-27;
• Όταν τον Μάιο πριν από ένα έτος κάτι άλλοι «αγανακτισμένοι» δολοφονούσαν εν ψυχρώ τρεις εργαζόμενους επειδή οι τελευταίοι αρνήθηκαν να υπακούσουν στις ντιρεκτίβες τους;
• Όταν  οι πραιτοριανοί  του ΚΚΕ συνελάμβαναν το περασμένο έτος τους 900 τουρίστες-εισβολείς του  κρουαζιερόπλοιου  Ζενίθ επιβάλλοντας στο ισπανικό πρακτορείο να βγάλει την Ελλάδα από το σχεδιασμό των «ιμπεριαλιστικών» κρουαζιερών  που οργάνωνε;.
• Όταν οι άμεσες ξένες επενδύσεις στην Ελλάδα μεταξύ των ετών 2003-2008  αντιπροσώπευαν μόνο το 1% του ΑΕΠ όταν ο μέσος όρος στις χώρες του ΟΟΣΑ είναι 4,1%;
• Όταν οι 11 πιο ζημιογόνες ΔΕΚΟ (με συσσωρευμένες ζημίες 1,7 δις ) στην Ελλάδα πλήρωναν το 2010 μέσο μισθό 40772 ευρώ  ανά εργαζόμενο –διπλάσιο από τον αντίστοιχο του ιδιωτικού;
• Όταν τα παλληκάρια της ΓΕΝΟΠ-ΔΕΗ απαλλοτρίωναν τους κοινωνικούς πόρους για να κάνουν «αγανακτισμένες» κρουαζιέρες στην Άπω Ανατολή η στις Μπαχάμες;
• Όταν ο μέσος όρος απόδοσης των Ελληνόπουλων στις διεθνείς εξετάσεις στην PIZA ήταν ο χαμηλότερος μεταξύ των χωρών του ΟΟΣΑ-με εξαίρεση το Μεξικό και την Τουρκία; Παρά το γεγονός ότι η Ελλάδα απασχολεί τους περισσότερους εκπαιδευτικούς ανά μαθητή σε σύγκριση με τον ευρωπαϊκό μέσο όρο;
• Όταν δεν υπάρχει ούτε ένα ελληνικό ΑΕΙ μεταξύ των καλύτερων 100 στον κόσμο;Ότι  το πτυχίο του ΑΕΙ βελτιώνει μισθούς κατά μόνο 32%, (έναντι 61% στην ΕΕ) αποφέροντας έτσι απόδοση 3,5% στο κόστος της εκπαίδευσης (έναντι 7% στην ΕΕ);
• Όταν επί δεκαετίες τώρα άλλοι  «αγανακτισμένοι» καταστρέφουν τις πανεπιστημιακές εγκαταστάσεις, εμποδίζουν τα μαθήματα και  εξευτελίζουν τους καθηγητές απαξιώνοντας έτσι ακόμα περισσότερο την τριτοβάθμια εκπαίδευση;  
• Όταν τα διπλώματα  ευρεσιτεχνίας στην Ελλάδα είναι μόλις 0,2% δηλαδή δέκα φορές λιγότερα από αυτά που της αναλογούν σε σχέση με τον πληθυσμό της;
• Όταν τέλος, σύμφωνα με πρόσφατα στοιχεία του Παγκόσμιου Οικονομικού Φόρουμ μεταξύ 183 χωρών, η Ελλάδα κατατάσσεται 84η στους θεσμούς, 123η στο μακροοικονομικό περιβάλλον, 94η στην αποδοτικότητα στην αγορά αγαθών, 93η στην ανάπτυξη της χρηματοοικονομικής αγοράς, 74η στην εξειδίκευση των επιχειρήσεων και 79η στις καινοτομίες;

Γιατί Αγανακτισμένε δεν σε είδα ποτέ να διαμαρτύρεσαι για όλα αυτά;

Better to feel Good Than to Do Good: Electric Car Edition

Electric cars may not be so green after all, says British study

by Ben Webster - The Times

The study was commissioned by the Low Carbon Vehicle Partnership, which is jointly funded by the British government and the car industry. It found that a mid-size electric car would produce 23.1 tonnes of CO2 over its lifetime, compared with 24 tonnes for a similar petrol car. Emissions from manufacturing electric cars are at least 50 per cent higher because batteries are made from materials such as lithium, copper and refined silicon, which require much energy to be processed.

Many electric cars are expected to need a replacement battery after a few years. Once the emissions from producing the second battery are added in, the total CO2 from producing an electric car rises to 12.6 tonnes, compared with 5.6 tonnes for a petrol car. Disposal also produces double the emissions because of the energy consumed in recovering and recycling metals in the battery. The study also took into account carbon emitted to generate the grid electricity consumed.

Greg Archer, director of Low CVP, said the industry should state the full lifecycle emissions of cars rather than just tailpipe emissions, to avoid misleading consumers. He said that drivers wanting to minimise emissions could be better off buying a small, efficient petrol or diesel car. “People have to match the technology to their particular needs,” he said.

We Hated Reagan

A memoir of ignorance.

by Jeremiah Duboff

They now looked upon me as a dangerous heretic, which I certainly was from their point of view, and I considered them a threat to the well-being of everything I now held dear, which they certainly were.

                                                Norman Podhoretz, Ex-Friends

Ronald Reagan is widely regarded as the greatest American president since Franklin Roosevelt, possibly the greatest of the 20th century, and definitely one of the greatest ever. His centenary this year has elicited a cavalcade of conservative encomia. All try to distill the essence of his leadership and transmit it to a new generation. Rare, however, are those who didn’t much care for him as president but whose opinions and convictions have shifted over time. Their assessments, however, make sense: his presidency created a new voting demographic (“Reagan Democrats”) and, often overlooked, the towering Republican legend had been more than half his life a loyal Democrat. As a youngster in Manhattan in the 1980s, I myself was formed in an intensely Democratic milieu where distrust, resentment, and repulsion underwrote our attitudes toward Reagan. Any honest attempt by any of us to reckon with him must begin by admitting that, at heart, we hated Reagan.

We hated Reagan because he hailed from another country, or another version of this country, a strangely idyllic ranch outside Santa Barbara, California. That place had no place in our parents’ iconic 1970s New Yorker poster — of a commanding but caricatured worldview, looking west from 9th Avenue. Hence it had no place for us. From our cultured, concrete canyons, the Reagan Ranch was and would remain terra incognita.

We hated Reagan because the grown-ups around us snickered at his old-time movie roles in Bedtime for Bonzo and Knute Rockne, All American. That we, at tender ages, were perfectly enamored of The Muppet Movie and E.T. and Rocky and Chariots of Fire bothered no one. We hated Reagan because MAD magazine mocked his interior secretary with the caption “Watt…We Worry!” Because New York Times editorials tended to sublimate MAD’s bias, at age twelve we gladly took out our first Gray Lady subscriptions — to the nodding approval of the grown-ups around us.

We hated Reagan because he was shot just four months after John Lennon had been shot and murdered. Instant karma got Reagan, we quipped mercilessly, and Hinckley was just a patsy. Before, Reagan was aggravating because he reminded us that Red, White, and Blue stood for more than just Beatles albums. Now we hated Reagan because more than ever he competed with “John” for our imagination.

We hated Reagan because our parents went Greyhound to show solidarity with striking air traffic controllers. During our first foray ever into the Deep South, we watched a white driver disembark a black passenger for consuming beer on board. The incident elicited a loud whisper from us about “racist” drivers — a self-righteous gesture on a self-righteous journey that comforted no one (except us). Reagan fired the air traffic controllers in the end, but along the way we hated him because we couldn’t admit that the return leg of every Freedom Ride is a Responsibility Ride.

We hated Reagan because M*A*S*H was cancelled after eleven seasons and over 250 episodes. We wanted war to be over, but not the sitcoms that made light of (our side of) it. Fortunately, we could still watch the show in syndication up to fifteen times per week. Thirty years after a Korean stalemate and eight years after a Vietnamese defeat, we knew more about M*A*S*H than we did about Korea or Vietnam — or about Nicaragua, El Salvador, Grenada, Libya, Lebanon, Iraq, Iran, or Afghanistan.

The Death of Common Sense

Yale And The New Threat To Free Speech On Campus.
by Greg Lukianoff

Administrators should be punished for threatening free speech:


".... What has not been sufficiently examined, however, is the potential disaster for freedom of speech that the April 4 letter presents.

 Why should a campaign against sexual violence have any ramifications for freedom of speech? Simple. While OCR's April 4 letter is aggressive and specific in requiring universities to police harassment, it took little to no notice of the fact that most university harassment policies, and many university sexual misconduct (a euphemism for various kinds of sexual assault, including rape) policies, are dangerously broad.

 Indeed, since the 1980s, harassment policies have been the main vehicle for campus speech codes -- that is, collegiate policies that restrict speech protected by the First Amendment. These policies don't just sweep in a little protected speech; in some cases, they go so far as to make virtually every student on campus guilty of harassment.

 Here are just a few examples of how harassment is defined on campus: California State University-Monterey Bay policies state that sexual harassment "may range from sexual innuendoes made at inappropriate times, perhaps in the guise of humor, to coerced sexual relations." UC Berkeley lists "humor and jokes about sex in general that make someone feel uncomfortable" as harassment. Alabama State University lists "behavior that causes discomfort, embarrassment or emotional distress" in its harassment codes. Iowa State University states that harassment "can range from unwelcome sexual flirtations and inappropriate put-downs of individual persons or classes of people to serious physical abuses such as sexual assault."

 At some point or another, we have all made someone else feel uncomfortable, whether intentionally or not. We have caused someone else emotional distress. And yes, all of us have likely flirted with someone who isn't interested and may have even made an innuendo. The thinking behind these absurdly broad codes seems to be if you make every student guilty, you can let campus administrators decide who to punish. In the "risk management" industry, which provides legal consulting to universities, this guilty-until-proven-innocent mentality is cutely referred to as "wiggle room."

There is a pernicious feedback loop between OCR, the risk management industry, and campus judicial systems. In the 1980s, universities and legal scholars were at the vanguard of the speech codes movement, which argued that in an effort to combat racist, sexist, and other offensive speech, the definition of harassment needed to be broadened to include anything that might offend.

 The policies constructed by this movement were struck down by courts as being so vague and broad as to prohibit huge swaths of speech protected by the First Amendment. That trend has continued -- since 1989, a dozen universities have lost legal battles over these codes. Many believe that speech codes went the way of the dodo because of these courtroom defeats. If only that were true.

 In part because universities could claim that they were required to pass speech codes under OCR requirements to investigate claims of hostile environment harassment, speech codes based on the harassment model flourished. My organization, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE, a nonpartisan nonprofit defending free speech on college campuses), found in the most extensive study yet conducted that 67% of 390 top colleges surveyed in 2010 still maintain policies that are laughably unconstitutional under First Amendment standards. Despite courtroom lessons, a dangerous synergy exists between campus ideologues who believe that free speech is incompatible with a just society, and campus lawyers who want to insulate their universities from OCR liability and harassment lawsuits.

 Indeed, the problem spiraled out of control so badly that in 2003 (under different leadership), OCR made it clear that its attempts to stamp out real harassment could not be used as an excuse for universities to pass speech codes that punish merely offensive speech. OCR explained, in another guidance letter to universities nationwide, that the First Amendment categorically made it impossible for the agency to require universities, whether public or private, to pass codes that punish protected speech. Its 2003 letter did an excellent job of taking away from universities the ability to invoke "the government made me do it" argument when they passed their speech codes. This did not stop universities from passing speech codes, but the 2003 letter may have been in part responsible for the slight decrease in campus speech codes in the past several years.

 It is therefore remarkable that the April 4 OCR letter makes no mention of this crucial 2003 guidance. By making it clear that OCR would be aggressively pursuing harassment claims, by mandating extensive changes to many universities' due process protections, but not requiring universities to adopt a uniform standard for harassment, OCR has supercharged the power of existing campus speech codes. OCR could have done our nation's colleges a favor if it required universities to adopt a uniform definition of harassment in the same breath as it required them to aggressively police it. Instead, it's created a perfect storm for rights violations.

War is a booming, non cyclical, business as well

Thanks to War on Drugs, U.S. is World's #1 Jailer

By Mark Perry

This is a post to recognize the 40th anniversary of the day in 1971 that President Nixon declared that the U.S. government would start waging a "War on Drugs" war on peaceful Americans who chose to use intoxicants not approved of by the U.S. government (HT: Don B.).

Q: Which repressive country puts the most people in jail for violating government laws?

A. Iran

B. Saudi Arabia

C. Libya

D. Egypt

E. United States of America

Well, it's not even close..............

World Rank, 2010	Country	Prisoners per 100,000 Population
#1	U.S.A.	743
37	Tunisia	297
52	Turkmenistan	224
53	Iran	223
61	Libya	200
61	Mexico	200
69	Colombia	180
70	Saudi Arabia	178
92	Bahrain	149
116	China	120
126	Venezuela	114
137	Iraq	101
140	Ethiopia	98
150	Egypt	89
156	Yemen	83
185	Syria	58
187	Afghanistan	56
198	Sudan	45
198	Pakistan	45

The table above shows how the 2010 U.S. prison incarceration rate (prisoners per 100,000 population) compares to some of the roughest countries in the world.  The full list of 216 countries is here, the countries above were selected as some of the world's most repressive regimes (Iran, Saudi Arabia and Libya), some of the world's least economically free countries (Venezuela, Turkmenistan, Sudan, Afghanistan, according to the Heritage Foundation), and some countries with the biggest narco-terrorism problems (Colombia and Mexico). 

But none of them even come close to the incarceration rate of the World's #1 Jailer - the United States, largely because of the "War on Drugs" war against peaceful Americans using intoxicants currently not approved of by the U.S. government (see chart below). 

 Note that in the full list of countries, neighboring Canada ranks #124 (117 prisoners per 100,000), and countries with liberalized drug laws like Portugal rank #128 (112 per 100,000) and Netherlands ranks #145 (94 per 100,000).  

Update: AIG claims that "There is ZERO evidence that this greater number of prisoners in the U.S. is due to the war on drugs."  Here is some evidence:

1. "A major cause of such high numbers of prisoners in the United States system is that it has much longer sentences than any other part of the world. The typical mandatory sentence for a first-time drug offense in federal court is five or ten years, compared to other developed countries around the world where a first time offense would warrant at most 6 months in jail.  Mandatory sentencing prohibits judges from using their discretion and forces them to place longer sentences on nonviolent offenses than they normally would have."

2. "One of the biggest contributors to the United States' spike is the war on drugs. Around 1980, the United States had 40,000 people in prison for drug crimes. After the passage of Reagan's Anti-Drug Abuse Act in 1986, incarceration for non-violent offenses dramatically increased. Part of the legislation included the implementation of mandatory minimum sentences for "the distribution of cocaine, including far more severe punishment for distribution of crack—associated with blacks—than powder cocaine, associated with whites."

Under the Anti-Drug Abuse Act, users of powder cocaine can possess up to 100 times more substance than users of crack, while facing the same mandatory sentence.  The Anti-Drug Act targeted low-level street dealers, which had a disproportionate effect on poor blacks, Latinos, the young, and women.

The United States houses over 500,000 prisoners for these crimes. Ethan Nadelmann of the Drug Policy Alliance said, "We now imprison more people for drug law violations than all of Western Europe (with a much larger population) incarcerates for all offenses."

The Prison Industry is booming

The Ends Didn’t Justify the Means

Our complicity in the devastating war on crime

By Matt Welch 

At the first presidential debate of the 2012 campaign, former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson implored Republican voters to conduct a “cost-benefit analysis” of the criminal justice system. “Half of what we spend on law enforcement, the courts, and the prisons is drug related, and to what end?” Johnson asked a South Carolina audience in May. “We’re arresting 1.8 million a year in this country; we now have 2.3 million people behind bars in this country. We have the highest incarceration rate of any country in the world. I would ask people to look at this issue; see if they don’t come to the same conclusion that I did, and that is that 90 percent of the drug problem is prohibition-related.”

The ends of justice, Johnson argues, have not justified the means of prosecution. This issue of reason is a detailed brief in support of that thesis. A system designed to protect the innocent has instead become a menagerie to imprison them. A legal code designed to proscribe specific behavior has instead become a vast, vague, and unpredictable invitation to selective enforcement. Public servants who swear on the Constitution to uphold the highest principles of justice go out of their way to stop prisoners from using DNA evidence to show they were wrongly convicted. Even before you start debating the means of the four-decade crackdown on crime and drugs, it’s important to acknowledge that the ends are riddled with serious problems.

America has one-quarter of the world’s prisoners. More than 7 million people are under correctional supervision in this country. These staggering statistics—no other country comes close in percentage terms, let alone raw numbers—have serious consequences. For one thing, there is the fiscal cost: The corrections system lags only Medicaid in government spending growth on the state level. Yet most prisons are overcrowded, underserviced, and exponentially more dangerous than any decent society should tolerate.

Worse are the cascading social effects, some of which you might not initially expect. Although prison is overwhelmingly the province of men, black women in America’s inner cities have some of the highest HIV infection rates in the developed world. Why? Because their male partners contracted the virus behind bars, via consensual sex or rape, often going undiagnosed while serving out their terms.

Very few in our political and media classes are familiar with the communities most ravaged by crime and punishment. No politician ever lost an election by alienating the ex-con vote (in no small part because in a dozen states, ex-felons who have completed parole are still permanently barred from voting). It is no accident that the people most likely to languish behind bars—poor minorities, sex offenders, illegal immigrants—tend to be among the most reviled groups in American society.

To the extent that we even think about our prison population bomb, we have allowed ourselves to believe it’s an acceptable price to pay for the recent reduction in crime. But the rates of incarceration and crime aren’t so easily correlated, let alone quantified in terms of cause and effect. And the notion that we are keeping dangerous predators off the streets is belied by the fact that an estimated 1 million prisoners in the U.S. are serving time for nonviolent offenses, predominantly related to drugs.

The drug war is a leading supplier to the prison industry and the biggest inspiration for new ways to circumvent the Fourth Amendment. More than 800,000 people are still arrested each year for marijuana alone, despite the widespread misconception that pot has been largely decriminalized, and despite the fact that close to half of all Americans by now have smoked it, and more than half, by some surveys, favor legalizing it. We can thank the drug war for “stop-and-frisk” harassment of young New Yorkers, for the transfer of military equipment and tactics to local police departments, for wrong-door SWAT raids that kill innocents, for an entire shadow economy of dubious jailhouse snitching and back-room sentence reductions. Vanishingly few public officials even pretend anymore that the drug war can somehow be “won.”

Meanwhile, government at every level continues to run out of money. So conditions are becoming increasingly ripe for a Johnsonian cost-benefit analysis to conclude that drug prohibition needs to go the way of alcohol prohibition. It remains my hope, even my conviction, that these hardheaded arguments will reverse this evil policy during the next decade or two.

Yet we can’t assess the corrosive and life-destroying faults of the criminal justice system—and our complicity in creating them—merely by looking at the bottom line of a spreadsheet. Americans have created a system in which criminals who have served their sentences can still expect to remain incarcerated for life. Voters continue to reward prosecutors who are notorious for locking up innocent people. Our periodic national panics about terrorism and immigration have created a system where defendants do not have access to a public lawyer, prisoners can rot indefinitely, and 30-year residents of the U.S. can get deported for Reagan-era misdemeanors.

Why did all this happen? Because we let ourselves be OK with the ends justifying the means.

Would you torture a terrorist suspect if he could reveal enough information to prevent a ticking time bomb from exploding in a big city? That was the armchair interrogator’s debate question eight years ago, recently revived when a variety of U.S. intelligence sources finally pinpointed the hiding place of 9/11 mastermind Osama bin Laden. It was the intellectual successor of CNN anchor Bernard Shaw’s famous debate question to 1988 Democratic presidential nominee Michael Dukakis: “Governor, if Kitty Dukakis were raped and murdered, would you favor an irrevocable death penalty for the killer?’’

These questions are intended not to further discussion but to end it. Only a monster would oppose either final retribution or preventive action against those who murder innocents. Even though the examples are always and necessarily fictional, these are the ultimate in cost-benefit analysis and base emotionalism. The mind-set behind them has dominated America’s policies for using deadly government force for decades.

That’s why I’m grateful that Gary Johnson wasn’t the only libertarian-leaning candidate at the first GOP debate in South Carolina. Before the former New Mexico governor gave his hardheaded consequentialist answer to the drug war question, Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas), who has always been more interested in principle than pragmatism, gave perhaps the most unusual answer in presidential campaign history. When asked about legalizing heroin, Paul analogized personal drug use to freedom of religion. When the stunned panelist asked him whether he had indeed just cited heroin use as an example of liberty, Paul said yes.

“What you’re inferring is that if we legalize heroin tomorrow everybody would use heroin,” Paul said. “How many people would use heroin if it’s legal? I bet nobody here would use heroin or say, ‘Oh yeah, I want heroin, I need the government to protect me, so I need these laws.’ ” Shockingly—and refreshingly—the comment drew some of the biggest applause of the night.

Now that the ends of our criminal justice system have produced the kind of outrages documented throughout this special issue, it’s long past time to reform the means. But those changes won’t last unless we reform ourselves. It is an unpopular and even counterintuitive notion that the ends don’t justify the means, particularly when the ends turn out well. But real justice is not a popularity contest.

The Therapeutic State

The Burden of Responsibility

By Thomas Szasz

Life is an unending series of choices and, therefore, “problems in living.” Ordinary choices—what to have for breakfast—we ignore as trivial. Extraordinary choices—whether to kill ourselves (or worse)—we dismiss as the symptoms of mental illness. The profession of psychiatry rests on, and caters to, the ubiquitous human desire to avoid, evade, and deny the very possibility of morally “unthinkable” choices. We use the rhetoric of psychiatry to transform such choices into medical-technical problems and “solve” them by appropriate “medical treatments.” This is why deception and prevarication are intrinsic to the principles of psychiatry, and fraud and force are intrinsic to its practices.

We humans are choice-making animals. The freedom to make choices is both a blessing and a curse. Depending on age, temperament, information, and alternatives, some people experience the opportunity for choice as exhilarating, others as tormenting. Traditionally, it was one of the functions of religion to relieve people of choices. Today, psychiatry and the therapeutic state perform the same job.

Karl Jaspers (1883–1969)—the great twentieth-century German psychiatrist-turned-philosopher—understood this. But he identified only one part of this drama, the patient’s: “Generally formulated, we may say that these people [“neurotics”] are determined that events for which they are accountable and in which they are understandably concerned shall be taken as mere happenings, for which they are entirely irresponsible.” Psychiatrists were, and are, happy to play the other part, authenticating the person’s false self-definition as mental patient—medical object, not moral actor.

Lord Acton

There is important religious precedent for the authoritative declaration of falsehood as truth. In 1870, under the leadership of the legendary Pope Pius IX—Pio Nono, the longest-reigning and one of the most colorful popes in history—the Vatican declared the dogma of papal infallibility. This was anathema to Lord Acton (1834–1902), the most respected Catholic layman in Europe in his time. Alienated from the Church, Acton did not leave it; and, probably because he had not been ordained, he was not excommunicated. It was in the context of this moral conflict that, in 1887, in a letter to Bishop Mandell Creighton, Acton made his famous pronouncement:

“I cannot accept your canon that we are to judge Pope and King unlike other men, with a favorable presumption that they did no wrong. If there is any presumption it is the other way against the holders of power, increasing as the power increases. Historic responsibility has to make up for want of legal responsibility. Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

Most people who quote Lord Acton’s famous dictum today are unaware it refers to papal power and was made by a devout Catholic. In 1882 Acton, now alienated from his great teacher and lifelong friend, Father Johann Ignaz von Döllinger, who was excommunicated for opposing the infallibility doctrine, writes him:

“I came, very slowly and reluctantly indeed to the conclusion that they [the great Catholic notabilities] were dishonest. And I found out a special reason for their dishonesty in the desire to keep up the credit of authority in the Church. . . . When I got to understand history from the sources, especially from unpublished sources, the reason of all this became obvious. There was a conspiracy to deceive. . . . That men might believe the Pope it was resolved to make them believe that vice is virtue and falsehood truth.”

Do no harm

Are You Being Served?

By David R. Henderson

“In the animal kingdom,” said psychiatrist Thomas Szasz, “the rule is, eat or be eaten; in the human kingdom, define or be defined.” It is important to use words carefully, to use words that have as exact a meaning as you can achieve. Those who manage to persuade others to use the words they wish used have enormous power; they define the debate. They can almost determine the outcome of a discussion before it begins. This is fine, as long as the words are used exactly and honestly. But often people use this power to smuggle in meanings and thus stack the debating deck.

Take the word “generous.” When I think of someone being generous, I think of the dictionary definition: magnanimous, kindly. But the term is often used to describe government programs that forcibly take money from some people and give it to others. Where is the generosity? Certainly not in the government’s treatment of those whose wealth it takes. Perhaps, then, the government is being generous in the size of these forcible transfers. But that’s not really generosity either. How can a government official be magnanimous with money that’s not his own?

Consider a debate between a proponent of forced transfers and an opponent. If the proponent can define the issue as one of whether the government should be generous to people, the opponent will likely lose before the debate begins. But if the opponent insists that the issue be stated without words that bias the discussion, as one of whether the government should forcibly transfer wealth from some to others, the opponent has a fighting chance. One reason I have hope for rolling back the massive power of government is that the proponents of power seem to use misleading terms at key points in their argument. If they were so confident of preserving that power, they would not need to.

Another term that is often abused in discussion is the term “serve” and its derivative “service.” There are some straightforward uses. For example, you go to a restaurant and a waitress asks if she can serve you. In that context, the term means the same thing to both of you. But I take issue with another use, which has become common: “government service.” The use of this term has corrupted and confused much of the discussion of what government does, in both domestic and foreign policy.

Often when someone introduces me to an audience, he will say I served as a senior economist with Ronald Reagan’s Council of Economic Advisers. But how does he know I served? All he knows is that I worked in the Reagan administration. I think I served. On almost a daily basis I tried to fight off bad ideas for further restricting Americans’ freedom and reducing their wealth. Most of these ideas came from other people within the executive branch, but occasionally I had time to fight off bad ideas from Congress. Like McGruff the crime dog, I tried to take a bite out of government. But the reason I don’t say that I served in the Reagan administration is that I don’t want to promote the idea that simply by working for the government, one serves the people.

Freedom may also work in Europe

The case of Hong Kong

by Andrew Morriss

Hong Kong has an impressive reputation for economic freedom and classical-liberal virtues. In a series of articles, Milton Friedman used Hong Kong to show how the power of free markets combined with little else can create wealth, pointing out that its per-capita income rose from 28 percent of Britain’s in 1960 to 137 percent of Britain’s in 1996. As Friedman wrote in 1998, “Compare Britain—the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution, the nineteenth-century economic superpower on whose empire the sun never set—with Hong Kong, a spit of land, overcrowded, with no resources except for a great harbor. Yet within four decades the residents of this spit of overcrowded land had achieved a level of income one-third higher than the residents of its former mother country.”

Friedman’s evaluation corresponds to Hong Kong’s consistent ranking at the top of both the Heritage Foundation’s Index of Economic Freedom and the Fraser Institute’s Economic Freedom of the World reports. In the 2008 Index, for example, Hong Kong scored 90 percent or better on seven of the ten measures of economic freedom. Impressively, Hong Kong’s weakest score (freedom from corruption, where it ranks 13th of the 180 countries rated in 2006 by Transparency International) put it well ahead of the United States (fifth most free overall, 20th on freedom from corruption).

Why has Hong Kong been so free?

Hong Kong never would have become the economic powerhouse it is today if either British or Chinese senior politicians had had any say in the matter. Britain acquired Hong Kong island in 1842 (additional territory came later) through a deal between the British representative, Captain Charles Elliot, and the Chinese negotiator, the Marquis Ch’i-ying, to settle a small war that had broken out over trade issues. (Compensation for a Chinese seizure of British opium was one issue, but the dispute was broader than the issue of opium, and recent scholarship tends to cast doubt on the conventional labeling of the dispute an “opium war.”)

The resulting deal was unpopular both with the Chinese Imperial Court and the British government. The Chinese authorities disliked any cession of territory to the British and worried about the impact on tariff revenues of creating a British-controlled port. Moreover, the Chinese disdained the British obsession with trade. The British government thought Hong Kong a poor location compared to the possible alternatives, such as Formosa. Nonetheless, the limits to communication in the nineteenth century had forced the two governments to delegate the authority to resolve the dispute to their representatives on the scene, so they were left with what Frank Welsh’s excellent one-volume history, A History of Hong Kong, terms “a source of embarrassment and annoyance to its progenitors since it first appeared on the international scene.” (Unless otherwise indicated, quotations are from Welsh’s book.)

Days of future past

Dmitry Medvedev: Government role in economy has to be cut

By NATALIYA VASILYEVA

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev on Friday challenged the legacy of his powerful predecessor, Vladimir Putin, condemning the centralization of economic and political power at the Kremlin in what was interpreted by some as an early campaign move ahead of next year's presidential election.

Medvedev's statements in a keynote speech to investors at the annual St. Petersburg International Economic Forum were a strong indication that he wants to distance himself from Putin, Russia's prime minister, in the run-up to next March's presidential vote.

Medvedev has been widely seen as the weak half of Russia's ruling pair, a placeholder while Putin awaits the opportunity to return to the presidency. Putin stepped down in 2008 because the constitution limited him to two consecutive terms; neither he nor Medvedev have announced whether they will run in next March's election.

Medvedev acknowledged that the government's expansion in managing the economy and the centralization of authority in the Kremlin under Putin was necessary in an earlier period of the country's post-Soviet development. But, he said, "this economic mode is dangerous for the country's future."

"The proposition that the government is always right is manifested either in corruption or benefits to 'preferred' companies," he said.

"My choice is different. The Russian economy ought to be dominated by private businesses and private investors. The government must protect the choice and property of those who willingly risk their money and reputation."

Talking to reporters after the speech, Medvedev aide Arkady Dvorkovich said he preferred not to give direct comment on whether that was a campaign speech, but said that "this was clearly a political speech, not merely a list of economic proposals."

Dvorkovich said that Medvedev wouldn't make an announcement on whether he will run for re-election until the autumn.

Putin's 2000-2008 presidency focused on concentrating power in the Kremlin away from the regions and raising the government's influence in the economy, particularly in the lucrative oil and gas sectors.

While Putin has hailed stability fueled by high oil prices as a major achievement of his time in office, Medvedev on Friday attacked the whole concept, warning that attempts to preserve stability could lead to stagnation.

Medvedev said that the country must begin to tackle the problem immediately to avoid "the point of no return from the (economic) models that are moving the country backwards."

"Corruption, hostility to investment, excessive government role in the economy and the excessive centralization of power are the taxes on the future that we must and will scrap," he said.

Chairman of auditor PwC International Dennis Nally, who has been visiting the St. Petersburg forum for several years, told The Associated Press that Medvedev now has "much more clarity in terms of the real challenges facing the Russian economy and his candor around some of those challenges is very refreshing."

Stephen Jennings, chief executive at major Russian investment bank Renaissance Capital, told the AP that Medvedev's statements sound "very logical and comprehensive," but "investors' concerns are with the implementation."

Alexei Mukhin, the head of Moscow-based Center for Political Information, said on Ekho Moskvy radio that Medvedev's statement clearly reflected his second-term aspirations, but added that his pro-reform calls would meet a strong resistance from the government dominated by Putin's fellow KGB veterans.

Medvedev renewed his calls to fight corruption, saying that "the loop on the throats of corrupt officials must get narrow all the time." He also called on the government to revise the privatization plan, which aims to raise at least 1 trillion rubles ($30 billion) by cutting the government's stake in such lucrative assets as oil companies and banks. The president said that Russia should consider not only lowering its stakes in some firms, but also selling off all in some of them.

Dvorkovich told reporters that the Kremlin could sell off all of their stakes in "competitive industries" which could affects bank such as Russia's second-largest VTB.

Also at the forum, Chinese President Hu Jintao said the world economy "is still overcoming the crisis rather slowly, although it began over two years ago."

A day earlier, Hu and Medvedev delayed the expected signing of a huge deal for Russia to sell natural gas to China. They did not specify reasons for the delay, but China previously has balked at Russia's aim to link the price to oil prices the way it does in Europe.