The Economics of Disagreement

True conformity is possible only in the cemetery

BY JR NYQUIST

Disagreement is a fundamental part of life. It is essential to the economy. Just as a certain kind of agreement is necessary to life, so is a certain kind of disagreement. It is when our interests coincide that we can agree. It is when our interests and beliefs do not coincide that we disagree. When a company is formed there is an agreement, when something is paid for there is an agreed price. Is disagreement, therefore, an economic negative?

We should not be so simple as to assume that agreement is good and disagreement bad. Although we might say that all wars are about disagreement and peace is about agreement, and we might say that wealth destruction occurs in the context of disagreement while wealth creation occurs on account of agreement, there is more to this story. It is possible to imagine a destructive agreement and a constructive disagreement. A country that agrees to the wrong trade policy, for instance, may give serious strategic advantages to a competitor; domestic industries may go under, manufacturing capacity may decline with implications for military security and domestic employment (e.g., as in the trade relationship between China and the United States). A constructive disagreement may result in a parliamentary debate over a new law from which new understandings and practices emerge.

Peter Barron Stark offers 8 Steps to Constructive Disagreement. According to Stark, “Disagreements are a positive, normal and necessary part of building a great relationship or a team.” People tend to disagree on many points, and we often find this troublesome; but we must not imagine that disagreements are something to be set aside in search of perpetual agreement. Such has often proved a dangerous course to follow. Every investor and business leader would profit by reading Irving L. Janis’s Victims of Groupthink: A Psychological Study of Foreign Policy Decisions and Fiascos. As Janis points out, the desire for agreement and consensus can result in people suppressing important objections and contrary observations that prevent disaster from overtaking those who are swept along with others by the desire to fit in. In seeking agreement, and through the suppression of unpopular views, people can do incredibly stupid things. A CEO or government leader is bound to have blind spots. If there is no way to disagree or challenge his views, then disaster is bound to occur. These are especially shown in the history of powerful or charismatic leaders.

Stark tells us that 

“Good business decisions are brought about by respecting each other’s opinion, and having the ability to have a constructive dialogue where each team member has the opportunity to learn from each other, rather than purely liking each other.” 

Obamacare - Blinding You With Science

Science is glorious. But government is not science, and society cannot be managed scientifically from the center.

by Jeffrey Tucker

It is such a kick to read the transcripts from the White House’s health care “war room” in the first days of release. What a meltdown, and you get to watch it all in real-time.

I’m not trying to be cruel to the kindly despots who have wrecked so much of what worked in the existing system, only to replace it with an unworkable central plan that’s robbing people all over the country.

But still, there is justice in this humiliation.

Somehow, the Republicans forced the Obama administration to cough up the details, and it is from these transcripts that we discovered the truth about HealthCare.gov’s mysterious first day. Only six people enrolled. That’s six of 7 million people eligible for the great new dawn for “affordable” health care.

It’s no wonder the Obama administration tried to hide the numbers from you. But in a digital age, even the White House can’t keep this stuff secret anymore. Every aspect of reality is logged in real-time.

It’s a double-edged sword. True enough, they are still logging our lives, which is tremendously annoying. But at the same time, they are also logging their own failures. In real-time, nonetheless. And this provides unprecedented insight into many great disasters of our time.

Here is a screenshot I pulled from one such transcript:

If you’re critical of the government, this is a beautiful failure.

Supporters of the president and the health care law in his name see this as a small hiccup. To be sure, people say that all of these problems will be fixed. That the problems with creating an account are mere technical issues. Top technicians from the best companies have all been hired by the government to make it right.

A government that would rape, torture a man to find a fistful of drugs is not worthy of our allegiance, obedience or respect

The government will continue to act like that until we say “enough.”

Some excellent and insightful comments from Ken White, writing at the Popehat blog, writing about the anal rape of an innocent 62-year old man by law enforcement officials and medical professionals that took place in New Mexico earlier this year:

What’s terrifying is that though the warrant is extraordinarily flimsy, there’s a decent chance a judge might find it sufficient. That’s because the judiciary has been steadily ground down by decades of law-and-order thin-blue-line rhetoric and by the purported imperatives of the Great War on Drugs, and judges routinely shrug and accept transparently bogus police speculation and awful warrants.

What’s terrifying is that a judge who has bought the government’s narrative may decide that the amount of drugs that can be hidden in a man’s rectum justifies detaining him, X-raying him, repeatedly digitally probing him, and despite a total lack of indication he is carrying drugs, sedating him and subjecting him to a colonoscopy.

What’s terrifying is that the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution is only as strong as judges allow it to be — and, by extension, only as strong as We the People insist that it must be. We the People are easily frightened into agreeing that the promise of safety outweighs the Fourth Amendment.

I’m not afraid because police officers violated David Eckert’s constitutional rights by raping and torturing him because they thought he might have a trivial amount of drugs. I’m afraid that they might not have violated his rights as defined by the courts, because we have allowed those rights to wither away out of fear and indifference.

The government will continue to act like that until we decide, collectively, that a government that would rape and torture a man to find a fistful of drugs is not worthy of our allegiance, obedience, or respect. The government will continue to act like that until we say “enough.” 

A Quick Fix Courtesy of Karl Marx

Privatize Social Security and the economy will roar back

by NATHAN SMITH

It is always a good time to privatize Social Security. In the long run, it is better for people to save for retirement, via portfolios of stocks and bonds, than to be dependent in old age on government handouts. The long-run case for Social Security privatization has been discussed before, especially in 2005, when George W. Bush had just been elected on a platform featuring Social Security reform. But doing it now has short-run benefits. Privatizing Social Security is the best way to get us out of this economic slump. Here’s why.

In broad terms, a pay-as-you-go system of public pensions, such as America’s Social Security program, reduces the overall savings rate, and therefore the growth of the capital stock and the economy. It corrupts the political system, turning it into a tug-of-war for society’s resources, as older generations demand payback for years of forced contributions—but get it from younger generations’ current production, via public tax-and-transfer systems. The government gets more current income, which it spends, and long-term obligations, burdening future taxpayers. Pay-as-you-go systems cheat the future, but the government can’t save without partially nationalizing private banks and corporations.

As for the current recession, economists and other pundits have a number of explanations. Keynesians like Paul Krugman and Matt Yglesias blame a “liquidity trap,” in which further injections of liquidity don’t stimulate the economy; they just get hoarded. In their own way, “market monetarists” like Scott Sumner (who blogs at www.themoneyillusion.com) believe this as well. 

On the other side, Tyler Cowen sees the 2008 financial crisis and the slump that followed as a symptom of a “Great Stagnation” that has been decades in the making, while Casey Mulligan argues that we are suffering a “redistribution recession” because minimum wages, more generous unemployment insurance, and other policy changes have made people less willing to work.

Escaping the Liquidity Trap

All of them are right. But it is the liquidity trap that Social Security privatization could solve. Two charts will help to illustrate what the liquidity trap means. First, business investment (using Bureau of Economic Analysis data):

The Language of Inflation

Modernity is the idea that society is understandable, hence must be designed, by humans

By Dylan Grice

Regular readers of our irregular publication will be aware of our thoughts on inflation, but for those who are not we would summarize them thus: inflation is not measurable. We can summarize our views on money with similar succinctness: it is poorly understood. And as for the economy, we know only this: it is a complex system. From these observations can be derived a straightforward corollary on economic policy makers: trying to control a variable you can’t measure (inflation) with a tool you don’t fully understand (money) in a complex system with hidden, unobservable and non-linear interrelationships (the economy) is a guaranteed way to ensure that most things which happen weren’t supposed to happen.

One such unintended consequence of the past three decades’ economic experiments with “inflation” targeting has been the unprecedented inflation of credit which today leaves the world burdened with debt as it has never been burdened before. In Issue 12 we wrote about another unintended consequence of this monetary experiment, a redistribution of wealth from the poor to the rich and, relatedly, a growing distrust both within countries and between them. Since money is based on trust, we concluded, devaluing money devalues trust.

Now, with the help of Google’s fabulous Ngram Viewer (which allows users to search word usage in five million digitized books published since 1600) we’ve recently stumbled upon another possibility, which is that the past three decades’ hidden devaluation of money has caused a subtle but significant devaluation of language too.

This might sound abstract. But language is the machinery with which we conceptualize the world around us. Devaluing language is tantamount to devaluing our ability to think and to understand. Inflation, whether credit inflation or otherwise, messes things up because it sends false signals. For the ordinary steward of capital in such an environment the near impossible task of judging what is real from what is not is difficult enough. But what chance does he have if in addition, his linguistic software has coding errors to which he is oblivious? This is a question which is perplexing us here at Edelweiss and what follows is an exploration of some of the issues as best we can untangle them.

We start our journey into the financial imagination at the beginning, by tracing an important idea which has had a profound effect, namely that society and the economy are things to be manipulated by expert policy makers. As Taleb opines in his wonderful bookAntifragile:

Modernity is not just the postmedieval, postagrarian, and postfeudal historical period as defined in sociology textbooks. It is rather the spirit of an age marked by rationalization (naive rationalization), the idea that society is understandable, hence must be designed, by humans. With it was born statistical theory, hence the beastly bell curve. So was linear science. So was the notion of “efficiency”—or optimization.

Supporting Taleb’s idea, the following chart shows how the word “optimal” has steadily gained prominence in the 20th century.

America's Descent to Tyranny

Tyranny is always capricious

By Mark Steyn

In the year 1215, Magna Carta provided a freeman of England with the right to a trial in a fixed, local law court, and protected him from being “amerced [fined] for a slight offence, except in accordance with the degree of the offence; and for a grave offence he shall be amerced in accordance with the gravity of the offence, yet saving always his contentment; and a merchant in the same way, saving his merchandise” – i.e., even for a “grave offence,” a man shall not be deprived of the ability to make his living.

Four-fifths of a millennium later, a 21st-century American merchant does not enjoy the rights of his 13th-century English forebear. The Economist reports on yet another case of “civil forfeiture” by the corrupt and diseased IRS – a Michigan grocery store owned by the Dehkos family:

Fairly often, someone takes cash from the till and puts it in the bank across the street. Deposits are nearly always less than $10,000, because the insurance covers the theft of cash only up to that sum.

In January, without warning, the government seized all the money in the shop account: more than $35,000. The charge was that the Dehkos had violated federal money-laundering rules, which forbid people to “structure” their bank deposits so as to avoid the $10,000 threshold that triggers banks to report a transaction to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS).

Cultural sclerosis

Things take 10x longer or don’t get done at all

Harry Reid claims there isn’t “a single shred of evidence” regulations cause big economic harm…”In the first six months of the 2011 fiscal year, 15 major regulations were issued, with annual costs exceeding $5.8 billion and one-time implementation costs approaching $6.5 billion…Overall, the Obama administration imposed 75 new major regulations from January 2009 to mid-FY 2011, with annual costs of $38 billion”…the Federal Register shows over 4,200 new regulations soon to hit an already battered economy — not including impending Environmental Protection Agency clean air rules, new derivative rules, the Federal Communications Commission’s net neutrality rule, fuel economy mandates, ObamaCare and Dodd-Frank financial restrictions. Yet Reid claims regs are harmless

Construction of the world’s tallest building, the Empire State Building took 14 months in 1930. The Pentagon, the world’s largest office building, took 16 months in 1941. 26 months from the beginning of construction, the World Trade Center became the tallest building in the world in 1970. It is 148 months since September 11, 2001 and its replacement is only now nearing completion. We need 10x the time to do things that were done a century ago.

Regulation certainly isn’t the whole story, but it’s a part of the story of America’s cultural decline. Look what happens when you incentivize performance and cut red tape — a project done in half the allotted time. So it can be done, but rarely these days. Daniel Greenfieldcomments that in today’s culture competence is denigrated and DC and its lawyers substitute the magic of government:

Competence is the real modernity and it has very little to do with the empty trappings of design that surround it. In some ways the America of a few generations ago was a far more modern place because it was a more competent place. For all our nice toys, we look like primitive savages compared to men who could build skyscrapers and fleets within a year… and build them well.

Obamacare Will Be Repealed Well In Advance Of The 2014 Elections

Obamacare represents the crisis of big government; the limits of administrative government have finally been breached

By Stephen Hayward

Prediction: even if HealthCare.gov is fixed by the end of the month (unlikely), Obamacare is going to be repealed well in advance of next year’s election.  And if the website continues to fail, the push for repeal—from endangered Democrats—will occur very rapidly.  The website is a sideshow: the real action is the number of people and businesses who are losing their health plans or having to pay a lot more.  Fixing the website will only delay the inevitable.

It is important to remember why it was so important for Obama to promise repeatedly that “if you like your health insurance/doctor, you can keep your health insurance/doctor.”  Cast your mind back to the ignominious collapse of Hillarycare in 1994.  Hillarycare came out of the box in September 1993 to high public support according to the early polls.  This was not a surprise.  Opinion polls for decades have shown a large majority of Americans support the general idea of universal health coverage.  But Hillarycare came apart as the bureaucratic details came out, the most important one being that you couldn’t be sure you’d be able to keep your doctors or select specialists of your choice.  The Clintons refused to consider a compromise, but even with large Democratic Senate and House majorities the bill was so dead it was never brought up for a vote.

Remember “Harry and Louise”?  Obama did, which is why he portrayed Obamacare as simply expanding coverage to the uninsured, and improving coverage for the underinsured while leaving the already insured undisturbed.  But the redistributive arithmetic of Obamacare’s architecture could never add up, which is what the bureaucrats knew early on—as early as 2010 according to many documents that have leaked.  The wonder is that Obama’s political team didn’t see this coming and prepare a pre-emptive strategy for dealing with the inevitable exposure of the duplicity at the heart of Obamacare’s logic.  Now that people are losing their insurance and finding that they may not be able to keep their doctor after all, Obamacare has become the domestic policy equivalent of the Iraq War: a protracted fiasco that is proving fatal to a president’s credibility and approval rating.  The only thing missing is calling in FEMA to help fix this Category-5 political disaster.

Founded By Geniuses And Run By Idiots

Food for thought…

H. L. Mencken correctly observed:

Government is actually the worst failure of civilized man. There has never been a really good one, and even those that are most tolerable are arbitrary, cruel, grasping and unintelligent.

Mencken also was prescient:

As democracy is perfected, the office represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their hearts desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.

But this is not about Mr. Mencken. Rather it is about some unknown individual who committed the following to the email world:

• If you can get arrested for hunting or fishing without  a license, but not for being in the country illegally … you might live in a  country founded by geniuses but run by idiots.
• If you have to get your  parents’ permission to go on a field trip or take an aspirin in school, but not  to get an abortion … you might live in a country founded by geniuses but run  by idiots.
• If the only school curriculum allowed to explain how we got  here is evolution, but the government stops a $15 million construction project  to keep a rare spider from evolving to extinction … you might live in a  country founded by geniuses but run by idiots.

The Dream of the Peruvian

Mario Vargas Llosa’s writing defends liberty and reason

by Adam Kirsch

Mario Vargas Llosa must be one of the few great writers ever to have argued that society should place less trust in great writers. “The mandarin writer no longer has a place in today’s world,” he has observed. “Figures like Sartre in France or Ortega y Gasset and Unamuno in their time, or Octavio Paz, served as guides and teachers on all the important issues and filled a void that only the ‘great writer’ seemed capable of filling, whether because few others participated in public life, because democracy was nonexistent, or because literature had a mythical prestige.” But today, “in a free society, the influence that a writer exerts—sometimes profitably—over submissive societies is useless.”

The irony, of course, is that Vargas Llosa has had a higher public profile than almost any writer of his time. He has been famous ever since emerging in the 1960s as a leading figure of the movement called the Latin American Boom, and in 2010, he won the Nobel Prize in Literature. At the same time, he has been a vocal participant in the politics of his native Peru, even mounting a serious campaign for president in 1990. Though he lost the second round of the election to the future dictator Alberto Fujimori, Vargas Llosa established himself as one of the world’s most eloquent spokesmen for democracy and free markets—a position that puts him directly at odds with most Latin American intellectuals of his generation, who are likelier to share the dogmatic leftism of his contemporary Gabriel García Márquez. Yet even as Vargas Llosa insists on the need for reason and freedom in politics, his fiction has continued to explore the imaginative realms of unreason and obsession, primitivism and violence.

Risk Management And (The Illusion Of) Insurance

A bridge too far

By Nicole Foss

The expansionist post war era has been characterized by the development of the FIRE economy (finance, insurance and real estate), with a greater and greater dependence on leveraged risk. A necessary consequence has been increasingly sophisticated mechanisms for operating at financially rarified levels far removed from any basis in real wealth. As the network of economic and financial connections has broadened exponentially, and become increasingly complex, greater attention had been paid to apportioning and diverting risk, and to anticipating and avoiding losses through insurance.

Insurance is the equitable transfer of the risk of a loss, from one entity to another in exchange for payment. It is a form of risk management primarily used to hedge against the risk of a contingent, uncertain loss…The transaction involves the insured assuming a guaranteed and known relatively small loss in the form of payment to the insurer in exchange for the insurer's promise to compensate (indemnify) the insured in the case of a financial (personal) loss.

The use of, and dependence on, insurance has spread throughout society in developed countries, and has led to changes in the perception of risk. Rather than addressing risk directly through prudent behaviour or due diligence, risk management has become highly abstract. Being able to pay to officially offset risk can lead to the perception that risk has somehow disappeared. The supposed insulation, or buffer, adds to the comfort level of operating at high levels of leverage, in the same way that driving a vehicle with many safety features can lead to people driving more recklessly, because they feel more secure in taking risks they feel they control, or have paid to minimize.

Orwell, Huxley and the Emerging Totalitarianism

Both men foresaw the future as totalitarian rather than democratic and free

by Emmet Scott 

George Orwell and Aldous Huxley, two of England’s foremost literary figures of the last century, each wrote a compelling description of a future dystopia, both of them nightmare visions of society totally under the control of a ruling clique whose only purpose is the enjoyment of power. In Orwell’s 1984 the ruling tyrant is named Big Brother and is clearly modelled on Stalin, whilst in Huxley’s Brave New World the ruler is known as the Director, a character somewhat less sinister and brutal than Orwell’s Big Brother. The two books are of course very different. Brave New World is a black comedy, which does actually make us laugh, whereas there is absolutely nothing funny about 1984. Nonetheless, there are similarities between the two, and both men can be said to have accurately predicted certain specific features of the world we now inhabit.

The most striking parallel of course is that both men foresaw the future as totalitarian rather than democratic and free. Neither presumably believed their vision of the future to be inevitable, though it is equally clear that each saw aspects of mid-twentieth century life which clearly pointed in the totalitarian direction. Thus 1984 and Brave New World may be seen as warnings against what might be if the trends identified by the two authors persisted. What these trends were and why the authors saw them leading towards totalitarianism is an important question and one that will be addressed presently.

The Economic Enemy Is At Home

China is neither destroyer nor saviour of the West’s economies

By PHIL MULLAN

Two recent events illustrated very well the contrasting responses from the West to the rise of China, and to the rise of the East more generally.

Last month, George Osborne, the UK chancellor of the exchequer, and Boris Johnson, London mayor, went to China. And as happens when you go there, they came back with some souvenirs. In this case, not the usual replicas of terracotta warriors, but something rather more substantial, in the form of inward investment deals. Great news, of course, for the people who will as a result get good jobs in Manchester, Ipswich, London, Somerset and beyond.

In contrast, we have the more negative American response, trying to limit inward investment from China, vetoing, for example, the attempted Chinese takeover of an American oil company, or banning the Chinese telecoms-equipment company Huawei from the US market (the same company Osborne announced is expanding its research-and-development centre in Ipswich).

My argument is that these clearly different approaches retain something in common, which I think is the biggest current threat to the prospects for the health of the world economy. The two approaches are both consistent with what I call the West’s Great Evasion: the failure of the elites here, first to recognise the depth of their systemic economic problems, and second to take direct responsibility for trying to fix them.

Focusing, for example, on whether Chinese investment is a good or a bad thing for the West takes the easy route that sees globalisation as something happening ‘over there’, in the East and South, which may either have some positive spin-off effects back here - perhaps becoming an offshore banking centre, like Luxembourg or the Bahamas - or is something we should be frightened about and that we need to protect ourselves from. Both approaches express a common complacency about the scale of the West’s homegrown problems, which, by being allowed to fester, represent the biggest danger to world economic expansion.

Lies Corrupt Democracy

Democracy by persuasion having become impossible, we are left with democracy as war

by Angelo M. Codevilla

Democracy has no cure for a corrupt demos. Politicians’ misdeeds taint them alone, so long as their supporters do not embrace them. But when substantial constituencies continue to support their leaders despite their having broken faith, they turn democracy’s process of mutual persuasion into partisan war.

Consider: In 1974 President Richard Nixon lied publicly and officially to cover up his subordinates’ misdeeds. His own party forced him to resign. In 1998 President Bill Clinton lied under oath in an unsuccessful attempt to cover up his own. But his party rallied around him and accused his accusers. In 2013 President Barack Obama lied publicly and officially to secure passage of his most signature legislation. But when the lies became undeniable, his party joined him in maintaining that they had not been lies at all.

The point is that Nixon’s misdeeds harmed no one but himself because no one excused them. But Clinton’s and Obama’s misdeeds contributed to the corruption of American democracy because a substantial part of the American people chose to be partners in them.

The difference between the mentalities of Republicans circa 1974 and of Democrats twenty-five and forty years later is the difference between a society before and after democratic corruption. Forty years ago, just as in our time, the President of the United States headed a coalition of groups with material and ideological interest in his Administration. But, back then, the beneficiaries of power were willing enough to subordinate their interests to the greater good of maintaining the bounds of democratic partisanship. In our time, however, the constituents of Democratic Administrations so identify their own status and benefits with “the greater good” that the very notion of bounds to their own partisanship makes no sense.

Are We Free To Reform Ourselves?

In matters of economics, we are all fascists now

by Theodore Dalrymple        

From afar, the defeat of the Republicans in Congress on the matter of the debt ceiling seemed fore-ordained and the inevitable consequence of political ineptitude on an almost heroic scale. Perhaps (and this is the best that might be said) they were staking their future claim to be able to say ‘I told you so’ when the financial catastrophe wrought by the western world’s addiction to spending money it has neither saved nor earns nor strikes not in the comparatively muted fashion that we have experienced hitherto, but in its full and terrible force.

If so, the Republican Party’s moral authority to pose as the party of fiscal prudence and rectitude is distinctly equivocal. Teetotal in opposition, they have been drunk in office. As in most, if not quite all, western countries, the electorate has been offered a choice between profligates, between those who want to overspend on one thing rather than on another, that is to say between those who wish to please one clientele rather than another. The Republicans have been in favor of fiscal rectitude the way weak-willed alcoholics desire complete sobriety.

The American situation is far from unique; in the two countries in which I spend most of my time, Britain and France, the inability of governments of whatever stripe to put public finances on a sound basis is by now plain for all to see. A slowdown in the rate of growth of the national debt is what is now regarded by much of the population as the most ferocious and heartless austerity.

The name of poor old Keynes is regularly invoked, as if he had ever supported deficit spending that (in the case of France) has lasted nearly half a century without interruption. Government deficits are not run any longer, if they ever were, to stimulate demand when demand contracts in the private sector: they are run to create economic dependence on government and as a permanent unearned subsidy (unearned, that is, by the economy as a whole) of the living standards of the entire population. And no population is going to vote, in the name of probity and prudence, for lower living standards, any more than pimps will vote for sexual purity.

The Triangle Connecting the U.S., Israel, and American Jewry May Be Coming Apart

For decades, shared interests kept all three players in a mutually beneficial relationship, but its end might not be such a bad thing

By Adam Garfinkle

American Jewry is in for a real shock: The “special relationship” between the United States and Israel is fast eroding. The strategic, cultural, and demographic alignments that gave rise to and sustained for more than half a century the special relationship between the United States and Israel are all changing. These changes have independent sources, and the relevant dynamics are playing out in different ways and at different rates. But make no mistake: They are connected to and influence one another.

The simple understanding of how the special relationship works is linear: American Jews go to bat in American politics for Israeli interests, as they understand them, because Israeli interests are believed to be inseparable from Jewish interests. This is the “lobby” model, and we recognize its appurtenances: the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee, the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, and a galaxy of smaller, sometimes explicitly partisan groups, from J Street to the Emergency Committee for Israel.

In truth, however, the relationship consists of a metaphorical triangle linking American Jewry with the governments of Israel and the United States. In the natural course of political events, all three actors intermediate between the other two, for good and ill. For example, even as American Jews lobby for Israel in American politics, Israeli governments sometimes get between American Jews and their own government: Jonathan Pollard is one example, and the loan guaranteefight during the George H.W. Bush Administration is another. So is the more contemporary effort of the Israeli government to put AIPAC and other American Jewish groups much further out on their skis in advocating a hawkish policy toward Iran than either the George W. Bush or Barack Obama Administrations have considered wise.

SWATted: The Militarization of America’s Police

SWATted: The Militarization of America’s Police

By Radley Balko

Over the past forty years, American policing has undergone a gradual but important and troubling evolution. Policing in some ways has become more professionalized, organized and regimented, but it has also become more aggressive, militaristic and belligerent. Put another way, there may be fewer cops going rogue today, but the kind of force now permitted and regularly practiced has changed to the point that it resembles rogue behavior en masse. The key case in point is the astonishing increase in the number and use of Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) teams. In America SWAT teams now violently smash into private homes more than a hundred times each day. The vast majority of these raids are to enforce laws against non-violent and consensual crimes, mostly having to do with illicit drug use. 

Austere, Devout Ayatollah Is Secretly As Rich As The Shah

All told, Reuters was able to identify about $95 billion in property and corporate assets controlled by Setad

Ayatollah Khamenei, the Supreme Leader of Iran, secretly runs a financial empire that would give the Shah a run for his money. The business interests of Khamenei’s little-known organization, called Setad, include a dizzying array of properties, oil and gas holdings, telecommunications, even ostrich farming. Reuters estimates that Setad oversees assets worth $95 billion.

The first part of an in-depth Reuters investigation shows that Setad habitually confiscates property from ordinary Iranians, including minorities like Baha’is, auctions it off and pockets the proceeds. It owns or invests in farms, energy businesses, stores, and much else. It intimidates Iranians who resist Setad’s efforts to take over their personal assets. Court orders support these shady dealings.

A “small part” of Setad’s operations are philanthropic.

When Khomeini, the first supreme leader, set in motion the creation of Setad, it was only supposed to manage and sell properties “without owners” and direct much of the proceeds to charity. Setad was to use the funds to assist war veterans, war widows “and the downtrodden.” According to one of its co-founders, Setad was to operate for no more than two years. [...]

A complete picture of Setad’s spending and income isn’t possible. Its books are off limits even to Iran’s legislative branch. In 2008, the Iranian Parliament voted to prohibit itself from monitoring organizations that the supreme leader controls, except with his permission. [...]

All told, Reuters was able to identify about $95 billion in property and corporate assets controlled by Setad. That amount is roughly 40 percent bigger than the country’s total oil exports last year. It also surpasses independent historians’ estimates of the late shah’s wealth.

Definitely read the whole thing and look out for parts two and three of the story. A full picture of how Iran’s top leadership operates is not complete without an understanding of how the Ayatollah maintains his upper hand in the society. Fascinating stuff from Reuters.

America Needs To Stop Eating Its Young

Life After Blue

By WALTER RUSSELL MEAD

The demographic problem facing the industrialized world isn’t just about empty cribs and the empty treasuries when there aren’t enough young workers to pay the retirement and health benefits their parents and grandparents expect. It’s also about quality of life. The consumer society is eating its young; people who live in the most affluent societies humanity has ever known are finding it increasingly difficult to start families and raise children. American houses today are filled with more stuff than ever before, but more and more Americans live in broken or struggling families.

Families are in crisis, with two parent households becoming more rare and many children growing up in poor and unstable circumstances as a result. Older people also face greater isolation; it is a quiet crisis most of the time, but in Europe, the United States and Japan a weakening of family ties is leaving more older people on their own with little or no support or contact from extended but atomized families. Obviously each of these problems takes a different shape in different countries, but in many places around the world we can see the same paradox at work. The industrial revolution was supposed to generate and in fact did generate unprecedented affluence. All over the world people have more and better food, more and better health care, more and better housing than their ancestors dreamed possible. Social safety nets even when incomplete provide levels of personal security that past generations never knew.

Yet with all this affluence and security, it is getting harder and harder for people to do the basic things that historically most people have most wanted to do: build a happy and stable marriage, raise a family, and enjoy rich lives in community with family and friends.

There are some who pooh-pooh all this talk about a crisis in our society’s reproductive system. Women are having fewer children, they say, because with more control over their own bodies and with cheap and reliable contraception, they have more choices than they used to. And if fewer women are ending up in stable marriages, this too reflects more personal freedom, not less. Women can live on their own; gay people no longer have to hide in conventional marriages. The marriage and birth rates are down because it was scarcity and ignorance rather than affinity and choice that kept people together and breeding in the past.

Perhaps, but in the United States those descriptions don’t really cover the facts. It’s the poor who aren’t getting married; in many ways as Charles Murray’s recent book Coming Apart: The State of White America 1960-2010 showed, the higher up you go in the social and economic scale, the more likely you are to be in a stable marriage. The upper middle class is where stable families and two parent households still flourish.

Moreover, the ancient human drive to reproduce still seems to be at work. Never in human history have so many spent so much on advanced methods of conception; affluent couples who have left reproduction too late or have fertility problems drop tens of thousands of dollars on intrusive and difficult techniques in a long quest to have a child. We’re all aware that one of the things the rich do more than the rest of us is to procreate; there are lots of successful men who want what I once heard one to call a “second litter” of kids to go with the trophy wife.

Man Dies In Jail Cell After Misdemeanor Pot Offense

Today's Drug War Outrage

By Radley Balko

Today's story is part drug war, part police indifference and callousness, part police cover-up. It comes by way of a lawsuit filed by the family of Michael Saffioti.

Saffioti failed to make a court date on a misdemeanor charge for pot possession. In July of last year, he surrendered himself to Snohomish County, Washington authorities, who promptly jailed him. (The streets of Snohomish County were a little safer that day.) When it came time for breakfast the following morning, Saffioti is seen on video having a conversation with a guard while holding his tray. Presumably, he was inquiring about any dairy products in the meal. Saffioti had a severe allergy. He's then seen taking a few bites of some oatmeal. (You can watch the video here.)

The awfulness that followed is detailed by KIRO TV.

Within a few minutes, Saffioti was back at the guard desk, using his inhaler.

According to the legal claim, he asked to see a nurse.

Instead, he was sent to his cell.

Over the next half hour, the video shows other inmates looking in Saffioti's cell as he jumped up and down.

The legal claim says he pressed his call button and was ignored.

It also alleges that the guards told him h was "faking."

About 35 minutes after he ate, a guard found Saffioti unconscious in his cell. The guard called for help and Saffioti was dragged out.

Nurses arrived and performed CPR. Everett firefighters took over and rushed Saffioti to the hospital where he was pronounced dead a half hour later.

Then the coverup began. County officials stonewalled Saffioti's mother's attempts to obtain video of the events leading to her son's death, first by denying its existence. After Saffioti's family discovered the police had lied about that, they turned over only non-incriminating portions of the video. The family was eventually able to force them to hand over the entire thing. So far, attorneys for the family have also been barred from interviewing jail staff or responding medical personnel.