Wait. A. Minute.
How can we have real liberty if we lack safety?
How is a man free to “pursue happiness” — another key phrase to our country’s Founders, if his house may be burned or his family killed?

Safety is a necessary condition to liberty. Not a sufficient condition, of course, but necessary. And we cannot have safety without our criminal code, which means “tough on crime” and docket management. Granted, there must always be a balance between safety and liberty, but they are not always at odds. Without safety, there can be no liberty. Without safety, any liberty we might have is an empty notion of what might have been.

There are a number of issues one might take with this.  For that reason, I decided to blog my response, rather than leave what would only be an overlong comment.

It’s difficult to know where to start with this.  Mark Bennett makes a good start in his own responsive comment. As Mark impliedly notes, there is no metaphysical or logical connection between being free and being safe. Sometimes, as Mark states, we deliberately move beyond a place of safety in pursuit of freedom.

What is not so clearly stated is that no absolute level of safety can ever be achieved.  Even in the most “locked down” of cultures, someone may burn your house, or kill you and your family.  You could even assign a police officer to every home — don’t worry, we’re getting there — and still not be completely safe.  Assuming the officer could protect you from your son, daughter, mother, or father, who’s to protect you from the officer?

The more that the rules or laws of a particular country attempt to lock things down “in the interest of safety,” the less freedom exists.  And, frankly, the pursuit of “safety” in the United States has reached the level of insanity.  Petty officials such as the Presiding Judge of the Fresno County Superior Court routinely ignore the constitutional requirements of the Fourth Amendment because it’s apparently reasonable to expect that anyone entering the courthouse might be armed and dangerous.  We’ve forgotten that the Constitution required probable cause particularized to the individual being searched, not a belief that it was reasonable to think some person entering a courthouse might have a weapon.

It was against the very idea of indiscriminate searches on baseless suspicion — fishing expeditions, you might call them — that our Founders rebelled.  It was this very sort of attempt at making sure all the rules are followed by everyone all the time — and overbroad rules like the “search all persons entering the courthouse” rules we’re increasingly running into now — through the application of arbitrary and indiscriminate searches that our Founders revolted.  Yes, revolted.  As in, “they started a revolution and overthrew the government.”

In spite of a Constitution which requires particularized reasons to subject a citizen to a search, we are routinely subjected to searches while moving from one area to another.  Try to fly without being searched.  Try to enter any government building without being searched.

The government gets away with this for two reasons.

First, on the whole, we are sheep.  We’re not actually citizens, we’re submitizens.  When some new procedure or directive comes down from “on high” requiring us to empty our pockets, strip off our clothing, or otherwise submit to interference in our personal lives from the government, the majority of us don’t even ask why.  We just do it.  Those of us who don’t, suffer the full wrath of the government because the majority of us are submitizens.  Why should the government fear acting as if there were no Constitution, when it knows the submitizens will let them get away with it?

Second, if someone actually does resist and takes the issue to court, the court (which, incidentally, is still the government) simply redefines the term “search.”  Somehow, someway, going through people’s things and making them empty their pockets is not a search.

This is okay, “Y” tells us.  Y?  Because we must have safety before we can have freedom.

But since we can never be safe, I guess what “Y” means is that we can never be free.

It always puzzles me that some of my (economically) middle- and lower-class friends, none of whom ever seem to do any reading on the subject, believe that Republicans have a better handle on things like lowering taxes, spurring job growth, and just generally protecting our standard of living.  I haven’t lived very long — just a half century so far — but even I have noticed that whenever we have a Republican President, things tank.  Whenever we get a Democrat in the White House, things improve. All the way around.

The current administration has, however, far surpassed past Republican administrations in damaging our country on just about every front imaginable.  Perhaps this is not surprising. After all, influential Republican adviser Grover Norquist once famously said one goal was,

to cut government in half in twenty-five years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in a bathtub.  (Sheldon Rampton & John Stauber, Banana Republicans: How the Right Wing is Turning America into a One-Party State (2004) p. 6.)

And journalist Elizabeth Drew noted that,

It’s not just because taxes are irritating and unpopular and all that.  He [Norquist] has a long-term view, which is the lower the revenues that the government takes in, the less spending it will be able to do, the less money will go to the groups that he sees as the base of the Democratic party and its power—the teachers’ unions, welfare workers, municipal workers and so on.  This is the big, long-term war.  It’s total.  It’s Armageddon.  And I have to say that the people on the right, I think, have thought this through much more than their opponents on the other side who really don’t much know what they do and how the opposition thinks and are just waking up to it.  (Elizabeth Drew, Whatever It Takes: The Real Struggle for Political Power in America, quoted in Banana Republicans, p. 7.)

I can only hope that people will start to wake up to what’s happening.  I’m personally concerned that the United States cannot survive another Republican President, not even one from the great hockey-playing, moose-shooting state of Alaska.  (Yeah, truth is, Obama isn’t running against McCain; he’s running against Palin.  Because while I’m concerned about whether the United States can survive another Republican President, I’m convinced that his health and age make it unlikely McCain will.)

Maybe it’s time we recognize that there’s a reason George W. Bush continues smiling and appears to be unconcerned about the severity of the problems into which he’s gotten us.  The reason is at least as old as the recognition that Rome needed a more robust fire department. I doubt it’s a mistake that Grover Norquist was once called “Field Marshall” of the Bush economic plan. And people think the administration doesn’t know what it’s doing.  Bush continues to smile and nod and grin and bob his head because everything is going exactly according to plan.

So I’m not surprised at either the economic devastation that we’ve seen under Bush’s watch, nor at his apparent lack of concern.  I suspect there may well be private parties in the now anything-but-transparent White House where Bush gleefully fiddles away, impervious to the vagaries of the economy he and his friends are helping to destabilize.

What does surprise me is the lack of recognition on the part of everyone else that this mess is caused by eight years of unbridled Republican policies. What does surprise me is that middle- and lower-income voters can’t see in their own lives what economists have long recognized:

The real incomes of middle-class families grew more than twice as fast under Democratic presidents as they did under Republican presidents. Even more remarkable, the real incomes of working-poor families (at the 20th percentile of the income distribution) grew six times as fast when Democrats held the White House.  (Larry Bartels, “Inequalities” (April 27, 2008) New York Times Magazine.)

Unfortunately, the thing that has created this mess is what will also make it virtually impossible for a true government bail-out.  For that, we need only look at the now-historic (and thus largely forgotten) Great Depression.  Only the oldest amongst us really remembers — and understands — the depth of that depression, the key cause of which was “an expansion of the money supply in the 1920s that led to an unsustainable credit-driven boom.”

The factors noted by the Austrian School economists, primarily Friedrich Hayek (The Road to Serfdom) and Murray Rothbard (A History of Money and Banking in the United States), are present again today.  And the government is trying the same things it tried after the crash of 1929 that preceded the Great Depression.

But forget that for now.  If you’ve ever tried to balance a checkbook, or run a household, just think about this:  George W. Bush has spent years — almost eight of them — cutting taxes.  Forget also, for the moment, that those tax cuts have largely benefitted the rich, and not the rest of us — seriously, forget that part for now.  Just think of it this way: Bush has cut the “income” of the United States government.  At the same time, he started a war that costs billions per day to run.  Coupled with that, he and his friends have failed to regulate lenders, effectively removing the controls that kept the kids from dipping into the piggy bank whenever they ran low on cash.

How long would your household last before you lost everything, if you did the same things our government is doing?

Even now I can see Dick Cheney and Grover Norquist sitting in a bathtub, clinking glasses, toasting one another, while George Bush fiddles (read that however you want) in the background.

Suggested Reading

The Road to Serfdom: Text and Documents–The Definitive Edition (The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek)	A History of Money and Banking in the United States: The Colonial Era to World War II	Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age

An elementary school in Massachusetts has banned playing tag during recess. One mother says her son feels safer because of the rule.

Has our society actually gone insane?

Her son feels safer because there’s a rule that says he can’t play tag now. Oh, okay. Now I understand. I didn’t realize that this was actually a repeal of the rule that said you must play tag. I thought it was just a new piece of insanity.

You know, if we sent our kids to school in all-encompassing Kevlar® body armor laced with metal plates and then stuck them to an electromagnetic that didn’t release until the end of the school day, they’d be even safer.

If only there were a god to save us from stupid Americans.

The article was about comments recently made by former-President Jimmy Carter which are apparently causing quite a stir in some circles.

Near as I can tell, it’s mostly Republicans and christians — but perhaps not exclusively them, as that last link to someone I think of as “one of the good guys” over at The Moderate Voice may show — getting stirred up, as well they should. After all, as TeaFizz notes, Carter is telling the truth. And anyone who reads enough knows just how much the Theocrats hate that.

On the other hand…

Self-proclaimed idealism notwithstanding, TeaFizz appears to take a kind of watered-down Ayn-Rand approach to Foreign Relations. After noting that Carter is stupid for telling the truth — no wonder so few Republicans believe in doing that! — and opining how nice it would be if we could all be one big happy family, he notes:

But that’s a pipe-dream. It is not within our nature. I believe that we all KNOW that it is not within our nature, but that we try to convince ourselves that it is.

I understand why we do this, but that doesn’t make it right. We seem to think that admitting we really don’t care about someone on the other side of the world makes us bad people. It is an uncomfortable feeling, admitting you don’t really care about another human being. But saying you don’t care about them is something totally different than wishing harm upon them. It is simply not possible to care about everyone, for all the “haves” in the world to be able to take care of all the “have-nots.” The only thing we, as individuals, can do is to provide whatever help we are capable of. That’s it. Nothing more. Nothing less. — TeaFizz, “The Truth” (April 16, 2005) TeaFizz: Life sucks…now run along.

While I don’t plan to actually contradict TeaFizz, because I must admit that he is essentially right, I think people — heck, I’ll go out on a limb here and say it this way: “even people like George Bush” — do care about others. They’re just, as TeaFizz said, setting different lengths to which they’ll go for others. Some will only go so far as to allow others to exist; some want them to exist and be as well off as the rest of us. Those are pretty close to the two extremes. (The real extreme would be those people who want everyone else dead on the one end and those who want everyone else to be supremely happy on the other. But those aren’t just extremes; they’re absurd and unrealistic extremes.)

To add to that — and I think Bush fits in this camp — some people differ markedly from me on what they think is good for other people. Like many who got rich not through their own gifts, but through the gifts of others, Bush appears to believe “everyone should earn their own way” and he wants to cut all government “hand-outs” like welfare (except corporate welfare), social security, a living wage and so on. Some people just think that’s what’s needed to make others “tough enough to survive.” (It’s no huge surprise that many people think the President Jimmy Carter, whose life most exemplifies the Spirit of Christianity laid down by Jesus, was the United States’ worst President, while the one who most makes a mockery of Jesus’ words (George Bush) is considered by some of those same people to be a terrific President.)

At any rate, there actually is “something more” most of us can do than what we do.

Not supporting exploitation of others, particularly when those others include us, and we just can’t think far enough to recognize that we’re being exploited, for one. (Thinking we’re really better off in the long run because we get something cheaper at Wal-Mart than at a local store comes to mind.)

As TeaFizz said, Carter was telling the truth. But I think he was also implicitly disagreeing with any theory that goes the way TeaFizz put it: that it’s okay.

It may be okay to not go to the extreme for people clear around the world (or even in your own decrepit downtown), but I don’t think it’s okay to just shrug our shoulders and say, “Nothing wrong with ignoring those folk.” This is particularly true when it’s often our actions that help make their lives what they are. As the smarmy Walt Disney voices used to sing to me as a kid, until I was ready to strangle them, “It’s a small world.”

And the United States has it’s hand in every port and every pot, for better, or (sadly, perhaps more often) for worse.

I don’t think any of us should beat ourselves up, or necessarily sacrifice our lives to the goal of improving everyone else’s. But there’s nothing wrong with at least thinking about ways to to live our lives without negatively impacting theirs.

And, who knows? Maybe if we think about it, enough of us will actually do it to make a difference.

It’s also amazing how dependent we’ve become on other countries to provide our services.

This morning I awoke to find an odd situation. Email appears to work. DNS (a critical background service) appears to work. But I cannot access any websites (except my own, which are right here in my home office).

This is always a dreaded situation for me. My network isn’t your average home network. The “second-level” technician I reached said, “Oh! You have a large network!” (I don’t. It’s just a few servers, two switches and a firewall. But to glorified power-users used to helping ordinary home users, that’s how it must appear.) At any rate, I know there will be virtually no technical support and I will probably just have to wait for things to “fix themselves.” Nevertheless, I must try. If SBC is unaware of the problem and I don’t call, it may not “fix itself” at all.

I knew I was in trouble this morning when — after the odd ring tone that came on the line within a mere 15 minutes of waiting — I had to repeat my DSL number for the fifth time. It appears that the SBC “technician” I reached in India had trouble understanding my California accent. These days, everyone who tries to call “tech support” from America has a difficult-to-decipher accent. You cannot say it’s the “technicians” who have the accent because they all do fine with their fellow “technicians” from India.

The initial “technician,” within 30 seconds of finally understanding my accent well enough to learn my DSL phone number, had diagnosed the difficulty as being in my firewall. There’s just one problem. I had already explained to her that computers both “inside” the firewall and “outside” the firewall exhibit the same problems. But she was adamant that it was my firewall.

So I patiently explained to her that I wasn’t angry or frustrated at her (but rather, SBC, which has decided to send all those American jobs to India). And I explained that I’ve built and taught and written on these topics enough to know it wasn’t my firewall. And could I please speak to someone with more technical expertise.

From there, I encountered the amazement of her supervisor at the size of my network. After she asked about each piece of my equipment, she delineated various possibilities for difficulties in (my) switches and so on. Finally, she asked, “What region are you calling from?” Repeating to her, as I’d told the prior “technician,” that I was in California, she exclaimed, “Oh! Are you in Sacramento or Fresno County?”

“Yes.”

“Oh! We are getting many calls from those two regions. Main-ten-ence has been notified. We will be having to wait until they can determine the cause and they will fix the problem. You will have to call back in two or three hours and we can tell you when it will be fixed.”

As I said, usually, I just wait. You’d think, though, that with a known problem in two areas of California, the first question would be whether I was in one of those two areas.

At least now I know why so many Americans are unemployed.

The War in Iraq is not going as well as expected. More money is needed. More troops are needed. More of your children (I have none, which is why I sometimes think I’m an idiot for not being a “get what I can and damn the next generation” Republican) are going to have to die.

On the other hand, our population is aging. There is already a recognized problem in that as the baby boomers age, there aren’t enough young people to support the Social Security program. There’s been talk about raising the age limits for Social Security benefits. And, since the government spends more of our tax dollars on fighting the rest of the world, those tax dollars cannot be used to support programs benefiting Americans at home.

The recent death of Pat Tillman — which was somehow publicized in spite of a Bush Administration ban on this kind of news — shows the heartache of the war caused by the death of the sons and daughters of America. Heartache is the inevitable outcome of war, but the death of our young does not have to be.

Instead, the President should consider changing the rules when the draft is reinstated. Instead of sending our young productive workforce to fight and die in Iraq, he should send aging baby boomers. In fact, the benefits would be even greater if he sends those already collecting Social Security. After all, they’re already used to living on lower incomes and it’s not like we’ll ever send the rich to fight the war they so desperately crave to run our military-industrial complex upon which they’ve built their riches. (More than half of our discretionary spending is military spending.)

This solution is even more important in an era where corporations increasingly profit from wars like this while simultaneously carrying less of the tax burden than they did in previous decades (in 1940, for example, corporations essentially split the bill with private citizens, paying almost half the taxes; today, they pay just 13.7%). It is increasingly important as we fail to listen to the warnings of the late President Dwight D. Eisenhower — himself one of our greatest Army generals during World War II; he was Supreme Commander of the troops that invaded France to throw out the Nazis — when he said,

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.

The time to heed such warnings is past. As Eisenhower feared, the military-industrial complex has taken over our government and the problem now is to figure out how to keep America functioning in the face of what they’ve done. Since we cannot maintain the balance Eisenhower talked about between military programs and national social programs, the question now is how best to keep from killing our sons and daughters and continue to allow our aging population to receive subsistence.

By drafting only people between the ages of 50 and 70, we can accomplish both of these goals. First, our young people will not go off to war only to die for the rich. Secondly, our aging population will. This will alter the balance between young and old in our country and make it possible to sustain the Social Security program indefinitely. And since old people (arguably) cannot fight as well as young people, we will have to send twice as many; the balance will be achieved that much quicker.

Lastly, this could be combined with a plan to solve our prescription drug problem. If, during the draft, we make no exceptions for those older people on medications — in fact, we may even wish to target them — we could stop giving them their medications. Many of them are going to be shot anyway. Those that collapse on the field because of a lack of medications can be deemed “war casualties.” Bingo! No more Medicare problem!

This is a win-win-win-win-win situation for the President.

Win Number One: Most older people tend to be altruistic (they probably learned this caring for their young) and are more likely to join the Democratic party. Young people tend to be more selfish, making them ideal candidates for the Republican party. Thus, a plan that keeps the young alive while simultaneously reducing the numbers of older people benefits a Republican President and his party.

Win Number Two: By reducing the numbers of older people, less folk collect Social Security. The program is thus cheaper to maintain.

Win Number Three: By not killing young people, we have more workers to support the remaining Social Security program. In fact, this is actually two wins in one, because young people also tend to save less money, since retirement seems so far away. They spend more. This drives our consumer-based society.

Win Number Four: Old dead people don’t have prescription drug problems. They don’t have to be bussed to Canada for cheaper medications. This will also reduce the FDA budget as less of these buses will need to be stopped and searched.

Win Number Five: With less old people — and particularly if we target those on prescription drugs as noted above — overall Medicare costs go down.

Best of all for the President, there’s no downside! With so many elderly out of the way, and so few young people who actually vote (and fewer still who think before voting), there’s no one to vote him out of office!

See? I can think like a Republican!

Last week, the army convicted five new recruits on charges that they refused to serve in the military for political reasons. The five, who are to be sentenced Tuesday, could each receive as much as three years in jail.

The story in which this quote appears mentions a growing resistance within the Israeli Army, including among some elite units, to being used in ways that appear to be inhumane. Months ago, as just one example, 27 pilots refused to carry out missions involving “targeted killings.” Members of elite units are refusing to engage in the continued oppression of Palestinians within the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Sharon and other hawks need to take a more thoughtful notice of this trend than they have thus far. When large numbers of one’s own military begin to question the humanity of their orders, it should give pause. If it were just a man or two who was refusing to obey, that would be one story. A trend is a different thing. Military men — especially Israeli military — do not take these steps lightly.

Did not our Jewish predecessors — indeed, the entire world — feel a revulsion for the attitude of German soldiers during World War II? At the Nuremburg trials, this attitude was repeatedly expressed in the phrase, “I was only following orders.” How then, can Israel not recognize that their moral compass has ceased functioning when they insist on jailing those growing numbers of soldiers who are refusing to follow orders which can only “lead to desperation and a humanitarian crisis in the West Bank and Gaza“?

What I am arguing is not that Israel should lie down and accept the oft-stated goals of Palestinian groups such as Hamas and Al Aksa. These groups have repeatedly stated that they will not stop until Israel is destroyed; peaceful co-existence is not on the board. As one Hamas representative stated, “We don’t believe in ’67 or ’48 — it’s all our land.” It is, of course, no more acceptable to argue for the end of Israel than it is to argue for the end of the Palestinian people.

Groups like Hamas and Al Aksa and all who would work as they do toward the destruction of Israel must be dealt with harshly. It is they — and neither Israel nor the Palestinian people — who must be destroyed.

Yet to consider (and act as though) it is not possible to take steps toward the establishment of peace with Palestinians because of the work of groups such as Hamas and Al Aksa is to embrace a false dichotomy. Too often, those asking Israel to make peace have put forth proposals that can only spring from the patently absurd world of “black and white”; Israel’s response must not be of the same sort.

The Palestinian people themselves will no more go away than will we Jews. That is reality. A realistic approach to the situation in the Middle East has to take this into account. It should be possible to engage in a dialogue with the Palestinian leaders of the Palestinian terroritories aimed at establishing a peaceful co-existence. If those leaders will not negotiate, then we have not a game of hide-and-seek with Palestinian members of the Intifada, but the need for an actual defined war. If the United States was justified in removing the Taliban and Saddam Hussein from power when they could not gain the cooperation of these governments, so, too, should Israel be justified in removing the PLO leaders if negotiations are impossible. A new government could then be set up with which Israel begins to negotiate for substantive rights for the Palestinian people, including statehood — yet not forgetting to provide for stable and humane daily living conditions even before statehood is achieved.

Israel can continue to seek out and destroy leaders of the Intifada movement, but in doing so must continue to work towards the goal of peaceful co-existence with the general Palestinian populace of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. These are not necessarily mutually-exclusive goals. The United States daily targets “terrorists” within its borders with an abrogation of its own Constitution and Bill of Rights at a level which is acceptable to the general population; there are no uprisings in the streets and no constant barrages of suicide bombers attacking governmental institutions. Israel can take a leaf from this book in dealing with the Palestinians.

There is no need to insist upon adopting the stance of World War II Germany and insisting that we should ignore the human tragedy being played out daily by “only following orders.”

Tonight, one did me the favor of posting a comment to my blog. To read it — and my response to it — you’ll need to return to a post I wrote in August about some controversy over Mel Gibson’s film, then called The Passion and now known as The Passion of Christ, which was then being filmed.

Feel free to take a look at my original post here. After the article are comments people have posted. Until now, my favorite comment had been one in that same post by “LadyLawyer” — it inspired its own article, by the way, which you can read here. Anyway, “R.C.” now holds the position. A more shining example of why some (not all: some) Jews get jumpy when people start talking about “Jews and Jesus” could not have been found.

In modern America, antisemitism seldom seems to me to wear so thin a veil.

On the other hand, after reading one of Vachon’s articles on Counterpunch, it appears he may just have taken one-too-many bad acid trips.