The People (well, maybe a small fraction of one percent of them) have spoken, however confused and inchoate the message.

And so, in response, I have a simple proposal: let’s make all tax payments voluntary.

Grover Norquist of “Americans for Tax Reform” proclaims that he wants to “drown government in the bathtub,” by which he must mean abolish government services. What gives government the right, we are often asked, to seize our property through taxation? “It’s your money!” Bob Dole shouted. And George Bush repeatedly asked, “who is better qualified to spend your money? You, or the government?” To the libertarian-right, tax payments for any purpose other then the protection of individual rights to life, liberty and property, is theft. (More on the “qualification” of the government to “spend your money” here).

No one likes to pay taxes. But for that matter, no one likes to pay the mortgage on one’s house, utility bills, or car payments. However, we all understand that if we do not make these payments, we will be evicted from our homes, or the electricity will be shut off, or our cars will be repossessed – and justly so.

So here is my proposal: make all tax payments voluntary. If all those April 15 “tea party” tax protesters find tax-paying so onerous, then they should be excused from paying taxes.

The only provision is that if they do so, they are no longer entitled to the services that are supported by taxes.

To wit:

• They may no longer use the public highways.
• In case of fire, they can not call the fire department to save their homes.
• In case of home invasion, armed robbery or other criminal threats, they can not call the police for help.
• They can not sue for damages in court. (Judges, bailiffs, court reporters, etc. are on the public payroll).
• They can not hire workers that were educated in public schools or universities.
• They can not use computers (micro-circuitry developed by NASA) or the internet (originated in DARPA, a federal agency).
• They can no longer purchase prescription drugs (certified safe and effective by the FDA).
• They can no longer purchase meat and dairy products that have been inspected by the Dept. Of Agriculture.
• They can not visit the National Parks or National Forests.
• They can not purchase airline tickets, (since that industry is regulated by the FAA) or use public airports.
• Their bank accounts may not be protected by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.
• For that matter, they cannot use United States currency, since it is guaranteed by the Federal Government. Instead, they will have to conduct all transactions by barter.

And that’s just the beginning of a long list.

Any takers?

Of course, it will be impossible to deprive the tax protesters of all government services – in some cases they will, of necessity, be “free riders.” For example, the air they breathe will be cleaner due to the enforcement of clean air standards, paid for by other citizens. Similarly, they will be safer from foreign invasion thanks to a military paid for by others.

All free-loading tax protesters who are caught using the above listed services, will be assessed charges. In other words, they will be required to pay their taxes.

Which kinda leaves things pretty much where they were to begin with, doesn’t it?

Politicians like Bob Dole and George Bush, and the FAUX News screech-merchants keep telling us that taxes are “your money!” – in other words, that we are entitled to keep it. Activists such as Grover Norquist and his “American for Tax Reform” demand that taxes be cut, and cut, and cut again, until, as Norquist puts it, government is reduced to the size where we can “drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub,” which I take to mean, eliminate government. All this, notwithstanding the obvious and manifest public benefits that are “purchased” by tax revenues.

And yet, somehow, this subversive nonsense strikes a responsive chord among our fellow citizens. Why is this?

To be sure, many citizens are not opposed to paying their taxes, per se. Their complaint is that so much of their tax assessment is lost to waste, fraud and abuse. But this complaint is legitimately voiced by all citizens, regardless of political persuasion – right, left, and center. Everyone, that is, except those scoundrels who benefit from that waste, fraud and abuse. The solution, however, is not to abolish taxes — not, that is, if the above listed services are to be supported. The answer is improved law enforcement and harsh penalties. Put bluntly, where there is waste, fraud and abuse, we should root it out and then nail the bastards – including Dick Cheney’s pals at Halliburton and other “contractors” who seem to have “lost”a few billions of “our” money in Iraq.

The more outrageous injustice in our tax system is the unfair distribution of the tax burden: a tax structure that allows the mega-billionaire to pay a smaller percentage of his income than his secretary or his house keeper. The traditional principle of tax assessment is that it be based upon the ability to pay. It is self-evidently true that the value of a constant sum of money, say a thousand dollars, is far greater to a poor person than to a wealthy person. If a Wal Mart clerk loses a grand, she and her children will go without food for several days. If Bill Gates loses that amount, it is of no consequence whatever to him. Hence the graduated income tax rates, and the inherent injustice of Steve Forbes’ “flat tax.” Similarly, the wealthy individual’s income from investments should not be taxed less than the poor workers’ salaried income. And yet, more and more, the tax burden is shifting away from the wealthy to the poor and middle class. This is legitimate reason for complaint and reform. But meanwhile, those aforementioned public services must be paid for.

Even so, there is in this country a tradition of the clever and resourceful tax evader as some sort of a hero. Ronald Reagan said as much in 1985 as he all but advocated rebellion against the very government over which he presided:

The members who spoke in this capital [Williamsburg, Virginia] said ‘no’ to taxes because they loved freedom. They argued, “why should the fruits of our labors go to the crown across the sea.” Well, in the same sense we ask today, “why should the fruits of our labors go to that capital across the [Potomac] river?” . . . . We, like the patriots of yesterday, are struggling to increase the measure of liberty enjoyed by our fellow citizens. We’re struggling, like them, for self-government — self-government for the family, self-government for the individual and the small business, and the corporation… What people earn is their money. Seventy-two years after its inception, what is our Federal tax system? It is a system that yields great amounts of revenue, even greater amounts of disorder, discontent and disobedience. [Tax cheating] is not considered bad behavior. After all, goes this thinking, what’s wrong with cheating a system that is itself a cheat? That isn’t a sin, it’s a duty! (Transcribed from a tape of Reagan’s speech, NPR, May 30, 1985)

This was a message that was repeated throughout the realm in the astroturf “tea parties” on Wednesday.

And so, by hiring a coterie of skillful accountants and lawyers to seek out loopholes, or by setting up phony off-shore corporations, the enterprising tax evader is admired by many for striking a blow against the despised and unworthy “big government.” In fact, he is transferring his tax burden to the rest of us, the honest taxpayers. Somehow, too many of us seem to forget as he evades his tax responsibility, legally or otherwise, he continues to take advantages of the services paid for by the rest of us: the roads and bridges, the protection of his property and person by the police and fire departments, the knowledge and skill of his workers, most of whom were educated at public expense. Some hero!

Pause for a moment and reflect upon what you are paying for with the federal income tax that your filed before Wednesday, along with the property and sales taxes that you pay to your state and community: the roads, schools, public safety, safe food and drugs, secure investments, parks and museums, clean air and water, and so much more. And if you are annoyed by your tax burden, direct your anger, not at the government which provides these services, but at the tax cheats and the politicians who write the tax laws that benefit their “sponsors”– their campaign contributors.

“Government” is not the culprit – “the problem,” as Ronald Reagan put it. The authentic villains are the free-loaders who “purchase” the tax loopholes and the sweetheart government contracts through their political “contributions,” and who thus leave it to the rest us to pay for the vital public services of which all of us, honest and dishonest alike, are the beneficiaries. Included among the villains are demagogues of the right-wing media who incite masses of gullible “sheeple” to protest against their own self-interest, and against their democratically elected leaders.

Are you “mad as hell, and not going to take it anymore”? Then don’t simply act angry. In addition, act smart. Don’t blindly demand the abolition of taxes. Public services, supported by taxes, are both desirable and, in many cases, indispensable. Instead, demand tax justice, and insist that public officials either get with the reform program or step aside and be replaced by those who will.

The collapse of market fundamentalism in economies everywhere is putting the Chicago School theology on trial. Its big lie has been exposed by facts on two levels. The Chicago Boys’ claim that helping the rich will also help the poor is not only exposed as not true, it turns out that market fundamentalism hurts not only the poor and the powerless; it hurts everyone, rich and poor, albeit in different ways . . . The fruits of Friedman test are in – and they are all rotten.

– Henry Liu

An economist and his guide, while hunting in Africa, fall into an elephant trap: twenty feet deep with vertical walls.

“That does it,” says the guide, “we’re done for. No escape, no food, no chance of being found in time.”

“Nonsense,” said the economist, “I can get us out of here.”

“And how do you propose to do that?,” the guide asks.

The economist replies: “Well, first we posit a ladder.”

Economists are no more inclined than the rest of us to live in a fantasy world – not, that is, as they go about the practical business of living their everyday lives. But when economists write technical papers and teach university courses, they often enter a theoretical realm of abstract concepts such as “economic man” (homo economicus) and “perfect markets,” articulated with virtuoso advanced mathematical manipulations. Very elegant, and very unreal.

Many economists, perhaps most, appreciate the limitations of economic theory in explaining and predicting social behavior and political trends. Some economists, however, claim to find in traditional (i.e. “neo-classical”) economic theory, the key to articulating and proposing public policy. It’s called “market absolutism,” and it has dominated American politics since the Reagan administration. It has also led this nation to the brink of economic disaster.

Market absolutism has led us to this crisis because its proponents in academia, politics and the media have been bewitched by theoretical concepts that apply imperfectly, if at all, to the real world in which we live and work. In particular: they posit an imaginary creature (“economic man”) that inhabits a mythical environment (the “perfect market.”)

Economic Man (Homo Economicus)

In neo-classical economic theory, “economic man” is a hypothetical individual who is a complete egoist, motivated solely by the self-interested desire to maximize his “preference satisfaction.” Homo Econ’s motivation is manifested by his willingness to pay for these satisfactions in a “free market.” Neo-classical theory also postulates that “all goods that matter to individuals … must be capable of being bought and sold in markets” and “anything that is valued instrumentally … can be handled by economics, be it acts of friendship or love.” (Freeman and Edwards. For citation of sources, follow this link). “Economic man’s” behavior is described, in neo-classical jargon, as “rational.” By implication, the self-sacrificing behavior of saints and heroes is “irrational.”

Clearly, “economic man” exists nowhere outside of Ayn Rand’s novels and, perchance, on Wall Street. And this is fortunate, for we wouldn’t want him for a neighbor.

In fact, there is much more to a fulfilled and moral life than self-interested “preference satisfaction.” Such a life also includes values that can not be priced in a free market. Among them:

* Truth. Scientists and scholars offer evidence and sound arguments, not bids. In courts of law, purchased verdicts are not only invalid, they are crimes.

* Civic Values such as justice, due process, civil rights, and the franchise, are not for sale. The governing impulse of economic man (qua consumer) is “I want.” The governing impulse of the citizen is “we need.”

* Distributive Justice. The economic concepts of “efficiency” and “utility maximization” do not touch upon the moral issue of the just distribution of wealth. “Just compensation” and “fair distribution” are moral, not an economic, concepts. A slave economy can, in classical economic theory, be perfectly “efficient” (i.e., “Pareto Optimal”).

* Love, friendship and loyalty which is bought is less valuable than that which is given freely. As philosopher Mark Sagoff reminds us, “a civilized person might climb the highest mountain, swim this deepest river, or cross the hottest desert for love, sweet love. He might do anything, indeed, except be willing to pay for it.”

* Moral values, which refer to the worth of persons, are systematically excluded from neo-classical economic theory.

A public policy for “economic man,” systematically detached from criteria of truth, civic value, distributive justice, friendship and loyalty, is a policy that any civilized person should reject, and reject on non-economic grounds. (See my “Why Economics Fails as a Sole Foundation of Public Policy,” for an elaboration of these points and a citation of sources).

The Perfect Market

Neo-classical economists, and their political acolytes, are convinced that “free markets,” completely undisturbed by government interference, yield optimum social and economic results. For example:

“In the free market, the individual would have to produce a good that the other person desired in order to receive a good in return. Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” of the market guides all participants in society to promote the best wishes of everyone else by pursuing his own wants and desires.” (Jacob Halbrooks)

“[T]he free market allows more people to satisfy more of their desires, and ultimately to enjoy a higher standard of living than any other social system… We need simply to remember to let the market process work in its apparent magic and not let the government clumsily intervene in it so deeply that it grinds to a halt.” (David Boaz, Libertarianism, a Primer, p. 40, 185.)

“A free market [co-ordinates] the activity of millions of people, each seeking his own interest, in such a way as to make everyone better off… Economic order can emerge as the unintended consequence of the actions of many people, each seeking his own interest.” (Milton and Rose Friedman: Free to Choose, pp 13-14).

History has taught us, time and again, that such assertions are true only in the purely abstract world of neo-classical economic theory. They are not true in the real world that we inhabit. To understand why this is so, we need only list the conditions of “the perfect market” postulated by economic theory.

* All participants are “perfectly rational” egoists – i.e., are “economic men.”

* There are many participants in the market.

* All participants have access to all relevant knowledge.

* There are no transaction costs.

* All transactions are mutually beneficial.

* There are no externalities (i.e., consequences to non-participating “third parties”).

Clearly, there are no “perfect markets” anywhere on earth, apart from the imaginations of economists. For consider:

(a) “Economic man” is a myth, or at the very least extremely rare. As noted above, most individuals engage in economic transactions for several reasons, some of them non-economic.

(b) Participation in markets is restricted to those with the ability to pay. Public policy decisions, on the other hand, should involve the rights and welfare of many who are systematically excluded from market activity; namely, the very young, the very poor, animals, and future generations. Furthermore, unregulated markets are self-eliminating, because capitalists detest competition and strive constantly to eliminate it. The remedy? The enforcement of anti-trust laws and regulation, which means, of course, “interference” by governments in the marketplace.

(c) The multi-billion dollar advertising and public relations industries are devoted to the task of persuading rather than informing. And persuasion involves the withholding of relevant information (e.g. health risks) and the dispensing of distorted and false information. Caveat Emptor!

(d) All transactions in the real world exact costs. Among them are the costs of enforcing the laws required for markets to take place at all (e.g. fair disclosure, patents and copyrights, contracts, civil and criminal courts, etc.), and this of course means government, which is so despised by “free marketeers.”

(e) Transactions are frequently not mutually beneficial, due to fraud (i.e., violation of “relevant knowledge condition”), the remedy of which is civil suits, which requires the “transaction costs” of the enforcement of law and the appeal to courts.

(f) External costs of market transactions are more the rule than the exception. Innocent, non-consenting parties are routinely impacted by economic activity. Among these external costs are environmental pollution, urban decay, public health costs, etc. Third-party “stakeholders” have no say in economic transactions. Their only recourse for protection and compensation is to the sole agency legitimately established to represent all citizens: the government. (See my “Market Failure: The Back of the Invisible Hand).

Summing up: “Economic man” and “perfect markets” are abstract constructs which, due to their clarity and simplicity, allow theoretical economists to devise complex mathematical models. However, they have no counterparts in the real world, which compromises the application of these concepts in public policy.

Case-In Point: Milton Friedman on Free Trade

Foreign trade and currency exchange rates provide a vivid example of the rule, “The theory is beautiful, but reality is baffling.”

According to free market theory, foreign exchange rates should be self-regulating, negative feedback functions, like house thermostats. The heat rises, the furnace shuts off, the heat drops, the furnace kicks in, perpetuo moto.

Similarly with foreign trade. If there is a “trade imbalance,” say between Japan and the United States, as dollars go to Japan and consumer goods are imported to the U.S., the Japanese will acquire a surplus of dollars causing the value of the dollar to fall with respect to the yen. U.S. consumer goods will then be less expensive than Japanese products, thus encouraging a flow of the yen to the U.S. to purchase American goods. Then the value of the dollar will rise until foreign goods once again become competitive. And so on, back and forth, like a thermostat. It’s all perfectly automatic – a “spontaneous order,” as the libertarians call it – no governmental interference (e.g. tariffs) required.

This is how Milton Friedman describes it:

If foreign exchange rates are determined in a free market, they will settle at whatever level will clear the market. The resulting price of the dollar in terms of the yen, say, may temporarily fall below the level justified by the cost in dollars and yen respectively of American and Japanese goods. If so, it will give persons who recognize that situation an incentive to buy dollars and hold them for a while in order to make a profit when the price goes up. By lowering the price in yen on American exports to Japanese, it will stimulate American exports; by raising the price in dollars of Japanese goods, it will discourage imports from Japan. These developments will increase the demand for dollars and so correct the initially low price. (Milton and Rose Friedman, Free to Choose, p. 47).

In theory, it’s all very neat and so simple: “all things being equal.” But in the real world, “all things” are never equal. Instead, the ecologist’s rule applies: “you can’t do just one thing.”

What if that flow of dollars abroad is accompanied by a dismantling of the U.S. industrial base? Then, when the time arrives for U.S. manufacturing goods to be competitive with foreign goods (due to the weakening of the dollar), there will be no more American-made goods on the market. Moreover, with the outsourcing of U.S. jobs overseas and the decline of median disposable income, fewer American can afford to buy foreign consumer goods. Regressive tax rates cause the nation’s wealth to flow to the very rich, who send their investments abroad in outsourced industries. A shrinking tax base results in a disintegrating physical infrastructure and a decline in higher education, followed by fewer scientists and engineers, and less basic research and development. Thus today the United States excels only in military technology, as it needlessly spends more on the military than all the rest of the world combined, building 3.5 billion dollar aircraft carriers to fight an “enemy” without an air force, and billion dollar submarines to fight an “enemy” without a navy.

This is what happens when public economic policy is abandoned to “the will of the free market” – an abstraction with, we are expected to believe, a benevolent “mind” of its own. This is what happens when a government puts the fate of the nation’s economy in the hands of wealthy individuals and corporations; individual agents without social conscience and with nothing more than their short-term profits in mind.

In the face of such grim realities, the neat “negative feedback” model of Friedman’s free-trade theory is irrelevant. It belongs to the abstract world of “theory,” not to the real world. In the real world, the thermostat is broken, the furnace will not turn on: down, down, down, goes the temperature.

“Physics Envy:” Formal modeling vs. Empirical Investigation

Neo-classical economists regard themselves and their discipline as more “formalist” than “empirical.” “Applied economists” such as John Kenneth Galbraith, Kenneth Boulding and Herman Daly who study the behavior of markets in “the real world” and attempt to draw inferences and conclusions from these studies, are regarded as an inferior caste: they rarely win Nobel Prizes and are conspicuously absent from the rosters and the publications of right-wing and libertarian think-tanks. (The remainder of this section is adapted from my “Beautiful Theory vs. Baffling Reality”).

Economic formalists are ever-ready to offer explanations of the state of the nation’s economy, and to issue warnings of dire consequences if their recommendations are not adopted, a willingness that is compounded as the economist’s academic training is mixed with his political sentiments and motives.

Consider, for example, an analysis of the prosperity of the Nineties, the longest sustained economic boom in our history. Who gets the credit? The Democrat replies, “Why Bill Clinton, of course!” “Not so fast,” says the Republican economist. “That prosperity was a time-lagged result of the policies of Bush I, aided by the wise legislation of the Republican Congress after the GOP took control in 1995.”

And what caused the stock market bust and recession early in the Bush II administration, and the humungous deficits that followed? Quoth the Democrat: “Clearly, those tax breaks to the rich failed to ‘trickle down’ and stimulate economic growth as the GOP promised.” “Wrong again,” says the GOP apologist. “The bust and the recession were “time-lag” effects of Clinton’s horrible economic policies. As for the stimulus from the tax breaks, be patient – just you wait.”

I trust that you can see where this is going. “Time lag” – the gift to the economic theorist that keeps on giving — is just one of several “explain-away” devices that economists fall back on, when their policies and predictions don’t quite turn out right.. Whenever “our” policies fail, or “their” policies succeed, there is always one or another of a myriad of macroeconomic imponderables to fall back on for an explanation. It’s no wonder that the disputes that ensue are never definitively resolved.

The problem is not that economic theories explain too little – it’s that they “explain” too much, so that whatever happens, their defenders have an “explanation,” and likewise, their opponents have a contrary “explanation.” That’s just another way of saying that politically motivated economic projections and explanations are “non-falsifiable,” and non-falsifiability is the definitive mark of non-science.

Astronomers can predict within seconds, eclipses hundreds of years into the future. If economists had a reliable 60% success rate in their macro-economic predictions, they could all retire at forty on the returns from their stock market investments. And as we all know, they don’t.

Please understand: I am not “anti-markets.” The failed economic experiment in the Soviet Union proved conclusively that a centralized command economy is vastly inferior to a market-based system of pricing, distribution, innovation and quality control. Having “shopped” in both the Soviet Union and the United States, I know this from personal experience. Furthermore, because human beings in significant aspects of their lives, do, in fact, act upon economic motives, a scholarly examination of market behavior has valuable implications for numerous disciplines, including environmental studies and political science.

In short, I do not assert that a study of markets and economic theory should count for nothing. Instead, I protest that they should not count for everything. Homo economicus is an ingredient of our nature that we would be well advised to study. But our lives consist of much more than buying and selling. We also love and we sacrifice, and we have goals and concerns that transcend our self-interest. And we seek, both personally and collectively, truth, justice, and personal excellence, none of which can appropriately be bought or sold in markets

With this conviction, I am joined by many esteemed economists, among whom are some of the severest critics of neoclassical economics. These include Herman Daly, Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, Kenneth Boulding, Paul Krugman, James Galbraith and Amartya Sen, all of whom possess a clear view of the limitations of their discipline. Indeed, my quarrel is less with economists than with politicians and policy-makers who have skimmed easy formulas and simplistic generalizations off the top of the neo-classical economic theory, and put them to work in behalf of their special political and economic interests.

Even so, the above-listed dissenting economists, whom I admire enormously, report that there is in fact a dominating “orthodoxy” of neo-classical thought in the discipline of theoretical economics, and that this orthodoxy has had enormous influence upon both public policy and politics.

I can validate their report with my own experience. Often, when I have mentioned the names of these mavericks to economist colleagues, I find that I have evoked stares of disbelief or even condescension, such as one might expect from a fundamentalist preacher upon hearing the name of Charles Darwin. I once asked Herman Daly why he is regarded as an “outsider” by the mainstream of his profession. He wryly replied that it was probably because he permits the elegance of formal economic theory to be contaminated by compelling facts of biology and physics. Meanwhile, the true believers read with admiration the pronouncements of economists such as Julian Simon, who confidently assert that the omnipotence of the free-market and the omniscience of future entrepreneurs can overcome trivial physical constraints such as the second law of thermodynamics. (See my “Perilous Optimism”). I once heard Paul Ehrlich remark to Johnny Carson that if an engineer proposed to design an aircraft for an exponentially expanding crew, he would rightly be regarded as mad. Yet when an economist proposes an economic model that posits perpetually expanding population and resource consumption, he is regarded as eligible for the Nobel Prize for economics.

Happily, this era of free-market dogmatism may be coming to an end, as the dreadful consequences of its application are cascading upon us. Some of the High Priests are, in the face of stark economic realities, abandoning the cult. Leading the way is Alan Greenspan, who told Henry Waxman’s Committee, “those of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholder’s equity (myself especially) are in a state of shocked disbelief . . . I made a mistake in presuming that they were best capable of protecting their own shareholders.”

The dogma of market absolutism may, at long last, be replaced by what James Galbraith calls “a new spirit of pragmatism, “ which, he writes, “surely requires that we discard the metaphor of market determinism — whole and entire. No more, let us bow and scrape before that altar. Markets have their place — they are a reasonably open and orderly way to assure the distribution of services and goods. They are not a general formula for the expression of social will and the working out of social problems.”

Thus might the economic strategy of FDR’s New Deal be reinstated: constancy in ends — national prosperity and economic justice — and flexibility in means. “Don’t just sit there, do something! If it works, keep it. If it fails, try something else.” In economics, as with any viable science, theory must be tested in the real world, whereupon the theory is either validated, modified, or discarded.

Looking back through history, we might wonder how it is possible that intelligent and educated people once accepted uncritically such notions as astrology, judicial trial-by-combat, the demon-possession theory of disease, and alchemy. Today, more and more sophisticated observers of society and politics are wondering how homo economicus, a creature bereft of sympathy, humanity, and noble aspiration, and “the perfect market,” a “place” devoid of any social contacts more elevated than market transactions, ever came to be regarded by our political elites as the foundation of a just political order.

First, my router/modem developed a terminal malfunction, and then my new anti-virus software failed to install. Thankfully, three very capable and patient gentlemen at various technical support facilities found solutions.

These three gentlemen were, respectively, from India, the Philippines, and once again, India.

If you or someone in your family is about to graduate with a degree in computer science, don’t expect to find a job in the U.S. any time soon.

Amidst my computer worries, I bought a dozen or so electrical supplies from the local hardware: a surge protector, extension cords, a phone, that sort of thing. Glancing at the labels, I found that each and every one was made in China. And a new hard drive? From Malaysia.

No need to go on with this, you know about it already. It’s called outsourcing.

Damned greedy capitalists are dismantling our manufacturing base and shipping it overseas!

Were it as simple as that, it would be a waste of my effort writing about it, and of your time reading yet another complaint about that which is painfully familiar.

But outsourcing, and the consequent loss of millions of American manufacturing and service jobs, is not the plain and simple result of corporate greed. It is, instead, an inevitable result of a combination of factors, including:

• the successful enactment of the right-wing dogmas of “the invisible hand” and “trickle down,” namely the conviction that individual entrepreneurs and corporations will, by seeking only their own economic gain, obtain the best results for society at large. These are “dogmas” because they are “proven,” not by historical evidence or practical experience, but rather through repetition.
• the corollary libertarian dogma that government has no justification whatever in interfering with the economic activities of private individuals and corporations. In the words of Milton Friedman, “There is nothing wrong with the United States that a dose of smaller and less intrusive government would not cure.”
• fiduciary responsibility: the legal requirement that the primary responsibility of the corporation is to its stockholders, not the public.

Thus the necessity of outsourcing is beyond the control of any single corporation’s executives or board of directors. It is a thus a tragedy, in the sense defined by the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead: a consequence of “the remorseless working of things.”¹ As long as these conditions obtain, jobs will gravitate toward the individuals accepting the lowest wages, i.e., those abroad, and the middle class will wither as wealth flows from those who create the nation’s wealth to those who own and control the wealth. These are conditions that are destined to ruin the economy of the United States.

“As long as these conditions obtain…” The obvious solution, then, is to change “these conditions.”

The Problem of Fiduciary Responsibility

So why don’t corporate executives simply behave like good Americans, and keep those jobs stateside?

Because, quite frankly, if they were to do so, they would be taken to court by the stockholders and sued. And they would lose.

Near the close of the Nineteenth Century, railroad tycoon William Vanderbilt famously said, “The public be damned, I work for my stockholders.” And in 1970, the New York Times Magazine published an article by Milton Friedman, “The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase its Profits.” The title says it all.

The knee-jerk liberal response is that these quotations are expressions of plain lousy attitudes. Sadly, it’s much worse than that.

It’s the law!

The fiduciary responsibility of corporations, first and foremost to their stockholders, has been articulated in numerous court decisions, and in the statutes of several states. And so, as Daniel Brook writes in Huffington Post:

Corporations have a fiduciary responsibility to maximize profits even if it means betraying the nation, trashing the environment, or fomenting unconscionable levels of inequality. Nothing is unconscionable for a corporation because they don’t have consciences; they’re not really people, whatever the courts may say.

Accordingly, my internet service provider and the company that makes my anti-virus software simply had no choice: they had to hire tech support workers in India and the Philippines and to fire their American technicians. Had they not done so, they would have been put at an insurmountable competitive disadvantage with their rivals who have no qualms about outsourcing. The profits and stock value of the “socially responsible” corporations would drop, causing losses to their stockholders – i.e., those to whom they owed “fiduciary responsibility.”

And then the company would find itself in court, facing a winning suit by the stockholders.

Obviously, corporate activity affects more than managers, employees and stockholders. Corporations also involve customers who are entitled to be protected from fraud and from defective products. Civil courts exist to reimburse customers for damages from corporate abuses, and few if any libertarians would object, in principle, to the exercise and enforcement of civil law. Because civil suits can be costly and impact upon the corporate bottom line, corporations have a fiduciary responsibility not to engage in fraud or to sell defective products. (Unfortunately, as the recent Supreme Court decision on the Exxon Valdez suit reminds us, corporate-friendly courts can reduce civil settlements to trivial sums that fail to deter corporate malfeasance).

In addition to injured customers, there are unconsenting third parties, “stakeholders,” who are affected by corporate activities. These include persons residing downwind and downstream from industrial polluters, teen-agers “hooked” on cigarettes leading to a shortened life of addiction, taxpayers who pay for the public health costs of smoking, ecosystems damaged by pesticides, citizens whose government is corrupted by corporate lobbying and campaign contributions, and humanity at large the future of which is imperiled by global climate change.

Add to this, American workers who lose their jobs to outsourcing; victims of “collateral damage” resulting from the fiduciary responsibility of corporations to reduce labor costs and thus to increase profits and the return on the investments of the stockholders.

Who Speaks for the “Stakeholders”?

Who else, but the government?

Many, and perhaps most, corporate executives, when confronted by the economic and social devastation brought on by outsourcing, might reply: “Yes, it’s horrible! But what can I do about it? If I insist on hiring American workers at American wages, my firm will go broke or, before that happens, the Board of Directors will fire me. I’m helpless!”

Sad to say, they are right.

Alternatively, one might bring together the CEOs of all the competitors, and try to persuade them to agree not to outsource. Problem is, that might be collusion, which is illegal. Or if not, there would be no sanctions against violating the agreement, and enormous advantages would be gained by any renegade firm that did so. It’s a paradigm case of the prisoner’s dilemma: that which is good for all is bad for each. Without the enforcement of sanctions there is an irresistible temptation to defect from the agreement.

In any case, missing from that assembly would be delegates representing those unconsenting but seriously affected third parties, the “stakeholders.” Their claims against the corporations would exact costs that would adversely affect “the bottom line:” profits and returns on investments. And the corporations, by law, have that fiduciary responsibility to maximize the bottom line.

Leave it to the unregulated free market, the profit motive, and fiduciary responsibility, and the stakeholders, which is to say the general public, is screwed. Given these conditions, there is no escape from this “remorseless working of things.” It is a tragedy.

So the solution is compelling: abolish the conditions that bring about the tragedy.

The stakeholders must be given a place at the table that determines corporate policy.

And there is one and only one institution qualified to represent the stakeholding general public. That would be a representative government, such as that established by the founders of our republic.

To secure these rights, governments are established among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

We the people of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

How strange and sad it is that we have allowed the right-wing dogmas of market absolutism, libertarianism, “the invisible hand” and “trickle down” to cause us to forget the founding principles of our republic, and to forget the lessons learned from a difficult history since that founding.

We’ve tried laissez faire capitalism, and each time it has failed all but a very few wealthy and privileged individuals, and eventually those too when the economy collapses.

We learned from the crash of 1929 and the depression that followed, that corporate greed, unconstrained and unregulated, can lead to a ruined economy. Then we recovered, not by abolishing capitalism, but by reforming it and regulating it with agencies of government acting in behalf of “we the people,” i.e. the stakeholders.

Through tax incentives, tariffs, and other laws and regulations, the government can end and reverse the outflow of jobs from the United States. Goodness knows there’s abundant work to be done within our borders. The physical infrastructure of the U.S. is in an advanced state of decay, and only government appropriations can repair it, with jobs that by their nature can not be outsourced. Like it or not, the petroleum age is on its way out, opening the necessity for the development and implementation of alternative and sustainable energy sources. Here is a compelling opportunity to re-establish our dismantled manufacturing base. And be assured that if we don’t take the lead in ushering in the solar age, some other country will do it and we will be left behind.

The lessons of history notwithstanding, we have tried market absolutism and minimal government once again, and they are failing once again. The United States of America is near bankruptcy, our currency is in decline, we are massively in debt to our rivals, our manufacturing base has been dismantled, and we are despised the world over.

“When you are in a hole, the first thing to do is stop digging.”

Time to stop digging and to start climbing out.

1. See Garrett Hardin’s “The Tragedy of the Commons.”

We live in a world … hardened and distorted by hate. We communicate in the language of fear and violence. Human beings are no longer viewed as human beings. They are no longer endowed in our eyes, or the eyes of those who oppose us, with human qualities. They do not love, grieve, suffer, laugh or weep. They represent cold abstractions of evil. The death-for-death means we communicate by producing corpses.

– Chris Hedges

In 1946, Dr. Gustav M. Gilbert, a psychologist fluent in German, was assigned by the U.S. Army to study the minds and motivations of the Nazi defendants at the Nuremberg tribunals. The following year, his Nuremberg Diary was published, containing transcripts of his conversations with the prisoners. (Excerpts here).

In words consistent with what I have read of, and about, Gustav Gilbert, he is portrayed in the 2000 TV film Nuremberg, as telling the Head Prosecutor Robert Jackson (Alex Baldwin): “I told you once that I was searching for the nature of evil. I think I’ve come close to defining it: a lack of empathy. It’s the one characteristic that connects all the defendants: a genuine incapacity to feel with their fellow man. Evil, I think, is the absence of empathy.”

“Absence of empathy” is likewise, I submit, “the one characteristic that connects” most of the immoral and misbegotten tenets of Bushism: that dogmatic mix of market absolutism, libertarianism, corporatism and simple greed that falsely describes itself as “conservatism,” and which I choose to call “regressivism.” “Absence of empathy” is the essence of evil which, if unchecked and unreversed, is certain to bring about the demise of the American republic as we know it, just as it led to the fall of the Third Reich.

In contrast, empathy, the capacity to recognize and cherish in other persons, the experience, emotions and aspirations that one is aware of in oneself, is the moral cornerstone of progressive politics. It is a principle recognized and taught in all the great world religions, reiterated by numerous moral philosophers, and validated by the scientific study of human personality.

Empathy is the foundation of the moral teachings of Jesus of Nazareth. In that most-quoted New Testament verse, the golden rule, Jesus said: “as ye would that men should do to you, do ye also to them likewise.” (Luke 6:31, also Matthew 7:2). Also, “thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.” (Matthew 22:39, also Leviticus 19;18). Both commandments imply recognition in others of the human dignity and worth that one recognizes in oneself. In a word, empathy.

The golden rule is echoed in the moral teachings of Islam: “None of you [truly] believes until he wishes for his brother what he wishes for himself.” And as Mohamed taught in his last sermon, “Hurt no one so that no one may hurt you.” (Mohamed, last sermon). And Rabbi Hillel, a contemporary of Jesus, taught “What is hateful to yourself, do not do to your fellow man. That is the whole Torah; the rest is just commentary.”

And yet, how much empathy is to be found among self-proclaimed “Christian” end-times preachers, such as James Hagee and Tim LeHaye, who eagerly anticipate “the rapture” and the eternal torment and damnation that awaits virtually all of humanity, as punishment for the sin of failing to agree with the preachers’ theology? How much empathy is evident in the late Jerry Falwell’s on-air remark to Wolf Blitzer, about Islamic militants, “If it takes 10 years, blow them all away in the name of the Lord,” and Ann Coulter’s infamous outburst, “We should invade their countries, kill their leaders, and convert them to Christianity.” Because they explicitly renounce Jesus’ injunction to “love thy enemies” these hate-mongers are, in a literal and moral sense, “anti-Christs.”

Regressivism and the Absence of Empathy

Empathy is conspicuously absent in the off-hand remarks of George Bush, his family, and his political allies. For example,

• Bush himself, to an ordinary citizen after a campaign event: “Who cares what you think?” And to Bob Woodward: “History, we don’t know. We’ll all be dead.”
• The President’s mother, Barbara Bush, on Good Morning America: “Why should we hear about body bags and deaths. Oh, I mean, it’s not relevant. So why should I waste my beautiful mind on something like that?” (March 18, 2003).
• Dick Cheney, in an exchange with ABC reporter, Martha Raddatz:

Raddatz: Two-third of Americans say [the Iraq War] is not worth fighting.

Cheney: So?

Raddatz: So? You don’t care what the American people think?

Cheney: No….

• John McCain: “bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran.” And in response to the news that cigarettes are a major US export to Iran, McCain remarked that it might be “a way of killing ‘em.”
• Former Senator Phil Gramm, economic advisor to John McCain, in an interview with the Washington Times, remarked that the American economy is in “a mental recession.: “We’ve sort of become a nation of whiners,” he added.

The foundational doctrines of regressivism are equally devoid of empathy. For example, Ayn Rand: “Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy.. the process of setting man free from men.” (The Fountainhead) And “Man must live for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself to others nor sacrificing others to himself.” (The Virtue of Selfishness)

Furthermore, “economic Man” (Homo economicus), a central concept of neo-classical economic theory favored by regressives, is an uncompromising egoist, whose sole motivation is to “maximize personal utility” or “preference satisfaction.” A “perfect market” of fully informed, non-colluding, uncoerced “economic men,” free of government interference, the theory tells us, will invariably produce better results for all than any governmental system yet devised. Never mind that “economic man” and “the perfect market” are fictions, that never have been and never can be realized in any human society. (For a defense of this claim, see my “Beautiful Theory vs. Baffling Reality”).

The unfounded yet undiminished right-wing faith in the “wisdom” of the free-market and in the superiority of the pursuit of individual “utility maximization” as the engine of social progress, was starkly summed up by “Gordon Gekko” (Michael Douglas) in the 1987 movie, Wall Street: “Greed … is good. Greed is right. Greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms — greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge — has marked the upward surge of mankind.”

In fact, history teaches us that greed is not good, and greed does not work. Homo economicus is, in fact, a moral monster, for he is a being devoid of empathy and even of conscience. A mere bundle of “consumer preferences” can not add up to personhood, much less moral agency. When greed (call it “the profit motive”) reigns supreme, “others,” be they employees or fellow citizens, are reduced to impersonal objects. If these “others” are employees, they are regarded as units of “human capital” to be replaced by less costly “units” (e.g. “outsourced”) whenever possible. And if they are fellow citizens, they are prospective customers, to be relieved through “creative marketing” of their disposable wealth. Human, social, environmental “external costs” be damned. Witness the tobacco industry.

A “society” of private, egoistic, “utility maximizers,” devoid of empathy and unregulated by law and popular government, without shared values, loyalties and aspirations, is no society at all. It is a Hobbesian state of nature – a “war of all against all,” wherein life becomes “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”¹

As we are now discovering, to our great regret and sorrow.

Progressivism and Empathy

In stark contrast, empathy — awareness of the needs, sufferings, aspirations, rights, and dignity of others — is the unifying theme of the progressive agenda, and of the history of political/economic liberalism (in the traditional sense of the word). The elite and wealthy delegates to the Continental Congress, when they demanded recognition of their rights, did not fail at that time to acknowledge the rights of all persons:

We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights; that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.

True, at the outset the full “rights” of citizenship were restricted to white, male, landowners. But through time and constant struggle, those rights were extended to include all adult citizens, regardless of gender, race or creed. These struggles, which continue today, were led by “liberals,” and resisted by self-described “conservatives.”

Joe Conason eloquently describes these struggles and achievements:

If your workplace is safe; if your children go to school rather than being forced into labor; if you are paid a living wage, including overtime; if you enjoy a forty-hour week and you are allowed to join a union to protect your rights — you can thank liberals. If your food is not poisoned and your water is drinkable — you can thank liberals. If your parents are eligible for Medicare and Social Security, so they can grow old in dignity without bankrupting your family — you can thank liberals. If our rivers are getting cleaner and our air isn’t black with pollution; if our wilderness is protected and our countryside is still green — you can thank liberals. If people of all races can share the same pubic facilities; if everyone has the right to vote; if couples fall in love and marry regardless of race; if we have finally begun to transcend a segregated society — you can thank liberals. Progressive innovations like those and so many others were achieved by long, difficult struggles against entrenched power. What defined conservatism, and conservatives, was their opposition to every one of those advances. The country we know and love today was built by those victories for liberalism — with the support of the American people.²

That public support and the consequent liberal reforms issued from empathy: from the awareness throughout the general public that oppressed minorities and economically and educationally disadvantaged individuals, possess the same sentiments, needs, aspirations and rights that more fortunate citizens recognized in themselves.

Regressivism as Psychopathology

Empathy is never totally absent in any functioning human being. A recognition that other persons with whom one deals have functioning minds with ideas, emotions, and aspirations is implicit in game playing, in negotiations, and even ordinary conversation. Self awareness, even that of a thoroughly egoistic, narcissistic and sociopathic self, can only arise out of childhood interaction with others. The self is a social construct.

Thus even such sociopaths as George Bush and Dick Cheney will acknowledge that the bombs dropped on Iraq cause “collateral damage” and thus profound suffering to innocent civilians. They likewise are aware of the suffering in New Orleans caused by the mismanagement of the Katrina disaster. They are, after all, at least minimally sane. Such an awareness of others that is also devoid of feeling we might call “abstract empathy.” The misery to innocent others that they cause simply does not matter to the Busheviks. They do not care, unless these moral atrocities exact political costs to themselves.

This “abstract empathy” is not the sort of “empathy” that Dr. Gustav Gilbert found absent among the Nuremberg defendants. The empathy that he had in mind combines awareness with feelings of concern and with respect for the rights and integrity of the other.

In contrast, the regressivism of the Bush-Cheney administration would have us ignore the economic, social and environmental consequences of unregulated commerce, and also have us dismantle Social Security, impoverish public education, tolerate inadequate health care for millions of our fellow citizens, abolish fundamental constitutional rights, and engage in aggressive wars against unthreatening countries, all of this with minimal regard for the human misery caused by these policies. To do all this, requires a deliberate stifling of feelings of empathy, and what David Hume called the “natural moral sentiment” of benevolence: a genuine concern for the well-being of others.

Regressives who support such policies are, at worst, simply amoral: without moral restraint, “rotten to the core.” At best, they are profoundly mistaken: possibly fundamentally decent individuals, trustworthy, law-abiding, charming friends, devoted spouses and parents, but bewitched by false dogmas. The former are, by and large, beyond redemption and are best isolated from political influence and from positions of public responsibility. The latter might be amenable to evidence and rational persuasion.

How can such an ideology captivate and take political control of a nation once renowned and admired for its generosity and compassion and for its devotion to democracy and human rights?

In part, the rise and dominance of regressivism is the result of a deliberate and opulently funded public relations campaign, supported for the past forty years by wealthy individuals and corporations. This campaign included the establishment of ideological “think tanks” such as The American Enterprise Institute, The Heritage Foundation, and The Competitive Enterprise Institute, the abolition of The Fairness Doctrine and the consolidation of most of the mass media into six “conservative” mega-conglomerates, enormous expansion of corporate lobbying of Congress, and a vastly increased corporate involvement in campaign financing, of both major parties. With conservative Republicans in control of the White House for all but eight of the past twenty-eight years, the federal courts have become dominated by right-wing judges.

With these formidable propaganda resources, the resurgent Right has exploited “natural sentiments” equally fundamental to human nature as empathy; namely, ethnocentrism (identification with and loyalty to “our group”) and its negative complement, xenophobia (fear, distrust, and hatred of “outsiders”). The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 intensified these prejudices, objectifying and depersonalizing the new enemy (so-called “Islamo-Fascists”) while, at the same time, neutralizing empathetic sentiments toward the residents of these “alien” nations.

With the captive media exploiting and intensifying public fear of “terrorism,” the Bush regime formulated, and the intimidated Congress readily assented to, assaults upon our traditional civil liberties such as the PATRIOT Act, the Military Commissions Act, and now the revised FISA Act.

Finally, regressivism feeds upon greed: the relentless corporate drive for still more profits and political control, and the perpetual cultivation of consumer demand by the multi-billion dollar advertising and public relations industries.

But greed is pitiless and blind to the side effects (“externalities”) of the unconstrained appetite for the consumption of consumer goods and for profit: effects such as poverty, pollution, disease, and the “collateral damage” of war upon innocent civilians.

A political economy based upon unregulated greed has been tried numerous times in the past, and has failed in each and every occasion: the French and Russian Revolutions, the era of the robber barons in the late Nineteenth Century, the Great Depression of the Thirties. They failed because when greed rules, the nation’s wealth inevitably flows from those who produce the wealth to those who own and control the wealth until, eventually, the toleration of the increasingly miserable masses for this economic injustice collapses, and the oligarchic regime is overthrown.

Once again, regressivism is on the brink of collapse.

• Time magazine and the Rockefeller Foundation reported last week that 85% of US population is unhappy with the US economy.
• In April, 80% of Americans believed that the “country is moving in the wrong direction.”
• “During the first six months of 2008, 343,159 Americans lost their homes, up 136% from 145,696 recorded during the same period in 2007.” (CNNMoney.com).
• An alarming and under-reported increase in unemployment and inflation is underway. (US government cost of living statistics do not include food and fuel prices).
• The latest Gallup Poll reports that Democratic party affiliation leads Republican by ten points (47% to 37%).
• George Bush’s approval ratings are at an all-time low at 28% (disapproval from 61%-69%).

This public sentiment should suffice to overthrow any regime that maintains power “with the consent of the governed” and subject to recall by election. Under normal circumstances, these statistics would indicate a landslide repudiation of the regime in the coming national election.

But these are not normal circumstances, for this regime is supported by a formidable array of resources: virtually unlimited financial support, a captive media including a cadre of right-wing pundits, a proven ability to rig elections along with a refusal of the media to investigate and report election fraud, oppressive laws, a ruthless GOP campaign organization unconstrained by facts, fair-play, or even on occasion, by the law. All these resource might once again overwhelm the “consent of the governed,” and prolong the regressive regime for another four or even eight years. But eventually, it must fall. The longer it holds on, the greater the misery and repression that will ensue, and the more violent the eventual overthrow.

Best to end it now.

But it will take an extraordinary effort by an overwhelming number of ordinary citizens to bring it off. There are no guarantees.

1. Thomas Hobbes, The Leviathan
2. Big Lies, p. 3.

But his politics are abominable! As often as not, when we visit his shop, Rush, or Hannity, or Savage are blaring on the AM radio. In 2000, and again in 2004, a “Bush/Cheney” sign was posted atop his shop.

Just once, I discussed politics with Roy. He let loose with the familiar complaints about how the immigrants were taking all the jobs, the welfare cheats were soaking up the tax money of honest citizens, the “wacko-environmentalists” were stifling growth with their dumb regulations, we had to fight the terrorists over there so that we don’t have to fight them here – the usual, familiar, drill.

I immediately saw that the only sensible thing to do was to back out gracefully. Arguing with a Rushophile is as futile as attempting to talk a Catholic Bishop out of his belief in the dogma of the Immaculate Conception, or to convince Rev. Hagee of the scientific foundation of evolution.

Roy’s closing comment, however, was worthy of note. “Look,” he said, “I’m a conservative, and I like to listen to what you call right-wing radio. You’re a liberal, and you read liberal magazines and internet blogs, and listen to Air America Radio. I’m convinced of my views, just as you are convinced of yours. So who’s to say who is right or wrong?”

An excellent question, which I have heard all too often from my college students. It is a question that must be answered by any serious liberal, with explicit and objective reasons. “That’s just my opinion” will not do.

Quoth Jack Cafferty, “so here’s the question:” What is the justification of the liberals’ claim that their sources — the Nation, the American Prospect, the Huffington Post, Democracy Now!, Bill Moyers’ Journal, etc. — are more reliable than the Weekly Standard, FOX (“fair and balanced”) News, the Washington Times, Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, etc., or even, for that matter, the mainstream corporate media?

And so, Roy, if you happen to read this piece, here is your answer.

Political arguments are not created equal, and do not all have equal merit. Even less so, political rants and diatribes. There are many objective criteria with which an unbiased spectator might judge whether or not an argument is strong or weak, and whether a position is well or poorly defended. Here, briefly, are just a few such criteria. Having taught numerous courses in Critical Thinking, I can testify that this list merely scratches the surface of a vast topic.

1. The Persistence of Memory — and of You-Tube and Google. Remember Saddam’s alleged “weapons of mass destruction” (WMD’s), and the “smoking gun in the form of a mushroom cloud”? Cheney’s assertion that “there is no doubt that Saddam has reconstituted nuclear weapons”? Colin Powell’s “proofs” before the Security Council of Saddam’s WMD’s and his evil intentions, along with the corporate media’s unanimous and uncritical praise of Powell’s performance? The welcoming in Baghdad with candies and flowers? The six-week, self-financed Iraq “liberation?”
The Busheviks and right-wing sycophants would prefer that you don’t remember all this, and more. But the issue is out of their control. All the above claims and predictions are indelibly on the record, justly undermining the credibility of further assurances by the Bush Administration, the Republicans, and their loyal stenographers in the corporate media.

There was a time in recent memory, when a politician could simply deny that he had made an embarrassing remark, and demand that his accusers “put up or shut up.” No longer. You-Tube and Google now provide instant “put-up” of such accusations for anyone with a modicum of computer skills.

The Google-ization of American politics is proving to be especially troublesome to the “maverick” and “straight-talking” John McCain. Virtually all of McCain’s “maverick” votes and positions have been reversed and thus nullified, as the “straight-talker” has endeavored to set himself straight with his right-wing/regressive base. Count ‘em: McCain on campaign finance reform, tax breaks for the rich, reproductive freedom, offshore oil drilling, windfall profit taxes to support alternative energy. Do any of McCain’s original “maverick” positions remain “unflipped”? None that I can think of. The substance of McCain’s “straight-talk” reputation has evaporated, leaving only an unsupported label.

In contrast, memory and recorded history have caused Barack Obama little lasting damage. The unauthorized recording of his “bitter” remark in San Francisco, and Michelle Obama’s reflection that “For the first time in my adult lifetime, I am really proud of my country,” immediately come to mind. And the latter is more than offset by the recently excavated video clips of John McCain saying “”I really didn’t love America before I was deprived of her company.”

Not surprisingly, the corporate media has amplified Obama’s gaffes and downplayed McCain’s. But media bias aside, an objective assessment of recent history is not supportive of right-wing dogma and rhetoric.

Santayana’s famous maxim has a corollary: “Those who fail to own up to their own history, are clearly trying to hide something.”

2. Sources: More is Better. If your information comes from several independent sources, it is likely more reliable than reports from few self-replicating sources, like wild horses tethered, not to a solid post, but to each other. Now critically examine the sources of right-wing opinion and compare them with the sources in the best of liberal publications, internet blogs, and broadcasts. (I will concede that there is a super-abundance of weak, “off the top” ranting from the left as well as the right). The right, I suggest, is more inclined to cite, if at all, a limited and self-supporting bunch of “conservative” publications and Bush administration press releases. From the left, I submit that you will find more citations of qualified experts, scholarly journals, and credible foreign sources.

But don’t take my word for it. Check it out yourself.

3. If it’s not reported by the corporate media, did it really happen at all? The adequacy of right-wing arguments can be assessed not only by what they say but also by what they choose to ignore. Likewise, the reporting of the corporate media. Did George Bush walk away from his National Guard obligations? Were the past two Presidential elections, along with numerous Congressional elections, stolen through election fraud? Has John McCain reversed himself on almost all of his “maverick” positions? Don’t look to the right-wing media for answers. All such embarrassing allegations have been shoved down the Orwellian “memory hole.” Out of sight, out of mind, never happened.

As for the corporate media, they too distort public opinion and understanding through the omission of essential information and through the saturation of print and air time with trivia (celebrity romances, missing blonds, etc.). For example, James Risen’s and Eric Lichtblau’s Pulitzer Prize report on illegal government spying was suppressed by the New York Times until after the 2004 election. Do you know about the July 2002 Downing Street memo that revealed the Busheviks’ determination to “fix the intelligence and the facts around the policy” of an invasion of Iraq? If you do, you did not learn of it through the corporate media. And the coordinated and successful effort of the Pentagon to flood the airwaves with the commentaries on the Iraq war by allegedly “independent” retired generals? Kudos to the New York Times for exposing it, and damnation to the rest of the media for ignoring it. Election fraud through “paperless” (DRE) voting machines and compilers? Faggetaboutit! Any attempt to investigate and report on this issue in the corporate media is a “career-ender.” And important books on the subject, such as Mark Crispin Miller’s Fooled Again, are rarely recognized and reviewed in the mainstream media.

And yet many of us know of such crucially significant facts, despite the blackout of information in the corporate media.

How so? We learn of these things through independent liberal publications, through the small but growing progressive radio talk shows, and of course through the internet — “the America Samizdat.”

4. The Treatment of Dissenters. After the Bay of Pigs fiasco, John Kennedy saw to it that before any crucial policy was adopted, dissenting opinions would be heard and seriously considered. That decision quite possibly spared the civilized world from nuclear annihilation, as cooler heads prevailed during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Contrast this with the Bushevik mode of “decision making,” replicated in the right-wing media. Bush’s “decisions” issue from his “gut,” not from his brain. Dissent is not tolerated, and is in fact a sure-fire guarantee of an early departure from the administration. Witness the aborted careers of Paul O’Neill, Richard Clarke, and General Eric Shinseki, and the extraordinary retaliation visited upon Joseph and Valerie Plame Wilson.

Likewise, dissenting (a.k.a. “unpatriotic”) opinions on broadcast and cable television have led to the ouster of Phil Donahue and Ashleigh Banfield. Not even Dan Rather was exempt. How Keith Olbermann remains on the air is something of a mystery. Perhaps his spectacular commercial success may have something to do with it.

In contrast, liberal publications acknowledge, and occasionally even publish, opposing opinions from the right. And while Rush Limbaugh’s screeners keep “leftist loonies” off the air, Rachel Maddow and Thom Hartmann routinely invite “conservative” advocates on to their programs.

5. The Quality of the Arguments. Arguments can be assessed according to their positive and negative qualities. First the positive. (We’ll deal with the negative, the fallacies, in the final two sections below).

Logicians identify three essential criteria of a cogent argument: (1) the availability of relevant information, (2) the truth of the premises, and (3) the validity of the inferences from premises to conclusion. Technical elaboration: “validity” means the “truth preserving” structure of the argument. In “pure” formal logic, this means that if the premises are assumed to be true, then (due to logical form), the conclusion must be true. In informal inference (i.e., most arguments) “validity” is a matter of degree. (Most logicians would prefer to call it “strength of inference”). In a well-formed informal argument, if the premises are true, then the conclusion is highly likely to be true.

A critical assessor of the best of right-wing and progressive discourse will, I submit, conclude that by and large, the progressives offer superior arguments.

Regarding Criterion One, liberals are less tempted to suppress relevant information. (See Item #3, above).

Furthermore, (Criterion Two) because liberal arguments have a broader range of sources of information (Item #2) and are more accepting of historical information (Item #1), the premises (the foundations of the arguments) are more likely to be true. Add to this, the apparent fact that liberals are, by and large, more convinced by the results of scientific investigation, and less convinced by dogma and “faith-based” appeals. Liberals insist that peer-reviewed scientific publications are the best sources of information, due to the discipline and methodology of science. “The best,” but not perfect. All scientific assertions are, in principle, fallible, which is to say, open to revision or even refutation when confronted with new information. Paradoxically, “fallibility,” far from being a weakness of science, is one of its fundamental strengths. (See my “Is Science Just Another Dogma?”).

Finally, (Criterion Three), liberal and progressive arguments will usually incorporate stronger inferences from premises to conclusions; which is to say that formal implications, statistical analyses, and inductive rules all come into play such that it becomes difficult to reject a conclusion once one accepts the premises and assesses the structure of the inferences.

What does the jargon of the preceding paragraph mean? Many ponderous and book-length treatises have been written, elaborating on the meaning of those terms “formal implications, statistical analyses, and inductive rules.” I cannot in this space, add to that shelf in the library. Suffice to say that an intelligent, educated and astute individual, who has somehow managed to avoid a logic class in college, is nonetheless quite capable of asking what some scholars call “the magic question:” Suppose that I accept all the premises, follow the inferences, and discard the fallacies, can I then imagine the conclusion to be false? If it is difficult to do so, then I have been presented with a well-formed informal argument.

6. Fallacies that (Sometimes) Aren’t. Philosophers, rhetoricians, and other such scholars have identified hundreds of logical fallacies, both formal and informal. Logic textbooks routinely list dozens. Obviously, in the remaining space, I can only deal with a very few of these.

The identification of fallacies within arguments can be a very tricky business, for many so-called fallacy forms are quite acceptable in some of their applications.

For example, consider the so-called fallacy of appeal to authority. But 99+% of all that we know, we get from someone else’s “say-so.” If we reject all second-hand, third-hand, and n-hand knowledge, we might as well close up all colleges, universities, and even primary schools, and then return to the caves. But that doesn’t mean that we can’t assess particular claims of authoritative knowledge. In fact, we must. Actors who “play doctor” on TV ads are not authoritative sources of information about drugs. Senator James Inhofe, former real estate developer, is not an authority on climate change. Nor is Michael Crighton, a physician, or most likely the local TV weatherman. But the two-thousand climate scientists who have contributed to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, some of whom have devoted years of their careers to laboratory and field studies, are authorities. Twenty years ago, Al Gore was not an expert on climate change, but after many years of study and the application of his critical skills to an assessment of the data, he may claim some expertise. More to the point, his arguments are grounded in sound scientific research.

Next, is generalization a fallacy? It depends. On the one hand, generalization is the essence of inductive inference, which is to say the foundation of empirical science. All scientific laws are generalizations. Newton’s laws of motion apply to all physical bodies, though obviously not all applications can be observed. Likewise, Grey’s anatomy, drawn from a few specimen cadavers, applies to all human bodies. On the other hand, a “hasty generalization” can be a grievous pitfall in reasoning. Example: Ronald Reagan’s “welfare queen,” who allegedly gathered in thousands of dollars in phony claims by non-existent husbands and children. Generalization: all welfare recipients are cheats. Of course, Reagan’s example had the further flaw of being totally false – a complete concoction.

How about arguments from analogy? Again, it depends. Animal experimentation with prospective drugs draws warranted analogies from animals to humans. Yet the fallacy of faulty analogy is among the favorite devices of unscrupulous propagandists. Among the most prominent of these is “the Munich analogy”: the claim that the example of the 1938 Munich agreement proves that bargaining with one’s (presumably “evil”) opponent will only increase the opponent’s appetite for more concessions. Yet diplomatic negotiations have prevented far more wars than they have caused. Another faulty analogy, I suggest, is B. F. Skinner’s inferences from laboratory rat behavior to human behavior. The disanalogy? Human beings, unlike rodents, use articulated language, a point that Noam Chomsky expounds upon in his devastating critiques of Skinner. Of course, many experimental psychologists would disagree.

The bottom line: “fallacies that (sometimes) aren’t” must be evaluated individually. Argument from authority? What are the qualifications of the alleged “authority”? Generalization? How adequate is the sample that is being generalized? Argument by analogy? How similar are the two cases, the original and the analog?

7. Fallacies that (Usually) Are. Some fallacies are reliable indicators of bogus arguments. Among these are the false premise and the straw man (attacking a non-existent invention of the arguer).

“Begging the question” (or circular reasoning) is a fallacy that is summarily excluded in courts of law. A simple, obvious, yet widespread example: “I believe the Bible to be the Word of God.” And why? “Because the Bible says so.”

Here’s another example from contemporary politics: When Ed Gillespie, former Chairman of the Republican National Committee, was presented with exit poll evidence that the 2004 Ohio returns were rigged, he replied that you can’t rely on exit polls because they have been proven time and again to be unreliable.

Trouble is, they haven’t. In fact, in virtually all of their applications throughout the world, exit polls have been “the gold standard” of election verification, generally yielding a margin of error within one or two percentage points. When the returns in the 2004 Ukrainian election were wildly inconsistent with the exit polls, it was generally assumed that polls proved that the election was stolen. The only noteworthy “failures” of exit polls turns out to be in US elections that use unverifiable touch-screen (DRE) machines.

So it comes to this: By claiming that the official election returns “proved” the inaccuracy of exit polls, Gillespie was assuming what he intended to prove: namely, that the election returns were accurate and thus that the election was honest. But that was the very point at issue.

Gillespie might have escaped this fallacy by presenting independent evidence that the exit polls were flawed, albeit exclusively in elections using unverifiable DRE voting machines.

In fact, apologists have done just that by introducing the theory of “the reluctant Bush voter.” Bush voters, they claim, were less inclined than Kerry voters to respond to the exit pollsters.

This leads to the final fallacy on our short list: the ad-hoc fallacy. This is an “explanation” that is concocted on the spot to explain (better “explain away”) some troublesome fact or experience. Trouble is, ad hoc hypotheses “explain” nothing else whatever, and are entirely disconnected from any independent evidence.

My favorite example comes from the “young earth creationists.” Question: If the world was created six thousand years ago, how do you explain the existence of dinosaur bones? Answer #1: Satan put them in the ground to lead us astray from the truth. Answer #2: God put them in the ground to test our faith. Of course, there is and can be no independent evidence whatever to support either “explanation.”

Returning to the 2004 Ohio exit polls: The hypothesis of “the reluctant Bush voter” was in fact tested and found to be without independent foundation. In paper ballot and other verifiable precincts, there was no such bias. Only in precincts with DRE machines. In other words, the “reluctant Bush voter” was an unfounded ad hoc “explanation” of a very suspicious and troublesome voting anomaly, which has been widely and scrupulously studied by numerous scholars and statisticians. But don’t expect to find any curiosity about it in the corporate media.

In sum: We all use fallacies: politicians, journalists, scholars, scientists, and even retired philosophy professors. To err — and to employ fallacies — is human. But just as there are recognizable degrees of virtue and justice (all falling short of perfection), there are also degrees of fallacious argument. And while all informal arguments fail to achieve perfection, they can nonetheless be assessed as to their cogency. In fact, the rules of evidence in law courts and the scientific method are both devised to minimize fallacious inferences.

I submit that the right is much more inclined than the left to utilize fallacies. That’s a bold and unsubstantiated claim. Perhaps I should now proceed to write the book that will support this claim. It will take at least that much space to accomplish the task.

But much better than that, why don’t you examine the arguments on the right and the left to see for yourself whether or not I am right?

And while you are at it, ask yourself: (1) Which side is more willing to own up to its past positions, predictions, and assurances? (2) Which side examines the broader field of source material? (3) Which side looks for the most relevant information, even if that information is absent from the corporate media? (4) Which side is more tolerant of dissent, both within and outside of its ranks? (5) Which side uses the more cogent arguments? And (6) which side relies less on fallacious reasoning?

You presumably know my answers by now. But I would not presume to do your thinking for you.

So check out the arguments of the right and the left, and find the answers for yourself.

That’s the first law of practical economics. Everyone knows this to be true, whether or not one has ever taken a course in Economics. Everyone except, apparently, a few Ph.D economists who seem to forget this rule when they are hired by the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute, etc., from which they migrate, back and forth, between offices in Republican administrations and these right-wing think tanks.

For these worthies, the “first law” is replaced by the dogmas of deregulation, “trickle-down” and market fundamentalism: impoverish the masses, throw money at the rich who will then invest it, and then “the invisible hand” of the unregulated free market will bring forth a cornucopia of goods and services.

Never mind that there will be few if any buyers for these consumer goodies.

Henry Ford saw the fallacy of such a policy when he raised the wages of his workers. His competitors in the auto industry were aghast. “Why did you do that?,” they asked. Ford is said to have replied, “If I don’t pay them more, who will buy my cars?”

It took awhile, but Henry Ford was eventually proved to be right. In 1935, in the depths of the great depression, Congress passed the Wagner Act which greatly enhanced the power of labor unions to bargain collectively on behalf of their members. And after World War II, the G.I. Bill allowed millions of returning war veterans to go to college and then to enter the work force as trained professionals. The ranks of the middle class swelled, and as a result of this gain in disposable income, so did the nation’s economy. In an ongoing and sustainable economic symbiosis, the investments of the capitalists “trickled down” to increase the worker’s productivity, income and purchasing power, which in turn “percolated up” to provide generous returns on these investments. Like the fabled golden goose, this economic arrangement promised a perpetual production of “golden eggs” of shared prosperity.

Then came Reaganomics, which allowed the ruling oligarchs with their insatiable appetites for “more, still more,” to dismantle the unions, to cut back workers’ salaries and benefits, to ship manufacturing and management jobs overseas, to starve the tax base through loopholes, regressive tax rates, and off-shore incorporations, and to strip the government of its Constitutionally stipulated function of regulating commerce. (Article One, Section Eight). As most citizens have consequently drifted toward poverty and serfdom, and the government has been taken “to the bathtub” to be drowned, the upward “percolation” has been drying up. Rather than protect and perpetuate the economic system that produced their wealth, the privileged class is cooking and devouring the golden goose.
Senator Bernie Sanders reports the resulting plight of the American middle class:

The economy is doing great, except for 90% of the people in the economy. The reality is that we have the hollowing out of the American economy. Median family income declined by $2500 in the last seven years. 8 million people lost their health insurance. 3 million people lost their pensions. This is a strong economy? You’ve gotta be insane to believe that.

Meanwhile, the richest one percent of the population possesses more wealth than the bottom ninety percent. (See also G. William Domhoff: “Wealth, Income and Power“).
This is how a once-flourishing economy shrivels up and dies: the few who own and control the nation’s wealth refuse to share that wealth with the many who produce that wealth.

Ahead lies ruin for rich and poor alike.

For those with eyes to see, and a willingness to see, the consequences of this unconstrained and unregulated greed are apparent and irrefutable: a constriction of the economy which, unless met immediately with decisive and painful countermeasures, must lead to economic collapse. We can expect no such countermeasures from the Bush (”the fundamentals are sound”) administration. With the bursting of “the housing bubble,” consumer debt has reached its limit: the national credit card is maxed out. Under Bush, the cost of food has doubled, and of gas has tripled. (Neither food nor fuel are counted in Bush’s phony Consumer Price Index, which consequently understates the gravity of current inflation). As the average family spends more on necessities such as food, medical care, home heating and transportation to and from work, “luxuries” simply must drop out. No more vacations. Fewer trips to the movies and to restaurants. Fewer purchases of new cars (the old one will have to do for a few more years). Businesses fail, workers are fired, stocks plunge, unemployment rises, the dollar falls, the cost of imported goods (which means, due to outsourcing, most consumer goods) rise. Still less disposable income to pay for higher priced goods and services. More businesses fail, more workers are fired, etc. Down, down, down, goes the spiral.

“No sellers without buyers.” It’s so obvious, so indisputable, even tautological. How can anyone doubt this fundamental rule of practical economics, much less promote policies that defy it? Answer: because just as history is written by the victors, political/economic dogma is written and taught by those with great wealth and power. And anti-government, trickle-down, market absolutism are the dogmas of those who own and control the nation’s wealth: dogmas that Friedrich Nietzsche called “a master morality,” and that John Kenneth Galbraith characterized as a “moral justification for selfishness.”

History provides numerous examples of such “justifications” by those privileged with wealth and power. Out of the middle ages came the doctrine of “the Divine right” of royalty to rule in luxury. This was supplanted by the Protestant claim that personal wealth was the sign of Divine grace. In the gilded age of the late nineteenth century, the Robber Barons embraced the theory of “social Darwinism;” their wealth proved their superior “fitness” to survive. And now we have the regressive dogmas of Reaganism, of Bushism, and, let’s admit it, to some degree at least, of Clintonism: “trickle down,” unconstrained capitalism, the wealth of the few as the key to the wealth of all others. “The rising tide” that lifts all yachts, the regressives assure us, lifts the dingys as well.

The fundamental error of “trickle down” economics is not that it is false, but that it is a pernicious half-truth. As noted above, in a healthy economy, investments do in fact yield results that “trickle down” to the benefit of the workers and the public at large. But as Abraham Lincoln correctly noted in his first inaugural address, “Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if Labor had not first existed.” Thus “trickled-down” benefits of investment presuppose the “percolated-up” wealth that is produced by labor. An economic theory that touts “trickle-down” benefits of investment to the neglect of the production of labor and the well-being of the workers, is a theory that must fail in its application.

The doctrines of regressive economics – “trickle down,” market absolutism, minimalist government – are dogmas in the literal sense of that word: like creationism and dialectical materialism (Marxism-Leninism), they are believed and promulgated independently of evidence and practical experience. If they are applied and fail, there is always an excuse at hand that does not allow a suspicion that the dogma itself may be flawed. In contrast, progressive economics is empirical, experimental and pragmatic: constant in ends, and adaptable in means. As with numerous schemes in FDR’s New Deal, the progressive policy is tried and, if it fails, it is discarded and a new approach is attempted, and so on until policy is found that “works.” (For an expansion of this point, see my “Beautiful Theory vs. Baffling Reality.”).

The public must reject these false dogmas of regressive economics, and the sooner the better; better for both the public in general and for the oligarchs. The longer that these dogmas dictate public economic policy, the greater will be the fall and the greater will be the retaliation of the people against their oppressors.

No untried utopian schemes need to be invented to replace the current kleptocracy. Only a restoration of a system that has proven itself in the past: a regulated capitalism combined with a social democracy dedicated to the welfare of all citizens and founded on the consent of an informed public as manifested in honest, accurate and verifiable elections. And that latter condition presupposes the existence of a free, independent and diverse media, along with a public education system staffed with well-paid, competent and dedicated teachers.

In short, what is required is a return to the liberalism — “the New Deal,” “The Fair Deal,” “The New Frontier,” “The Great Society” — that Ronald Reagan and the regressives have abolished in the past twenty-seven years. The programs and policies of Reagan’s liberal predecessors were all imperfect, as are all human endeavors, but unlike the regressive politics of today, these earlier administrations had within themselves the means of adaptation, correction and improvement.

We the people know the way out of the political and economic morass in which we find ourselves. But if we are to escape, we must do so ourselves. We can expect no help from the corporate media or from the politicians of both political parties that have led us into the present crisis.

* Note: These ideas are presented and defended at greater length in “Remedial Economics for Regressives;” Chapter 9 of my book in progress, Conscience of a Progressive).

In 2005, newspaper circulation declined over the previous year by 2.6 percent, with the largest declines posted in the major newspapers. Still worse, in 2007, newspaper advertising revenue fell by 9.4 percent. As a result of this shrinkage, in 2007 2,400 journalists lost their jobs, and 15,000 have been canned in the last decade.

The predicament of network TV evening news programs is still more desperate. In 1980, the combined audience for the NBC, CBS and ABC newscasts was 53 million. Just last month, that audience tallied at 21.5 million: about seven percent of the US population. And the median age of that audience is 60.2, which means that the networks are failing to reach the essential younger age cohorts.

The newspaper and broadcast industries cite a number of alleged reasons for these figures: the internet, competition from cable news programs, and declining literacy and political interest among the public.

Missing from this list is “the crud factor”; namely, that the quality and credibility of reporting has deteriorated so spectacularly that the public, fed-up with the insults and lies, has turned to other sources of news and information. As Newsweek’s Tony Dokoupil reports: “less than one person in five believes what he reads in print… and nearly nine of ten Americans believe that journalists are actively biased.”

The good news: at long last, the mainstream media is being punished for its failure to perform its essential service to the public; which is the presentation of accurate and relevant news along with competent, informed and diverse opinion.

The bad news: as the founders of our republic warned us, access to essential public information and the free publication of diverse opinions are indispensable to a free society. And as Thomas Jefferson wrote to John Jay, “our liberty depends on the freedom of the press, and that cannot be limited without being lost.” Fortunately, a sizeable portion of our population, having acquired a healthy contempt for the corporate media, has found more reliable and informed sources of information in the alternative press and in the internet.

This promising development is undermined by the plain fact that the growing use of the internet as a free source of information and opinion is economically unsustainable. Why buy a newspaper or a magazine, when much or most of the content therein can be read for free on a computer monitor? And if so, who then will pay the researchers, writers, investigators, graphic designers, video producers, and publishers who gather, authenticate and then write and publish quality news and opinion?

For as we the “news consumers” too easily forget, quality journalism comes to us at a cost. The all-too-infrequent investigative reports in today’s media often require hundreds of hours of “hidden” labor by reporters and their staffs. The Pulitzer Prize winning disclosures in the Washington Post of the deplorable conditions at Walter Reed Army Medical Center required months of investigation by Dana Priest, Anne Hull, and Michel du Cille. Likewise, James Risen’s and Eric Lichtblau’s exposure of illegal wiretaps by the Bush administration, and David Barstow’s recent uncovering of the Pentagon’s “hidden hand” inside the sock-puppet media “analyses” by retired military officers, each of which required substantial financial support by the publisher, the New York Times. Exposés such as these are, in turn, the raw material of journalistic scrutiny, and citizen activism and dissent, all of this nourished by the considerable investment of time and money by the publishers. Conversely, the quality of news reporting, in particular foreign reporting, has been severely compromised by the reduction and closing of news bureaus throughout the world.

If independent investigative reporting and responsible journalism are to be restored, how are they to be financed? Not by net surfers like you and me, who enjoy the product of hard journalistic labor for free. And yet, all of the aforementioned “scoops” — about Walter Reed Center, the illegal wiretaps, the retired military “experts” — can be had, gratis, on the internet. Just follow the links.

To be sure, many websites, including those of print publications, are at least partially supported by advertising income. Even so, it is doubtful that advertising alone can support a flourishing alternative independent media. Moreover, if ad revenue is to be the primary support of this new media, then the concerns of the commercial sponsors will all too often trump the public interest — a situation that is today the scourge of “the old media.”

I happen to subscribe to The Nation, the American Prospect and Mother Jones, among other progressive publications, but not because I have to. Most of their content is available on the internet. My subscriptions amount to donations, motivated more by conscience than by necessity. When I download content from publications to which I do not subscribe, I am a parasite gaining free “nourishment” from the labor and costs of others.

So I pose the question anew: with the erosion of paid support of established “mainstream” print and broadcast media, who and what is to pay for information and diverse opinion that is essential to a functioning democracy? If the purveyors of the junk that dominates the mass media today fail to reform themselves and as a result shrivel and die from financial strangulation, we’ll all be the better for it. Good riddance! But the question remains: who or what is to support the indispensable responsible journalism that is the lifeblood of our democracy — in particular, the journalism that appears on the internet, which might well become the next mass media?

It won’t do simply to ignore the question and to go on using the free internet while we have it. Such behavior imitates that of the Grover Norquist “tax reform” crowd, which willingly enjoys the benefits of the common public resources that are sustained by tax revenues — the courts, an educated public, physical infrastructure, regulation of commerce, protected food and drug supply, scientific research and development, etc. — yet steadfastly advocates the abolition of those taxes.

Simple fairness, not to mention economic viability, require that the investigators and reporters of essential public information be compensated, and that the requisite time, energy and expertise required to obtain this information, be financially supported.

But how is this to be accomplished?

I confess that I don’t have a simple answer. If you do, please share it with me, and we will publish the worthier proposals in The Crisis Papers.

But here, at least, is a suggestion, admittedly in need of much elaboration and refinement: adopt a system of financing similar to that of the music and entertainment industry.

As I understand it, most copyrighted music is registered with two agencies: ASCAP and BMI. Radio stations, artists, etc., who perform this music must pay a fee to the appropriate agency but not directly to the composers. The agencies then conduct surveys to determine how often the copyrighted works are performed, and then issue individual payments to the composers in proportion to the number of performances. (In my brief stint as a talk show host, some thirty years ago, I was not allowed to use a BMI tune as a theme, since the station was registered only with ASCAP. If my recollection of the system is incorrect, I am confident that some reader will set me straight). According to this arrangement, neither ASCAP nor BMI exercised any control over the use of titles in their inventories. They were entirely passive; it was up to the performers, station managers, disk jockeys, etc. to decide what was or was not to be performed, and this decision was, in turn, responsive to public preferences.

Might not a similar system be adopted by the internet service providers? A uniform fee might be assessed to each internet user, and the proceeds of that fee might then be put into a general “author/designer/producer/publisher fund.” Content creators might then be compensated according to the number of “hits” recorded for their works. (As any user of Google is well aware, this is a far more accurate system than the surveys conducted by ASCAP and BMI). Since literally millions of individuals post on the internet, there would have to be several “filtering” mechanisms separating the amateurs from the pros. One such filter might be a minimum threshold of “hits” required for compensation. Another would be an annual registration fee to be paid by the authors, with the payment added to the general fund. Suppose that fee were to be one hundred dollars. Since the likely annual payments to the vast majority of amateur bloggers would fall far short of the annual registration fee, most would opt themselves out of the system.

This system, like that of ASCAP and BMI, would be totally passive: no place here for censorship. The public, or if you prefer, “the market,” would rule. Payments would then be proportioned to the individual choices of the millions of users of the internet. And like ASCAP and BMI, the distributing agency would be a private, non-profit association of composers, artists and publishers, regulated by the government.

The cost to each internet user? Negligible, I believe, given the fact that there are now 211 million internet users in the United States, and nearly a billion worldwide, with internet use increasing by about eighteen percent a year. If each US user were to be charged ten dollars a year for payment to the “author/designer/producer/publisher fund,” that would total more than two billion dollars to the fund. An annual fee of one hundred dollars (about eight dollars a month), with revenues of twenty-one billion, would finance a free, independent and diverse media industry that would rival, and perchance supplant through open competition, the rotten-to-the-core corporate media that has betrayed us so spectacularly today.

For one hundred bucks a year, that’s a bargain, any way you look at it.

I rarely write about personalities, being much more interested in issues and ideas. Celebrity-obsession is a major pox on the American body-politic, and I’d just as soon ignore the AAR-Rhodes contretemps. But l’affaire Rhodes bears larger implications that deserve examination.

Quite frankly, I will miss the Randi Rhodes show on Air America Radio. She is smart, sassy, witty, and she deftly stroked my political biases. But a typical RR show was like a feast of carnival junk food: enjoyable at the moment, but devoid of much nourishment. (I exclude from this assessment her interviews with such outstanding guests as John Dean, Jonathan Turley and Brent Budowsky). I prefer to listen to the radio with the expectation that I might learn something. Far better to listen to Thom Hartmann and Rachel Maddow, each of whom possess a high-wattage intellect and awesome critical skills, gained through years of serious study. Plain brilliance is a rare commodity in talk radio, and Hartmann and Maddow both have it in generous abundance.

On the other hand, the Randi Rhodes show was my guilty pleasure, evoking many grins and chuckles, and suitable for multi-tasking: background for housework, driving, or typing and filing at my desk. Yes, I will miss The Randi Rhodes Show, but will be none the worse for her departure.

As I learned long ago, when for a couple of years I had a talk show in Salt Lake City, a microphone can be a mischievous ego-inflator. On Air America Radio, Hartmann, Maddow, Flanders, Kennedy, Papantonio have displayed a commendable ability to keep their egos in check. Sam Seder, on the other hand, might benefit from their example.

Of late, Randi’s ego has got the better of her, as she has become increasingly abusive of her callers, even those who are approximately 80% in agreement with her. Hillary-supporters could expect to be insulted, shouted-at, and cut off at any moment. The number of McCain supporters heard on Randi’s show was roughly equivalent to the appearance of authentic liberals on the Rushathon or the Hannity-Calamity. (This in contrast with Thom Hartmann, who invites conservative guests on his show and puts dissenting callers at the head of the queue).
Moreover, Randi has acquired the strange notion that informed liberals give a fractional goddam about her personal showbiz enthusiasms. OK, so she likes to watch “American Idol.” But enough, already!

Even so, there is an audience for that sort of thing, for, as we were reminded daily, The Randi Rhodes Show was promoted as the “top liberal talk show in the nation.”

While I regret Randi Rhodes’ departure from Air America Radio, I endorse the decision of AAR’s management to suspend her. This incident could have had a better outcome if Randi had used her time off the air to reflect on her performance and her role in the upcoming political contest. Then she might have returned to AAR both a better person and a better performer. The AAR owners gave her that opportunity.

But reflection and contrition are not part of Randi’s moral repertory. So she quit.

Randi’s regrettable “f***ing whore” outburst, aimed at Hillary Clinton, put the AAR management in an impossible lose/lose dilemma. Toleration of such behavior was unthinkable (as I will argue shortly). A summary firing was overkill, which would have outraged her many fans and seriously muffled the already faint voice of liberal talk radio. (Just consider the outcry that resulted from her suspension). But while suspension was the judicious middle-road, this too has had its costs. Once Randi Rhodes uttered those two words in public, there was to be no easy solution for AAR management. Suspension was merely the least-worst alternative.

There is no first amendment issue here, so may we please put that nonsense aside? No one has a “right” to gain or keep a microphone or to demand space in a publication. I have no first amendment claim on the New York Times to publish my essays, nor a first amendment claim on Random House to publish my book. (Alas!) Just read the relevant portion of that amendment: “Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.” This does not forbid AAR from taking the microphone away from Randi Rhodes. It simply forbids the government from telling AAR what it can or cannot broadcast, just as it forbids the government from telling The New York Times and The Washington Post that it can’t publish the Pentagon Papers. (Ah, those were the days! RIP free and independent press).

So we turn now to those “larger implications” of Randi Rhodes’ outburst in that San Francisco night club.

Like Randi Rhodes, I support Barack Obama, and find much to criticize in the behavior of Hillary Clinton, who, prior to this campaign, I had once greatly admired. But Obama’s advantage today is such that the prize is all-but won. Like the wolf in the Russian tale, “Peter and the Wolf,” Hillary Clinton is trapped: the more she tries to throw off the lasso, the tighter its hold on her. Clinton’s negative attacks on Obama are backfiring: he is rubber, she is glue. Barring a colossal blunder by Obama, anything that Clinton might do to win the nomination will be so destructive to the party and to her reputation that the prize will be worthless.

The wise decision of the Obama campaign, thus far brilliantly conducted, is to hold back while the Clinton campaign self-destructs. All the while, Obama projects calm, poise, and respect for his rival.

Into this well-considered and well-executed strategy, storms Randi Rhodes. With “friends” like this, who needs enemies?

Remember, above all, that while Randi was attacking a fellow Democrat, she was at the same time alienating that candidate’s supporters. In a recent poll, more than thirty-percent of Hillary Clinton’s supporters said that they would not be inclined to vote for Obama if he gets the nomination. If even half of those sore losers feel the same way on election day, John McCain will be our next president. So, at the very least, those two abusive words were tactically stupid.

Next, there is the question of the preferred “tone” of the post-convention campaign. Aside from a small and shrinking contingent of “dittoheads,” the American public has had just about enough of the right-wing screech-merchants. Evidence? Consider the “retirement” of Tucker Carlson, and declining audience of FAUX News and of Limbaugh, Hannity, Savage, O’Reilly and the other “Lords of Loud.” At the same time, MSNBC, with its emerging contingent of responsible liberals and centrists such as Keith Olbermann, Dan Abrams, and now Rachel Maddow, is overtaking FOX and CNN, while CBS’s 60 Minutes is willing to give air time to an investigation of the Siegelman persecution.

If the public is, at long last, turning away from politics-as-personal-destruction, then it ill-behooves progressive broadcasters to perpetuate this misbehavior by imitating it. The last thing we need this season is a left-wing version of Rush Limbaugh or Ann Coulter. The Republicans, under the tutelage of Lee Atwater and Karl Rove, have perfected the art and craft of political skullduggery. If the Democrats choose to play by the rules of these scoundrels, they will lose. But if, instead, the Democrats treat these tactics with the contempt that they deserve, and direct the public’s attention to indisputable facts and compelling issues, they can win in November, and there is a chance that we might take our country back from the outlaws, thieves and oligarchs.

I am not, however, counseling rhetorical disarmament by asking the Democrats to bring bare knuckles to a knife-fight. Al Gore thought that the “inventing the internet” was unworthy of a reply. So too John Kerry when confronted with the “Swift Boat Vets.” And we know how all that turned out. Be assured that this time, Karl Rove, though out of the White House, is still very much in the fight. So we must be prepared for more of the same gutter politics from the GOP.

But while the Democrats need not fight dirty, they must fight smart. They must use “rhetorical judo,” by turning the opponent’s strength to their own advantage. That is precisely what Rove did with the “swift boat” caper. But that attack, like the Bush/Rove attack on McCain in South Carolina in 2000, was based on lies. The Democrats have more than enough truth in their armory to do fatal damage to the Republicans in November.

There is a fine line between well-deserved ridicule on the one hand and abusive insult on the other. Well-crafted ridicule yields political advantage, while insult has a way of backfiring. The Democrats should watch that line very carefully.

Howard Dean says that the Democrats will not use McCain’s age as an issue. Well, yes and no. Calling him “Grandpa” seems out of line. But pointing out, and, better yet, showing video clips of “senior moments,” is fair game. A candidate’s capacity to function as Chief Executive is most assuredly a valid issue.

McCain has acquired the label, “Senator Bomb-Bomb.” Fair enough. He did, after all, sing “bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran.” The public needs to be reminded that bombing appears to be McCain’s favored “instrument of diplomacy.” And that photo of McCain hugging Dubya deserves to be shown at least as often as the image of Bill Clinton hugging Monica at the rope line. The media will not oblige, of course, but in a country with a genuinely free press, it could be possible. And, more to the point, the McCain/Dubya hug really happened, and that image conveys a deeper truth: that McCain will do anything to further his career, even cozy-up to the man who insulted his wife and child. Furthermore, it bears repeating that McCain is now up close and personal with the detested George Bush and his policies.

Simply put, that fine line between deserved ridicule and insult is the line between truth and slander. Slander is the mother’s milk of Karl Rove and his kind, and slander and lies are all that the Republicans have left. The Democrats have no need of it, for the truth will suffice. As Harry Truman put it, “I didn’t give ‘em Hell, I gave them the truth and they thought it was Hell.”

Let that “truth” be the truth that cruelly impacts the lives ordinary Americans. The truth that their sons are being sent abroad to fight and die in fruitless and immoral wars. That their country has been demeaned by an illegal war and is being led by war criminals who lied us into that war. That their government’s treasury has been looted, that their jobs have been exported; that they have lost or are about to lose their homes, their pensions and their health care.

If these truths can somehow break through the iron curtain of the corporate media, and if somehow enough votes can be fairly counted, the Democrats can win in November.

This can be accomplished without calling our opponents “f***ing whores,” least of all those “opponents” within our own party. Those who resort to such behavior must be condemned, and the public at large must understand that such behavior will not be tolerated within the ranks of the supporters of the Democratic party.

We are better than that. Let the world take note.

Let’s face it: though there is a light-year’s distance between the intellectual capacities and moral qualities of the presumptive candidates, Barack Obama and John McCain, this election campaign promises to be brutal. As Al Gore will testify, a simple “win” will not suffice. GOP partisans own the media and count the votes, and they are even today hard at work throwing millions of Democratic voters off the rolls. Either the Democrats win overwhelmingly or they lose. There will be no photo finish this time.

Even while the pre-convention contest continues, it is not too soon for Democrats to unite. Obama and Clinton must now direct their critical fire, not at each other, but at the presumptive Republican nominee. So too the liberal and progressive advocates on the minuscule authentic “liberal media.” The punditocracy tells us that the early resolution of the GOP contest has worked to the advantage of the Republicans. This need not be so. That same resolution gave the left a singular and very vulnerable target. So have the Democrats used this early decision to their advantage? Don’t be silly!

Leave it the Democrats never to miss and opportunity to miss an opportunity.

It is past time for the establishment Democrats to wise up. Bush, Cheney, Rove, and their chosen supplicant, John McCain, are the enemies, not the Clintons or, alternatively, Barack Obama. The end of the GOP/corporate kleptocracy and the restoration of the American republic and its Constitution are the over-arching issues before us.

Those who promote discord within the party ranks, be they Hillary Clinton or Randi Rhodes, are doing the devil’s work, and they must be marginalized.

If Randi Rhodes uses her unintended hiatus to cool down, reflect, and redirect her considerable talents to an engagement with the appropriate adversaries and issues, then her return to the struggle will be both valuable and welcomed.

We read each others’ papers, we exchange ideas by e-mail, and we invite each other to participate in our seminars and conferences.

On numerous occasions, my libertarian friends have treated me with generosity and respect. I’ve found them to be personable and tolerant of my progressive opinions.

And also unyielding in their convictions.

My libertarian friends, I have discovered, are like the kindly Catholic bishop, who will patiently listen to your heresies, all the while never budging an iota from his absolute faith in the authority of the Pontiff, the truth of the dogma of the immaculate conception, and the sinfulness of birth control.

Likewise, the typical libertarian is steadfast in his beliefs,

* that “there is no such thing as a public” (Ayn Rand) – that (so-called) “society” is nothing more than an aggregation of individuals. It follows that there is no such thing as “the public interest,” “social problems,” or “victims of society.”

* that the profit motive combined with human ingenuity (Julian Simon’s “ultimate resource”) is the primary engine of human progress and the solution to any problems that might arise from industrial civilization.

* that a free market, unconstrained by government regulation, will always produce better results than centrally planned, “collectivized” public enterprises. (“Market Absolutism”)

* that private ownership of natural resources and institutions is always preferable to public ownership: “Whenever we find an approach to the extension of private property rights in these areas, we find superior results.” (Robert J. Smith)

* that the fundamental and exclusive human rights are to life, liberty, and property, and that governments have no legitimate function other than the protection of these individual rights. Accordingly, taxation for any other purposes, such as public education, welfare, promotion of the arts, national parks, or the protection of the environment, is theft.

To yield these principles is to abandon libertarianism itself.

Accordingly, like Ptolemy’s fixed earth around which the sun, the planets, the stars, and the entire universe circulate, these core libertarian dogmas are eternally fixed, and neither, history, practical experience, and occasionally not even science and logic, can be allowed to budge them.

Thus the inevitable collision between libertarianism and climate science over global warming.

This “collision” may be found in the pronouncements and publications of such “conservative” think tanks as The Heritage Foundation, The American Enterprise Institute, The Cato Institute, and the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

Never mind that the two thousand scientists of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), along with the vast majority of qualified scientists of The American Association for the Advancement of Science, The National Academy of Sciences (NAS), The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and the National Center for Atmospheric Research, etc. all affirm the reality of global warming.

(My libertarian friends have never offered me a plausible explanation as to how, if they are right, the overwhelming majority of so many accredited scientists could be so wrong, or what might motivate them to persist in their alleged “errors”).

Secular libertarians are not noted for their rejection of established scientific opinion. They do not, for example, dispute evolution or modern medical science, and in fact their faith in the capacity of applied science (spurred on, of course, by private “competitive enterprise”) to solve any and all pending resource shortages and environmental crises exceeds that of most scientists.

But when it comes to climate science many libertarians treat the results of extensive and lavishly funded research of qualified experts with a skepticism that rivals Bob Jones University’s dismissal of Charles Darwin.

Why is this so?

It is so, because, like Biblical literalism vs. modern biology and structural geology, the fundamental tenets of libertarianism are flatly incompatible with a scientific understanding of the causes of, and the remedies for, global warming. A libertarian who was somehow convinced of these causes and remedies would almost certainly have to give up his or her libertarianism. To be sure, one might maintain one’s insistence upon the privacy rights and the sanctity of individual autonomy, in which case the libertarian might then become a progressive.

Of course, the libertarian, if convinced at last of the validity of the IPCC findings, would have to admit that Al Gore is right, after all. That concession, while painful, would be superficial. Much graver recantations would be in order, involving not personalities but basic libertarian principles.

Regarding the causes of the climate crisis: The overwhelming scientific consensus is that global warming is “anthropogenic;” i.e., caused by human activity, which means largely by industrial activity. The primary chemical culprit is carbon dioxide, released by the consumption of fossil fuels: coal, natural gas, and petroleum. CO2 build-up is a giant-size example of what economists call an “externality:” a effect of economic transactions on unconsenting “third parties.” And externalities are the No.1 nemeses of libertarianism: the compelling justification, time and again, for the regulation and intervention of private enterprise by governments, acting in “the public interest” – which is to say, in behalf of all those unconsenting “third parties.” In this case, those “third parties” are nothing less than all of mankind today and in all succeeding future generations.

With the onset of the industrial revolution, some three hundred years ago, wood fuel and human and animal labor were replaced first with coal and later with petroleum. The advantages of this transition were enormous and therefore irresistible. The effects of this transition upon the global climate (i.e., the “externalities”) were unknown, and until very recently, unknowable. But now, at last, we know.

Simply put, global warming is the by-product of the unconstrained “free market” that is celebrated by the libertarians. Also, let us not forget, it is the by-product of the command economies of the Soviet Union and China, whose governments were as unconcerned about externalities as any of the capitalists.

The industrial revolution, while it has caused untold misery among the working classes, has also brought about incalculable advantages: advances in medicine that have more than doubled the human life span, ease of communication and transportation, material abundance, and an explosion of scientific knowledge and technological capacity. Seated at this computer, with instant access to multiple libraries of information, having just enjoyed a meal of salmon from Alaska, oranges from Florida and avocados from Chile, and hale and hardy past my biblically allotted three-score and ten years, I should be ungrateful indeed if I were to disparage the bounties of industrialization.

But all this does not mean that mankind, upon releasing the fossil energy accumulated through millions of years, was not therefore obliged to study, forecast, and act upon the consequences of that release.

Those consequences fall not simply upon isolated, enterprising individuals, they fall upon a global collective entity — a “public,” a “society,” the existence of which, let us recall, the libertarians refuse to acknowledge. And they also fall upon future generations, who do not vote and do not participate in today’s markets. Moreover, that study, forecasting, and action, by their very collective nature, can not be done by individual entrepreneurs and private corporations, for “where’s the profit in it?”

No, the task of responding appropriately to the gathering climate emergency must fall upon non-economic entities, acting in behalf of mankind at large. Such entities are called “governments.”

Well, those governments have responded, in internal agencies such as the NAS, NCAR, NOAA, and in the United Nations agency, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Add to these, non-profit non-governmental organizations, such as the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

The response of the libertarians to this informed consensus is denial. But how could it be otherwise? Accepting the conclusions of IPCC and the virtually unanimous opinion of climate scientists throughout the world would entail the conclusion that unconstrained market forces, privatization, and moral atomism have brought human civilization to the brink of unspeakable catastrophe.

Regarding the remedies to the climate crisis: Don’t look to private enterprise for a solution to global warming. The fundamental responsibility of the private corporation is to protect investments and ensure the survival of the enterprise. If science won’t serve the corporate interests, then public relations will have to do the job. Case in point: the tobacco industry. So too, “global warming skepticism,” lavishly funded by the coal and petroleum industries. In both cases, the “science” is reversed and therefore fatally compromised, as the corporate order is given: “these are our ‘conclusions,’ now it’s your job to come up with some ‘evidence’ to support them.”

Individual self-interest, the libertarians tell us, is the engine of progress. And it is both spontaneous and sufficient. No need for governments to “plan” or interfere; just leave progress to the benevolent “invisible hand” of the marketplace.

Tragically, those with eyes to see, can see where that approach has led us. Those who cannot see, should look at the satellite photos of the Arctic ice cap, the Antarctic ice shelves, and then learn from the trained eyes of the scientists who have measured the CO2 levels at Mauna Kea, who have examined the Greenland and Antarctic ice cores, who have measured the declining volume of the Greenland ice shield, etc.

All these researches have been sponsored and funded by governments.

Quasi-market solutions, such as carbon trading, while not totally useless, have proven at last to be too little and too late.

And so, some enlightened economists have finally if reluctantly come to the forced conclusion that only a massive, international government effort can avert the looming global catastrophe.

In a New York Times article, published just two days ago, Andrew C. Revkin reports a growing consensus opinion that

What is needed … is the development of radically advanced low-carbon technologies, which … will only come about with greatly increased spending by determined governments on what has so far been an anemic commitment to research and development. A Manhattan-like Project, so to speak….

In an article in the journal Nature last week, researchers concerned with the economics, politics, and science of climate also argued that technology policy, not emissions policy, must dominate.

“Policy” means guidance “from the top.” No place for an “invisible hand” of the market here. “A Manhattan-like Project” means government funding and administration today, just as it did sixty-five years ago at Oak Ridge, Hanford and Los Alamos. Exxon-Mobil won’t do it. Why should they? They are flourishing quite well, thank you very much, in the “awl bidness.” Global warming is a public emergency, requiring a public response.

“Market forces” are not irrelevant to this vast undertaking. Tax incentives and competition for government contracts can stimulate incentive, innovation, and enterprise. For example, windfall profit taxes could be levied on the oil companies, with the proceeds directed back at them earmarked for alternative energy research and development. But market forces, thus utilized, are subordinated to public policy. And the libertarians will have none of it.

It is this uncompromising market absolutism that disqualifies the libertarians from a seat at the table where climate control and remediation policy is to be deliberated.

And so, we arrive at last at the logical crux of the libertarian’s denial of global warming: If the retrospective and prospective conclusions of the IPCC and other scientific bodies are essentially correct, then the core principles of libertarianism are practically unworkable and morally untenable in modern industrial society. The logically valid implication must be that if the fundamental libertarian doctrine is to be maintained, then the multi-million dollar findings of thousands of expert scientists must be summarily rejected. (QED: Modus tolens, for you logic students).

There is an equally valid response for the libertarians: Accept the scientific consensus and abandon your dogmas. (QED: Modus ponens).

C’mon, my libertarian friends, give it up and join the rest of humanity in our common struggle to save the planet for human habitation. I promise, you’ll feel good about it once you’ve taken the plunge.

The monkey is then faced with two choices: let go of the bait and go free or hold on to the bait and be captured. Escaping with the bait is not an option. African monkeys, determined and single-minded critters that they are, usually hold-on until captured.

Hillary Clinton, it seems, is consumed with a monkey-like determination to become the 44th President of the United States, and with that consuming objective in mind, she fails to perceive the context and the likely consequences of her behavior. She has essentially two options: hang on to her determination to win the nomination by any and all means necessary, which, as I will explain below, will almost certainly result in the election of John McCain, or let go of her personal ambition and join a united effort to elect a Democratic President in November. Winning both the nomination and the general election is apparently out of the question.

Most objective observers of the campaign agree that Barack Obama has a near-mathematical lock on the nomination, provided the contest continues according to the party’s rules. In compliance with a signed agreement by both candidates, the unauthorized and uncontested Michigan and Florida primaries are out of play. Any likely compromise resolution of the Michigan and Florida controversies will be of negligible advantage to either side. Obama’s 150 pledged delegate lead can only be overcome by unobtainable two to one Clinton majorities in all the remaining primaries followed by the support of a majority of the super delegates.

Clinton can play fair, or she can play dirty. If she plays fair by following the rules and refraining from smear tactics, she will surely lose the nomination. Given Barack Obama’s unassailable lead among the pledged delegates, it is clear that the super-delegates will not overturn the people’s will as expressed in the primaries and the caucuses. Nancy Pelosi, who leads more than two-hundred super-delegates, has recently announced as much.

So if Clinton is to be nominated, she must overturn rules that she has agreed to, persuade most of the super-delegates to ignore the will of the voters and caucus participants, and to accomplish all this she must diminish Obama’s stature through negative campaigning. Because such tactics also devastate the public opinion of her (not very high to begin with), those same tactics employed to gain the nomination will almost certainly deprive her of the presidency in the general election.

In sum, this is Hillary’s dilemma: Hold on to the bait, and both Clinton and the Democrats lose. Let go of the bait, and Obama wins. Hillary Clinton’s victory in November is not an option.

Clinton began her campaign with the pollsters projecting that about half of the voting population would not vote for her under any circumstances. So to win the presidency, she must somehow reverse a widespread negative public perception of her. And what is this perception? Among other things, that she is shrill, self-serving, unprincipled, manipulative, and untrustworthy. And yet to win the nomination, how must she behave, and thus appear to the public, if she is to overcome Obama’s commanding advantage? She must be, as she now appears to be, shrill, self-serving, unprincipled, manipulative and untrustworthy. In short, in order to win the nomination, she must behave in a manner that will validate a public opinion of her that will surely deprive her of victory in the general election.

And even if her negative campaign against Obama, both overt and covert, fails to capture the nomination, it might well sufficiently damage Obama’s stature to deprive him, along with numerous Democratic Congressional candidates, of success in November. Hence Obama’s guilt by association with Pastor Jeremiah White, and her favoring of McCain’s “experience” over Obama’s “speech-making.” Justly or not, there is a suspicion spreading among rank-and-file Democrats that Hillary’s attitude is “it must be me, or nobody!” Meanwhile, as this bitter rivalry continues we can see a fracturing of the party: Support Clinton? “You’re a racist.” Support Obama? “You’re a sexist.” It’s nonsense, of course. Most of Clinton’s supporters are not racists, and most Obamaphiles have no objection to a woman president; just not that woman. It’s all nonsense, but mischievously divisive nonetheless.

Then there is the issue of “playing by the rules.” Early in the campaign, Clinton, along with the other candidates, signed a statement agreeing not to recognize the delegates of, or to campaign in, the rule-defying states of Michigan and Florida. Now that she desperately needs these votes, she is ignoring her agreement and is demanding as her own the delegates in Michigan, where she was the only candidate on the ballot, and in Florida where Obama, by agreement, did not appear. Having lost in the Texas delegate count, she is attempting to overturn this result in the courts, perchance to be eventually bailed out by the Supreme Court, as was George Bush.

Not content to defy these party rules, she now proposes her own rules. For example, because the “caucus delegates,” have been chosen by an allegedly “less democratic process,” they should not be regarded as equal to “primary delegates.” It just happens that Obama has been more successful in caucuses than in primaries. And now we are told by the Clinton campaign that the Pennsylvania primary should be treated as decisive. Fortunately, not many Democrats seem to be buying that one.

After seven years of Bush/Cheney violations of treaties and international law, of trashing the Constitution, of defying Congressional subpoenas, and of nullifying acts of Congress with signing statements, it is not likely that the American public will have much stomach for another President that regards herself as unbound by rules or, by implication, by laws.

The Democratic Party is caught in the grips of a tragedy, in the classical sense, described by Alfred North Whitehead as “the solemnity of the remorseless working of things” which rational agents can see at work but are helpless to intervene and avert. Historical examples include the drift of the European powers into the First World War, the uncontrolled growth of world population, and the onset of catastrophic climate change. Now a prospective candidate of one of the major parties, consumed by personal ambition, is set upon a course that might well cripple the party and destroy its otherwise excellent prospects of success in the presidential election.

Or possibly not. But in order to put the brakes on this potential train-wreck, the Democratic party elders, which is to say the super-delegates, must take the initiative and intervene. And sadly, the Congressional members among the Democratic super-delegates have not distinguished themselves through their initiatives and interventions against the Bush/Cheney crime syndicate.

What the supers might do, however much I despair of hope that they will, is announce to both candidates: “Either this orgy of party self-immolation and this violation of party rules ends now, or else we will end it forthwith.” They can do so if a sufficient number of the super-delegates endorse the innocent candidate to put that candidate’s total “over the top.”

Failing that, or perchance in addition, the rank and file Democratic voters must voice their displeasure, loud and clear, at the behavior of Hillary Clinton and her campaign.

Only then might Hillary Clinton lose her grip on the prize that she has already lost and cannot regain: The Presidency of the United States.

I suspect that by now those leaders may be having some second thoughts.

For while it was a good thing for the American public to learn about the Mormon faith, Church leaders are now discovering that it is possible to have too much of a good thing.

The thirteen Articles of Faith of the Mormon religion enumerate a set of beliefs, some of which are quite consistent with traditional Christianity, and others which, while unique to Mormonism (e.g., the Book of Mormon), are not outlandish or immediately offensive to most ordinary Christians. (The Articles of Faith were written by the Mormon founder, Joseph Smith, to a Chicago publisher, John Wentworth, in 1842). The Articles say nothing about God once being a mortal human and being one among many Gods, about the brotherhood of Jesus and Satan, about God inhabiting a planet called “Kolob,” or about the “magic underwear” that devout Mormons are required to wear, etc. Nor are you likely to hear about such things from the Mormon missionaries that might appear at your front door.

However, it now seems naive to have supposed that these and other bizarre Mormon doctrines would not be brought to light by Mitt Romney’s political rivals.

Many faithful Mormons are surprised at the astonishment and derision that some LDS beliefs provoke among the general public. This surprise is likely due to the simple and universal fact that beliefs that are taught in childhood and shared in a community of believers are regarded by the faithful as “obvious” and “ordinary,” while at the same time those same beliefs are considered, “from the outside,” to be weird and outlandish.

I can testify to this fact, for I have experienced Mormon doctrine from both the inside and the outside. From childhood, through high school, I shared Mitt Romney’s faith in the Mormon religion. Then that faith totally vanished during my freshman year in college – at Brigham Young University, of all places!

MORMONISM AND ME

If I might be permitted a few autobiographical remarks, this is how it happened.

My high school education was outstanding. I was among a few students selected to attend a “demonstration” school attached to a state teachers’ college, where we were taught by college professors. There I acquired a precociously secular, scientific, and scholarly perspective on human history and institutions. At the same time, my parents (both graduates of BYU and both post-graduates of Columbia University) saw to it that my two brothers and I regularly attended LDS Sunday services. They accepted the conventional view that “Sunday School” was essential to a child’s moral development — a view that I have since come to seriously doubt.

Accordingly, during my adolescence, I carried about in my head, a bifurcated mind. There was “the weekday mind” of ancient dinosaurs, of evolution, of American Indians as migrants from Asia, and above all, of skepticism, scientific discipline and critical thought. Then there was “the Sunday mind” of the Creation in 4004 BC, of the Garden of Eden and Noah’s flood, of the Indians as migrant Israelites (the “Lamanites”), and of faith trumping “man’s reason” — faith: “the substance of things hoped-for, the evidence of things not seen.” (Hebrews, 11:1). I somehow managed the alternation of mind-sets from weekdays to weekends to weekdays again, without undue strain.

But at BYU the shifting of mind-sets from classroom to classroom to library to study hall proved to be untenable. At the end of my sophomore year, I transferred to the University of Utah and majored in Philosophy. Courses in geology, anthropology, new-world archeology, etc., pounded the final nails into the coffin of my childhood faith. In the words of the apostle Paul: “when I was a child, … I thought as a child. But when I became a man, I put away childish things.” (I Corinthians, 13:11) In my mind, the Latter-Day Saints, formerly “us,” became “them,” and since then I have never looked back. (Accounts of this “de-conversion” may be found in my unpublished “A Peculiar People” and “Religion and the Schools: A Dialog”).

Today, the polygamous man-God of Kolob, the magic underwear, the Hebrew-Indians, the translating peep-stones and the golden plates, the farm boy and the angel, “the curse of Cain” upon all people with any African ancestors, baptism for the dead (the Creator of the earth and all human souls being incapable of saving those souls all by himself), etc. — all this and more seem as bizarre to me as they do to most non-Mormons. (The essential tenets of Mormon theology are presented in this remarkable cartoon narrative of unknown origin. It is generally accurate, although there are a few identifiable minor errors. For example, Mormons do not believe that God and Mrs. God came to earth as Adam and Eve).

But equally bizarre to me is the Catholic dogma of transubstantiation (the ritual cannibalism of God’s body), the argument that birth control is contrary to “natural law,” the protestant fundamentalist beliefs in biblical literalism, young-earth creationism, and the doctrine of “the rapture,” the orthodox Jewish ban against eating shellfish or wearing mixed fabrics, and the Islamic belief that the Angel Gabriel handed the Koran to Mohammed. Much worse is the plain immorality of many traditional religious beliefs. These include the belief that the genocide, murder and mayhem chronicled in the Old Testament were condoned and even commanded by the Lord God, that God had ordered that disobedient children, blasphemers, unchaste young women (but not men), and those who toil on the Sabbath be put to death, and that a loving God created billions of souls, all but a few thousand of whom He has condemned and will condemn to eternal damnation and torment. Among those condemned are authentic “secular” saints and martyrs such as Socrates, Marcus Aurelius, Galileo, Voltaire, Gandhi, Jefferson, Sakharov, who somehow failed in their lifetimes to agree with Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell and to accept Jesus as their personal Lord and Savior.

A “RELIGIOUS TEST” FOR PUBLIC OFFICE?

We Americans are traditionally a tolerant people, who believe that one’s personal religious faith should not disqualify one from public office. It is so stated in Article Six of our Constitution: “no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.”

Until recently, I endorsed this pronouncement without qualification. Now, after seven years of George Bush’s “faith-based” administration, I have reservations. Thus, I find the prospect of a Mitt Romney or a Mike Huckabee administration to be unsettling. At the very least, the question of a “religious test” for public office deserves some careful scrutiny.

The issue articulates around the meaning of “religious test.” The term can be interpreted negatively: “no Catholics, Jews, Moslems, or atheists need apply.” Or it can be interpreted positively: “these offices are open exclusively to born-again evangelical Christians” (or other religious persuasion). Article Six of the Constitution notwithstanding, there is, practically speaking, a religious test for the Presidency and for membership in Congress; no self-professed atheist has ever occupied the White House, and only one admitted non-believer is now in Congress (Pete Stark of California), although there may be a few more who associate themselves with a religious denomination out of political necessity.

Does “religious test” refer to an individual’s religious affiliation, or to his or her religious beliefs? Despite the close correlation between affiliation and belief, the distinction is crucial. Exclusion from public office on grounds of religious affiliation is a giant step toward theocracy and the establishment of a state religion. The framers of the Constitution were wise to forbid it.

But once you have identified a person’s religious affiliation, what do you have? Perhaps, not much. Consider, for example, “Mormonism.” There are reportedly over twelve million Mormons. Among them are faithful Mormons like Mitt Romney, with uncompromising “testimonies” of the truth of their beliefs in “the restored Gospel of Jesus Christ,” of the Book of Mormon, of the divine mission of Joseph Smith, and of the divine authority of the “prophet, seer and revelator” in Salt Lake City, who leads the LDS Church. There are, I would guess, at least as many “social Mormons,” who have an abiding respect for the history and traditions of the Church and who enjoy the weekend company of other Mormons, while at the same time rejecting the LDS theology. “Social Mormons” admire, as do I, the strong family values, the integrity, and the in-group solidarity and compassion that is conspicuous among the Mormons. But they may be much less impressed with the indifference of the Church and its members to social and economic injustice. Many of my much-admired professors at the University of Utah were non-believing “social Mormons.” So too, as I was eventually to discover, were my parents.

And finally, because it is extremely difficult to remove one’s name from the membership rosters of the Church, those rolls include individuals who are totally alienated from the Church. When the LDS Church proclaims that there are more than twelve million Mormons, the Church no doubt counts me among them, although I have entered a Mormon church just twice in the last forty years, each time for the funeral services of my parents.

So when Jon Meacham of Newsweek writes that “the world’s nearly 13 million [Mormons] … believe that God … [revealed] the Book of Mormon,” Meacham and Newsweek are flatly wrong.

Because John Kennedy was apparently a “social Catholic” rather than an uncompromising believer in the absolute authority of the Pope and the Vatican, his affirmation of the separation of church and state was quite credible and thus he was fully qualified to serve as President of the United States.

Accordingly, an individual’s religious affiliation, per se, should not disqualify one from public office. But should a person’s religious beliefs enter into a public discussion of that person’s qualification for office? Here the issue becomes complicated and controversial, and the distinction between religious affiliation and religious belief comes into play.

Suppose a candidate for public office identifies himself as a believer in the ancient Aztec religion, and thus an advocate of ritual human sacrifice to the Sun God. In such a case, clearly the vast majority of Americans would say that he is unqualified for public office. I’d venture that those who signed the Constitution would agree. However, I would argue that the correct focus of this objection would not be to his religious affiliation but rather to his public advocacy of human sacrifice.

The same argument would apply, I suggest, to those who would promote policies of burning witches, of trial by combat, and of capital punishment for disobedient children, homosexuals, and blasphemers. True, all such policies issue from religious conviction, but it is the specific policies, not the general religious orientation, that should be of most immediate relevance.

What if a Roman Catholic proclaimed that if elected, he would do his utmost to outlaw all birth control drugs and devices, “because the Pope tells me to do so.” If so, then that person should not hold public office in the United States. Not because of a “religious test” against that candidate because of his Catholic faith but rather because of his attempt to “establish” Catholicism as the ultimate source and sanction of secular U.S. law (contrary to the First Amendment to the Constitution) and to impose his religious beliefs upon citizens that do not share these beliefs.

Similarly, if a candidate of any religious persuasion were to suggest that persons of other faiths, or no faith, must be given a diminished citizenship status in our republic, then that candidate likewise disregards the establishment clause of the first amendment. Those who insist that “this is a Christian nation” are of such a type, as is Mitt Romney when he asserts that he would not appoint an Moslem to high office in his administration.

Finally, suppose a believer in “the end times” proposes to do nothing about global warming, to abolish the Environmental Protection Agency and all environmental protection laws, and to invest nothing in alternative “green” energy sources. He proposes all this because, like Ronald Reagan’s Interior Secretary, James Watt, he devoutly believes that Jesus will soon return to renew the earth, thus making all such policies unnecessary. Again, such a candidate should be judged as unsuited for public office because of his policies, and not because of his religious affiliation. In fact, many evangelical Christians, such as Jimmy Carter, believing as they do in responsible “stewardship” of God’s creation, have an opposite point of view.

Having thus separated a candidate’s religious affiliation from his public policies, I do not wish to suggest that religious faith is irrelevant to one’s conduct in public office. Quite the contrary. If a candidate wishes to tell the world that he intends to be guided in public office by his religious convictions, then a voter is fully entitled to examine those convictions and to speculate as to the behavior and policies that might issue from those convictions. As we have seen, the professed religious convictions of George Bush, of his appointees to high office, and of his supporters in the religious right, have had profound effects upon public policies and legislation regarding global warming, energy, scientific research and development, public health, and foreign policy towards Islamic nations.

With these considerations in mind:

What About Mike Huckabee? Like Jimmy Carter, Mike Huckabee is a Southern Baptist. But Huckabee is no Jimmy Carter. Carter, a trained and certified nuclear engineer, negotiated an amicable personal peace between his religious faith and modern science, and thus his administration was distinguished by Carter’s support of scientific research and education . Huckabee, unlike Carter, does not accept evolution or the scientific account of the age of the earth, and he believes the Bible, from Genesis through Revelation, to be the inerrant word of God.

This is not the sort of leader that the United States requires at this crucial moment in the nation’s and the world’s history. As Al Gore correctly warned us in his Nobel Prize speech, we are facing a planetary emergency. Evidence of rapid and radical climate change comes from data samples that are thousands and millions of years old. Remedial action must take long-term ecological consequences into account. Resources, information and initiatives from the life sciences are urgently needed, and evolution is the central coordinating concept of the biological sciences. The last thing we need in the White House is a man who denies evolution, who believes that the earth is less than ten thousand years old, and who believes that inerrant wisdom resides in a collection of ancient texts by unknown authors.

What About Mitt Romney? Mitt Romney is a man of uncompromising faith in his “restored gospel” and in its living prophet, Gordon Hinkley, the President of the LDS Church. Perhaps Romney believes that he can govern independently of the doctrines of his church and the guidance of its leaders, but I am not convinced. This is a church that proclaims, “when the prophet [LDS President] has spoken, the thinking has been done.” I’d prefer a president who continues to think after an old man in Salt Lake City has had his say.

Romney’s firm grasp on the “iron rod” of LDS doctrine (a Book of Mormon allusion) is not replicated in his announced political and economic policy positions. Far from it. His alternating, weather-vane endorsements and rejections of positions on abortion, gay marriage, etc. have become notorious. We know that Mitt Romney is a faithful and believing Mormon. But what else is he? He gives us little guidance as to his position on public issues, or as to how he would perform as President. In any case, if you don’t like his political position, just be patient. Like Seattle weather, it’s bound to change.

Romney’s so-called “JFK speech” in Texas was alarming to say the least, and had the opposite intention and effect than did Kennedy’s. Bill Curry in the Huffington Post summarized it well: “Kennedy reassured evangelicals that though his faith was different from theirs he’d never impose it. Romney told them his faith wasn’t so different and that in any event he’d be happy to help impose theirs.” Romney, who has announced that Moslems have no place in his administration, effectively demoted non-believers (secularists) to second-class citizenship when he asserted that “freedom requires religion just as religion requires freedom. Freedom and religion endure together, or perish together.” By implication, the irreligious and the non-religious are enemies of freedom.

In that same speech, Romney warned that “in recent years, the notion of the separation of church and state has been taken by some well beyond its original meaning.” He did not spell out that “original meaning,” nor did he explain how he intends to undo this allegedly excessive separation — how, that is, he would reunite church and state in a Romney administration.

I wonder if Romney has given much thought to the meaning and implications of his reassurances regarding the role of religion in American political life.

I can report that this “secularist” is not reassured.

Faith and dogma have got us into our global trap. Trained intelligence, education, critical thinking and courageous political initiative must lead us out.

These essential assets have been in short supply in this political season.

And almost no one has questioned the wisdom of Benjamin Franklin’s establishment in Philadelphia in 1736, of the first municipal fire department in colonial America.

Not until now.

Before fire-fighting became the business of local and state governments, fire-fighters were employed by insurance companies. Plaques placed on the front of homes and businesses identified the companies that underwrote the properties. If a fire alarm was answered by a cadre of fire-fighters from the “wrong” company, that was just tough luck. “Burn, baby, burn!” Many structures were lost while competing companies tried to sort out which was authorized to put out the fire.

Many more adjoining structures were consumed by fires that were oblivious to property lines.

Fires, as it happens, are not reducible to individual incidents affecting particular structures. They are public threats to communities at large. Accordingly, the task of fighting fires is appropriately assigned to municipal agencies, managed and financed by the community, which means, of course by the government. (See my “Privatization and Public Goods”).

Two hundred and seventy-one years of uncontested validation of this simple truth does not faze the libertarians and the regressives (self-described “conservatives”). Some of them are now proposing a giant step backward to privatized fire fighting. As Naomi Klein reports in The Nation:

Just look at what is happening in Southern California. Even as wildfires devoured whole swaths of the region, some homes in the heart of the inferno were left intact, as if saved by a higher power. But it wasn’t the hand of God; in several cases it was the handiwork of Firebreak Spray Systems. Firebreak is a special service offered to customers of insurance giant American International Group (AIG)–but only if they happen to live in the wealthiest ZIP codes in the country. Members of the company’s Private Client Group pay an average of $19,000 to have their homes sprayed with fire retardant. During the wildfires, the “mobile units”–racing around in red firetrucks–even extinguished fires for their clients.

One customer described a scene of modern-day Revelation. “Just picture it. Here you are in that raging wildfire. Smoke everywhere. Flames everywhere. Plumes of smoke coming up over the hills,” he told the Los Angeles Times. “Here’s a couple guys showing up in what looks like a firetruck who are experts trained in fighting wildfire and they’re there specifically to protect your home.”

And your home alone. “There were a few instances,” one of the private firefighters told Bloomberg News, “where we were spraying and the neighbor’s house went up like a candle.” With public fire departments cut to the bone, gone are the days of Rapid Response, when everyone was entitled to equal protection.

Privatized fire fighting? It was a lousy idea in Ben Franklin’s time, and it is lousy idea today.

This is why:

Privatized fire fighting is inefficient. Several separate and uncoordinated fire crews struggling to save separate individual homes are far less efficient than a large, integrated and strategically organized “army” of fire-fighters. Add up the costs of manpower, equipment and losses to the fires, and the latter, coordinated, effort will always win, hands down. This will be so, even if every structure in the area is “protected” by one or another private company of “responders.” Imagine, for example, a street in which a line of houses is insured and protected, sequentially from left to right, by the fire crews of Acme, Inc., Gecko, Inc., Good Hands, Inc., Acme, Inc., Gecko, Inc., Good Hands, Inc. — then add a few more companies, in random order, as you continue down the street. See what I mean? It’s far less expensive and more efficient if one agency is protecting the neighborhood as a unit. But more significantly, this example demonstrates that:

Privatized fire fighting is ineffective. The approach described above — several independent companies protecting individual homes, randomly situated — is comparable to opposing an invading army with individual local police and sheriff departments. An invading army attacking with an integrated force and battle plan can only be defeated by an opposing army with a superior integrated force and battle plan. Supply lines, effective use of available equipment, deployment of personnel, geographical contingencies, must all be taken into account by the opposing generals as they plan attacks, defenses and counter-attacks. Indefensible lands must be yielded and their populations abandoned so that forces might regroup on defensible terrain. Command decisions must be communicated intact through the company commanders to the individual soldiers. Decisive advantage is enjoyed by the side with the accurate “Big Picture” of the entire battle, a “picture” that changes as the battle evolves.

Similarly, the massive wildfires that ravaged southern California in October and November, 2003, and again last month, had to be responded to strategically — with a consideration of available resources, of terrain, and of priorities. “The Big Picture.” Thus a dozen homes, located beyond a defensible fire line (a road or a stream), might have to be sacrificed so that several hundred might be saved. Structures close to water sources and to open roads have higher priority than other structures that are isolated and offer poor means of escape for the fire fighters. The wealth or the insurance arrangements of the respective owners are irrelevant to the strategic planning of the fire fighters.

Community pre-planning and preparation are also essential to disaster management. For example, last month, in the “Grass Valley” fire near my home, the mansions of the “have mores” at Lake Arrowhead were protected by the removal of a million dead and diseased trees by order of the “big government” U.S. Forest Service, and by the local government requirement that flammable brush be removed from the modest homes of the “proletariat.” Cooperative community action combined with a large-scale coordinated response by professional fire-fighters saved the day, as the fire was contained to 1200 acres and the loss of about two hundred out of ten thousand homes.. (See “The California Wildfires and Right Wing Smoke”).

In contrast, a private fire crew, “contracted” to save this particular house at 1234 My Castle Circle (not 1232 and not 1236), has no “big picture” in mind. The total concern of the crew is this house, and this house only.

Clearly, it’s a helluva way to fight a fire.

Privatized fire fighting is immoral. The determined regressive might reply that the neighborhood could avoid the “this house but not that house” problem by agreeing to hire a single private fire fighting company. (However, there would remain the “this neighborhood but not that neighborhood” problem. But let that pass). All members of the neighborhood would then be required to pay a fee to the company – “required,” because those who might otherwise not pay would nonetheless be at least partially protected by the fee-payers, i.e., they would be “free riders.” Hence a “coercion” (and implied “theft of property”) detested by Ayn Rand and the libertarians.

But this scheme puts the “regressive” neighborhood perilously close to installing a public fire department. What’s in a name? Call the neighborhood a “town,” the fee “taxes,” and the fire company a “fire department,” and what is the practical difference?

There is this difference: because of the high fees (due to the inefficiency problem, above) the neighborhood described here would have to be comprised of very wealthy home owners. And having paid exorbitant fees for individual fire protection, they would not be inclined to pay taxes to support city, county and state fire fighting agencies. In fact, San Diego County was ill-prepared for the fires of last month, due to successful tax-cutting proposals by anti-tax, anti-government conservative Republicans.

Accordingly, a privatization of fire protection, along with other emergency management services, increases and solidifies the stratification of society into the “have-nots” and “the have-mores.” “I have mine; you’re on your own.” The community then encompasses the neighborhood, but no more. Beyond the neighborhood is another country. Gone is the civic friendship that binds a nation together — the “equal justice under law,” the shared covenant enshrined in the founding documents of the republic, the sense that the national economy is a cooperative venture comprised of indispensable components: workers, investors, managers, and government.

Instead, we have George Bush’s “ownership society,” wherein today the wealthiest one percent of the population owns more than the bottom ninety percent, and that “ownership” of the oligarchs is increasing. Included in that one-percent of the country effectively “owned” by the “have-mores” are privatized fire and other emergency services, the media, the courts, private armies, the paperless touch-screen machines that count our votes and the secret software that compiles election returns, and, finally, via lobbyists and campaign contributions, the Congress of the United States.

This concentration of wealth and this privatization of essential public services and government functions are both symptoms and causes of a failing democracy and a disintegrating nation.

Our history, our laws, and our shared sense of justice all warn us of this.

It remains to be seen whether we the people of the United States, the “proletariat” 90%, have the collective power and resolution to reverse this slippery slide toward despotism.

But take a close look at those charges and that evidence and I submit that you might find abundant reason to disagree with the jury’s guilty verdict

Despite this initial sentence, the remainder of the Times’ editorial consists of a commendable criticism of “the Bush administration’s serial abuse of the American legal system.” I will have much to say about this “abuse” shortly.

But first, let’s take that close look at the charges and the evidence against Padilla.

The Charges and the Evidence

Padilla and his two co-defendant were found guilty of conspiracy to murder, kidnap and maim overseas, and of providing material support for terrorists. These offenses could result in sentences of life in prison. Sentencing is set for December 5.

The prosecution failed to specifically identify any of the allegedly intended victims of murder, kidnapping and maiming. Furthermore, the defense claimed that the so-called “material support” was, in fact, contributions to Islamic charities.

The crime for which Padilla was initially accused and arrested in June, 2002, plotting to set off a radiological “dirty bomb,” played no part in the trial. From Moscow, the Attorney General, John Ashcroft, announced Padilla’s arrest in Chicago. That announcement and arrest took place, coincidentally or not, just two weeks after FBI agent Colleen Rowley’s explosive disclosure of the FBI’s failure to follow evidence that might have foiled the 9/11 attacks. Following that arrest, the “dirty bomb” allegation faded away, due to lack of evidence.

Just two categories of evidence were presented against Padilla by the prosecution: a “mujahideen data form” with Padilla’s fingerprints, and wiretapped phone calls.

Concerning the “application form,” it is noteworthy that there is no chain of custody linking that form with it’s alleged “discovery” among a truckload of documents hauled out of Afghanistan. That form could have been handed to Padilla at any time during his three and a half years in custody. Also, strange to say, those fingerprints are found only on two of the five pages. There is no evidence that Padilla ever attended the “training camp” to which he had allegedly applied.

Regarding the wiretaps, Lewis Z. Koch reports,

The prosecution has in its possession 300,000 wire taped conversations involving Padilla’s two alleged co-conspirators Adham Hassoun and Kifak Jayyousi, of which 230 were the core of its case. Only 21 of these 300,000 make reference to Padilla. Of these the government produced 7, count ‘em 7, phone calls with Padilla’s voice and not one making a reference to the charges he was indicted on “murder, or kidnaping or maiming.”

In the final paragraph of the aforementioned New York Times editorial, we are assured that “a would-be terrorist will be going to jail.” “Would-be?”

At best, the prosecution proved that Padilla “intended” to receive al Qaeda training, and “intended” to “murder, kidnap and maim.” There was not a scrap of evidence that he acted on any of these intentions. And so, simply stated, Padilla was convicted of “thought-crime” and “pre-crime” (as depicted in the 2002 movie, “Minority Report”).

(For still more condemnation of the Padilla trial and verdict, see Paul Craig Roberts’ “Padilla Jury Opens Pandora’s Box,” Lewis Z. Koch’s running commentaries on the trial, and the comments that followed the Common Dreams of the New York Times editorial).

Was Padilla guilty as charged? Frankly, I don’t know. I did not attend the trial and did not hear the evidence and arguments. But of this much, I am confident: that evidence and those arguments did not rise to the level of “beyond reasonable doubt.” And in our legal system — at least, that system pre-Bush — failure to achieve that degree of certitude calls for a verdict of not guilty.

Furthermore, Padilla’s treatment prior to his trial, was of itself grounds for a directed acquittal from the bench. Nonetheless, not only did the defense’s motion for acquittal fail, the circumstances of Padilla’s three and a half year incarceration in a Naval Brig were ruled inadmissible at the trial. The jury heard nothing about it.

Incarceration and the “Goddam piece of paper”

The treatment of Jose Padilla, an American citizen, following his initial arrest in June, 2002, was totally alien to the American legal system. It was more in tune with Nazi and Soviet practice — with the treatment of Winston Smith in George Orwell’s 1984, and of Rubashov in Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon.

Fred Grimm of The Miami Herald, thus described Padilla’s confinement:

[He] was held in extreme isolation for 1,307 days. Held in a nine-by-seven-foot cell. The only window blacked out. He was the lone prisoner on the two-tier cellblock. He was given food through a slot in the door. He slept on a steel mattress. No reading material. No calendar. No clock. Nothing to connect him to the outside world…

Psychiatrist Dr. Angela Hegarty, who interviewed Padilla for twenty-two hours, adds to this description:

In this very small cell, he was monitored twenty-four hours a day, and the doors were managed electronically….He had no way of knowing the time. The light was always artificial. The windows were blackened.. He really didn’t see people, especially in the beginning. He only had contact with his interrogators.

In addition, no radio, no television, no telephone, no visitors, and for almost two years, no lawyer.

All this, mind you, was done to a prisoner who was not formally charged with a crime and thus, according to our system of jurisprudence, presumed to be innocent.

Consequently, Dr. Hegarty reports, when his family was at long last allowed to see Padilla,

[They] said he was changed. There was something wrong. There was something very “weird” — was the word one of his siblings used — something weird about him. There was something not right. He was a different man. And the second thing was his absolute state of terror, terror alternating with numbness, largely. It was as though the interrogators were in the room with us. He was like — perhaps like a trauma victim who knew that they were going to be sent back to the person who hurt them and that he would, as I said earlier, he would subsequently pay a price if he revealed what happened..

Also … he had developed really a tremendous identification with the goals and interests of the government. I really considered a diagnosis of Stockholm syndrome. For example, at one point in the proceedings, his attorneys had, you know, done well at cross-examining an FBI agent, and instead of feeling happy about it like all the other defendants I’ve seen over the years, he was actually very angry with them. He was very angry that the civil proceedings were “unfair to the commander-in-chief,” quote/unquote. And in fact, one of the things that happened that disturbed me particularly was when he saw his mother. He wanted her to contact President Bush to help him, help him out of his dilemma. He expected that the government might help him, if he was “good,” quote/unquote.

Dr. Hegarty’s account vividly brings to mind the closing lines of Orwell’s 1984, as the broken and condemned Winston Smith reflects:

O cruel, needless misunderstanding! O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast! Two gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.

Dr. Hegarty concludes: “… as a clinician, I have worked with torture victims and, of course, abuse victims for a few decades now, actually. I think, from a clinical point of view, he was tortured… What happened at the brig was essentially the destruction of a human being’s mind. That’s what happened at the brig. His personality was deconstructed and reformed.”

Before me is a copy of the Constitution of the United States, a document that George Bush took an oath to “protect and defend,” and about which the same George Bush reportedly described as “a Goddam piece of paper.”

In that Constitution, the supreme law of the United States of America, I find the following guarantees to all citizens, including Jose Padilla (and to all “persons,” for that matter):

The privilege of the writ of habeas corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in cases of rebellion or invasion the public safety may require it. (Article One, Section Nine).

No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury. (Bill of Rights, Article Five)

…nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law. (Bill of Rights, Article Five).

In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the assistance of counsel for his defence. (Bill of Rights, Article Six)

In suits at common law, where the value in controversy shall exceed twenty dollars, the right of trial by jury shall be preserved. (Bill of Rights, Article Seven).

Excessive bail shall not lie required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted. (Bill of Rights, Article Eight).

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws. (Fourteenth Amendment).

All these unequivocal guarantees to all citizens, stipulated by the Constitution, the supreme law of the United States, were violated in the case of Jose Padilla vs. the United States.

In ordinary criminal cases, massive prosecutorial bungling of a defendant’s Constitutional rights is grounds for directed dismissal of charges.

But not in the case of Jose Padilla vs. the United States. This was a case that the Bush administration simply could not afford to lose. From the time of his arrest in June, 2002, Padilla was the trophy prisoner, the “designated villain.” As that arrest was a political act, so too must be his incarceration and eventual conviction. It was simply not allowable that the Constitution, that “Goddam piece of paper,” interfere with this political theater.

But the Busheviks are not yet home free. The Padilla case now goes to the appellate courts. Even so, if the conviction is overturned on appeal, there follows the Supreme Court. Given the recent rulings of that Court, in particular Bush v. Gore in December, 2000, the outcome there is uncertain, and portentous. For if the Supremes forsake the Constitution in the Padilla case, what protections remain for the rest of us?

Jose Padilla and You

Step by step, through acts of Congress and unchallenged executive orders, we Americans have been transformed from free citizens of a democratic republic to subjects of an arbitrary dictatorship. Whereas we were once protected by our Constitution and the rule of law, we now remain “at liberty” at the whim of the government.

A majority of Americans might say, with some justification, “I am not a terrorist, I have not openly complained against the government, so I have nothing to fear.”

Unfortunately for those of us who protest, who publish, speak and demonstrate against the Bushevik regime, the imprisonment and subsequent trial of Jose Padilla gives us abundant reason to be fearful. Nor is the Padilla case exceptional, as indicated by the treatment of US citizens John Walker Lindh, Yassir Hamdi, Muslem Chaplain James Yee, along with hundreds of uncharged and unrepresented “detainees” at Guantánamo and elsewhere. The Bill of Rights explicitly apply, not to “citizens,” but to “persons.”

The peril to all opponents to the Bush regime follows directly from Bush’s pronouncement to Congress on September 20, 2001: “either you are with us or you are with the terrorists.” From the logical rule of “disjunctive syllogism,” the conclusion follows: “if you are not with “us” (presumably the Bush regime), then you are with the terrorists.” Put more bluntly: dissent is treason. The option of “loyal opposition” – opposition to both official government policy and to terrorist – is rejected by Presidential fiat.

Dave Lindoff asks:

Who is at risk? That’s hard to say, but it’s clear that it won’t just be hardened terrorist types. A presidential executive order signed by Bush on July 17 declares that anything “undermining efforts to promote economic reconstruction (sic) and political reform (sic) in Iraq” could be deemed a crime making the perpetrator subject to arrest. Would writing essays critical of the president, the war in Iraq, or the “reconstruction” effort in Iraq meet that standard? Who knows? Would being interviewed for commentary as part of a news story on English-language Al Jezeera TV? … And how about anti-war protesters?

The Constitution stipulates the right of all citizens to engage in such dissenting activities. But as we have seen, the Bush regime, with the collaboration of Congress, has set aside the Constitution — “a Goddam piece of paper,” the President calls it. And to date, the Democratic Congress has failed to restore the right of habeas corpus or any other citizen rights cancelled by the Republican administration and Congress.

The Military Commissions Act of September, 2006, gives the President, through his appointed “Combat Status Review Tribunals,” the power to identify almost anyone an “illegal enemy combatant” virtually at his own say-so. To be sure, there are restrictions in the Act, but they are so vague and ambiguous as to be meaningless and unenforceable.

In effect, says Keith Olbermann,

We have handed a blank check drawn against our freedom to a man who may now, if he so decides, declare not merely any non-American citizens “unlawful enemy combatants” and ship them somewhere — anywhere — but may now, if he so decides, declare you an “unlawful enemy combatant” and ship you somewhere — anywhere…

And if you somehow think habeas corpus has not been suspended for American citizens but only for everybody else, ask yourself this: If you are pulled off the street tomorrow, and they call you an alien or an undocumented immigrant or an “unlawful enemy combatant” – exactly how are you going to convince them to give you a court hearing to prove you are not? Do you think this attorney general is going to help you? (For a concurring opinion, see The New York Times editorial of September 28, 2006).

So it comes to this: those of us who openly oppose the policies of the Bush administration, are free today at the whim of the Bush administration — simply because the Busheviks choose not to seize all our assets (cf. Executive Order, July 17, 2007) or to round us up and “preventively detain” us.

To be sure, Bush’s newly-acquired dictatorial powers are not total. He dare not “disappear” Congressional dissenters such as Russ Feingold or Dennis Kucinich, or media critics such as Keith Olbermann. Not yet. Such overt acts could, at last, mobilize Congressional and media opposition sufficiently to put an end to the this incipient dictatorship. But these are practical limitations. As the Padilla case has vividly demonstrated, legal constraints have been effectively abolished.

If such “practical limitations” are all that we have left, then let us use them to fullest advantage. Bush/Cheney, Inc., might be able to silence and incarcerate dozens of insignificant wretches such as Padilla, Lindh, Yee, etc. Perhaps even hundreds or thousands. But not yet members of Congress or media critics, or prominent dissenters such as Al Gore and ex-Presidents Carter and Clinton. Least of all the organized and massed protests of millions of ordinary citizens.

While the door to a restoration of our liberties still remains unlocked, we must push it open and rush through it. Waiting for others to effect our rescue and hoping for the best, will only permit the oppressors to lock that door.

Pastor Martin Niemoller’s warning is as valid today as ever:

In Germany they came first for the Communists, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Communist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Jew. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a trade unionist. Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn’t speak up because I was a Protestant. Then they came for me, and by that time no one was left to speak up.

Consider an extreme and unlikely example, but nonetheless illustrative: Suppose the Supremes were to rule (five to four, of course), that “The United States is a Christian nation,” and that henceforth, only confessing Christians could hold public office. Such a ruling would, of course, directly contradict Article Six and the First Amendment to the Constitution. But such considerations have not constrained this Supreme Court or its predecessor. The Constitution also stipulates that the states are to determine the electors in a presidential election. (Article 2, Section 1) In Bush v. Gore, the Supremes ignored that when they brushed aside the Florida Supreme Court’s ruling that a statewide recount of the vote must continue. The same court in the same decision, set aside the rule of stare decisis (precedent) when it wrote that “Our consideration is limited to the present circumstances.”

The Roberts Court has found no occasion to restore habeas corpus or to reaffirm the Fourth Amendment prohibition of search and seizure, both of which are required by the Constitution, and both of which are openly violated by the Military Commission Act and by Bush’s admitted defiance of FISA. And just last month, in Hein v. Freedom from Religion Foundation, the Roberts Court moved half the distance toward an establishment of religion, when it allowed federal tax revenues to be distributed to religious agencies selected by the Bush’s White House.

Suppose further that in 2008 a Democratic President and an overwhelmingly Democratic Congress is elected. The Congress then proceeds to enact, and the President to sign, legislation depriving corporations of “personhood” status, instituting single-payer medical coverage, reforming campaign finance, etc. — in short, repealing the abuses of the Bush regime and the GOP Congress and instituting progressive reforms. And then, one by one, all these are voided by the Supreme Court, with rulings that are flimsy at best, and more often plainly absurd, and none of them open to appeal. In short: a nullification by one branch of government of the remaining two branches.

The Constitution of the United States provides checks and balances, to prevent unwarranted exercise of power by branches of the federal government. The Congress is restrained by the President’s veto power, and the President is kept in check by the Congressional option of impeachment and removal from office. Both the executive and the legislative branches are constrained by Supreme Court’s “judicial review” of enacted laws and executive orders. (“Judicial review,” however, is not specified in the Constitution. It was established in 1803 in the landmark case, Marbury v. Madison).

While specifying “checks and balances” against the President and the Congress, the framers of the Constitution failed to likewise constrain the powers of the Supreme Court, other than to allow impeachment if the judges failed to “hold their offices during good behavior,” a vexing and vague condition, to say the least. (Article 3, Section 1). All federal officers take an oath to “support the Constitution” (Article 6). But that requirement raises a troubling paradox: How is the Court, or a Justice of the Court, or a ruling of the Court, to be judged to violate the Constitution, when the Court itself is the final interpreter of the Constitution?

Apparently the framers couldn’t imagine a time when the Supreme Court itself might become an outlaw, and thus they provided us with no remedy.

Such a time is upon us now, soon to be followed by a desperate search for a remedy.

Facing judiciary tyranny, what is the next President, the Congress, and the vast majority of the voters that elected them, to do?

Testifying under oath before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Roberts and Alito both promised to decide cases as “umpires,” without “agendas” or “any preferred outcome in any particular case.” And they said they would be guided by precedent: stare decisis. They lied, of course, as is evident in their recent decisions. Unfortunately, since their rulings are open to endless interpretation, charges of perjury will likely lead nowhere.

In view of their few rulings to date (and I fear, far worse to come), it appears that the five controlling justices (Roberts, Alito, Kennedy, Scalia and Thomas) do not see themselves as the guardians of established law and the Constitution. They are activists, championing the agenda of the mega-corporations and the religious right, at the expense of the rights of minorities, the poor, and ordinary individual citizens. They are, in short, the judicial exemplars of Bush-Cheney Inc.

And nothing, it seems, can stop them. Least of all the Democrats in the Congress as now constituted, who, after all, allowed the confirmation of Roberts and Alito.

Are there no remedies?

To say that there are none, is to surrender before the struggle even begins. As Abraham Lincoln reportedly said, “the Constitution is not a suicide pact.” So if the framers neglected to provide an easy solution to judicial tyranny, they surely did not intend to allow it by default. It is our task to find a remedy, otherwise we will meekly submit to repression. Here are some suggestions.

Impeachment due to perjury. Clarence Thomas told the Judiciary Committee that he never gave an idle thought to Rowe v. Wade. He also testified that he did not sexually harrass Anita Hill. Might there not still be eyewitness, written, or other testimony and evidence proving that Thomas committed perjury? This approach is not very promising. The evidence is cold, and perhaps Thomas is protected by the statue of limitations. (Lawyers, please help me with this). The Roberts and Alito lies under oath are, as noted above, “open to interpretation,” and thus can not overcome the “beyond reasonable doubt” standard.

The “Good Behavior” condition. It is likely that a $50 million Ken Starr type investigation would uncover some dark secrets in the lives of “the regressive five” on the court. But the country can ill afford still more politics of personal destruction. There are two edges to this sword, which can cut away any and all of the comity that is pre-requisite to productive political activity. Furthermore, the “good behavior” condition likely applies to conduct while on the bench, and there is no evidence that any of the Five have “behaved badly” in the ordinary sense. They have “behaved badly” in their recent rulings, but this is a judicial rather than a moral judgment, and surely not what the framers had in mind by their “good behavior” condition.

A Constitutional Amendment. One might imagine a constitutional amendment allowing the removal a Supreme Court justice upon two-thirds vote in both Houses of Congress. Or it might abolish life-time appointments and require periodic reconfirmation. (The specifics are not important, just the principle that the power of the Court might be curtailed by Constitutional Amendment). This might be an ideal long-term solution, made more feasible by the abuses that we have and will see in this Court. But it will not suffice for the short- or mid-term, when The Roberts Five may do the most damage.

Nullification of the Bush Administration Appointments. This, admittedly, is a long shot — bordering on fantasy. But who knows? It just might work.

Suppose that, at long last, we have proof-positive that the 2000 and 2004 elections were stolen. By this I mean indictments, jury trials, guilty verdicts and convictions, resulting from confessions, and “smoking gun” physical and documentary evidence (e.g., internal memos from Diebold and expert examination, at last, of the “proprietary” source codes).

Proving a stolen presidential election is less difficult than one might suppose. Provide such proof in one large state (say Florida in 2000 and Ohio in 2004), and we have proof that the election was obtained through criminal activity. The capper would be proof that this felonious activity extended all the way up to Karl Rove and the RNC, and that both Bush and Cheney were aware of it. Ideal, but perhaps not necessary.

With all this in the public and legal record, might not a post-2008 Congress rule that all appointments during the illegitimate Bush-Cheney administration were null and void? It would follow that judges appointed by Bush and confirmed by Congress would, at the very least, be required to submit to new hearings before the Judiciary Committees and subject to re-confirmation. Roberts and Alito would then be vulnerable. This strategy has the added advantage of clearing out the Bush-troglodytes from the Federal appellate courts.

Court Packing. Nowhere in the Constitution is it specified that the Supreme Court must contain nine members. With the ratification of the Constitution, there were five. There is thus no constitutional prohibition to adding two more justices, thus putting The Regressive Five in the minority. Franklin Roosevelt tried to increase the number of justices to thirteen and was rebuffed by the Congress, and since then political scientists and legal scholars have, by and large, held FDR’s ploy in low regard. But if the Roberts Court proves to be as contemptuous of the President, the Congress, and legal precedent as it appears they might by their current behavior, then desperate measures are in order. And court packing is entirely permissible under the law.

I am not a legal or constitutional scholar. Perhaps I have overlooked a solution that is more promising than any of the above. I devoutly hope so. If there any such solutions, please let me know, and I will share it with all who regularly read my essays.

There must be an escape from the judicial tyranny that Bush, Cheney and the GOP has foisted upon all of us.

It is our task, and that of our representatives, to find it.

[The individual] neither intends to promote the public interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it… [H]e intends only his own security; and by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention.

An unyielding faith in the infallible beneficence of “the invisible hand,” leads to “market absolutism” — the doctrine that whatever government attempts, privatization and the free-market can do better.

What market absolutists (unlike Smith) fail to notice, is that not all workings of “the invisible hand” are beneficial. Some unintended consequences of market activity are harmful — “the back of the invisible hand.” Economists call these “market failures.”

One cannot enroll in an Introduction to Economics class, without encountering the concept of “market failure” – the acknowledgment that a totally unconstrained and unregulated free market can, at times, have socially undesirable consequences (as I will exemplify below). It is one of the most obvious and incontrovertible facts of economics. Almost all of us are aware of market failures, whether or not we have ever studied economics.

Some students of Econ. 101 choose to major in Economics, and a few of these earn doctorates in the field. Those scholars who go on to work for The Heritage Foundation, The American Enterprise Institute, The Cato Institute, and other such “conservative think-tanks” somehow manage to completely forget about “market failures.” The free unregulated market, they tell us, always brings about the socially optimum result. Some examples (with my italics):

    * “In the free market, the individual would have to produce a good that the other person desired in order to receive a good in return. Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” of the market guides all participants in society to promote the best wishes of everyone else by pursuing his own wants and desires.” (Jacob Halbrooks)

    * “[T]he free market allows more people to satisfy more of their desires, and ultimately to enjoy a higher standard of living than any other social system… We need simply to remember to let the market process work in its apparent magic and not let the government clumsily intervene in it so deeply that it grinds to a halt.” (David Boaz, Libertarianism, a Primer, p. 40, 185.)

    * “A free market [co-ordinates] the activity of millions of people, each seeking his own interest, in such a way as to make everyone better off… Economic order can emerge as the unintended consequence of the actions of many people, each seeking his own interest.” (Milton and Rose Friedman: Free to Choose, pp 13-14).

Accordingly, governments should never interfere with markets. Furthermore, governments should not own property, which is better managed by private individuals. So argues the libertarian, Robert J. Smith: “The problems of environmental degradation, pollution, overexploitation of natural resources, and depletion of wildlife all derive from their being treated as common property resources. Whenever we find an approach to the extension of private property rights in these areas, we find superior results.” (My italics). “All,” “whenever” — no compromise or qualification here!

In short: let the free market decide. The mysterious “invisible hand” of the free market will “promote the best wishes of everyone..,” (Halbrooks), “[allow] more people to satisfy more of their desires” (Boas), and “make everyone better off” (Freidman).

Practical experience tells us otherwise:

    * The unconstrained chemical industry promoted pesticides and caused extensive damage to the ecosystem, until the public and then the government, aroused by Rachel Carson’s book, Silent Spring, put a stop to it.

    * Similarly, the chemical industry strenuously resisted demands that it cease the manufacture and distribution of chloro-fluorocarbons (CFCs), when atmospheric scientists discovered that the CFCs were eroding the stratospheric ozone, which protects the earth’s inhabitants from ultra-violet radiation. Once again, the federal government, joined by the governments of other industrialized nations, enforced a ban on CFCs.

    * Scientific warnings about global climate change (“global warming”) were countered by “junk science” sponsored by the energy industry. Now, at last, as the fact of climate change becomes undeniable and widely acknowledged, the same industry is promulgating the “line” that climate change may not be all that bad, and might even be beneficial. Clearly, mankind can not count on private enterprise to solve this grave crisis. Only international agreement among the industrial nations will suffice. Meanwhile, the Bush administration, on behalf of its “sponsors” the energy industry, is resisting international action.

    * Reduced labor costs yield increased profits and increased dividends to the stockholders of the corporation. Thus, if workers abroad accept wages that are a fraction of the wages demanded in the United States, then the “responsible” policy of the corporation executives is to re-locate jobs abroad. “Outsourcing.” The consequences to the displace workers, and eventually to the national economy, is devastating. But strictly speaking, that is not the concern of the corporation. Not, that is, unless the government intervenes with tariffs, tax incentives, regulations, and laws.

    * Finally, the tobacco industry, whose corporate responsibility to its stockholders is to maximize profits, successfully marketed its products to the point where half of the US population were smokers. As a result, almost a half million Americans die prematurely each year — more than the total US casualties in World War II. Today, only a fifth of adult Americans are smokers. No thanks to the industry. Once again, government intervention, vigorously and persistently opposed by the tobacco industry, has curtailed marketing and has publicized the health hazards of smoking, saving the health and lives of millions.

We are all quite familiar with these “market failures,” and many more. It is obvious that, in numerous undeniable cases the unregulated free market fails to “make everyone better off,” as Milton Friedman would have us believe. So why, if market failures are so compellingly obvious, should we even bother to mention them? The answer is that our present government is dominated by individuals who behave as if they don’t recognize these malevolent consequences of free markets. So one after another, regulations and laws designed to correct market failures are being dismantled, as government regulatory agencies are staffed with lobbyists and officers from the corporations that these agencies are charged to regulate.

But why do markets fail to produce optimal results for society at large? Railroad tycoon, William Vanderbilt (1856-1938) said it all: “the public be damned, I work for my stockholders.” Moreover individual entrepreneurs and workers also want and strive for what is best for themselves. Indeed, as any neo-classical economist will insist, personal want-satisfactions (e.g., profits) are what drive an economy.

Implicit in market absolutism and libertarianism is the belief that what is best for each individual and each corporation is best for all individuals – in other words, for “society at large.” As President Eisenhower’s Secretary of Defense, Charles Wilson, put it: “What is good for General Motors, is good for the country.” (For a refutation, see my “Good for Each, Bad for All”).

Market absolutism, like “young-earth creationism” and biblical literalism, is a dogma, and thus it is untouched by hard evidence and practical experience. “Market — good; Government — bad. Period! Now don’t confuse us with the facts.”

Those who are not captivated by the dogma of market absolutism (i.e., most of us), know better. We trust the scientists who tell us that pesticides damage the ecosystem, that CFCs erode the ozone in the stratosphere, that the continuing use of fossil fuels is changing the climate. And we know that smoking causes lung cancer and premature death — the cigarette packs tell us so, not because the tobacco companies warn us out of a sense of social responsibility, but because the government requires them to print the warnings.

Government regulation, and laws restricting commercial activity, arise, not from dogma, but through accumulated practical experience and political action. As human institutions they are imperfect, which means, to be sure, that they are sometimes excessive. The appropriate response to “insolence of office” is reform, not abolition of the office — reform through the same processes of practical experience and political action.

As James Galbraith puts it:

A new spirit of pragmatism surely requires that we discard the metaphor of market determinism — whole and entire. No more, let us bow and scrape before that altar. Markets have their place — they are a reasonably open and orderly way to assure the distribution of services and goods. They are not a general formula for the expression of social will and the working out of social problems.

Corporations quite properly work for the stockholders, and private individuals, in their economic activities, work for themselves and their families. But when these corporate interests and private activities cause social harm, who or what is most authorized to act in behalf of society – of all the people?

The solution is the same in all civilized societies: the law and the government that enacts and enforces the law. To be sure, law and government can be despotic and oppressive, and when they are, “it is [the] right, it is [the] duty” of the people “to throw off such government.” (The Declaration of Independence). Such “despotism” surely includes the situation that we face today, as the corporations that should be regulated by government, instead have taken control of the government. However, in liberal democratic countries, law and government, unlike private enterprises, are authorized to act in behalf of the public at large. This, the unregulated free market can not do and must not presume to do.

There is nothing new or startling about these political principles. They are enshrined in our founding documents:

We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights; that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness. That, to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That, whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government… (Emphasis added).

And note in the Preamble to the Constitution, these enumerated legitimate functions of government: “… establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.”

And yet, the dogma of the ruling elites would ordain that we put all these founding principles aside, and in matters of public interest and social welfare, “let the market decide.”

These individuals have the nerve to call themselves “conservatives.”

The same Administration has conducted warrantless surveillance of American citizens in violation of the Fourth Amendment of the Bill of Rights, and despite an explicit order of the Supreme Court to cease and desist.

And the Administration, in violation of ratified treaties which have the force of law (Article Six of the Constitution), is engaged in an undeclared war against a non-threatening nation, and is torturing prisoners. The treaties are, respectively, the Nuremberg Accords and the Geneva Conventions.

The President, upon signing Congressional legislation, issues “signing statements” which state, in effect, that he can, at his discretion, ignore the legislation above his signature. And he has issued a “directive” that, in event of some unspecified “emergency” so designated by himself, he can assume dictatorial powers.

Nor is this the end of it. As most readers are well aware, there have been numerous additional illegal acts by the Bush Administration, including the “outing” of a covert intelligence officer, obstruction of justice, and lying to the Congress and the American people.

The institution best situated to put an end to these crimes and to hold the criminals accountable to the rule of law is the Congress of the United States, each member of which has taken an oath to “protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”

Five months into its new term, the Congress now in control of the Democratic party has done essentially nothing to restore the rule of law and the supremacy of the Constitution. The initial decisive act leading to that end might be as simple as the passage of this two sentence resolution:

The Congress of the United States hereby affirms that the Constitution is the supreme law of the United States. Accordingly, any and all legislation and executive orders in violation of the Constitution are null and void.

The word “affirms” is crucial, for it states that at no time was the Constitution legally “in suspension,” and thus any legislation or acts by the Bush administration in violation thereof were at all times illegal and invalid. Accordingly, the word “restoration” must be avoided in such a resolution.

The Democrats should bring this resolution to a vote, and dare the Republicans to vote against it. The GOP would doubtless resist by calling it a “meaningless political stunt,” and would struggle to prevent an open vote. But if it were to be brought to a vote, who would dare go on record with a denial that the Constitution is the supreme law of the land?

And if such a resolution were to pass both houses of Congress, it should be immediately followed by other resolutions specifying the implications of that first resolution. Namely,

* It is affirmed that all US citizens and other individuals under US jurisdiction enjoy the protection of Habeas Corpus, as specified in Article 1, Section 9 of the Constitution.

* Therefore, all persons in custody at Guantánamo and other prisons must either be charged with a crime and given a fair trial, or released. Following that, the Guantánamo facility must be closed and all “renditions” of prisoners to other countries cease.

* All torture of so-called “enemy combatants” must cease immediately.

* All provisions of the Patriot Act and the Military Provisions Act in violation of the protections of the Constitution must be declared null and void.

* Acts of Congress signed by the President have the status of law, and signing statements have no legal status whatever.

In addition, the Congress should act upon the following:

* Cite Attorney General Gonzales for perjury, obstruction of justice and contempt of Congress. Then proceed with his impeachment.

* End the funding of the Iraq occupation, except for the funds required for the prompt withdrawal of American troops from Iraq.

* Proceed with investigations and then indictments for war profiteering, with special attention directed toward Halliburton and its ex-CEO, Dick Cheney.

* At long last, investigate election fraud by e-voting machines, intimidation, and voter disenfranchisement (e.g., through “caging lists”).

* Above all, issue bills of impeachment of Bush and Cheney, followed by investigations, hearings and open debate.

Impeachment is being resisted by “practical” Democratic politicians on the grounds that even if it succeeded in the House, conviction and removal from office would surely fail in the Senate.

I am not at all certain of this, in view of what might result from the House investigations and debate. But this objection misses the point. Ultimate conviction and removal may be less important than the impeachment process and the evidence and prosecution case that would result from it. Once the high crimes and misdemeanors of Bush and Cheney are brought to light, those who vote against impeachment in the House and conviction in Senate may pay a high price at the polls.

In the meantime, what is the progressive citizen and voter to do? Both parties have betrayed the trust of the American public and have violated their oaths to protect and defend the Constitution. Thus those of us who are justifiably disgusted with both parties, are faced with daunting dilemma:

One the one hand, should we punish the Democrats by voting for third parties? Such a decision serves to keep the Republicans in power which would keep the culprits forever unaccountable for their crimes.

On the other hand, should we vote for the Democrats, as the lesser of the evils? If so, the party might construe this as public approval of its delinquent behavior.

With much reluctance and regret, I would opt for the latter alternative, all the while putting a well-deserved scare into the ranks of the “establishment” Democrats.

Most immediately, all Democrats who voted for Bush’s Iraq resolution and otherwise collaborated with the outlaw regime should be challenged in the primaries. A few might lose their seats to such challenges, though most would not. But even if the challenges fall short, strong showings at the polls by the progressive challengers will send a message: we the people are here, we protest, and we demand to be heard.

If that protest fails to reform the Democrats, then perhaps it will be time to look to third parties. The Democrats must understand that this remains a live option.

Finally, progressives must take a lesson from the religious right and take over the Democratic Party from the bottom up. Get active in local and state party activities, send progressives to the state conventions and then to the national convention. Far better to take control of an existing major party organization than to attempt to build a national organization for a minor party.

The good news for the Democrats is that public approval of Bush is down to around thirty percent. The bad news is that the public approval of the Democratic Congress is not much above that: thirty-seven percent, down from forty-four percent in April. And the worst news is that this poor and declining public opinion of the Democratic Congress is well-deserved.

There is no other way to put it: the Congressional Democratic leadership (with a few honorable exceptions) has failed the American public and has violated its oath to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.

We must demand that they wake up and do their duty, assuring them that if they do, they will earn the respect and support of their constituents.

Thus began a grand experiment: Release the American economy from the bonds of government regulation. Individual enterprise and initiative, the profit motive, the free market and open competition will usher in a new birth of freedom and a new era of unprecedented prosperity.

“It’s morning in America.”

Twenty-six years later, what do we have? A dismantled and “outsourced” industrial base, an impoverished work force, a nine trillion dollar debt burden upon future generations, and a degradation of education and scientific research, and a captive media that deprives the public of essential news as it issues outright lies. In addition, the Bush administration, the current keeper of the covenant, has accomplished the trashing of the Constitution and its guaranteed Bill of Rights, a seemingly endless war with no prospect (or even definition) of victory, and the contempt of the peoples and governments of the civilized world.

The grand experiment has failed, and we are just beginning to realize the enormous costs of that failure.

How did it happen? It happened because the core dogmas of this so-called “conservatism” – the possibility and desirability of an ungoverned society, the superior “wisdom” of an unconstrained free market, the suitability of simple greed as a driving force of society – were fated from the start to fail the test of “real world” application.

A Fallacy of False Comparison. “The theory is beautiful, but reality is a bitch,” is a maxim that should be carved above the entrance of every college of economics, not to mention The Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute. Analyses of competing theories is appropriate in academic journals and seminar rooms is appropriate, as is a comparative evaluation of competing policies in action (e.g., murder rates in states with capital punishment vs. states without). But untried utopian schemes can not be fairly compared with worst-case anecdotes of policies-in-action, in this case government regulation of market forces. For history has taught us, time and again, that idealized abstract concepts such as “the free market,” “the profit motive” and privatization of the commons, inevitably come a-cropper when applied uncompromisingly to actual, ongoing, practical circumstances. Theory is best applied empirically and pragmatically, as reality “feeds back” information that prompts alterations and improvements of policy. This is why the New Deal succeeded, while utopian communities usually fail.

Thus we have discovered at length, what wise individuals knew at the outset of “the Reagan revolution:” that the profit motive and free market, while necessary ingredients of a thriving economy, are not, all by themselves, sufficient providers of prosperity, and that government, while a nuisance and a burden (especially to the wealthy and powerful), is the essential protector of the ordinary citizen, entitled to “equal justice under law.” In short, “the market,” while an invaluable servant, can be a ruthless master. (For an elaboration and defense of this claim, see my “With Liberty for Some,” and in particular, the closing sections).

The regulated capitalism that flourished in the United States until Reagan and his successors dismantled it is the result of countless experiments and adjustments – an accumulated “political wisdom,” learned from and validated by experience. Contaminated meat and deadly patent medicine? Bring in the Food and Drug Administration. Bank failures and stock market crashes? Establish the FDIC and the SEC. Cacophony on the airwaves? Bring on “traffic control” with the FCC – at the request of the broadcast industry, as it happened. Contamination of the common air, water, and landscapes? Voila! The Environmental Protection Agency.

All these functions of the government, and more, exist for reasons learned through the practical exercise of government as it legislates in Congress, adjudicates in the courts, and administers through the executive and the agencies. And yet we are told that all this practically proven regulatory structure is to be brushed aside by an untried theory: “government is the problem, not the solution.”

Well, now it has been tried, beginning with Reagan in 1981, with the woeful results enumerated above. And as for the dogma of “free market competition,” that old war horse was dead at the starting gate. The corporate interests that have purchased our government have little regard for competition. They much prefer the total control that comes with monopolies. Hence the consolidation of the media and the no-bid government contracts to the mega-corporations. The remedy? The enactment and enforcement of anti-trust legislation, which means, of course, government regulation — the best friend of “competitive enterprise.”

Ranchers in the American West have a long-standing rule: “Never take down a fence unless you know for sure why it was put up.” Political theorists and reformers would be well advised to follow this rule.

So it comes to this: the so-called “conservatives,” aren’t! They are determined to tear down regulatory “fences” heedless of the practical problems that led to their installation. And it turns out that the “liberals” are the authentic “conservatives,” as they endeavor to maintain proven governmental functions, and as they resist the uncompromising imposition of untested dogmas. (See my “Conscience of a Conservative”).

“The Profit Motive” is a sometime thing. The classical economic theory embraced by Reagan/Bushism proclaims that optimal economic outcome is the result, “as if by an invisible hand” (Adam Smith), of each individual seeking to maximize his or her “preference satisfaction.” Or more simply, “the profit motive.” In the words of Gordon Gekko in the movie “Wall Street,” “greed is good.” Greed, we are told, is the fuel of the freest and most productive economic engine.

The proponents of “the grand experiment” fail to recognize that “the profit motive” is not all that important to everyone. Perhaps it is to the “captains of corporatism” promoting the experiment, but not to all of us. There are other motives: service to others, the promotion of justice, the pursuit of scholarly knowledge, the advancement of science, the joy of teaching.

This is not to say that those of us who, for example, have chosen a scholarly profession would not like a salary boost, or that we would turn down a no-strings salary of a million dollars a year. We are not indifferent to wealth, it is just not all-important to us. Moreover, the trappings of wealth — multiple homes, a fleet of automobiles, the management of an extensive investment portfolio, etc, – would be unwelcomed burdens, since they would be distractions from our preferred activities: research, writing, and teaching.

Similarly, many individuals of high accomplishment and opportunities for great wealth, simply choose not to acquire that wealth – their profit motive might be weak and practically insignificant. Medical doctors might choose to join “Doctors Without Borders” and treat the poor, or they might choose a career in medical research. Lawyers might choose to work, not on Wall Street, but for Environmental Defense or Public Citizen.

Not everyone is driven by the profit motive, and arguably not the most significant and productive citizens. A society and an economy without individuals primarily motivated by service, or the pursuit of knowledge, etc, rather than by a quest for personal wealth, would be at best a morally impoverished society, and more likely, an unsustainable society.

And significantly, these non-profit-motivated professions are often, though not always, most effectively pursued “in the public interest” in governmental institutions: schools, universities, government agencies, research facilities, courts, etc. “Private enterprises” have little use for them. Abolish government, and these service-oriented professions would vanish with it.

Clearly, the “great experiment” – down with government and up with “the unregulated free market” – has failed. It has proven itself to be bad for our workers, bad for our families and our children, bad for the moral tone of our society, bad for the natural environment, bad for future generations, and eventually it will prove bad for those very few who are now enjoying lavish prosperity at the expense of the rest of us. For in the long run, there is no prosperity on a ruined planet, and few of the privileged wealthy will remain so when the economy they have promoted collapses.

We have before us the results of the great experiment. Now it is past time to end it. The sooner and the more decisively we do so, the better it will be for all of us.

This was, at the same time, the high tide of liberalism as Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society” rolled through Congress and as Barry Goldwater, the “conscience of conservatism” suffered a crushing defeat in the 1964 election.

The clash between the liberals and the libertarians generated heated and exciting debates, whereby both contesting ideologies were refined and clarified.

Little did the liberals suspect then that three and four decades hence, libertarianism would become a significant player in American politics.

Today, many liberals insist (and I concur), that the ascendance of libertarianism is the result, not of the cogency of its ideology, but of the overwhelming financial and media resources that have promoted it.

Where liberals and libertarians meet — and part. Libertarianism does not fit in comfortably with either the Democrats or the Republicans, which explains the determined, if futile, persistence of the Libertarian Party. However, when faced with the forced choice of the lesser of two evils, most Libertarians have sided with the Republicans.

Now that is beginning to change, as many libertarians are deserting the GOP and joining the liberal Democrats in a fragile alliance of convenience. They are doing so as they find their principles of minimal government, personal autonomy, fiscal responsibility and church-state separation massively betrayed by the theocrats and crypto-fascists that have taken control of the Republican Party. At the same time, the Republicans continue to proclaim the libertarian ideals of the free market and privatization, as they cut back on government services.

The common ground between the liberals and libertarians is found in their endorsement of personal autonomy, as articulated by John Stuart Mill: “Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.” (On Liberty, Ch. 1). Accordingly, the libertarians (and less enthusiastically, the liberals), oppose the criminalization of so-called “victimless crimes,” such as prostitution, homosexuality, and “recreational” drug use, and both insist that the government has no business interfering with a woman’s personal decision whether or not to continue a pregnancy.

Notwithstanding this ground of common agreement, the differences between liberalism and libertarianism are fundamental and irreconcilable.

To begin, the libertarian’s advocacy of completely unfettered individual “sovereignty” extends to property rights and economic activity. Thus the libertarian is steadfastly opposed to zoning restrictions or to seizure of property by eminent domain. And the libertarian endorses, without qualification, the unrestricted free market, confident that the summation of individual “capitalist acts by consenting adults” (Robert Nozick) will result in optimal results for all.

On the other hand, the liberal, while not hostile to free markets and private property, insists that both must be regulated and occasionally be curtailed “in the public interest.”

And why shouldn’t one extend unrestricted personal liberty to include property and a liberty of economic activity? What justifies the liberal’s insistence upon government regulation of the economy? The answer lies in two principles endorsed by both liberals and libertarians. First, the “no harm principle:” “the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised … is to prevent harm to others. (J. S. Mill). And second, the “like liberty principle:” “Each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive total system of equal basic liberties compatible with a similar system of liberty for all.” (John Rawls)

The liberal will argue that the libertarian fails to recognize the full implications of these principles, for, if he did, the libertarian would find that an unconstrained free market results in harm to others and to a loss of their liberties. Furthermore, unconstrained free markets are self-eliminating, since they lead to cartels and monopolies. Thus the necessity for regulation and anti-trust laws.

The liberal’s insistence that unrestricted property rights and unregulated free markets can be socially harmful and contrary to the public interest leads to another fundamental and irreconcilable difference with the libertarian:

Society and “The Public.” Simply stated, the libertarian denies the existence of “society” and “the public.” If this sounds outlandish, consider the following observations by three prominent libertarians. First, Margaret Thatcher: “There is no such thing as society – there are individuals and there are families.” Next Ayn Rand: “There is no such entity as ‘the public,’ since the public is merely a number of individuals.” Finally, Frank Chodorov: “Society is a collective concept and nothing else; it is a convenience for designating a number of people.”

The implications of these pronouncements are radical in the extreme, for if there is no such thing as “a public,” it follows that there are no “public goods” or “public interest,” apart from summation of private goods and interests. Moreover, if there is no society, it follows that there are no “social problems,” there is no “social injustice,” and there are no “victims of society.” The poor presumably choose their condition; poverty is the result of “laziness” or, as the religious right would put it, a “sin.” There are further implications. Since there is no such thing as a “public,” taxation for the support of such “so-called” public institutions as education, libraries, the arts, parks and recreation, is coercive seizure of private property, or “theft.”

The liberal replies that this denial of the very existence of “society” and “the public” is reductionism, plain and simple — what the Brits call “nothing-buttery.” It is comparable to saying that Hamlet is “nothing but” words, that Beethoven’s music is “nothing but” notes, and that the human brain is “nothing but” cells and electro-chemical events.

Refutation of this keystone of libertarianism is simple and straightforward. If we can cite cases in which advantages to each individual harms the interest of all individuals, and conversely that harm to each individual benefits all individuals, then, by distinguishing “each” and “all” we have demonstrated the existence of an “all-entity,” “society,” that is distinct from a summation of “each” individual. Because I have devoted two chapters of my book in progress to proving that society is more than the sum of its component members (“good for each, bad for all,” and “bad for each, good for all”) I will let just two examples suffice here.

Antibiotics: The over-use of antibiotics “selects” resistant “super-bugs,” decreasing the effectiveness of antibiotics for all. But just one more anti-biotic prescription for a trivial, “self-limiting” bronchial infection won’t make a significant difference “in general,” while it will clearly benefit the individual patient. But multiply that individual doctor’s prescription by the millions, and we have a serious problem. “Good for each patient, bad for the general population.” The solution: restrict the use of antibiotics to the seriously ill. Individuals with trivial and non-life-threatening ailments must “tough it out.” “Bad for each, good for all.”

Traffic laws: We all agree that traffic laws can be a nuisance. But if you believe that traffic lights constrain your freedom of movement, try to drive across Manhattan during a power outage! In the blackouts of 1965 and 1977 in the eastern United States and Canada, traffic began to move only after the police and a few citizen volunteers stood at the intersections and directed traffic. (I was in Manhattan during both events). The decision of each driver to accept constraints worked to the advantage of all. So too with the traffic lights and stop signs that we encounter daily. We are all freer to move about only because we have collectively agreed to restrict our individual freedom of movement. “Bad for each, good for all.”

To sum up: “society” is not, as the libertarians would have us believe, simply a physical location where autonomous private individuals “do their own thing,” from which activity somehow, “as if by an invisible hand” (Adam Smith), benefits for all accrue without foresight or planning. On the contrary, the liberal insists, a society is more than the sum of its individual parts. A society is, as John Rawls puts it, “a cooperative venture for mutual advantage [which] makes possible a better life for all than any would have if each were to live solely by his own efforts.” As the anti-biotics and traffic examples illustrate, common goods are achieved through individual constraint and sacrifice. “ Bad for each, good for all.” Conversely, unconstrained self-serving behavior by each individual can harm society as a whole. “Good for Each, Bad for all.”

The liberal does not deny that self-serving individual behavior, for example by scientists, entrepreneurs and artists, often or even usually results in benefits for all. (“Good for each, good for all”). Instead, the liberal insists that this is not a universal rule. In innumerable instances, such as the two presented above, it can be clearly shown that social benefit requires individual constraint and sacrifice.

Concerning Rights. The libertarian recognizes three fundamental rights: to life, liberty and property. All three are “negative rights” — rights to non-interference by others. From these rights are derived the only legitimate functions of government: protection of life, liberty and property from within (the police), from abroad (the military), and the adjudication of property disputes (the civil courts). And because these are the only legitimate functions of government, all other existing government services and property should be privatized.

The liberal, while accepting the libertarian triad of negative rights, also proclaims the citizens’ “positive rights” — to an education, to employment with a living wage and safe working conditions, to a clean and safe environment, etc. These rights arise from the fact that the liberal, unlike the libertarian, recognizes social benefits and public interests. Communities flourish, the liberal insists, when they include an educated work force, when the citizens are assured that their basic needs for livelihood and health-care are met, and when the citizens share the conviction that the society is their society and that they have a role in its governance. And because the communal activity produces more wealth than would be obtained by the sum of individual efforts, members of the community have positive rights to a share of that wealth, and to community assistance in case of misfortune.

Accordingly, Ayn Rand’s ubermensch, John Galt, is a fantasy. There is no fully “self-made man,” morally free of all responsibility and obligation to the society that nurtured him and sustains him. On the contrary, as the nineteenth century sociologist, W. T. Hobhouse observed:

The organizer of industry who thinks he has ‘made’ himself and his business has found a whole social system ready to his hand in skilled workers, machinery, a market, peace and order — a vast apparatus and a pervasive atmosphere, the joint creation of millions of men and scores of generations. Take away the whole social factor, and we have not Robinson Crusoe with his salvage from the wreck and his acquired knowledge, but the native savage living on roots, berries and vermin.

Moral perspective. As we have noted above, human rights are at the center of both the libertarian and the liberal ideologies. And from this pivotal center, the two ideologies diverge.

They diverge because libertarians and progressives articulate their moral and political philosophies from radically different perspectives.

*The Libertarian: From the point of view of the individual (“the egocentric point of view”). “Good for each.” From this perspective, the individual is enjoined to “ live for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself to others nor sacrificing others to himself.” (Ayn Rand).

*The Progressive: From the perspective of an unbiased benevolent spectator of society (“the moral point of view”). “Good for all.”

Thus the libertarian (who, recall, denies the very existence of “society”) advocates the maximum liberty for each individual. The liberal, on the other hand, seeks to maximize the amount of liberty extant in the society.

The liberal argues that, paradoxically, the egocentric point of view can not accomplish the libertarian goal of maximizing individual liberty. It fails, because individual liberties, and especially the liberties enjoyed by the privileged, powerful and wealthy, constrain the liberties and diminish the welfare of others. In other words, they violate the “no harm” and “like liberty” principles.” “Good for each, bad for all.”

Furthermore, the libertarian’s egocentric perspective fails because political and economic problems are not problems of individuals, they are problems of groups (i.e., of “all”), and therefore the interests of all affected individuals must be taken into account. The liberal proposes that these interests are best “taken into account,” fairly and equally, from the perspective of a hypothetical individual who is unbiased and benevolent — seeking the best result for all while respecting the inalienable rights of each.

In fact, no such neutral observer is actually necessary, for each moral agent, and the agent’s surrogate, the government, is quite capable of adopting the point of view of the hypothetical “unbiased benevolent observer.” Indeed, we did just that as we found solutions to the aforementioned problems, the use of anti-biotics and traffic control, whereby constraints upon each resulted in benefits to all. There we found that the astute moral agent would, as a “the unbiased benevolent observer,” perceive that all would benefit from antibiotics if these drugs were not prescribed for inconsequential ailments, and the same observer would conclude that the freedom of vehicular movement for all is enhance by imposing constraining rules upon each.

The perspective of the “unbiased neutral observer” has a name — in fact, numerous names, since it is one of the most familiar concepts in the history of political theory and moral philosophy: “the impartial spectator” (Adam Smith), “the ideal observer” (John Stuart Mill), “the general will” (Rousseau), “the view from nowhere” (Thomas Nagel), “the original position” (John Rawls), and my personal favorite, “the moral point of view” (Kurt Baier, Kai Nielsen and many more).

And who or what is most appropriately entitled to adopt the perspective of the “unbiased, benevolent observer?” What else than an agency selected and acting by the consent of the people, an agency that enacts and administers laws to the benefit of all, an agency constituted to “establish Justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty.”

That agency has a name: “democratic government.” And in case you didn’t notice, the above quotation is from the Preamble to the Constitution of the United States.

The Menace of Libertarianism. Libertarianism appears, at last, to be succumbing to the consequences of its own “success.” We are discovering at last that this stark and simple theory cannot accommodate itself to social and political realities. For there is, in fact, such a thing as a “society,” and there is a “public interest.” Social problems are not solved, and social justice is not obtained, through the egocentric point of view — the pursuit of self-interest by each individual in a mythical “free market.” Instead, as we have seen and as the liberal insists, the public interest is best perceived through the “moral point of view” — the perspective of the unbiased benevolent observer” of society.

Libertarianism, a fascinating intellectual diversion and challenge in the sixties, has become a menace in this new century. The denial of the very existence of society and the public interest is an invitation to chaos, which must result in the unraveling of civilization and the just society, and in its place a government of, by, and for the privileged, the powerful, and the wealthy.

Proving libertarianism wrong and immoral is not difficult. However, removing the libertarians from power and repairing the damage that they have caused, will be horrendously difficult.

And there is no guarantee that these efforts will succeed.