The Severe Touch of Truth

In An Essay on the Principle of Population, Thomas Malthus posits a socialist-anarchist Utopia, as imagined by William Godwin, and steps through the consequences of such a delightful living arrangement:

Mr. Godwin considers marriage as a fraud and a monopoly. Let us suppose the commerce of the sexes established upon principles of the most perfect freedom. Mr. Godwin does not think himself that this freedom would lead to a promiscuous intercourse; and in this I perfectly agree with him. The love of variety is a vicious, corrupt, and unnatural taste, and could not prevail in any great degree in a simple and virtuous state of society. Each man would probably select himself a partner, to whom he would adhere as long as that adherence continued to be the choice of both parties. It would be of little consequence, according to Mr. Godwin, how many children a woman had, or to whom they belonged. Provisions and assistance would spontaneously flow from the quarter in which they abounded, to the quarter that was deficient. And every man would be ready to furnish instruction to the rising generation according to his capacity.

I cannot conceive a form of society so favourable upon the whole to population. The irremediableness of marriage, as it is at present constituted, undoubtedly deters many from entering into that state. An unshackled intercourse on the contrary, would be a most powerful incitement to early attachments: and as we are supposing no anxiety about the future support of children to exist, I do not conceive that there would be one woman in a hundred, of twenty three, without a family.

With these extraordinary encouragements to population, and every cause of depopulation, as we have supposed, removed, the numbers would necessarily increase faster than in any society that has ever yet been known. I have mentioned, on the authority of a pamphlet published by a Dr. Styles and referred to by Dr. Price, that the inhabitants of the back settlements of America doubled their numbers in fifteen years. England is certainly a more healthy country than the back settlements of America; and as we have supposed every house in the island to be airy and wholesome, and the encouragements to have a family greater even than with the back settlers, no probable reason can be assigned, why the population should not double itself in less, if possible, than fifteen years. But to be quite sure that we do not go beyond the truth, we will only suppose the period of doubling to be twenty-five years, a ratio of increase, which is well known to have taken place throughout all the Northern States of America.

There can be little doubt, that the equalization of property which we have supposed, added to the circumstance of the labour of the whole community being directed chiefly to agriculture, would tend greatly to augment the produce of the country. But to answer the demands of a population increasing so rapidly, Mr. Godwin's calculation of half an hour a day for each man would certainly not be sufficient. It is probable that the half of every man's time must be employed for this purpose. Yet with such, or much greater exertions, a person who is acquainted with the nature of the soil in this country, and who reflects on the fertility of the lands already in cultivation, and the barrenness of those that are not cultivated, will be very much disposed to doubt whether the whole average produce could possibly be doubled in twenty-five years from the present period.
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Alas! what becomes of the picture where men lived in the midst of plenty: where no man was obliged to provide with anxiety and pain for his restless wants: where the narrow principle of selfishness did not exist:where Mind was delivered from her perpetual anxiety about corporal support, and free to expatiate in the field of thought which is congenial to her. This beautiful fabric of imagination vanishes at the severe touch of truth. The spirit of benevolence, cherished and invigorated by plenty, is repressed by the chilling breath of want. The hateful passions that had vanished reappear. The mighty law of self-preservation expels all the softer and more exalted emotions of the soul. The temptations to evil are too strong for human nature to resist. The corn is plucked before it is ripe, or secreted in unfair Proportions; and the whole black train of vices that belong to falsehood are immediately generated. Provisions no longer flow in for the support of the mother with a large family. The children are sickly from insufficient food. The rosy flush of health gives place to the pallid cheek and hollow eye of misery. Benevolence yet lingering in a few bosoms, makes some faint expiring struggles, till at length self-love resumes his wonted empire, and lords it triumphant over the world.

See the Tragedy of the Commons

You can actually see the Tragedy of the Commons hit Zimbabwe in these satellite photos:

Books That Have Influenced Me

Tyler Cowen recently answered a reader's question of which books have influenced his world view the most. Some of the works I don't recognize, others I haven't read, others I've read about in great detail, and a couple I have in fact read. In that last category, Plato certainly held my interest, but I can't point to any lasting influence. (Camille Paglia neither held my interest nor had any lasting influence.)

Arnold Kling and Bryan Caplan produced their own lists, and Tyler has since compiled a list of lists.

Naturally I got to thinking that perhaps I should produce my own list. An e-mail prod from Aretae pushed me over the edge — and just before I unleashed my oh-so-clever idea, he went and beat me to it. Anyway, here's my list

1. Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Monster Manual – If I'm going to be honest, I need to admit that I was profoundly influenced by D&D and many other related games, which introduced me at a very young age to the entire notion of simulation — of using more-or-less mathematical models to explore how things might play out — and thus to many of the flaws in such models. Sometimes a more detailed model is less realistic, and sometimes a human's judgment is invaluable.


2. The Count of Monte Cristo, by Alexandre Dumas – I don't mean to imply that Dumas's novel furnished me with an unquenchable desire for vengeance. Rather, reading The Count of Monte Cristo in 11^th grade clarified just how derivative most of the entertainment we consume really is — everything has been done better by Dumas, and he did it over a century ago — and it got me wondering why we don't regularly enjoy the pop classics. We read new books, listen to new music, watch new TV shows, and wait in long lines to watch new movies, when most of the best works produced — best for our own middle-brow tastes — are still new to us. (It also reminded me that our public-school curriculum goes out of its way to avoid books that kids, especially boys, might enjoy, under the pretense that teenagers with no life experience will learn literary analysis by parroting back what the teacher said about The Scarlet Letter, or some other work that does not speak to them at all.)


3. "The Man Who Came Early", by Poul Anderson – I suppose I could pick any number of science fiction novels or short stories here, but Poul Anderson's "The Man Who Came Early" really stuck with me. If you're not familiar, it's the story of an American MP pseudo-scientifically transported back in time to Viking-era Iceland, where his knowledge of modern technology enables him to do... very little. Anderson's story does an excellent job of conveying just how little modern specialized technical knowledge is worth without adequate infrastructure and just how foreign modern society would seem to anarchic medieval Icelanders.


4. Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, by Ayn Rand – There seems to be an unwritten rule that anyone who cites Rand as an influence should cite Atlas Shrugged, but I came to her work first through her short collections of essays. This regrettably stripped her enormous novels of most of their novelty; I already knew what she was trying to say. Anyway, the experience of reading Rand as a teenager is one of looking up to where God isn't and asking, Why isn't anyone else saying these things?


5. Economics in One Lesson, by Henry Hazlitt – When I bought my college textbooks a few weeks before the start of my sophomore year, I wasn't sure what to make of Hazlitt's Economics in One Lesson, because I'd already been through one year of indoctrination, and I was terrified that my econ professor was going to refute this wonderful book that seemed too good to be true. I felt quite fortunate that school year.


6. The Selfish Gene, by Richard Dawkins – I had found evolution fascinating from long before I found Dawkins' book, but his work took my understanding to another level and introduced so many fascinating concepts — or explained them in a much broader context, like his discussion of tit for tat and the natural balance of defectors in a lax population of cooperators.


7. The Bell Curve, by Charles Murray – The chief lesson of The Bell Curve is that if you put one small chapter on racial differences in your book, no one will talk about anything else. Far more interesting to me was the story of the shift in society from the old order, in which elite schools were filled with the social elite, to the modern meritocratic order, in which elite schools are filled with the academic elite — which has unintended consequences.


8. Law's Order, by David Friedman – Aretae mentioned Friedman's anarcho-capitalist Machinery of Freedom, which I enjoyed but didn't find especially influential. I much preferred Law's Order, which explores the nature of property right and brings Coase's theorem to life.


9. Guns, Germs, and Steel, by Jared Diamond – I don't know to what degree his grand theory is true, but I certainly found it thought-provoking. So much of our "technology" is agricultural — domesticated plants and animals — and it's far too easy to neglect something so vital.


10. The Discovery and Conquest of Mexico, by Bernal Diaz del Castillo – I picked up this first-hand account of the Spanish expedition that toppled the Aztec empire because Diamond had mentioned it in Guns, Germs, and Steel, and I was not disappointed. My primary take-away was this: Why didn't we read this in school? Real history is nothing like school history. Oddly, real history is more like a swords-and-sorcery novel: evil priests, hair matted with blood, commit human sacrifices atop pyramids amidst a city built on a lake inside a volcanic crater; frenzied fighting ensues.


11. Fooled by Randomness, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb – Ironically, the chief lesson of Taleb's book, and its sequel, is humility. Things that were "obviously" inevitable after the fact, like World War II, were not obvious at the time. The Lebanese "knew" that any fighting around Beirut would soon blow over; theirs was a country where Jews, Christians, and Muslims had lived in harmony for centuries.


12. A Farewell to Alms, by Gregory Clark – I was familiar with Malthus from high school biology, and I was familiar with the standard refutation by Simon vs. Ehrlich, et al. What Clark did was to explore the conditions under which the Malthusian Trap would hold, the conditions under which it would not, and how policies ideal for one situation would backfire in the other. In an agricultural society with little human capital, the plague can raise living standards. In a modern society? Not so much.

Relative Economic Development

The relative economic development of post-colonial Africa has been miserable:

A random sample of five former British colonies testifies to this negative trend. Interestingly, their economies in relative terms to that of their imperial master were not in a dire shape in the 1960-early 70s. Taking Rhodesia/Zimbabwe as an example, the Rhodesian GDP per Capita remained steady at the interval 15-20% of the UK equivalent despite sanctions from the mid-60s due to their unilateral declaration of independence. The insurgency clearly took it’s toll from the mid-70s and upon transition to Mugabe’s ZANU PF’s rule from 1980 saw a brief comeback due to international aid.

However from the mid-80s until today the economy is in complete shambles, with the average Zimbabwean being 100 times poorer in GDP per Capita terms to that of the average UK citizen. This compares with the 1960-70s when the average Rhodesian only was five times poorer, comparable to that of the average Mexican vs Briton today.

(Hat tip to Automatic Ballpoint.)

Progress and Poverty

I recently read Andrew Bisset's The Strength of Nations on a whim, because it was mentioned in Henry George's Progress and Poverty, which argues that land is fundamentally different from other forms of property:

The English yeoman — the sturdy breed who won Crecy, and Poictiers, and Agincourt — is as extinct as the mastodon. The Scottish clansman, whose right to the soil of his native hills was then as undisputed as that of his chieftain, has been driven out to make room for the sheep ranges or deer parks of that chieftain's descendant; the tribal right of the Irishman has been turned into a tenancy-at-will. Thirty thousand men have legal power to expel the whole population from five-sixths of the British Islands, and the vast majority of the British people have no right whatever to their native land save to walk the streets or trudge the roads.
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And so the abolition of the military tenures in England by the Long Parliament, ratified after the accession of Charles II, though simply an appropriation of public revenues by the feudal land holders, who thus got rid of the consideration on which they held the common property of the nation, and saddled it on the people at large, in the taxation of all consumers, has long been characterized, and is still held up in the law books, as a triumph of the spirit of freedom.

Yet here is the source of the immense debt and heavy taxation of England. Had the form of these feudal dues been simply changed into one better adapted to the changed times, English wars need never have occasioned the incurring of debt to the amount of a single pound, and the labor and capital of England need not have been taxed a single farthing for the maintenance of a military establishment. All this would have come from rent, which the land holders since that time have appropriated to themselves — from the tax which land ownership levies on the earnings of labor and capital. The land holders of England got their land on terms which required them even in the sparse population of Norman days to put in the field, upon call, sixty thousand perfectly equipped horsemen,⁵³ and on the further condition of various fines and incidents which amounted to a considerable part of the rent. It would probably be a low estimate to put the pecuniary value of these various services and dues at one-half the rental value of the land.

Had the land holders been kept to this contract and no land been permitted to be inclosed except upon similar terms, the income accruing to the nation from English land would to-day be greater by many millions than the entire public revenues of the United Kingdom. England to-day might have enjoyed absolute free trade. There need not have been a customs duty, an excise, license, or income tax, yet all the present expenditures could be met, and a large surplus remain to be devoted to any purpose which would conduce to the comfort or well-being of the whole people.

As that passage suggests, Henry George strongly believed in a single tax on land. This makes a fair amount of economic sense, given the inelastic supply of land, but George presented it as a matter of social justice, making him an odd combination of free-market libertarian and leveling socialist — and the inspiration for the game of Monopoly.

Be sure and put up with no affronts

When a typical American thinks of the Puritans, Pilgrims come to mind — or maybe superstitious witch-burners. I suppose the typical Englishman thinks of Old Ironsides:

"Be sure and put up with no affronts," was the maxim of Cromwell; and when an English merchant — a Quaker — proved to him that a ship of his had been unjustly confiscated by the French, Cromwell, having first given the Quaker a letter to Cardinal Mazarin, demanding redress within three days, but without effect, then seized and sold the two first French ships within his reach, indemnified the Quaker out of the proceeds, and paid over the surplus to the French ambassador.

Why did it take so long for humans to have the Industrial Revolution?

Why did it take so long for humans to have the Industrial Revolution? Tyler Cowen emphasizes that extended periods of economic growth require that technologies of defense outweigh technologies of predation:

They may also require that the successful defender, at the same time, has good enough technology to predate someone else and accumulate a sizable surplus. Parts of Europe took a good deal from the New World and this may have mattered a good deal.

Building a strong enough state to protect markets from other states is very hard to do; at the same time the built state has to avoid crushing those markets itself. That's a very delicate balance. China had wonderful technology for its time and was the richest part of the world for centuries but never succeeded in this endeavor, not for long at least.

England was fortunate to be an island. Starting in the early seventeenth century, England had many decades of ongoing, steady growth. Later, coal and the steam engine kicked in at just the right time. English political institutions were "good enough" as well and steadily improving, for the most part.

Christianity was important for transmitting an ideology of individual rights and natural law. As McCloskey and Mokyr stress, the Industrial Revolution was in part about ideas.

There are numerous other factors, but putting those ones together — and no others — already makes an Industrial Revolution very difficult to achieve.

Why do we have an Air Force?

Why do we have an Air Force? It seems like an odd question, until you realize that the US did not form an air force when airplanes proved their worth in WWI, as the Brits did, and didn't form one for WWII either. All those planes strafing German half-tracks and shooting down Japanese Zeros belonged to the US Army Air Force and the US Navy.

Only after WWII, in 1947, did the US Air Force become an independent air force, like the Brits' Royal Air Force. In each case, the independence of the new air force was closely tied to the notion of strategic bombing, which was deemed unstoppable before the invention of radar and overwhelming after the invention of the atomic bomb:

In the period between the two world wars, military thinkers from several nations advocated strategic bombing as the logical and obvious way to employ aircraft. Domestic political considerations saw to it that the British worked harder on the concept than most. The British Royal Flying Corps and Royal Naval Air Service of the Great War had been merged in 1918 to create a separate air force, which spent much of the following two decades fighting for survival in an environment of severe government spending constraints.

Royal Air Force leaders, in particular Air Chief Marshal Hugh Trenchard, believed the key to retaining their independence from the senior services was to lay stress on what they saw as the unique ability of a modern air force to win wars by unaided strategic bombing. As the speed and altitude of bombers increased in proportion to fighter aircraft, the prevailing strategic understanding became "the bomber will always get through." Although anti-aircraft guns and fighter aircraft had proved effective in the Great War, it was accepted there was little warring nations could do to prevent massive civilian casualties from strategic bombing. High civilian morale and retaliation in kind were seen as the only answers. (A later generation would revisit this, as Mutual Assured Destruction.)

In Europe, the air power prophet General Giulio Douhet asserted the basic principle of strategic bombing was the offensive, and there was no defence against carpet bombing and poison gas attacks. Douhet's apocalyptic predictions found fertile soil in France, Germany, and the United States, where excerpts from his book The Command of the Air (1921) were published. These visions of cities laid waste by bombing also gripped the popular imagination and found expression in novels such as Douhet's The War of 19-- (1930) and H.G. Wells's The Shape of Things to Come (1933) (filmed by Alexander Korda as Things to Come (1936)).

Douhet's proposals were hugely influential amongst airforce enthusiasts, arguing as they did that the bombing air arm was the most important, powerful and invulnerable part of any military. He envisaged future wars as lasting a matter of a few weeks. While each opposing Army and Navy fought an inglorious holding campaign, the respective Air Forces would dismantle their enemies' country, and if one side did not rapidly surrender, both would be so weak after the first few days that the war would effectively cease. Fighter aircraft would be relegated to spotting patrols, but would be essentially powerless to resist the mighty bombers.

In support of this theory he argued for targeting of the civilian population as much as any military target, since a nation's morale was as important a resource as its weapons. Paradoxically, he suggested that this would actually reduce total casualties, since "The time would soon come when, to put an end to horror and suffering, the people themselves, driven by the instinct of self-preservation, would rise up and demand an end to the war...". As a result of Douhet's proposals airforces allocated greater resources to their bomber squadrons than to their fighters, and the 'dashing young pilots' promoted in propaganda of the time were invariably bomber pilots.

Pre-war planners, on the whole, vastly overestimated the damage bombers could do, and underestimated the resilience of civilian populations. The speed and altitude of modern bombers, and the difficulty of hitting a target while under attack from improved ground fire and fighters which had yet to be built was not appreciated.

Again, the development of the atomic bomb brought back the argument for strategic bombing.

(By the way, I've discussed Things to Come before.)

Years ago, I assumed that we had an army for fighting on land, a navy for fighting on water, and an air force for fighting in the air. It all seemed perfectly straightforward — except for the Marines and, to a lesser extent, naval aviators. Then I read James C. Bennett's The Anglosphere Challenge, which explains the roots of our system:

This model was based, fundamentally, on the militia system. The “general militia” was defined as the armed populace of the country, organized on a county-by-county basis. Those who trained regularly and were preorganized into units having a dedicated function in wartime were known as “select militia.” In time of war, this militia was to form the core of the army, along with the royal bodyguard regiments and any additional new regiments raised specifically for that war. Permanent peacetime military forces were viewed with such suspicion, constitutionally, that even select militia training was opposed by most Whigs throughout the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries.

There were several important exceptions. It was recognized that specialized bodies of military experts could not be trained up quickly in emergencies, but would have to be maintained in time of peace. Artillerymen were the most obvious example; fortification engineers were another. To maintain this expertise, specialized bodies such as the Royal Artillery and Royal Engineers were established and maintained.

Note the terminology. Contemporaries, ignorant of the constitutional purpose behind the Anglo-American military structure, idly wonder why the British Air Force and Navy are termed “Royal” while the Army is merely the “British Army.”

This terminology is not a piece of historical trivia: it reflects and illustrates a specific constitutional point. “Royal” forces are permanent forces of the state, maintained even in peacetime.
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Therefore, while the British Army is not a “Royal” force, those parts of it that historically had to be maintained in peacetime are. Examples include the artillery or engineers: Royal Artillery, Royal Engineers, and so on. The Royal patronage of various individual regiments comes originally from their origin as the personal bodyguard of the king — the Coldstream Guards, Horse Guards, and the like. Another force of troops maintained in peacetime was the category of “guards and garrisons” — troops manning forts at home and overseas. This category constituted most of the nonspecialist peacetime standing forces maintained by the British military from the Restoration until the post-1918 era.

Since it was recognized that maintenance of the freedom of international commerce and other necessary functions of government might require small-scale exercise of military force, one standing land force was earmarked for that purpose — the Royal Marines, maintained as an adjunct of the Royal Navy. The navy was ever landing small parties of marines to deal with pirates or piratical small tyrants, especially in areas such as North Africa, the Caribbean, and Southeast Asia (all of which, for that matter, remain troublesome nests of piracy to this day). An examination of the use of the Royal Marines, and subsequently the U.S. Marines, demonstrates how the structure of the armed forces under the Anglo-American civil constitution historically served to create an effective barrier to the abuse of the war-making power. Small-scale interventions have been, and will probably continue to be, an inevitable adjunct of the functions of a large country with worldwide trade and maritime activities. The need to deal with organized ideological-religious terrorist groups, larger than gangs but smaller than states, makes it all the more likely that small-scale armed expeditions will be an ongoing feature of contemporary affairs.

Traditionally, intervention using the navy and marines could be done on the initiative of the executive without the explicit sanction of Parliament. When the problem became too large and army troops had to be raised (since there were so few permanent troops, to send any overseas almost always implied raising them), the Crown was required to go to Parliament for an authorization for troops and funds. In the course of this process, the goals and objectives of the conflict could be thoroughly debated, and the costs and benefits to the country weighed. The subsequent call for volunteers and appeal for subscriptions and loans gave the country an additional opportunity to demonstrate its enthusiasm or lack thereof for the conflict in question. The bias against standing armies was so great that the term “British Army” was not used in official language, like acts of Parliament during peacetime, until 1745. (Appropriations for existing forces were earmarked for “guards and garrisons.”)

By that reasoning, a force like America's Strategic Air Command, would be, in some sense, naval — ever ready to intervene anywhere in the world — but America's strategic bombers had always been part of the land-based army, like tanks and artillery, so the new non-Army Air Force became independent — and protective of its turf.

Entering the Atomic Age with a branch of the military devoted to atomic bombs seems reasonable, especially with so many related technologies coming to the fore — ballistic missiles, spy satellites, guided missiles, etc.

But our military doesn't do much strategic bombing these days, and the Air Force has monopolized almost all "fixed-wing" aircraft. If the Army wants tactical air support, it has to use helicopters — "rotary-wing" aircraft — or go through the Air Force.

That's why Robert Farley, for instance, is arguing that we should abolish the Air Force as a separate bureaucratic entity:

The Air Force is most effective when operating in support of the Army, and least effective when carrying out its own independent campaign. However, the Air Force dislikes ground support. Its antipathy to tactical missions, for instance, is at the root of its repeated efforts to shed itself of the A-10 Warthog. The A-10 is a slow attack aircraft, extremely effective against tactical enemy targets. The Army loves the A-10, but because the aircraft contributes neither to the air superiority mission that the Air Force favors nor to the strategic mission that provides its raison d'etre, the Air Force has always been lukewarm toward the aircraft. Offers on the part of the Army to take over the A-10 have been rejected, however, as this would violate the Key West Agreement.

If strategic bombing won independence for the Air Force, yet strategic bombing cannot win wars, it's unclear why the Air Force should retain its independence.

There's a better way to use American airpower:

The Army and the Navy can accomplish the jobs that the Air Force does well within their current institutional structures. Tactical airpower should belong to the Army. Although the Army and the Air Force have worked out credible systems of cooperation, reunifying the two would likely result in tighter collaboration between air and ground forces. The tactical mission would also include air superiority, which is necessary to prevent enemy use of airspace and to allow freedom of action for U.S. forces. Similarly, some tactical elements of airpower would pass to the Marine Corps.

To the extent that the United States requires a capability to punish other states militarily for political purposes, the Navy can handle the job. The aircraft carriers of the Navy already represent the most powerful concentration of mobile military power in the world. Navy cruise missiles, launched from submarines and surface vessels, can strike most of the surface of the Earth within a couple of hours. Adding certain elements of the Air Force portfolio to the Navy would neither transform nor hinder the Navy's power projection mission.

The strategic nuclear capability of the Air Force should also go to the Navy. The USN already operates its own strategic deterrent in the form of the Ohio-class ballistic missile submarines, armed with the Trident missile. The Navy could also operate the other two legs of the nuclear triangle (ICBMs and strategic bombers) without difficulty, especially since the latter would support the Navy's strategic mission.

The Emergency Room Argument

How often have you heard the emergency room argument?, Robert J. Samuelson asks:

The uninsured, it's said, use emergency rooms for primary care. That's expensive and ineffective. Once they're insured, they'll have regular doctors. Care will improve; costs will decline. Everyone wins. Great argument. Unfortunately, it's untrue.

A study by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation found that the insured accounted for 83 percent of emergency-room visits, reflecting their share of the population. After Massachusetts adopted universal insurance, emergency-room use remained higher than the national average, an Urban Institute study found. More than two-fifths of visits represented non-emergencies. Of those, a majority of adult respondents to a survey said it was "more convenient" to go to the emergency room or they couldn't "get [a doctor's] appointment as soon as needed." If universal coverage makes appointments harder to get, emergency-room use may increase.

You probably think that insuring the uninsured will dramatically improve the nation's health, too:

Studies of insurance's effects on health are hard to perform. Some find benefits; others don't. Medicare's introduction in 1966 produced no reduction in mortality; some studies of extensions of Medicaid for children didn't find gains. In the Atlantic recently, economics writer Megan McArdle examined the literature and emerged skeptical. Claims that the uninsured suffer tens of thousands of premature deaths are "open to question." Conceivably, the "lack of health insurance has no more impact on your health than lack of flood insurance," she writes.

How could this be? No one knows, but possible explanations include: (a) many uninsured are fairly healthy — about two-fifths are age 18 to 34; (b) some are too sick to be helped or have problems rooted in personal behaviors — smoking, diet, drinking or drug abuse; and (c) the uninsured already receive 50 to 70 percent of the care of the insured from hospitals, clinics and doctors, estimates the Congressional Budget Office.

The big problem is uncontrolled spending.

(Hat tip to Robin Hanson.)

Glory in Conquest

The only glory in conquest, Andrew Bisset says — writing in 1859 — must be in the valour and military skill displayed:

A man who obtains the appointment of governor-general of the British empire in India by rhetorical displays in the British Parliament, and then, by way of adding to his rhetorical renown the military glory of a conqueror, sits and plans an annexation of new territory to an empire already much too extensive, and picks a quarrel at his desk, can have no solid title to honour from the result of such a proceeding, however ably the general who is employed under him may act.

USA Inc.

John Robb wrote a piece looking back from 2025 at how the loss of trust in the US government — and its ability to pay off its debts — led to a massive sell-off of assets. He doesn't advocate for USA Inc.; he merely predicts it — and its consequences:

• Nearly all roadways, from interstates to local networks, became toll roads. Further, toll road wireless billing systems, run by private companies, were expanded to charge for infractions — from speeding to improper turns — of the National Roadway Conduct statutes.


• Universal K-12 schools were replaced with a combination of public online education and private in-person services. Education had finally become a commoditized in the form of a buffet of national online programs that provided state of the art educational technique tailored to individual needs (mass customization) at a low annual cost — for example, most programs cost less than $5 a day. In-person private education became a luxury item reserved only for those that could pay for the extra services.


• National security services were privatized in 2020. Those remaining assets that were still intact following the draw down earlier in the decade (many consider the loss of many of these assets due to looting a travesty and blame it on the failure of Congress to privatize sooner) were either sold through public auction or put into use by the private firms that assumed national security duties. In short, the national security system was finally right-sized to meet the needs of the global security environment with the President assuming the permanent role of Chairman of the board for the holding company that ran it. Much of the funding for the newly minted privatized national security system was accomplished through fees for services provided to corporations for protection their assets both globally and domestically.


• Police and fire services are still in the process of market consolidation. Early efforts at privatization created a plethora of new firms formed by former police departments and other first responders. By 2023, three major providers have finally reached a scale sufficient to offer national coverage and are quickly gaining market share due to their ability to offer quick response to member needs regardless of location and a very comprehensive set of services (from SWAT to hostage negotiation to HAZMAT clean-up). However, much of the country is still reliant on local providers and franchises of varying quality although this is difficult to determine with accuracy due to widespread corporate purchases of police and fire services for their employees.


• The courts system has been reformed through the use of computerized automation supplied by several major competitive systems. Expert systems can now yield verdicts in seconds pending the input of evidence. This allows rapid resolution of conflict at the both criminal and civil levels. For most that can afford it, legal consul now includes a certified legal systems analyst in addition to a lawyer, for any major court case. Those that can’t afford it are offered automated legal help that can record testimony and gather facts for the case for a fraction of the cost of the previous system.

From Men, to Black Cattle, to Sheep

Sometimes economic progress means moving from men, to black cattle, to sheep:

The mountainous region of the north of Scotland contained large tracts of moorland, which were anciently employed chiefly for the rearing of cattle. It was found at a later period that these extensive pastures might be employed with much greater advantage in the feeding of sheep. For this latter occupation the Highlanders were by nature and education as unfit as they were qualified for that of rearers of cattle. The result was, that the sheepfarmers of the south of Scotland made offers of large rents to the Highland chiefs, with which the Highland tenants, or tacksmen, were unable to compete; and the latter, being deprived at once of their lands and their occupation, left the country, with large numbers of those employed under them as herdsmen, and emigrated to North America and other foreign settlements.

Sir Walter Scott says that he can well recollect the indignation with which these proceedings were regarded by the ancient Highlanders. He says he remembers hearing a chief of the old school say, in sorrow and indignation, the words following: "When I was a young man, the point upon which every Highland gentleman rested his importance was the number of men whom his estate could support; the question next rested on the amount of his stock of black cattle; it is now come to respect the number of sheep; and I suppose our posterity will inquire how many rats or mice an estate will produce."

It has not yet come to rats or mice; but red deer are superseding sheep. The clergyman of one parish said lately that within the last few years he has lost about one hundred and twenty of his small congregation, who have been obliged to leave the country where their forefathers had been settled for centuries, because their landlord, a man of enormous landed possessions, had resolved to turn a glen of some ten miles in extent into a deer forest. And it may be added that, in a late session of Parliament, the motion of a Scotch member for the equitable assessment of deer forests and other shooting grounds was set aside.

The English Constitution

The unwritten English constitution bears little resemblance to the written American Constitution:

The land of England was held on certain well-defined conditions, which conditions were, in the strictest sense, the purchase-money of that land. That purchase-money may be very accurately described to have been made payable as a perpetual annuity to the State, increasing in value as the land increased in value, just as tithe is payable to the clergy, and copyhold and other rents and profits to the landholders.

But the members of the Long Parliament and of the Convention Parliament of 1660 — in the face of the emphatic protest of Prynne and other sound constitutional lawyers — voted that the holders of the land of England should be totally exonerated from the future payment of this perpetual annuity, which constituted the purchase-money of their estates; and that this annuity, or purchase-money, should for the future be paid, in the shape of an excise, by other people, who held none of the land for which they were thus made to pay.

The land-owning members of Parliament used to be much more like voting shareholders. They voted on whether to fund a war or not, because they were footing the bill.

The Rise and Fall of Society

Foseti reviews The Rise and Fall of Society by Frank Chodorov, which moves from a short history of economics to this Burnham-esque analysis of the modern state:

The bu­reau­crat likes his job. The emol­uments may or may not be as great as what the mar­ket place would pay for such re­al ser­vices as he may be able to ren­der to So­ci­ety, but the ku­dos which is heaped on those who ex­er­cise or rep­re­sent or have ac­cess to pow­er is of im­por­tance; his ego pay is not to be de­spised. But his job de­pends on law, not on pro­duc­tion, and there­fore his pri­ma­ry con­cern is in law, its en­act­ment, its per­pet­ua­tion, its en­large­ment. The more law the bet­ter; which is an­oth­er way of say­ing that his mind is keen­ly at­tuned to the pos­si­bil­ities of re­form. The pro­lif­er­ation of re­forms means the pro­lif­er­ation of bu­reau­crat­ic jobs, with a cor­re­spond­ing abun­dance in hon­orifics and op­por­tu­ni­ties for the am­bi­tious. Thus, a vest­ed in­ter­est in re­form ap­pears, de­vel­op­ing both a class-​con­scious dis­tinct­ness and the skills nec­es­sary to its per­pet­ua­tion and ad­vance­ment. The bu­reau­cra­cy is an aris­toc­ra­cy of of­fice; it is vi­tal to this aris­toc­ra­cy that of­fices once es­tab­lished be per­pet­uat­ed, even though the oc­ca­sion that brought them in­to be­ing is long past, and that those which can­not be kept alive be re­placed by oth­ers. The vest­ed in­ter­est sees to it that the pow­er of the State does not di­min­ish.

Strict­ly speak­ing, laws are made by monar­chs and leg­is­la­tors. It was Pharaoh who pro­claimed the law, not Joseph. But it was on the ad­vice of Joseph that Pharaoh act­ed. In our “demo­crat­ic” era, when par­lia­ments make laws, it is the bu­reau­crat who phras­es them, who pre­pares the sup­port­ing ar­gu­ments (which leg­is­la­tors mouth), who es­ti­mates (or un­der­es­ti­mates) the costs of op­er­ation, who sets up the ma­chin­ery (jobs) to im­ple­ment the laws. And when a law in op­er­ation does not ef­fect the so­lu­tion of the prob­lem it was sup­posed to solve, but pro­duces prob­lems of its own, it is the bu­reau­cra­cy that comes up with cor­rec­tives. Ide­olog­ical­ly, the bu­reau­cra­cy is al­ways “left­ist” (if by that term is meant the en­large­ment of State pow­er), not so much by per­sua­sion but be­cause of per­son­al in­ter­est and the psy­chol­ogy of the trade. A bu­reau­crat is a so­cial­ist, or com­mu­nist, be­cause his busi­ness re­quires him to think like a so­cial­ist or a com­mu­nist.

Once a law en­ters the statute books it is be­yond the purview of those who made it, the leg­is­la­tors or the king, and be­comes the spe­cial, pri­vate province of those who op­er­ate it. The more nu­mer­ous and pro­lix the laws, the more im­por­tant and the more self-​suf­fi­cient are the op­er­at­ing spe­cial­ists. No part-​time leg­is­la­tor (whose prin­ci­pal con­cern is in get­ting elect­ed) or king (pre­oc­cu­pied with en­joy­ment) can pos­si­bly make his way through the labyrinth of law with­out a guide. Thus the re­al gov­ern­ing body of the coun­try is its prac­tic­ing bu­reau­cra­cy, whose prospects bright­en with each re­form that be­comes law.

The crux of the problem is that political authority is not containable by con­tract:

No con­sti­tu­tion­al con­stric­tion ev­er in­vent­ed has suc­ceed­ed in keep­ing the po­lit­ical per­son with­in his ap­point­ed sphere, that of main­tain­ing the peace with­in So­ci­ety, of ef­fect­ing eq­ui­ty be­tween pro­duc­ers, of as­sur­ing each mem­ber that his rights shall not be in­vad­ed by an­oth­er. Some oth­er in­stru­ment of con­trol is nec­es­sary if So­ci­ety is not to be pe­ri­od­ical­ly swal­lowed up by the State.

The Enormous Expense of Modern Wars

What are the causes of the enormous expense of modern wars?, Andrew Bisset asks, in 1859 — and he first turns to David Hume for an answer:

Some writers, and particularly David Hume, seem to think that the question is solved by the consideration of the greater facilities and means for borrowing which existed after the Revolution, and did not exist before it.

In his Essay on Civil Liberty, published in 1742, Hume says: "Among the moderns, the Dutch first introduced the practice of borrowing great sums at low interest, and well nigh ruined themselves by it. Absolute princes have also contracted debt; but as an absolute prince may make a bankruptcy when he pleases, his people can never be oppressed by his debts. In popular governments, the people, and chiefly those who have the highest offices, being commonly the public creditors, it is difficult for the State to make use of this remedy; which, however it may be sometimes necessary, is always cruel and barbarous. This, therefore, seems to be an inconvenience which nearly threatens all free governments, especially our own at the present juncture of affairs. And what a strong motive is this to increase our frugality of public money, lest for want of it we be reduced by the multiplicity of taxes, or, what is worse, by our public impotence and inability for defence, to curse our very liberty, and wish ourselves in the same state of servitude with all the nations that surround us."

Bisset sees the rising costs of war as a direct consequence of the shift away from feudalism:

Under the old English constitution, the legislating classes had a direct personal interest in keeping down the expenses of the government: that is, those who voted for wars and subsidies carried on the wars and paid the subsidies with their own blood and their own money; whereas, under the constitution substituted in the room of it, about the middle of the seventeenth century, those who voted for wars and subsidies carried on the wars and paid the subsidies with other people's blood and other people's money.

Those, therefore, who profess to be the advocates of good and economical government, will never attain their object till they obtain the restoration of that part at least of the principle of the old constitution, which gave to those who had the power a strong and direct interest in keeping down the expenses of the government.

A rentcharge proportioned in amount to the incidents or branches of tenure by knight-service in time of peace, and to the main trunk, or a certain number of days' actual military service, in addition to those incidents, in time of war, would effectually accomplish its object, and save the nation from the ruin in which the system of the last two hundred years, if persisted in, will overwhelm it long before another period of two hundred years has elapsed.

I can only imagine how irresponsibly a government might behave if those in power had no incentive to keep expenses down...

The Grope that Ended a Dynasty

Before backing the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan against the Soviet invasion, Charlie Wilson supported the right-wing government of Nicaragua, led by President Anastasio “Tachito” Somoza:

The Somoza family ruled Nicaragua from the 1930s until the late 1970s, and Tachito Somoza was effectively leader of the country from 1967. Wilson was a strong supporter of the right-wing Somoza, and felt that his strong anti-Communist regime was being undermined by Jimmy Carter’s wishy-washy human rights-focused foreign policy. In trying to cajoul President Carter into supporting Somoza, he fought in the House appropriations committee, and at one point threatened to wreck President Carter’s Panama Canal Treaty if the U.S. did not resume supporting Somoza.

Wilson’s admiration for Somoza was unaffected by his offer of a large cash bribe to Wilson the first time they met in person (which were unnecessary — Wilson was a true believer). And when Wilson set up a meeting between Somoza and an allegedly former CIA operative, in a small party where the booze-was flowing freely, Somoza was initially delighted at the offer of a 1000-man squad of ex-CIA operatives to fight on Somoza’s behalf. But in a drunken stupor, Somoza made the mistake of fondling Tina Simons, a secretary of Wilson who was also his girlfriend at the time. (It was not Wilson but Somoza’s mistress Dinorah, who was present at the meeting, who went into a rage and ripped Somoza from Tina.) The fiasco embarrassed Somoza, who then lost interest in the squad when he heard about the price tag of US$100 million. Wilson was so embarressed by the situation, and in his awkward attempt to hijack US foreign policy after word of the meeting leaked out, that he abandoned his support for Somoza.

The aftermath? Somoza was ousted and exiled to Paraguay where he was assassinated. Nicaragua fell to a revolution led by the Sandinista National Liberation Front, and President Reagan later authorized the CIA to support the remnants of Somoza’s National Guard, the “contrarrevolucionarios” that became known as the Contras. And Tina Simons ended up testifying against the alleged CIA operative and disappeared into the witness protection program.

Charlie Wilson was embarressed and disgraced by the Somoza fiasco, which left people thinking he was reckless and had terrible judgment. But failure is the mother of success. Wilson learned from this experience: who he should work with in the US government, what was realistic, who he should trust, and the avenues of influence and barriers to success that faced him as he sat in Congress. It was this experience that taught him what to do when going solo on US foreign policy. And that was what led to Charlie Wilson’s War.

The Opium of the Intellectual

Modern Marxism, Lee Harris explains, is a fantasy ideology dressed up to look like Marxism:

Marx and Engels’s wholesale condemnation of all previous socialism as utopian fantasy is the fundamental innovation of their own work. It is the basis of their claim to be taken seriously, not merely by Hoffmanesque daydreamers, but by men of practical judgment and shrewd common sense. To fail to make this distinction, or to fail to stay on the right side of this distinction once it has been made, is to cease to be a Marxist and to fall back into mere Träumerei.

This demarcation line arose because Marx believed that he had grasped something that no previous utopian socialist had even suspected. He believed that he had shown that socialism was inevitable and that it would come about through certain ironclad laws of history — laws that Marx believed were revealed through the study of the very nature of capitalism. Socialism, in short, would not come about because a handful of daydreamers had wished for it, or because pious moralists had urged it, but because the unavoidable breakdown of the capitalist system would force the turn to socialism upon those societies that, prior to this breakdown, had been organized along capitalist lines.

Schematically the scenario went something like this:

• The capitalists would begin to suffer from a falling rate of profit.


• The workers would therefore be “immiserized”; they would become poorer as the capitalists struggled to keep their own heads above water.


• The poverty of the workers would drive them to overthrow the capitalist system — their poverty, not their ideals.

What is interesting here is that, once you accept the initial premise about the falling rate of profit, the rest does indeed follow realistically. Now, this does not mean that it follows necessarily or according to an ironclad scientific law; but it certainly conveys what any reasonable person would take as the most probable outcome of a hypothetical failure of capitalism.

For Marx it is absolutely essential that revolutionary activities be justifiable on realistic premises. If they cannot be, then they are actions that cannot possibly have a real political objective — and therefore, their only value can be the private emotional or spiritual satisfaction of the people carrying out this pseudo-political action.

So in order for revolutionary activity to have a chance of succeeding, there is an unavoidable precondition: The workers must have become much poorer over time. Furthermore, there had to be not merely an increase of poverty, but a conviction on the part of the workers that their material circumstances would only get worse, and not better — and this would require genuine misery.

This is the immiserization thesis of Marx. And it is central to revolutionary Marxism, since if capitalism produces no widespread misery, then it also produces no fatal internal contradiction: If everyone is getting better off through capitalism, who will dream of struggling to overthrow it? Only genuine misery on the part of the workers would be sufficient to overturn the whole apparatus of the capitalist state, simply because, as Marx insisted, the capitalist class could not be realistically expected to relinquish control of the state apparatus and, with it, the monopoly of force. In this, Marx was absolutely correct. No capitalist society has ever willingly liquidated itself, and it is utopian to think that any ever will. Therefore, in order to achieve the goal of socialism, nothing short of a complete revolution would do; and this means, in point of fact, a full-fledged civil war not just within one society, but across the globe. Without this catastrophic upheaval, capitalism would remain completely in control of the social order and all socialist schemes would be reduced to pipe dreams.

When Communism took hold in agrarian Russia and then China, while the workers in America and Britain grew prosperous, it should have been clear that Marx's "scientific" predictions were in no sense coming true — but socialists did not admit their non-scientific shift into utopianism:

There might be several reasons advanced for this, but certainly one of them is Paul Baran. A Polish born American economist and a Marxist, Baran is the author of (Monthly Review Press, 1957). In it, for the first time in Marxist literature, Baran propounded a causal connection between the prosperity of the advanced capitalist countries and the impoverishment of the Third World. It was no longer the case, as it was for Marx, that poverty — as well as idiocy — was the natural condition of man living in an agricultural mode of production. Rather, poverty had been introduced into the Third World by the capitalist system. The colonies no longer served the purpose of consuming overstocked inventories, but were now the positive victims of capitalism.

What needs to be stressed here is that, prior to Baran, no Marxist had ever suspected that capitalism was the cause of the poverty of the rest of the world. Not only had Marx and Engels failed to notice this momentous fact, but neither had any of their followers. Yet this omission was certainly not due to Marx’s lack of knowledge about, or interest in, the question of European colonies. In his writing on India, Marx shows himself under no illusions concerning the brutal and mercenary nature of British rule. He is also aware of the “misery and degradation” effected by the impact of British industry’s “devastating effects” on India. Yet all of this is considered by Marx to be a dialectical necessity; that is to say, these effects were the unavoidable precondition of India’s progress and advance — an example of the “creative destruction” that Schumpeter spoke of as the essence of capitalist dynamics. Or, as Marx put it in On Colonialism: “[T]he English bourgeoisie... will neither emancipate nor materially mend the social condition of the mass of the [Indian] people... but... what they will not fail to do is to lay down the material premises for both” the emancipation and the mending of this social condition.

The radical nature of Baran’s reformulation of Marxist doctrine is obscured by an understandable tendency to confuse Baran’s theory with Lenin’s earlier theory of imperialism. In fact, the two have nothing in common. Lenin’s theory had evolved in order to explain the continuing survival of capitalism into the early twentieth century, and hence the delay of the coming of socialism. In Lenin’s view, imperialism is not the cause of Third World immiserization, but rather a stopgap means of postponing immiserization in the capitalist countries themselves. It is the capitalist countries’ way of keeping their own work force relatively prosperous — and hence politically placid — by selling surplus goods into captive colonial markets. It is not a way of exploiting, much less impoverishing, these colonies. It was rather a way “to bribe the upper strata of the proletariat, and... to... strengthen opportunism,” as Lenin put it in Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (International Publishers, 1933).

This gives us the proper perspective from which to judge the revolutionary quality of Baran’s reformulation. For, in essence, what Baran has done is to globalize the traditional doctrine of immiserization so that, instead of applying to the workers of the advanced capitalist countries, it now came to apply to the entire population of those countries that have not achieved advanced capitalism: It was the rest of the world that was being impoverished by capitalism, not the workers of the advanced countries.

Baran’s global immiserization thesis, after its initial launch, was taken up by other Marxists, but it was nowhere given a more elaborate intellectual foundation than in Immanuel Wallerstein’s monumental study The Modern World-System (Academic Press, 1974), which was essentially a fleshing out in greater historical and statistical detail of Baran’s thesis. Hence, for the sake of convenience, I will call the global immiserization thesis the Baran-Wallerstein revision.

This Baran-Wallerstein revision helped explain a lot:

For example, there was no longer any difficulty in accepting the astonishingly high level of prosperity achieved by the work force of the advanced capitalist countries — indeed, it was now even possible to arraign the workers of these countries alongside of the capitalists for whom they labored — or, rather, more precisely, with whom they collaborated in order to exploit both the material resources and the cheap labor of the Third World. In the new configuration, both the workers and the capitalists of the advanced countries became the oppressor class, while it was the general population of the less advanced countries that became the oppressed — including, curiously enough, even the rulers of these countries, who often, to the untutored eye, seemed remarkably like oppressors themselves.

With this demystification of the capitalist working class came an end to even a feigned enthusiasm among Marxists for solidarity with the hopelessly middle-class aspirations of the American blue-collar work force. The Baran-Wallerstein revision offered an exotic new object of sympathy — namely, the comfortably distant and abstract Third World victims of the capitalist world system.

Perhaps most important, the Baran-Wallerstein revision also neatly solved the most pressing dilemma that worker prosperity in advanced capitalist countries bequeathed to classical Marxism: the absolute lack of revolutionary spirit among these workers — the very workers, it must be remembered, who were originally cast in the critical role of world revolutionaries. In the new theoretical configuration, this problem no longer mattered simply because the workers of the capitalist countries no longer mattered.

Hence the appeal of the global immiserization thesis: The Baran-Wallerstein revision neatly obviates all the most outstanding objections to the classical Marxist theory.

On the other hand the Baran-Wallerstein revision doesn't explain how the revolution could succeed:

This is because the original immiserization thesis was set within the context of a class war within a society — an actual civil war between different classes of one and the same society, and not between different nations on different continents. This makes an enormous difference, for it is not at all unreasonable to think that a revolutionary movement could succeed, by means of a violent and bloody civil war, in gaining the monopoly of force within a capitalist society, and thus be able to dictate terms to the routed capitalists, if any survived.

But this is an utterly different scenario from one in which the most advanced capitalist societies have a monopoly of force — and brutally effective force — at their disposal. For in this case it is absurd to think that the exploited Third World countries could possibly be able to alter the world order by even a hair, provided the advanced capitalist societies were intent on not being altered.

What could they do to us?

The answer to this question, according to many of those who accept the global immiserization thesis, came on 9-11. Noam Chomsky, perhaps America’s most celebrated proponent of the Baran-Wallerstein thesis, expressed this idea in the immediate aftermath. Here, for the first time, the world had witnessed the oppressed finally striking a blow against the oppressor — a politically immature blow, perhaps, comparable to the taking of the Bastille by the Parisian mob in its furious disregard of all laws of humanity, but still an act equally world-historical in its significance: the dawn of a new revolutionary era.

It's still not enough though:

For those who are persuaded by the Baran-Wallerstein thesis, 9-11 represents a classic temptation. It is the temptation that every fantasy ideology offers to those who become caught up in it — the temptation to replace serious thought and analysis, fidelity to the facts and scrupulous objectivity, with the worst kind of wishful thinking. The attempt to cast 9-11 as a second taking of the Bastille simply overlooks what is most critical about both of these events, namely, that the Bastille was a symbol of oppression to the masses of French men and women who first overthrew it and then tore it down, brick by brick. And while it is true that the Bastille had become the stuff of fantasy, thanks to the pre-1789 “horrors of the Bastille” literature, it was still a fantasy that worked potently on the minds of the Parisian mob and hence provided the objective political conditions necessary to undermine the Bourbon state. But the fantasy embodied in 9-11, far from weakening the American political order, strengthened it immeasurably, while the only mobs that were motivated by the enactment of this fantasy were those inhabiting the Arab streets — a population pathetically unable to control even the most elementary aspects of its own political destiny, and hence scarcely the material out of which a realistically minded revolutionary could hope to fashion an instrument of world-historical transformation. These people are badly miscast in the role of the vanguard of the world revolution. And what can we say about those in the West, allegedly acting within the tradition of Marxist thought, who encourage such spectacularly utopian flights of fantasy?

There is nothing Marxist about the Baran-Wallerstein thesis:

On the contrary, according to Marx, it was the duty of the non-utopian socialist, prior to the advent of genuine socialism, to support whatever state happened to represent the most fully developed and consistently carried out form of capitalism; and, indeed, it was his duty to defend it against the irrational onslaughts of those reactionary and backward forces that tried to thwart its development. In fact, this was a duty that Marx took upon himself, and nowhere more clearly than in his defense of the United States against the Confederacy in the Civil War. Only in this case he was defending capitalism against a fantasy ideology that, unlike that of radical Islam, wished to roll back the clock a mere handful of centuries, not several millennia.

Unto Caesar

F.A. Voigt argued that both Communism and National Socialism were revolutionary secular religions that sought to render unto Caesar that which is God's — that is, to transform religious promises into worldly reality — and that Britain had to act, within realistic constraints, to save the Commonwealth:

The greatest extension of international, social, and religious peace ever achieved has been achieved within the British Commonwealth. Throughout a quarter of the world the satanic forces that engender war and revolution are curbed, thanks to the Pax Britannica, with which a benevolent Providence has associated the Pax Americana and the Pax Gallica.

The Pax Europaica is one of these ideals that transcend practical statesmanship, which is necessarily short-sighted and bent on the fulfillment of immediate tasks. Excessively far-sighted statesmanship may be very dangerous, and to pursue an international ideal by political means is to invite a general catastrophe.

The Pax Europaica would certainly be in the interest of the British Commonwealth, but to enforce it is beyond the power of the Commonwealth (we often forget that the greatest power — even the power of the Commonwealth — is limited). England is under the absolute necessity of defending western Europe because that defense is self-defense. That necessity imposes a terrible burden and is attended by fearful dangers. The burden and the dangers must be borne, but to augment them in the pursuit of an ideal that is, in any case, unattainable in so short a time as one generation, would be madness. The Pax Britannica would be shaken and, perhaps, fall to pieces, British vital interests would suffer profound and perhaps irretrievable injury, and the ideal would certainly not be achieved but would, in all likelihood, be buried forever in the irretrievable ruin.

This passage, in Mencius Moldbus's opinion, approaches greatness:

The true lover of peace will be more concerned with peace in the concrete than peace in the abstract; with defending his and his country's peace, rather than with chimerical schemes for extending peace beyond the limits of the possible. He will always reflect whether its extension beyond the frontiers of his own country will be an extension not of peace, but of war. Even a seemingly small extension of peace may be dangerous, as the extension of the Pax Britannica to western Europe is. Inherent in universal peace is the menace of universal war — "indivisible peace" is "indivisible war."
[...]
The modern effort to establish universal peace is perhaps for this reason mainly an English effort. After the armistice, the English experienced a prodigious revulsion against war. But they also felt an island security which could no longer be menaced, seeing that the German fleet had been destroyed. Their pacifism acquired a messianic character — they were less concerned with saving their fellow-countrymen than with saving all mankind from war. Their own security made them more accessible than any other nations to utopian dreams of universal peace — and blinder to the danger inherent in such utopian dreams.
[...]
Monstrous proposals, like the proposal to create an international air force that would emerge — from some Alpine stronghold, presumably — and bomb the cities of the alleged aggressor, found a considerable following in the post-war years. Such inhuman phantasmagoria had an affinity with the secular religions of the European continent. Indeed, English militant pacifism had something in common with the Marxian dreams of a universal realm of peace, justice and well-being. As we have seen, the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth is inseparable from its own opposite. It can only come about by violence.The threat of universal war as a means of establishing universal peace is a peculiarly English conception that has crystallized in the doctrine of "sanctions." This doctrine is analogous to the doctrine of the proletarian dictatorship which would establish social peace by making class-war permanent and universal. "Sanctions" are the counterpart of the revolutionary terror — the purpose of either is peace, but the effect of both is the consolidation, through war or the threat of war (whether between classes or nations), of power in the hands of those hold it.
[...]
To erect the "punishment of the aggressor" into a general system would be to concentrate immense power into a few hands and establish an abominable and universal tyranny. In nothing is the evil inherent in universal systems of enforced morality more evident than in the doctrine of "sanctions."
[...]
There is no reason to suppose that a universal system of "sanctions" would abolish war even for a time. One evil would be replaced by a greater evil. Private wars would be abolished — only world wars would be allowed.

England, Voigt emphasizes, is the only Great Power exposed to the permanent danger of total and permanent defeat in war:

The United States have absolute security. They are exposed neither to blockade, nor invasion, nor attack from the air. Not one of their vital interests can be menaced. Unless their whole fleet engages in some rash enterprise far from its bases, they are safe from major defeat. And even major defeat would not expose them to conquest by a foreign foe. The United States can never be less than a Great Power.
[...]
Of all the Great Powers, England is the most vulnerable. On her armed strength depends her own existence — and the existence of others. She can never share the enviable state of the small countries on the north-western fringe of Europe. Without her, these countries would be threatened with extinction. If it were not for the British command of the sea, Holland would be absorbed by Germany, and her colonial empire would be at the mercy of Japan. It is very doubtful whether Denmark would exist at all if she were not situated on the fringe of the Pax Britannica. Norway and Sweden have a certain security in their remoteness — but the security of Norway, at least, is made doubly secure because England could not tolerate an alien conquest or penetration that would give a foreign navy the use of the Norwegian coast.

Belgium cannot exist as an independent nation without Britain and France. It is not even sure that Swiss independence would survive if the Swiss had not the French for neighbors and the French had not the English for allies.
[...]
England's general interest is in the national independence of existing States within their present frontiers and therefore, in the European status quo. But that interest is not so vital that she can make every change in that status a casus belli. Indeed no change in the territorial status anywhere in Europe, except in the west and in the Mediterranean area, can be a casus belli for England. But so delicate is the European equilibrium and so far-reaching may the consequences be if it is upset, that any territorial change anywhere in Europe may, by involving other Powers (especially France), lead to a situation so full of danger that she must always reserve to herself the possibility of intervening in defense of her vital interests.

Nor is the question purely political. The triumph of the militant, imperialistic Powers would promote the spread of protection and of tied economies. German expansion in central and eastern Europe would extend the area of German "self-sufficiency." Whether Germany achieves political domination, or even a decisive political and commercial influence, tariffs and systems of quotas, subsidies and import and export licenses are promoted to the advantage of Germany and to the exclusion of other countries.

Loss of trade in an area so extensive as the prospective Pan-German Empire and the zones of German ascendancy beyond the borders of that Empire would be a very serious matter for England.
[...]
While avoiding direct intervention in the affairs of central and eastern Europe, [England] must always be able to impinge on the central and eastern European situation, using her influences and her good offices to preserve the status quo. A general anti-German policy would be excessively dangerous and costly. Any general coercive system would be fatal to England if it were to dominate her policy. Isolation would be no less fatal. Her path must run clear of a utopian universalism and an equally utopian isolationism.

This passage, Moldbug says, demonstrates the tragedy of Voigt's liberal realism:

The principal antithesis in the world today is not between Berlin and Moscow, London or Rome, but between London and Berlin. Without this antithesis, a Pax Europaica or a United Europe would be possible.

The greatest — and perhaps unattainable — political need of Europe today is that a relationship, such as exists between London and Washington, should also exist between London, Paris and Berlin. If England, France and Germany are united, not in any federation or any centrally directed system, or indeed any system of any kind, but by virtue of a certain fundamental identity of outlook and by a common civilization (no other unity can be real), then Europe is united, and the dream of all "good Europeans," the Pax Europaica, will have come true.

The Pax Europaica cannot be achieved by protocols or treaties, by pacts, by alliances, by mutual assistance or by the League of Nations. It can only come about through a spiritual change — in Germany, but also in France and England.

Moldbug's reaction:

Here we see the tragedy of the British "appeasers" of the late '30s. Between the Congress of Vienna and the rise of Germany, Britain had enjoyed effective world supremacy, as the US does now. Liberal Imperialism foundered on this rock; it could not let Germany become a world power equal to the British, for Germany was not liberal.

Yet, by opposing Germany and denying it Westphalian parity, Britain made Germany hateful and paranoid, for Germans saw themselves being treated as an inferior in a world system in which it was not just formally an equal, but economically and militarily an equal. Thus the harder Britain worked to deny Germany equality, the less deserving of that equality Germany became.

The appeasers of the '30s inherited the final dilemma of this epic conflict. From the perspective of British interests, the right decision was clearly to abandon the Little Entente-type states created after World War I, whose adherence to democratic principles was anyway quite a bit less than stellar, and allow Germany to create her empire in the East. Yet this decision was both a release of power, which is always difficult for the powerful, and an empowerment of dangerous and illiberal forces beyond the control of Britain or anyone. Unlimited national sovereignty!

Another decision, of course, would have been to support Poland and Czechoslovakia to the hilt. This might not have restrained all future Hitlers; it probably would have restrained Hitler. But ultimately, it would have been necessary to back this bluff with actual war. Hence the course of universal peace, later followed.

But, through the natural tensions in her political system, Britain wound up following a course between these two poles, and one which was clearly worse than both. Seeking to avoid war and preserve her Empire — excuse me, "Commonwealth" — she got war, and lost her Empire. And lo, did Edgar Mowrer inherit the earth. Along with Moscow, for a time.

Here, again, is the tragedy of Voigt's liberal realism. He dabbles with actual, real realism — and rejects it. He ends up, with Mowrer, trying to convert Germany to "good thinking." That this can only be done with bombs, and that it can only end in the death of the British Empire, he at some level knows; but he cannot reject his geopolitics, his commercial advantage, his trade routes, all the cant of late Imperialism. Hence the war sucks him and his country in.

Western markets are like Western medicine

What suffered most in the Great Depression, John Nye says, was trust — impersonal social trust:

The idea of impersonal social trust was the most dramatic accomplishment of industrial civilization’s rise from the 18th to the early 20th century. The greatest achievement of early modern economic growth was not the Industrial Revolution itself, but the way in which the leading Western economies began to move away from highly parochial, narrow networks of personal exchange and came to rest instead on increasingly complex national and international commercial networks of impersonal exchange. The networks were mediated by competition, but also by an Adam Smithian understanding that strangers’ seeking their own gain amongst each other could lead to universal benefit. Praxis and theory reinforced each other.
[...]
In some ways, FDR did not so much break from normalcy as return to it. It helps to recall that large-scale systems based on anonymous exchange were a recent phenomenon. The system of orderly, global trade developed in the 19th century under the financial and political leadership of the United Kingdom, and backed by the gold standard, produced growth and prosperity. But it also produced plenty of social disruption and downward as well as upward mobility. It certainly never inspired the kind of devotion that nationalist and communal ideology more readily induce, as suggested by the rise of fascism during the interwar period. The world’s experience with democracy and market capitalism was limited. The more common experience by far consisted of political systems that allowed limited access to property rights and trade, reserving the most exalted benefits for elites who treated control of the political economy as their reward for preserving peace.

This older, more organic order, which even today represents the default for most nations, has the advantage of being both stable and intuitively natural. So thoroughly has the West taken for granted the triumph of the more abstract liberal nation-state that its denizens must remind themselves how fragile its origins were and how little emotional loyalty it has commanded. Indeed, the evidence suggests that few people trust large-scale systems of commerce. It is much easier to focus on political economy as a system of extended associations in which successes or failures can be attributed to individuals or groups for whom we feel either loyalty or loathing. Despite the prevalence of market behavior throughout history, it has rarely trumped communal corporate identity, especially in hard or frightening times. Abstractions do not generally prevail over concrete social relations because personal trust is more readily attained and maintained than impersonal trust.
[...]
Seen as a reversion to older habits, the odd mix of regulation, make-work, intervention, protectionism, nationalism and (as in Germany and elsewhere) anti-Semitism that characterized the Western policy response to the Depression suddenly seems less like an incoherent flaying in all directions and more like elements of a uniform retrenchment in social relations. What all these habits had in common, in all the countries in which they loomed large, was their role in spurning the system of abstract, anonymous and international exchange for more parochial, inward-looking responses to danger. So afraid of the new were they that some national elites followed this path of retrenchment to the point of utter self-destruction. Indeed, the severity with which people rose to tear up or overturn that still new system, despite the unprecedented prosperity it had wrought, seems indisputable testimony to how paper thin support for liberal trading regimes truly was.
[...]
In a sense, Western markets are like Western medicine: Just as an outbreak of incurable plague would lead to both a renewed search for sound cures and an atavistic appeal to folk remedies, so the Depression stimulated both productive thinking about the sources of business instability as well as destructive appeals to extreme nationalism, protectionism and military aggression.

As Arnold Kling adds, it is more natural to live in a world of Mafia Godfathers than one with fair, open, competitive markets.

Solar Thermal Paired with Natural Gas

Across 500 acres just north of West Palm Beach, the FPL Group is building the world’s second-largest solar thermal plant, with 190,000 mirrors:

But that is not its real novelty. The solar array is being grafted onto the back of the nation’s largest fossil-fuel power plant, fired by natural gas. It is an experiment in whether conventional power generation can be married with renewable power in a way that lowers costs and spares the environment.

This is (almost) exactly what I was discussing with respect to wind power recently. An intermittent alternative-energy plant can produce energy at near-zero marginal cost, but it can't guarantee energy when it's needed, while a natural gas plant can't produce free energy, but it can produce energy right when it's needed. (At least solar-thermal generation is naturally correlated with when people demand energy to run their air conditioners.)

Under the same ownership, I suspect we'll see that a kW of “backup” natural gas capacity combined with a kW of seasonal solar capacity has very high capital costs for its sometimes-low, sometimes-high variable costs — so only questionable subsidies and mandates will make solar appear economical, as in Spain, where they agreed to buy solar power for $0.58/kWh.

Akrasia and the Greatest Drug Worker in History

Don’t blame drugs for drug addiction, says Theodore Dalrymple, in Romancing Opiates. Richard DeGrandpre makes the same point in The Cult of Pharmacology. Lee Harris offers his own perspective:

If the drug induced the moral weakness, then shouldn’t we blame the drug, as the addict asks us to? If the moral weakness was already there, before the drug use began, and if it explains the addict’s inability to control his drug use, then what sense does it make to hold the addict responsible for his moral weakness? If a person has been trained to believe that he is helpless to control his own behavior, can you alter this fact by stigmatizing him or by making him face the adverse consequences of what Dalrymple calls his “conscious choices”? It is his very moral weakness that makes him impossible to help, because that moral weakness has long convinced him that he cannot help himself.

To accept the addict’s account at face value does not require a bleeding heart. The problem of moral weakness was frankly recognized and brilliantly analyzed by the tough-minded Aristotle who put great emphasis in both his ethical and political theories on a psychological phenomenon he called akrasia. This Greek term literally means “without power,” and it refers to a lack of mastery over the self — a state of helplessness in respect to one’s appetites, passions, and impulses. It is defined in contrast to the concept of enkrateia, which represents the exact opposite kind of character — the person who has obtained mastery over himself, and who can control and regulate his passions and impulses. The dieter, for example, who follows his self-imposed regimen strictly and faithfully, is displaying enkrateia, while the dieter who goes off his diet because he cannot resist the lure of a strawberry milkshake is an example of akrasia.

According to Aristotle, not all akrasia is the same. There is weakness (astheneia) and impetuosity (propeteia). Our lapsed dieter is an example of weakness. He has thought out a plan of action that he thinks is the right thing for him to do, namely, to lose weight; he has even established a dietary routine to achieve his end. Yet he simply cannot resist the impulse to have a strawberry milkshake, in violation of the rules that he had set out for himself. He knows better, but this rational knowledge makes no difference to his actual conduct. He is too weak to control his appetites and his passions. He exists in a state of internal conflict: part of him wants to do the right thing, but that part is not strong enough to conquer the part of him that wants to do the wrong thing.

On the other hand, the impetuous person makes no attempt to curb and control his impulses and appetites. He simply acts, and does so without any internal agonizing over what choice to make, and indeed without any reflection or deliberation at all. Yet, for Aristotle, the impetuous person is capable of regretting his impulsive actions once he has committed them, though perhaps only in the way that the impulsive shoplifter regrets the fact that he has been caught red-handed. This regret, by itself, cannot bring about a change in the behavior of the impetuous person; he will continue to give in to his impulses and to be punished for them — like the criminal who, as soon as he is released from jail, returns to committing the same crimes that put him there in the first place. The impetuous person never learns.

Aristotle’s analysis is helpful in seeing where Dalrymple’s treatment of the addict falls short, since the concept of akrasia allows us to recognize that there will inevitably be large groups of human beings who will be unable to control their own lives — a group that will naturally exhibit all the signs of the impetuous personality. Large doses of testosterone coursing through the veins of young males will invariably lead to impetuous behavior, unless these boys have been subjected from a young age to a rigorous program aimed at habituating them to self-control, or enkrateia — and even then the success may be hit or miss. Kids who have been allowed to grow up feral cannot be expected to display self-control; self-mastery is a technique no one has taught them, so how could they have learned it? They will in fact lack the strength of mind to rise even to the level of Aristotle’s weak man, since they will be ignorant of what constitutes right conduct.

In Aristotle’s political theory, such human beings are classified as “natural slaves” who must be governed by others because they are completely unable to govern themselves. Today we find Aristotle’s theory objectionable, despite the fact that in even the most advanced societies many people are “enslaved” to drugs, to alcohol, to gambling, and to sex. Indeed, Aristotle could rightly point out that no society has ever existed that achieved the complete elimination of the weak-willed and the impetuous, if only because each rising generation will consist of children who, by nature, lack the self-mastery that can only be achieved by the right upbringing — if even then.

Civilizing the young is one of the first duties of any society, though it is a duty that certain cultures have discharged with vastly more success than others. If there are many people in the society whose behavior is characterized by akrasia, or moral weakness, then the society, for its own good, has a right and an obligation to keep them from dangers to which they, by nature, are especially vulnerable. The sociological motive behind such puritanism is not a hatred of pleasure as such, but only of those pleasures that weaken the will and undermine self-control. Some pleasures are wholesome and acceptable, and should be encouraged. Other pleasures challenge not just individual self-control but the collective self-control of the whole community, threatening the ethical foundation of the society; such pleasures must be curbed. Lead us not into temptation, both for our own good and the welfare of the general society.

There are, of course, people who live perfectly productive lives while addicted to drugs:

To begin with, let us examine the case of two remarkable individuals, one cited by DeGrandpre, the other by Dalrymple.

William Halsted was an American doctor whom DeGrandpre calls “one of the greatest of surgeons in American history, perhaps even the father of modern surgery.” In 1892, Halsted became the first professor of surgery at Johns Hopkins Hospital; he later introduced the use of rubber gloves when operating on patients, and went on to organize “new fields of medicine, including orthopaedics, otolaryngology, and urology.” Yet Halsted had been using morphine from the age of twenty-two, and remained a morphine user for well over the next half-century. A study made of him in 1942 reported that Halsted “found that his addiction caused him little inconvenience.... Sometimes he went for a few days, or even weeks, without the drug, but then ‘suddenly the overpowering desire would come.’”

William Wilberforce, an Englishman who lived a century before Halsted, played a pivotal role in bringing about one of the world’s greatest ethical achievements: he worked tirelessly for the emancipation of slaves, not just in British colonies, but around the world, and he was instrumental in ending the horrors of the Atlantic slave trade. His contemporaries admired his eloquence; Boswell famously described watching the diminutive Wilberforce give a speech: “I saw what seemed a mere shrimp mount upon the table; but as I listened, he grew, and grew, until the shrimp became a whale.” Thanks to his patience and persistence, the abolitionist cause eventually won out in Parliament. Yet, as Dalrymple notes, Wilberforce died an opium addict.

Halsted and Wilberforce certainly do not fit into the categories of the weak-willed or impetuous man. Can their addictions be summarily dismissed as mere self-indulgence, or do they offer evidence that certain substances possess an occult hold over even the strongest of us? When Halsted spoke of the times when he tried to quit morphine, but found himself seized by “the overpowering desire” for the drug, was he simply propagating more pharmacological lies, as De Quincey is supposed to have done, or was he genuinely possessed by a desire over which he had no control?

Earlier we discussed the case of the weak-willed fellow who set out to follow a rigorous diet plan, but found himself seduced by the temptation of a strawberry milkshake. When dealing with our lapsed dieter and his strawberry milkshake, our common sense tells us that it would be silly to blame some sinister power in the milkshake. Instead, it makes more sense to say that he lacked the strength of will; or, as Aristotle would say, that he was weak. But can the same thing be said about other substances, like opium, cocaine, or alcohol? It was the immensely strong-willed Samuel Johnson who, when asked why he never touched wine, replied: “Abstinence is as easy for me, as temperance would be difficult.” But why would temperance have been so difficult for Johnson to achieve? It makes no sense to blame it on his lack of willpower, since he was strong enough to abstain from wine completely, and, as he said, quite easily.

Johnson’s quip about abstinence and temperance makes sense when it is a question of spirituous beverages, but what about strawberry milkshakes? We can understand a man who abstains from drinking strawberry milkshakes — but what about a man who cannot drink strawberry milkshakes in moderation, and who goes on a weekend-long strawberry milkshake binge? Is such a man even imaginable? If one finds pleasure in a strawberry milkshake at all, one can find it only in moderation: drink three of them in a row as an experiment if you doubt the truth of this observation.

But the same thing cannot be said about the pleasures of alcohol, and by extension, the pleasures of opium, cocaine, crack, and methamphetamine. While it is true that some people can use these drugs moderately, the way many of Johnson’s contemporaries could drink wine moderately, the fact remains that there are many otherwise strong-willed people who begin taking alcohol and drugs and discover, too late, that they cannot control their desire to take more and more — a problem which, as we have seen, does not afflict even the most self-indulgent lover of strawberry milkshakes. In short, the chemical nature of the temptation does matter.

Harris argues in favor of useful myths:

Is it possible that one of the causes of the modern drug epidemic is that more and more people have ceased to subscribe to the idea that certain substances are inherently destructive of our strength of will, and have therefore been tempted to taste the erstwhile forbidden fruit? If scientific knowledge leads us to abandon such myths as that of Demon Rum, Demon Heroin, and Demon Cocaine, is it altogether clear that our increased sophistication will be advantageous to the welfare of both present and future generations? Some irrational fears are obviously bad; others may serve an immensely useful social purpose. Carrie Nation’s crusade against Demon Rum may raise smiles on our faces today, but have we developed a more effective technique at getting people to resist the temptation of forbidden fruit than scaring the hell out of them?

The libertarian position seems inevitable, Harris says, once we have decided that drugs are not the cause of drug addiction:

If opiate users can be divided into those who would be criminals anyway and those who end up brilliant surgeons like Halsted and eminent humanitarians like Wilberforce, then it obviously makes far more sense to lock up the criminals for their criminal behavior, and not for their heroin use. But this argument can be turned on its head: If strong and confident men like Halsted and Wilberforce can become hopelessly addicted to a drug, then might this not be an argument for doing everything possible to keep it out of the hands of adolescent boys, slum addicts, the weak-willed, the impetuous, the self-indulgent, the depressed — in short, to treat it in the same way you would treat a dangerous strain of plague that threatened to sweep through entire populations? Yes, some people will be immune to the plague, but it remains a plague all the same. The obvious fact that some people can use these substances without undermining the foundation of the open society does not mean that their widespread promiscuous use among the general population will prove equally innocuous.

Mill argued that the prohibition of opium imports into China was an “objectionable ... infringement of liberty ... of the buyer.” This was a straightforward, if unappetizing, application of his “simple universal principle.” But would Mill have stood by his simple principle if he had foreseen the consequences of its application in this case? By the time the Communist Party came to power in 1949, there were approximately 20 million opium addicts in China. Chairman Mao, no student of Mill, decided that the only answer to the problem was ruthlessness. As Dalrymple writes, Mao gave the Chinese opium addicts “a strong motive to give up and the rest of the population a strong motive not to start. He shot the dealers out of hand, and any such addicts who did not give up their habit. The carrot for addicts was life and the stick was death. It would not be going too far to say that, within a mere three years, Mao produced more cures than all the drug clinics in the world before or since, or indeed to come. He was the greatest drug worker in history.”

Immediately after making this observation, Dalrymple writes that “the point of this story is not to advocate a repetition of Mao’s methods on our soil, but to demonstrate that, when a motive is sufficiently strong, not merely some, but many, indeed millions, of addicted people can abandon their addiction, without the whole paraphernalia of the help that is necessary on the standard view of the problem.” But what kind of substitute for mass executions is available to the open societies of the West in dealing with our drug problems? Out of our limited box of tricks, how do we devise motives that are “sufficiently strong” to get addicts to kick their habit, but which fall short of lining them up against a wall and shooting them?

Open societies cannot be open to everything, Harris claims.

I think Harris makes an error in logic when he asks, If the moral weakness was already there, before the drug use began, and if it explains the addict’s inability to control his drug use, then what sense does it make to hold the addict responsible for his moral weakness? As Mao's answer to the drug problem demonstrated, moral weakness is not simply present or absent; when threatened with execution, addicts quickly found the moral strength to drop their bad habit.

That's the totalitarian answer — Communist or Fascist. The liberal answer — modern progressive or classical liberal — is to let drug-users use drugs. More specifically, the progressive answer is to let drug-users use drugs, and to effectively subsidize their bad habit through "harm reduction" measures — clean needles, free clinics, methadone and buprenorphine treatment, etc. The libertarian answer is to let drug-users use drugs, and to assume that the only damage done is to the drug-users themselves — and to emphasize how much damage is done by drug prohibition.

What rarely seems to come up is the notion of treating self-destructive drug addicts, who live off of petty crime, as distinct from productive members of society who have a vice. In Beggars & Thieves, street ethnographer Mark Fleisher emphasizes that the members of this criminal underclass don't get better. They come from broken homes. They become addicted to illegal drugs and legal alcohol. They commit petty crimes and beg on the streets. And when they do time in a "correctional facility", it's a big step up in living standard for them — except that they can't wait to get back to their booze and drugs. They never join productive society. But they do get let out of jail.

These beggars and thieves are Aristotle's "natural slaves" — unable to govern themselves. And giving them warm blankets and clean needles doesn't solve their problems — or our problems with them.