Fascism and the Surveillance State

What is the purpose of telecommunication and internet surveillance?

by Ben O'Neill

The NSA presents its surveillance operations as being directed toward security issues, claiming that the programs are needed to counter terrorist attacks. Bald assertions of plots foiled are intended to bolster this claim.[1] However, secret NSA documents reveal that their surveillance is used to gather intelligence to achieve political goals for the US government. Agency documents show extensive surveillance of communications from allied governments, including the targeting of embassies and missions.[2] Reports from an NSA whistleblower also allege that the agency has targeted and intercepted communications from a range of high-level political and judicial officials, anti-war groups, US banking firms and other major companies and non-government organizations.[3]This suggests that the goal of surveillance is the further political empowerment of the NSA and the US government.

Ostensibly, the goal of the NSA surveillance is to prevent terrorist acts that would harm or kill people in the United States. But in reality, the primary goal is to enable greater control of that population (and others) by the US government. When questioned about this issue, NSA whistleblower Thomas Drake was unequivocal about the goal of the NSA: “to own the internet and find out what everybody is doing.”[4]

“To own the internet” — Public-private partnerships in mass surveillance

The internet is, by its very nature, a decentralized arrangement, created by the interaction of many private and government servers operating on telecommunications networks throughout the world. This has always been a major bugbear of advocates for government control, who have denigrated this decentralized arrangement as being “lawless.” Since it began to expand as a tool of mass communication for ordinary people, advocates for greater government power have fought a long battle to bring the internet “under control” — i.e., under their control.

Egypt's Sphinx casts eyes on Syria

Big trouble seems to lie ahead for the Islamist movements in the region as whole, including the Syrian rebel groups

By M K Bhadrakumar 
It looks increasingly that solving the Egyptian puzzle is going to take us all to Syria. How far the army's coup in Egypt resets the geopolitics of the Middle East, or, conversely, whether the coup itself forms the commencement of a region-wide tectonic shift that is going to play out over time - this is the big question. 

The cascading events this week indicate that the latter could well be the case. To be sure, even by the standards of the Middle East, the past week has been an extraordinary one. 

There has been a strong expression of support from the United States and its Persian Gulf allies to the Egyptian military, which in turn is providing the political underpinning for a brutal crackdown by the junta on the Muslim Brotherhood, which has implications for the "Arab Spring" as a whole. 

Russia's overture to the junta at such a point may come as quite a surprise but it is integral to the Russian strategy in Syria and the Russian skepticism of the "Arab Spring". 

The isolation of Qatar, Turkey and Iran on the regional chessboard has accentuated through the past week with the junta in Cairo ticking off these countries for their pretensions of being arbiters or opinion-makers in Egypt's internal affairs. It so happens that these three countries have been deeply involved in the Syrian situation as well. 

Meanwhile, Israel's openness to accept Russian peacekeepers on the Golan Heights could not have surged to the surface this week without US acquiescence - or even approval - and the timing of the leadership changes both in Syria's ruling Ba'ath Party and the Syrian National Coalition could be more than a coincidence. 

There is a background to all this, lest it be forgotten amidst the cacophony of the coup in Egypt - Hassan Rouhani's thumping victory in the Iranian presidential election and the promise of an impending thaw in the Saudi-Iranian relationship. 

A seminal event
If a seminal event is to be identified in this torrential flow of events in regional politics, it must be the visit by the US Secretary of State John Kerry to Saudi Arabia on June 25, which was embedded within a regional tour of the Middle East and was a diplomatic initiative on Syria. 

In hindsight it becomes apparent now that the slow-motion coup in Egypt was well under way by that time in end-June and the US was already in deep consultation with the military leadership in Cairo regarding a political transition in Egypt. Without doubt, Kerry's talks with the Saudi leaders couldn't have ignored the gathering storms in Egypt. 

Egypt could start looking more like Pakistan

Egypt’s Deep State Dilemma

By WALTER RUSSELL MEAD

With political frustration running high during the holy month of Ramadan, the situation in Egypt still looks more like a gathering storm than any kind of transition to democracy. Muslim Brotherhood politicians are again being accused by the army of deliberately inciting violence, and there are reports that members of Egypt’s Christian minority, many of whom vocally supported the ouster of Morsi, are being attacked and lynched by enraged Islamist mobs. A very potent and poisonous brew is simmering on the banks of the Nile.

Yet an article in today’s NY Times seems to suggest that, despite it all, a kind of normalcy is returning to Egypt:

The apparently miraculous end to the crippling energy shortages, and the re-emergence of the police, seems to show that the legions of personnel left in place after former President Hosni Mubarak was ousted in 2011 played a significant role—intentionally or not—in undermining the overall quality of life under the Islamist administration of Mr. Morsi.

And as the interim government struggles to unite a divided nation, the Muslim Brotherhood and Mr. Morsi’s supporters say the sudden turnaround proves that their opponents conspired to make Mr. Morsi fail. Not only did police officers seem to disappear, but the state agencies responsible for providing electricity and ensuring gas supplies failed so fundamentally that gas lines and rolling blackouts fed widespread anger and frustration.

The Egyptian deep state was certainly working to undermine Morsi, and it will now try to make the new system work. We’ve actually written about this kind of sabotage in the past, and anyone thinking about Egypt’s future has to take these kinds of forces well into account. But the bigger question not explored in the Times piece is whether the passions unleashed over the past few months can be controlled by the army and the deep state, especially given that the lack of growth and the danger that instability will keep investment and tourists at bay.

The long term outlook is not pretty. The divisions between the Brotherhood and the rest of society will probably deepen, and Egyptian Islamism will curdle and sour while the army and its allies continue to make things work well enough to keep the peace…for a while. Polarization and authoritarianism, a “managed democracy”, Mubarakism without Mubarak—it’s what the army wanted all along. And the Saudis and the United Arab Emirates seem ready to grease the wheels with money for a while. They are rightly worried about what an Egyptian meltdown would do to the region.

However, it’s very important to remember that the old system that the deep staters want to restore was and is a profoundly dysfunctional one. It was crony capitalism for the rich and the high ranking, with large subsidies to keep the poor quiet and complacent—and thuggish torturers in jail for those who didn’t shut up. Public services were shambolic, the educational system was a disaster, and poorly paid make-work government jobs offered a pale imitation of middle class life for those lucky enough or connected enough to get them. For decades, this system hasn’t been able to prepare Egypt for anything better, and Egypt’s youth bulge has exacerbated all of these trends past the breaking point.

Surveillance dystopia looms

America cannot have both empire abroad and democracy at home

By Alfred W McCoy 
The American surveillance state is now an omnipresent reality, but its deep history is little known and its future little grasped. Edward Snowden's leaked documents reveal that, in a post-9/11 state of war, the National Security Agency (NSA) was able to create a surveillance system that could secretly monitor the private communications of almost every American in the name of fighting foreign terrorists. The technology used is state of the art; the impulse, it turns out, is nothing new. For well over a century, what might be called "surveillance blowback" from America's wars has ensured the creation of an ever more massive and omnipresent internal security and surveillance apparatus. Its future (though not ours) looks bright indeed. 

In 1898, Washington occupied the Philippines and in the years that followed pacified its rebellious people, in part by fashioning the world's first full-scale "surveillance state" in a colonial land. The illiberal lessons learned there then migrated homeward, providing the basis for constructing America's earliest internal security and surveillance apparatus during World War I. A half-century later, as protests mounted during the Vietnam War, the FBI, building on the foundations of that old security structure, launched large-scale illegal counterintelligence operations to harass antiwar activists, while President Richard Nixon's White House created its own surveillance apparatus to target its domestic enemies. 

In the aftermath of those wars, however, reformers pushed back against secret surveillance. Republican privacy advocates abolished much of President Woodrow Wilson's security apparatus during the 1920s, and Democratic liberals in Congress created the FISA courts in the 1970s in an attempt to prevent any recurrence of President Nixon's illegal domestic wiretapping. 

Today, as Washington withdraws troops from the Greater Middle East, a sophisticated intelligence apparatus built for the pacification of Afghanistan and Iraq has come home to help create a twenty-first century surveillance state of unprecedented scope. But the past pattern that once checked the rise of a US surveillance state seems to be breaking down. Despite talk about ending the war on terror one day, President Obama has left the historic pattern of partisan reforms far behind. In what has become a permanent state of "wartime" at home, the Obama administration is building upon the surveillance systems created in the Bush years to maintain US global dominion in peace or war through a strategic, ever-widening edge in information control. The White House shows no sign - nor does Congress - of cutting back on construction of a powerful, global Panopticon that can surveil domestic dissidents, track terrorists, manipulate allied nations, monitor rival powers, counter hostile cyber strikes, launch preemptive cyberattacks, and protect domestic communications. 

Therapeutists as Teachers of Evil

Cruelty and oppression disguised as benevolence

by Theodore Dalrymple   

In the year of my birth, which now seems to me a very long time ago, C. S. Lewis wrote a short and incisive essay entitled The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment. In this essay, Lewis drew attention to the potential for tyranny of this seemingly humane theory, according to which people were to be treated not according to their deserts, but according to what would make them ‘better’ on whatever scale of goodness was adopted by the therapists, who of course would also decide whether or not the wrongdoers were ‘cured.’

The horrors that Lewis foresaw as following from the humanitarian theory of punishment were those of cruelty and oppression disguised as benevolence. What he did not foresee was irresponsible and self-indulgent leniency disguised as benevolence. Under this new dispensation, it was not those who had been wronged who would exercise mercy, but those at several removes from the wronged, and who themselves would never suffer the practical consequences of its exercise, if any such there were. They would enjoy the psychological rewards of leniency without experiencing the material effects of recidivism.

It is hardly any secret that no one these days enjoys a reputation  for generosity of spirit (at least among intellectuals) by advocating more severe penalties for wrongdoers; or that an easy way to secure a reputation for broad understanding is to forgive everything. Pardonner tout, c’est tout comprendre. The pressure on those who want to bask in the esteem of all right-thinking people to forgive those who have done wrong to others is therefore considerable. C. S. Lewis, I need hardly add, lived at a time when psychotherapy was a long, arduous and even never-ending process; he did not live to see the advent and triumph of the so-called brief intervention that could allegedly cure the mad, the bad and the sad in a few sessions.

In France there is currently a court case that glaringly exposes the inhumanity of the therapeutic approach to life, at least when it is carried beyond its proper sphere. In November, 2011, the charred body of a young girl called Agnès Marin, nearly 14 years of age, was found in some woods near the village of Chambon-sur-Lignon, previously famed because its inhabitants had saved the lives of hundreds of Jewish children during the war.

The Fish Rots from the Head

Spain's Slush Fund Scandal and More ...

By Pater Tenebrarum

According to a recent report in the FT, the former treasurer of Spain's ruling Popular Party, Luis Bárcenas, has claimed in an interview that the party has been in breach of Spain's campaign finance laws for a minimum of 20 years. Presumably he was moved to talk because he was the one who got caught and is expected to fall on his sword. Now that he is facing a lengthy prison sentence, he no longer has a reason to clam up. Incidentally, no-one in Spain was surprised to learn what he had to say.

According to the FT:

“The former treasurer of Spain’s ruling Popular party (PP) has broken his silence over a slush fund scandal that has rocked the country for the past six months, claiming in an interview that the party had broken campaign finance laws for at least 20 years.

Luis Bárcenas, the man at the heart of the scandal, was arrested and detained late last month in connection with an inquiry into the €48m fortune he is said to have amassed in Swiss bank accounts. The investigating judge ruled that the former party treasurer will have to remain in prison until his trial, and fixed his bail at €28m.

His decision to give an interview after months of blanket denials, and to threaten further revelations, marks a potentially dramatic turn in the high-profile scandal. It suggests that Mr Bárcenas is disappointed with the lack of support he has received from PP leaders since the affair broke, and that he may be ready to implicate other senior party leaders.

According to the front page report in the Sunday edition of El Mundo newspaper, Mr Bárcenas claims to have documents and hard discs that chronicle the systematic violation of party finance laws. Their publication, he adds, would “bring down the government”. The interview – which appeared carefully worded and contained only a handful of direct quotes from the former treasurer – was conducted by the editor of El Mundo several days before Mr Bárcenas went to jail.

Though he confirmed many of the allegations that have been swirling in the Spanish media in recent months, Mr Bárcenas made clear that he was not yet willing to release all the damaging information he possessed. “In the current circumstances, the last thing that Spain needs is this government to fall,” he was quoted as saying.

However, the interview is likely to deal a heavy blow to the center-right PP all the same, and not just because it contains the threat of further revelations. Mr Bárcenas described in detail how donors used to arrive at party headquarters with bags and suitcases full of cash, some of which would be channeled into the official party bank account, while some would be used to cover election expenses outside the official campaign fund. Another portion of the money would go into a safe, and contribute to a party slush fund.”

(emphasis added)

The reason why Barcenas is not making everything public just yet is probably that he hopes that the material could yet provide him with a ticket to freedom. Essentially, he is telling the Rajoy government: 'Think of something to help me, or else'. At this stage we believe the 'or else' option has become nigh unavoidable, short of Mr. Barcenas suffering an unfortunate accident. Too much has already been revealed, and he is by now in too deeply already.

Who cares?

The crisis of kindness in the NHS

by ALKA SEHGAL CUTHBERT

Created through the 2008 Health and Social Care Act, the UK’s Care Quality Commission (CQC) is responsible for inspecting and regulating the provision of health and social services. In short, as its title suggests, it’s meant to ensure that the care on offer is of the highest quality. That, at least, is the idea.

Since the CQC became operational in 2009, however, the reality has been somewhat different. In fact, under the auspices of the CQC, the caring professions have stumbled from one scandal to another. In 2011, for instance, an undercover BBC Panorama team filmed carers shouting at, and slapping, elderly patients at the Winterbourne View care home. Earlier this year, the Francis Report into the high mortality rate at Mid-Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust hospitals reported that 200 to 300 deaths between 2005 and 2009 may have been caused by negligence.  The report also uncovered appalling instances of neglect, from patients drinking water from vases to being left to lie in their own waste.

And now, following recent revelations that top-level CQC staff attempted to suppress the results of an investigation into the deaths of mothers and babies at Furness General Hospital, the CQC finds itself at the centre of a scandal.

Yet, the response to each scandal, even when it involves the regulator itself, has been uniform: a repeated call for more regulation and transparency in the healthcare sector.

Here are just a few of the latest proposals: establishing an Ofsted-style inspectorate for the medical profession; the publication of consultants’ success/failure rates on the NHS website; and the introduction of ‘new’ headboards on patients’ beds specifying a named nurse responsible for the particular patient and what the patient would like to be called.

The problem with such proposals is that they ignore the real problem here: the crisis of care itself.

Of Owls and Richard the Third

Shakespeare should have the last word

by Theodore Dalrymple 

By far the most important English King for me during my childhood was Richard III; or, more accurately, Shakespeare’s Richard III; or, more accurately still, Laurence Olivier playing Shakespeare’s Richard III. The film captivated me when I was about 10, and I have subsequently found the malignity of evil always more fascinating, emotionally and intellectually, than the beneficence of good. Fictional or dramatic heroes have been to me ever since but pale and uninteresting shadows of villains. Heroes, in fact, tend to bore me as villains seldom do. And this is thanks to Richard III, in the special sense above.

When, therefore, I saw a biography of Richard III (Richard III: England’s Black Legend by Desmond Seward) in the window of a charity (thrift) shop near my home, together with a book about owls, I bought it. Not only did I buy it but I read it, and was somewhat surprised that, in effect, it endorsed the Shakespearian view of Richard’s character. Published on the 500th anniversary of Richard’s accession to or usurpation of the throne, Richard emerges as very much the unscrupulous, hypocritical, treacherous monster depicted in the play.

I believe this is no longer the orthodox view of him. The accusers are now the dissenters. And a friend of mine, who grew up in the Soviet Union and lived there until he was twenty-five, dislikes Shakespeare’s play because of its crude and seemingly propagandistic encomium to Henry VII, of the type to which his upbringing in the great motherland of ubiquitous and compulsory lies had made him allergic. Henry VII himself in truth was no mean slayer of his enemies, at least the equal of Richard III at his worst, but he was the grandfather of Queen Elizabeth, reigning monarch when Shakespeare wrote. Queen Elizabeth’s title to the throne depended upon Henry VII’s, and his depended on the right of conquest rather than on any plausible claim by royal descent. That conquest could itself be justified only if Richard III were a bloody and tyrannical usurper of a quite unparalleled type; so that my friend sees the whole play as an elaborate apologia for a current political regime.

The irony here, of course, is that the objection to the play is itself highly political. The sycophantic message at its end – assuming that it was not justified by the historical facts, and that Henry VII did not ‘Enrich the time to come with smooth-fac’d peace,/ With smiling plenty and fair prosperous days!’ – could hardly efface, neutralise or outweigh the poetic, dramatic and psychological brilliance of what had gone before. And it should be remembered that Shakespeare’s depiction of Queen Elizabeth’s father in Henry VIII is by no means flattering: though of course he was a mere continuator of the dynasty, not its founder, so the question of his character was perhaps less a sensitive matter despite his reign having been more recent.  

There is probably no finer portrayal of the intelligent, charming, plausible, unctuous, ruthless psychopath in literature than that of Richard:

What do I fear? myself? There’s none else by: Richard loves Richard; that is, I am I.

The Fusing/Meeting of Extremes

Red Fascism

by Paul Austin Murphy
It’s interesting to note that it was probably anarchists, not the Right, who coined the term 'red fascism'. They did so when they realised that not only did the Far Left and the Nazis/fascists often behave in the same ways; but that they believed many of the same things too. This is not a surprise if you bear in mind the fact that Lenin and the Bolsheviks, followed by Trotsky and other Communists/Trotskyists the world over, often fought and killed anarchists (e.g., at Petrograd/the Kronstadt rebellion/massacre, which Trotsky was largely responsible for). This particularly occurred during and after the Bolshevik Revolution and even during the Spanish Civil War. It was during that war - despite the Leftist hype about his activity in it - that George Orwell realised that the Left often behaved worse than the fascists they were fighting against and that they believed similar things too. Despite that, many Trotskyists have attempted to claim Orwell for themselves. Nonetheless, Orwell was never a Trotskyist and he soon realised that Trotskyists could be as violent and unscrupulous as the pro-Soviet Communists. Consequently, there is as little to connect Orwell’s socialism, or even his anarchism, with Trotskyism as there is to connect it with Stalinism.

The anarchist Emma Goldman summed up this often bogus distinction between Trotskyism and Stalinism (or between Trotsky and Stalin) as follows:

“In point of truth I see no marked difference between the two protagonists [Stalin and Trotsky] of the benevolent system of the dictatorship except that Leon Trotsky is no longer in power to enforce its blessings, and Josef Stalin is… I must, however, point out that Stalin did not come down as a gift from heaven to the hapless Russian people. He is merely continuing the Bolshevik traditions, even if in a more relentless manner.”

Perhaps Jurgen Habermas, the German sociologist and philosopher, belongs to this tradition of the anarchist critique of the Left.

Plainly, Habermas reacted against the frequent use of violence on the Left and instead emphasised 'rational discourse', democratic institutions and the reliance on 'conflict theory' to end political violence. Of course allied with that Leftist use of violence is its hatred of democracy and free speech; things which Habermas also noted. In fact, Habermas was an early user of the term 'left-fascism'.

The term ‘left-fascism' also refers to a Leftism that often contradicts or goes against the allegedly 'progressive ideals' which are supposed to motivate the Left generally. This can be shown by alliances with Islamists, misogynist and homophobic Muslims, support of terrorism and 'street violence', Jew-hatred and so on. 

Natural Law, Natural Rights, and the Law of Freedom

The Conservative Mind

by Bradley J. Birzer 

Sixty years ago, Russell Kirk (1918-1994) published his stunning and culturally and politically shattering work, his barely revised dissertation, The Conservative Mind.  Knopf had accepted it but the prestigious publishing firm wanted the relatively young author to pare the manuscript down significantly.  In response, Kirk submitted the full manuscript to the Chicago publishing firm founded only a few years earlier by Henry Regnery.  Arriving on bookshelves on May 11, 1953, The Conservative Mind enjoyed a popularity that stunned its author and its publisher.  Nearly every major newspaper, magazine, and journal in the English speaking world reviewed it, sometimes twice, and Kirk became nothing less than a major celebrity for the next decade.  Time magazine even went so far as to label the Michiganian one of the fifteen most important intellectuals in America.

It can be argued rather effectively that without Kirk and Hayek, the Goldwater movement could never have emerged in the fashion that it did in the late 1950s and first half of the 1960s.  As almost every writing and scholar, regardless of political disposition, agrees, if Kirk is not THE founder of the post-war conservative movement, he is one of its most important architects.  Additionally, almost everyone agrees that The Conservative Mind gave creditability to the budding conservative and libertarian movements, post World War II.

Kirk’s literary output throughout his adult life is nothing short of astounding.  During the sixteen years prior to his marriage, 1948-1964, he published nine books of history and cultural criticism, his first novel, over four-hundred articles, twenty-six reference articles, sixty book reviews, seventeen book introductions, and ten short stories.  He also founded and edited two journals–Modern Age and the University Bookman–over the same time period.  Between 1962 and 1975, Kirk also wrote close to 3,000 syndicated newspaper columns.  Covering every topic imaginable—from the encouragement of defacing billboards to the condemnation of Barbra Streisand as a no-talent hack made popular only by massive corporate marketing—Kirk’s “To the Point” syndicated column reached millions of readers.  And, the record of publication does not cease here.  During his married years, 1965-1994, Kirk published fourteen books of cultural criticism and history, 408 articles, 32 original chapters in edited books, 182 book reviews, 2 novels, and 8 short stories.  Political scientist W. Wesley McDonald properly claims that “Russell Kirk has written more, it would be fair to say, than the ordinary American has read.”

A Meddlesome Foreign Policy Establishment

Changing the ways in which others live is impossible

by Angelo M. Codevilla    

The Egyptian people’s rejoicing over the armed forces’ overthrow of the Muslim Brotherhood’s looming dictatorship was mixed with…anger at the American people – anger sure to trouble our relations with the Muslim world’s vital center; trouble which our foreign policy establishment richly earned by playing sorcerers’ apprentices in Egyptian politics. This meddling is neither new nor confined to Egypt. Breaking this half-century old destructive habit is essential to restoring our peaceful relations with the rest of mankind.

The Egyptian people have been mired in despotism and poverty since the 1950s. They might have done that all by themselves. But they did not. In 1953 our CIA helped a combination of the Muslim Brotherhood and the Army to overthrow the country’s British-backed constitutional monarchy. Thereafter the Army, under Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser, jailed and hanged the Brotherhood’s leaders and set up a ruinous dictatorship. In 1956, when Nasser seized the Suez Canal (property of Britain and France), excluded Israel from it, and prepared war against it, the US government saved him from Britain’s, France’s, and Israel’s invasion. That meddling resulted in Egypt becoming an ally of the Soviet Union for a generation.

When, in 1975, Nasser’s military expelled the Soviets as their grip was tightening around them, the US government treated what was an act of self-preservation as if it had been a favor to America and began to subsidize the Egyptian military to the tune of some two billion dollars per annum. The military dictators – Anwar Sadat followed by Hosni Mubarak – repaid us by merely refraining from only the worst anti American excesses. They continued to ruin their country, while giving their people the impression that their policies were guided by America. As anti Americanism grew in Egypt, military dictators who were suppressing the Muslim Brotherhood’s domestic activities tacitly encouraged the Islamic extremists to focus their hatred on America.

Are We Egyptians?

No Denial: Once Americans, now Egyptians

by Ken Masugi

Was the anti-Morsi coup in Egypt justified on liberal and democratic grounds? The distinguished legal scholars Ilya Somin and Michael Rappaport agree that democracy cannot be defended on the ground of majority rule alone, and I add my voice to theirs but for different reasons. In making their respective critiques of Morsi, Rappaport emphasizes long-run majoritarianism and consensus; Somin the protection of classical liberal principles. Put them together and you get something close to the American founding but still not quite there. I would advance the arguments of Thomas Jefferson articulated in his First Inaugural Address that is crucial for understanding Egypt and, more important, our own democracy.

Confused reaction to the Egyptian coup (or attempted re-refounding) reveals that it is we Americans who are Egyptians, in an older sense. It is as though we were Jews who have become assimilated to Egypt (cf. Genesis 49-50) and lost our faith and our identity in foundational American political documents. Democracy cannot be identified with elections, but neither is it reducible to a set of classical liberal values.

As Rappaport puts it, “A single election can be thought of as democracy, but few thoughtful people would defend it as such.” This was precisely the situation that America found itself in following the establishment of the Constitution, the two terms of Washington, and the term of John Adams. The 1790s brought America close to civil war over regime issues—thus Jeffersonians denounced the Federalists as “monocrats,” crushing the States, favoring Britain, and erecting a monarchy.  Hamiltonians responding in kind by accusing the Republicans of being “mobocrats,” minions of the French Revolution’s terror, atheism, and despotism.  Over American politics loomed the horrors of the French Revolution. (By far the most penetrating thoughts are found in the significantly titled work by John Zvesper, Political Philosophy and Rhetoric: A Study of the Origins of American Party Politics.)

Yet Jefferson described his election as “the revolution of 1800” (letter to Spencer Roane, Sept. 6, 1819). For it was “as real a revolution in the principles of our government as that of 1776 was in its form; not effected indeed by the sword, as that, but by the rational and peaceable instrument of reform, the suffrage of the people.” For the first time in modern history, the elected leaders of a government surrendered power merely because they were voted out of office. The election thus helped complete the words and deeds of 1776. Lincoln’s election in 1860 and his Civil War statesmanship represented another step toward a “more perfect union.”

The Divine Comedy And Islamic Philosophy

The Uncanonical Dante 

by Paul A. Cantor

The distorted notions of invisible things which Dante and his rival Milton have idealized, are merely the mask and the mantle in which these great poets walk through eternity enveloped and disguised. It is a difficult question to determine how far they were conscious of the distinction which must have subsisted in their minds between their own creeds and that of the people. Dante at least appears to wish to mark the full extent of it by placing Riphaeus, whom Virgil calls justissimus unus, in Paradise, and observing a most heretical caprice in his distribution of rewards and punishments.

                                --   Percy Shelley, A Defence of Poetry

The case of Dante provides an excellent opportunity to open up the question of the Western canon. In one sense, Dante is the perfect example of a canonical author. His name is one of the few certain to appear on anybody's short list of the truly central authors in the Western literary tradition. But in another sense Dante can be regarded as uncanonical. In his own day he was widely suspected of being heretical in his religious views, ¹ and a careful reading of his works does indeed raise serious doubts about his being the pillar of orthodoxy he is often taken to be today. ² Out of this interplay between the canonical and the noncanonical Dante, I hope to show that the issue of the Western canon is more complicated than either its defenders or its attackers generally present it.

In discussing the issue of the canon, it is important to sort out at the [End Page 138] beginning what we do and do not mean by the term. A canonical work may merely be a work that has been accepted into the literary canon, one that has become a touchstone in the reading and teaching of literature. But the term canonical can suggest something else, that the work is orthodox and somehow represents a central authoritative position in Western culture. The word canonical is so loaded with religious connotations that it is difficult to separate the relatively neutral first meaning of the term from the loaded second meaning. Dante is a case in point. When people refer to him as a canonical author, they usually do not simply mean that he is widely read and taught. Most discussions of Dante today treat him as representing an authoritative cultural moment in the Western tradition, as the supreme embodiment of the medieval mind. Viewed that way, Dante becomes an emblem of everything contemporary critics of the Western canon bitterly hate and reject. The reason they feel that they must attack authors like Dante and displace them from the center of literary study is that these authors have come to stand for orthodoxy and thus seem to enforce the hegemony of Western culture.

Critics who wish to champion various forms of non-Western culture have a particular axe to grind with canonical authors like Dante. The contemporary debate over the Western canon seems to be premised on a sharp opposition between Western and non-Western cultures, as if they were complete and irreconcilable antitheses, and even wholly unrelated. One of the principal charges against the Western canon is that it is Eurocentric, that it remains confined within a narrow orbit of European ideas and beliefs, thus excluding all other views of the world. A corrolary of the idea of Eurocentrism is the concept of Orientalism, developed by Edward Said. ³ Said argues that throughout its history, the Occident has defined itself in opposition to the Orient, basing its elevated self-image on a debased vision of the cultural Other. In Said's argument, the Occident views itself as rational as opposed to an irrational Orient, as emotionally disciplined in contrast to an emotionally uncontrolled Orient, and as masculine over against a feminine Orient.

What's Right with Malthus?

More than enough

by ROSS EMMETT

If . . . we come to the conclusion, not to interfere in any respect, but to leave every man to his own free choice, and responsible only to God for the evil he does . . . this is all I contend for.

                 —Thomas Robert Malthus

I am constantly surprised that defenders of liberty and free markets love to bash Thomas Robert Malthus.

Maybe I shouldn’t be, but consider this: Robert Malthus (his friends called him “Bob”) was one of the primary interpreters of Adam Smith for the generation after Smith. Indeed, a lot of people who pick on “Thomas” Malthus get Bob Malthus wrong.

That’s not to say that Malthus was right about everything. But even more than Smith's, Malthus’s economics built upon the idea that all humans similarly respond to incentives, and he thereby rejected the idea of natural hierarchy. Writing in a country that had excessive restrictions on labor markets—take a look at the poor laws—Malthus was an advocate of free labor markets. And Malthus argued that private property rights, free markets, and an institution that would ensure that both parents were financially responsible for the children they bore (that is, marriage) were essential features of an advanced civilization.

“Wait a minute,” you may be thinking. “Are we talking about the Malthus who claimed back in 1798 in his book An Essay on the Principle of Population that population growth would decrease per capita well-being? Isn’t this the guy who argued that the combination of population growth and natural resource scarcity would create catastrophic consequences, including disease, starvation, and war, for much of the human race? And didn’t he miss the benefits of entrepreneurship and innovation, blinded as he was by the fallacy of land scarcity?”

That Malthus—let’s call this one “Tom”—is more a creature of the ideological opponents of markets than of Malthus’s own writings. So maybe we should revisit Malthus and see what he actually said.

It all begins with a thought experiment: What would happen to human population in the absence of any institutions?

The answer is the population principle, which is the only thing most people know about Malthus. And it’s largely correct. In the absence of institutions, humans are reduced to their biological basics. Like animals, humans share the necessity to eat and the passions that lead to procreation. To eat, humans must produce food. To procreate, humans must have sex. If there are no institutions, human population will behave like any animal population and increase to the limit of its ecology’s carrying capacity.

The biological model is simplistic; it treats humans as mere biological agents. It is this biological model that produces all the results people usually associate with Malthus’s name. And it’s not very far off from people’s conditions when their institutions have suddenly been disrupted by things like conquest, revolution, or war. (Consider the dual problems of war and drought that resulted in famine for Ethiopians in 1983–85, for example.)

The Missing Middle-Class Case

Yes, the middle-class has been disappearing, but they haven’t fallen into the lower-class, they’ve risen into the upper-class

By Mark J. Perry 

The chart above is based on Census Bureau data on “Money Income of Families–Percent Distribution by Income Level, in Constant (2009) Dollars” from 1967 to 2009 (Table 696) for the family income categories: a) $25,000 and under, b) $25,000 to $75,000 and c) $75,000 and over.

The chart and this post were inspired by a comment made by Ken on this CD post earlier today on middle-class incomes over time and the myth of middle-class stagnation. Ken points to Census Bureau Table 696 as evidence that the reason the middle-class appears to be “disappearing” is because that income group is actually “disappearing” or moving into the upper-class, and not falling into to the lower-class as is typically claimed.

Here’s what the family income distribution data in the chart above show:

1. In 1967, almost 62% of American families were earning between $25,000 and $75,000 in constant 2009 dollars, an income range that might accurately describe America’s “middle-class.” Also in that year, fewer than one out of six (16.3%) American families had income above $75,000 (upper-class), and 22% of families were earning $25,000 or less, an income category that might be described as “lower-class.” In 1967, there were almost four American families earning a middle-class income ($25,000 to $75,000) for every high-income family earning above $75,000.  Further, there were almost three “middle-income” families for every one “low-income family,” so the middle-class American families earning between $25,000 and $75,000 clearly represented a significant share of US families.

Here’s what happened over time:

2. The share of lower-income families fell over time by 4.2%, from 22% of all US families in 1967 to only 17.8% of all US families in 2009, while the share of middle-income families decreased by 18.6% during that period, from 61.8% in 1969 to 43.2% in 2009.  So where did those 22.8% of families go that disappeared from the lower-income and middle-income categories in the 42-year period between 1967 and 2009? They “disappeared” into the upper-income category of incomes above $75,000, which increased by 22.8%, from a 16.3% share of American families in 1967 to a 39.1% share in 2009. Whereas “middle-class” families were so numerous that they outnumbered “upper-class” families by ratio of almost 4:1 in 1967, so many American “middle-class” families have moved by the 2000s to the “upper-class” by income, that those two groups have been almost equally represented for their shares of the total number of US families over the last decade (see the convergence of the blue and red lines in the chart above).

Bottom Line: In other words, America’s “middle-class” did start largely disappearing in the 1970s, but it was because they were moving up to a higher-income category, not down into a lower-income category. And that movement was so significant that between 1967 and 2009, the share of American families earning incomes above $75,000 more than doubled, from 16.3% to 39.1%. On the previous CD post, Ken commented that although “Many prominent people like Paul Krugman claim that the middle class has been in decline since the 1970s, that assertion is incredibly and verifiably wrong.” And according to the percent distribution of family income data by income level (in constant dollars) in Table 696 from the Census Bureau, I think Ken is exactly right. 

The deposit illusion

No, Virginia, Nothing Is Really Risk Free

By Alex J. Pollock

It is impossible to make riskless deposits out of the inherently risky business of banking. But governments everywhere insist on trying to do it anyway.

The financial world confronts us with ineluctable uncertainty and risk. Its future is unknowable, not only for borrowers, lenders, and investors, but also for governments and central banks. No matter how hard anyone might try, risk cannot be made to disappear; it can only be moved around. 

People all over the world long for their bank deposits to be risk free. Governments attempt to satisfy this longing by creating deposit insurance and by bailing out depositors and other creditors of failed banks. Of course, as in Cyprus this year, the government itself may be broke. Historically speaking, this is a common occurrence: there have been more than 250 defaults on government debt since 1800, up to the notorious defaults by Argentina in 2002 and Greece in 2012, which gives us a long-term average of about one default on government debt per year.

Governments constantly strive to promote “confidence” in the banking system, whether or not such confidence is warranted. They wish to induce what we might call “deposit illusion” — that the safety of deposits is unrelated to the soundness of the banks’ assets. But the inescapable fact is that deposits fund banking assets, which are inherently very risky, and these assets are subject to periodic losses which are unexpected and of magnitudes previously not even thought possible.

The President’s Broken Window Fallacy

Carbon Policies and Jobs

By Benjamin Zycher

In my earlier essay discussing President Obama’s speech on climate change and “carbon pollution,” I noted the weakness of the evidence on the effects of increasing atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases (GHG) and the poor predictive performance of climate models. I also noted the trivial prospective temperature effects of even draconian anti-carbon policies regardless of what one believes about the underlying climate science, and the obvious implication that wealth redistribution, essentially from red states to blue, is the real underlying goal motivating these policy proposals.

I turn now to some of the poor economic analysis in the speech, in particular the jobs promised as an ancillary benefit of costlier electricity, specifically in the form of complementary employment growth in the wind and solar power sectors. As Mr. Obama claimed: "And that means jobs… manufacturing the wind turbines [and] installing the solar panels…"

At a general level, employment created — that is, shifted — as a result of a government policy is a cost rather than a benefit for the economy as a whole, unless the policy improves resource allocation by, say, correcting for some sort of market inefficiency. (Whether or not government policies can be predicted systematically to improve the efficiency of resource use is the central focus of the vast public choice literature). As counterintuitive as that may seem, imagine that a federal policy had the effect of increasing the demand for high-quality steel. That clearly would be a benefit for steel producers, or more broadly, for owners of inputs in steel production, including steel workers. But for the economy as a whole, the need for additional high-quality steel in, say, an expanding wind-power sector would be an economic cost, as that steel (or the resources used to produce it) would not be available for use in other sectors. More generally, the creation of “green” jobs as a side effect of environmental (or carbon) policies is a benefit for the workers hired (or for those whose wages rise with increased market competition for their services). But for the economy as whole, that use of scarce labor is a cost because those workers no longer would be available for productive activity elsewhere.