Archive for April, 2003

Check out my latest editorial, In Defense of Fast Food, inspired by this article: Anti-War Leaders Fear US Fast Food Threat to Iraq _{(Thanks to Dakach for the original story.):}

April 14, 2003

A sinister new threat is looming over helpless Iraqi civilians, one that may rob them of their health, take away their freedom, and destroy their culture.  Is it the Iraqi dictator?  No, Saddam is dead or missing.  Is it American bombs and bullets?  No, the U.S. military took great care to avoid civilian casualties (putting our soldiers at risk in the process) and besides, the war is nearly over.  What is the nature of this insidious threat?  According to Voices in the Wilderness, an anti-war group in Chicago, one of the greatest threats to Iraqi civilians is fast food.  After complaining for years about millions starving due to U.S. sanctions, liberals are now whining about overeating and obesity due to American food.  As member Stephanie Schaudel explains, “Some people would think that seeing a KFC on a street corner is a sign of progress, I certainly don’t.”  Why the opposition to fatty foods?  “You can just look at what those kinds of businesses have done to the diet and health of many Americans to think that it might not be the number one thing we should be exporting…Iraqis have really good food, they don’t need a KFC.”  Now that the pacifists’ hopes of bloody resistance to the liberation of Iraq have been dashed, they are once again uniting to oppose U.S. “colonialism” and “cultural imperialism.”  A spokesman for A.N.S.W.E.R., an anti-war group worries that fast-food corporations “will enter this homogenized McDonalds culture and of course we will see a loss of local traditions and a local way of life.”  What is the nature of this unspoiled native “way of life” and what kind of threat does McDonalds pose to it?

Iraq has a 4000-year history of being ruled by one despot after another.  In 634 AD, invading Muslim armies kicked out the Persian rulers and offered the people the following ultimatum: “Accept the faith and you are safe; otherwise pay tribute.  If you refuse to do either, you have only yourself to blame.  A people is already upon you, loving death as you love life.”  For a time, Islamic civilization was a thriving center of intellectual discourse, in stark contrast to the barbaric tribes and religious fundamentalism dominating Europe during the Middle Ages.  However, around the eight century, the Islamic world was split between teachings of the Arab philosopher, al-Kindi, founder of the school of Mu’tazilites and advocate of a rational interpretation of basic beliefs of Islam, and the followers of Ahmed ibn Hanbal, a traditionalist who argued against the use of reason and for the reliance on faith and tradition in interpreting the Qur’an.  When the Mu’tazilite school lost out in the ninth century, Iraq, along with the rest of the Arab world, were plunged into an era of religious fundamentalism and traditionalism that persists to this day, effectively isolating themselves from the intellectual Renaissance in Europe that brought scientific discovery and progress back into the Western world.  Like many of his predecessors, Saddam was not religious, but he used religion to skillfully exploit the beaten and brainwashed people of Iraq.

The rediscovery of classical thinking during the Renaissance led to the formation of the “ethnocentric western culture” that liberals love to demonize. The foundation of Western culture is the reliance of reason rather than faith to find out the basic facts of reality. By the use of reason, great thinkers like Thomas Aquinas, Francois Voltaire, John Locke, Adam Smith, and Thomas Jefferson, discovered that man had certain unalienable rights, among them the rights to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness. While the Islamic world plunged ever deeper into the stagnation of religious fundamentalism, the great minds of Europe and America woke up and asserted that every man had a right to live for his own sake, and that the proper function of government was to be an obedient servant, not master of the people. They recognized that voluntary trade to mutual benefit was superior to slavery and servitude, whether to a king or to a mob. When the Founders established the United States of America, they set up the greatest experiment in history to test their newly-found values. The experiment, for a while at least, was a great success. The civilized world experienced never-before seen prosperity, economic growth, and increases in the longevity and quality of life. Religion did not die out in the West, but the Founders recognized that the role of government was to protect men’s rights, not to enforce morality, and allowed men to their own meaning in the universe. Western civilization was far from perfect: slavery, war, and suffering persisted — but to the extent that men recognized the right of every person to his own life, their societies flourished.

This is then, the “Western imperialism” that liberals condemn as inferior and destructive to the “fragile” Iraqi culture.  McDonalds and KFC are the products of a wealthy society, one that is able to mass-produce cheap, dependable goods more efficiently and safer than ever before.  Certainly, as a mainstay of one’s diet, fast food would be unhealthy – but the rapid growth of low-fat items on menus and health-oriented franchises like Subway shows that the markets respond to consumer demand.  Peter Cook, an organizer with a radical pacifist group claims that “Iraqis have really good food, they don’t need a KFC” – but is he worried that Iraqis will be dragged into KFC at gunpoint and traditional eating venues bombed into extinction?  No, he is scared stiff that Iraqis will choose to eat cheaper, safer, and yes, even healthier food paid by productive and free Iraqi workers, rather than thrown the scraps of international handouts after their dictator decided which city was going to starve that day for not bowing down to his regime.

The pacifists are clearly not concerned about Iraqi civilians.  They did not care about the millions who died under Saddam’s brutal regime, and they do not wish to bring Iraqis the values that brought the Western world out of the Dark Ages and into the light of liberty and prosperity.  They volunteered as human shields to protect Saddam’s weapons factories, but they now wish for Americans to get out of Iraq without restoring order or reconstruction by turning over Iraq to the incompetent and corrupt hands of the UN.  Now that they have failed to keep the United States from asserting the right to its own existence (albeit weakly), they seek to prevent the United States from asserting the values that give us the right to that existence.  Having failed to save the Iraqi dictator, they seek to save the values that created him.  They claim that all cultures are equal, that even the claim that freedom is better than slavery, prosperity is better than poverty, and life is better than living death amounts to ethnocentric imperialism and racism.  It is not fast food that these peaceniks oppose, but civilization and life – as it should be lived.  They have made their stance clear.  Let us now make ours.

Leonard Peikoff recently gave a speech at the Ford Hall forum titled "America Versus Americans." I’m not going to summarize it, because you should watch it yourself. Several points stood out. First, while it’s easy to get wrapped up in the outpouring of support for the war coming from moderates and conservatives, we have to put things in context: in many ways, America is fighting the wrong war for the wrong reasons.
While Dr. Peikoff explains the reasons for our moral failures sufficiently well, I recently experienced the views he mentioned firsthand. I work with two students — a Russian exchange student and a typical Texan bible-thumping conservative. When the topic of civilian causalities came up, the Russian was vehemently anti-war and claimed that even one civilian casualty was killing, which was wrong per se. Now, we are normally on good terms, but I almost ended having a shouting match with him right in the middle of the office. I asked if the victims of Saddam Hussein counted as murder too, and he gave the usual liberal rant about evil US occupiers, violence wrong in all forms, etc, etc, until I refused to listen anymore and he stormed off shouting about western imperialism, Dictator Bush, etc, etc. At this point, I took up the conversation with my Christian coworker, giving him the same arguments as those found in Stop Apologizing for Civilian Casualties. In reply, he questioned whether it was more important on balance to risk the lives of American soldiers or Iraqi civilians. (!!!) I asked him why we were in the war in the first place, and he have the usual altruist reply (even using biblical references) that our sole motivation was "to free the Iraqi" people, and rejected any "selfish" motivations such as being free from terrorism. At this point, I gave a passionate defense of the proper motivation for the war, the idiocy of valuing civilian lives over that of our soldiers, but that is beside the point. The incident was indicative of how conservatives are just as blinded by religiously-motivated altruism as liberals are by the secular kind from seeing the real nature of the conflict: pro-individual western secularism vs. collectivist fundamentalism.
I did not agree with everything Dr Peikoff said however. I am tempted to agree that Iran is a more worthy target of regime change than Iraq, and that the primary reason we are in Iraq is that it is much easier to portray Saddam as a just another "corrupter of the peaceful nature of Islam" and rely on the existing public support from Gulf War I. However political reality makes a war with Iran impossible, and I think that Iraq may be more successfully used to influence the rest of the Middle East if we take an approach of peaceful reconstruction into a US-friendly democracy, than trying to intimidate the Islamic world by turning Iraq into a nuclear wasteland, as Dr Peikoff would have us do. If it were politically feasible (and if it were, we would not have a terrorist problem in the first place) nuking Irag may scare fundamentalists into behaving, but it would not result in long-term positive change. Creating a free democracy in Iraq on the other hand, will put continual pressure on other Middle Eastern governments, and that may be a more effective strategy in the long run. After all, even Al Jazeera admitted that Saddam’s fall sends a warning message to other Islamic dictators.

Oh please. The Democrats are getting so desperate for issues, they have to resort to claiming that they could have won the war for less, and demanding that Bush kowtow to the "international community." Don’t get me wrong, I’m no fan of either party: while the Republicans are politicking for who gets to rebuild Iraq both parties are busily creating a socialist state in America.

(Update: I can’t spell. :-\)

I am writing a paper on Alexis de Tocqueville’s interpetation of “self-interest rightly understood.” I will post the link to it tonight, but meanwhile, here is food for thought:

I do not think, on the whole, that there is more selfishness among us than in America; the only difference is that there it is enlightened, here it is not. Each American knows when to sacrifice some of his private interests to save the rest; we want to save everything, and often we lose it all. Everybody I see about me seems bent on teaching his contemporaries, by precept and example, that what is useful is never wrong. Will nobody undertake to make them understand how what is right may be useful?

– Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America
(Update: here it is.)

While reading Herbert Hoover’s 1934 book "The Challenge to Liberty," I discovered the groundwork of the political views held by both of the major parties today. Hoover was by no means the greedy capitalist that history professors bill him as, but rather offered the market system as a temporary excuse – because "for at least the next several generations, we dare not abandon self-interest." His defense of (mixed-economy) capitalism was not based the morality of capitalism, but on its practical necessity – at least until we could find a way to make socialism work. There are many lines I could offer, but following are quotes indicative of his approach:

"No civilization could be built to endure solely upon groundwork of greed or even upon the enlightened self-interest f the individual. It is out of the altruistic and constructive impulses that the standards and the ideals of the nation are molded and sustained."

"Proper action in relief of distress is inherent in the social vision of the true American System. No American should go hungry or cold if he is willing to work. Under our system relief is the first obligation of the individual to his neighbors, then of institutions, then of local communities, and then of State governments. The moment the need exceeds the honest capacities of the local agencies, then they must have the support of the Federal Government as the final reservoir of national strength."

"The American System holds equally that monopoly, group or class advantage, economic domination, Regimentalism, Fascism, Socialism, Communism, or any other form of tyranny, small or great, or small are violations of the basis of Liberty."

With this approach, is it any wonder that Statism/altruism has been the dominant political philosophy of the 20th century? The success of socialism was not caused by the supposed flaws of capitalism, but by the moral default of its so-called supporters. I won’t make the same mistake.

The AP reports that the FED is in "uncharted territory" and is trying out "experimental moves" to stimulated the economy. How? Basically, by "lending massive amounts of money directly to commercial banks to make sure that financial markets do not freeze up."

I’m not sure if the public is so clueless about economics that they are afraid question Greenspan’s policy, or whether they are deluding themselves into going along with the Fed’s hysteria about a "deflationary cycle" but it is clear that the only solution the Fed has to offer to the depression we are now in is inflation. The "solution" also happens to be the catalyst that caused the depression in the first place. The Fed hopes to jumpstart the economy by making (virtually) interest-free money available to investors, but since there are few solid investment opportunities out there (otherwise we wouldn’t be in a depression) the funds are likely to go high-risk, politically nimble, but non-viable enterprises that will collapse just in time to wreck the real recovery. In other words, the seed of the next depression are being planted in this one. The real risk is not a "deflationary cycle" but the redistribution and uncertainty caused by the Fed’s inflationary policies.

If the government really wants to help the economy, it should do the only thing in can do for business – create a business friendly environment by moving towards real capitalism. This means ending the witch-hunt of CEO’s, ending government handouts and subsidies, lowering trade restrictions, ending anti-trust, and protecting all forms of property rights. Until entrepreneurs are not sure whether they will reap the rewards of their labor or have it stolen by some government looter or given to a competitor, they will not risk hard-earned money the investments needed for real economic growth. (Update: Frank Shostak agrees.)

Meanwhile, Japanese entrepreneur Sachio Semmoto, the founder and CEO of eAccess, one of the most successful DSL suppliers in that country is planning to offer voice over IP service, undercutting traditional phone service, and according to MSNBC, "perhaps yet another blow to the already shaky Japanese economy."

The columnist here makes the classic mistake of thinking that an improvement in technology causes workers to lose jobs by making labor more efficient. He sees Japanese telecoms firing workers because internet VOIP service can do it cheaper and with less labor. What he doesn’t see is that consumers suddenly have more money to spend on things other than phone bills, that fired telephone company workers are not only hired by the VOIP providers, but find new jobs thanks to the extra money made available by the increased efficiency of communication. The short-term loss of telephone companies is the long-term gain of everyone else.

Finally, the Supreme Court has decided that cross burning is not protected by the First Amendment because it is an "instrument of terror." This reminds me of sexual harassment law, which states that sexual harassment is anything that "feels" like harassment. Likewise, racism is now defined according to how it makes you feel, rather than actual threats or violence against certain groups. Non-objective law which based on whether you "feel" wronged, rather than the actual use (or plans to use) force is one example of the dangers of non understanding the initiation of force. Feminist groups are already planning to use the ruling against anti-abortion protesters who "intimidate" abortion clinic workers. Imagine the effect on free speech if any action that made someone "feel threatened" could suddenly land you in jail.

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