This TechDirt article pulls together a lot of the various strands that are worrying about the growth of the U.S. police state — extralegal detention, the militarization of local police at the hands of the DHS, surveillance, increased imprisonment despite an all-time low crime rate, punitive immigration policy, the war on x where x is a member of the set {drugs, terror, …}. The only dots they don’t connect here are the invasive, expensive, ineffective policies and practices of the TSA and the indiscriminate use of drone strikes. But even without connecting those dots in, their assessment is
Bad news about the impending police state here in America: it’s already here. From the indefinite detention (without trial) of terrorism suspects both foreign and American to the escalating militarization of our nation’s police forces, there’s little to indicate that any level of government is willing to “walk back” the overreach of law enforcement, much of which stems from the Patriot Act’s anti-terrorism aims.
The persistence of these policies defies both logic and common sense. For how long are we going to put up with these rights-eviscerating, socially corrosive uses of our tax money? After following the Patriot Act, DHS, TSA, digital surveillance, the NDAA, and so on over the past decade, I fail to see either the moral or economic justification for these policies that fall under the Patriot Act umbrella, particularly since the terrorist threat has ebbed. And what’s more disturbing is that support for such authoritarian policy is high and crosses the tribal Team Red-Team Blue political boundaries.
It’s enough to make a dispassionate economist weep for her country’s lost principles.
I found a lot of interesting and insightful thoughts in my morning reading today; here’s a synopsis:
Election year linguistics 1: The New York Times has an analysis of the language used by Obama and the four presidential candidates; at Cato at Liberty, David Boaz points out how different Ron Paul’s emphasis is from all of the others. He speaks about the fundamentals of both economics and the American small-l-liberal political tradition, while the others focus on topics that are more matters of expediency.
Election year linguistics 2: Newt Gingrich is currently getting his panties in a twist about people calling his ideas and his rhetoric “grandiose”, claiming that grandiosity is a defining American characteristic. I encourage Mr. Gingrich to consult his dictionary. According to dictionary.com, the first two definitions of “grandiose” are (1) affectedly grand or important; pompous and (2) more complicated or elaborate than necessary; overblown. I submit that while these meanings fit Mr. Gingrich, they are not defining characteristics of American culture, historically or at present.
Speaking of rhetoric and meaning, the Wall Street Journal has an interview, The New Theories of Moral Sentiments, with Deirdre McCloskey. She is doing more than any one person I know to return the perspectives of political economy and economics as transcending “Max U” to the professional and policy conversations.
Adam Thierer has a review of Liars and Outliers, the new book from security expert Bruce Schneier. Schneier analyzes the social institutions and mechanisms that enable trust to evolve in societies, and it sounds like it will be a great read; I’ve been looking forward to it, and Adam’s review whets my appetite even further. Schneier is the preeminent voice of reason in the debate over the surveillance state, so this book is self-recommending.
Also in technology, Steven Titch unpacks Google’s consolidation of its privacy policies across its suite of applications, and discusses what information Google does and does not capture, and what they will and won’t do with it. Very useful corrective to some of the anti-Google hyperbole, although I have some remaining skepticism.
I found some things striking in yesterday’s SOPA/PIPA protests. One was Jim Harper’s clear and cogent statement that the Internet is not a thing, it’s a set of protocols stipulating how computers communicate with each other. That set of protocols is a platform, and those protocols are not the government’s to regulate.
Jim’s Cato colleague, the ever-reliable Julian Sanchez, points out that if you estimate the profits/surplus at stake from piracy relative to the lost value all of the other Internet activities that would be stifled under SOPA/PIPA, the cost of piracy is just not that large. Sure, it’s concentrated in the hands of politically-powerful entertainment content companies, but relative to the rest of the vibrant, dynamic value creation that would “be disappeared” it’s small. Moreover, domestic and international legal institutions already exist to deal with piracy; like any other human institution they are imperfect, but as a consequence of them the losses from piracy are small relative to what would be lost if Congress imposed SOPA/PIPA. Here’s a good, short video from Julian covering some of the basics:
But the notion that enforcement and prevention matters will be put in place that create massive harm to the lives of innocent individuals while being unlikely to really actually led to less of the activity targeted is not unprecedented. You can think about this every time you go through a US airport and think about who is winning there. …
So the scenario that US people should be concerned about is if publishing on the Internet becomes like airport security. That is, if copyright enforcers are able to automate enforcement without due process. That will raise the costs of publishing and will deter many. As is often the case with over-reaching laws, the problem is that it creates too few incentives for enforcers to enforce discriminately rather than indiscriminately.
These contributions to the discussion have all been outstanding, but the most useful one in my estimation is this TED video posted yesterday from Clay Shirky on the issues at stake in the SOPA/PIPA debate:
It really is a must-watch video, well worth 10 minutes of your time. Shirky describes the technological issues clearly for non-techies and delves helpfully into the legal history of copyright in media, but then makes the crucial economic point when he says “Time Warner wants us all back on the couch and not creating our own content”. In all of the justifiable furor about censorship, this is the economic point that gets a bit lost. For the past 70 years the entertainment companies have had a lot of market power, because entertainment was essentially an oligopoly. They profited handsomely from their market power over content. But with the decentralization and edge content generation now possible due to technology, and with the way that their content provides an input into that edge creation, we now have many more substitutes for their content. They are using the piracy red herring (which is not as large as they claim it is, as Julian points out above) to try to retain the viability of their decades-old business model and market power over content. That’s the real economic issue here — they want us back on the couch and in the movie theater.
This is a fight that is not new with SOPA/PIPA and the Internet, nor will it end with the Congressional retreat from these ill-designed pieces of proposed legislation. Yesterday raised a lot of awareness of the issues, but it’s going to have to happen over and over and over …
I’m going to give the last word to my friend Sarah, who makes a useful analysis of language and its use in the context of both SOPA/PIPA and the recently signed into law National Defense Authorization Act, complete with its provisions that allow extralegal detention of American citizens without due process on suspicion of terrorist activity. Sarah offers an analysis of Orwellian Newspeak language, and identifies disturbing parallels with our current environment:
It struck me today that the combination of SOPA/PIPA and the NDAA move us terrifyingly close to an Orwellian world where people, language, history, and information can disappear at any time. Forever. As if they never were. And worse than that, our primary way to discuss/protest/remedy that disappearance–the Web–will be taken from us as well. …
Newspeak as a language, then, mirrors the political system that creates it, and serves to support it and perpetuate it by creating an agreed upon reality where meanings are strictly limited, the possibility for unorthodox thought is all but eliminated, and an agreed upon “reality” allows Ingsoc to have been always in control. Winston’s friend Syme is correct that “Newspeak is Ingsoc and Ingsoc is Newspeak.”
I leave further connections to the contemporary political situation as an exercise for the reader.
For the past couple of years, I’ve commemorated Martin Luther King day by rereading his Notes From A Birmingham Jail, which I recommend to you as an eloquent articulation of, among other things, the values of liberty and of equality before the law.
It’s interesting to reread it this year,as our awareness of increasing encroachment and violations of our civil liberties grows. The juxtaposition of “Birmingham Jail” with Jonathan Turley’s analysis of the top ten ways in which the United States is no longer the land of the free is striking and thought-provoking. We lose such liberties incrementally, and King’s reminder of the importance of disobeying unjust laws is important to remember as we consider Turley’s list and how to regain our freedom. Note also the juxtaposition with the Economic Freedom of the World report from 2011, in which the US fell in stature due to increasing regulatory invasiveness to accompany the civil liberty invasiveness.
Yesterday was the anniversary of the original signing of the Bill of Rights to the U.S. Constitution. Congress commemorated that birthday by passing the National Defense Authorization Act, which still leaves interpretive room for detention of U.S. citizens without due process even after the word smithing that left President Obama the executive power he wants, thus neutering the hoped-for veto. Congress also moved forward with the Stop Online Piracy Act, an abomination of Internet censoring, regulation, and monitoring.
In combination these two laws gut the already-trimmed Bill of Rights; all of the amendments have been under threat since its birth, the 9th and 10th have been made moribund through unchecked government action, and the 4th is also pretty much gone.
Yes, I think the members of Congress who voted for NDAA have violated their oaths to uphold and defend the Constitution. No, I don’t think it’s hyperbole to say that we are looking at the slide toward fascism unless we take affirmative action to defend our rights that the Bill of Rights was supposed to protect (although in hindsight perhaps enumerating them was a bad idea).
Also consider this: I have argued for the past year that the policies of the TSA and the way they treat airline passengers conditions us for the loss of liberty. If you doubt this, I suggest you read up on the Stanford prison experiment and Milgram’s work on authority and power. Look at these actions together, and notice the importance of a docile, accepting public to allow such liberty-destroying laws to pass. If we are docile in the face of authority operating under the false flag of terrorist threat and providing the pretense of security, we can be controlled in other ways. I see NDAA and SOPA as logical consequences in this progression.
Unless we stand up and defend ourselves from our government. Because we are moving toward a world in which a private citizen whose primary civic interest is liberty, toleration, and peace can be detained without warrant for saying that. That scares me, and it should scare you too.
Have you been paying attention to the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) that the Senate passed last week? I don’t blame you if you have not heard much about it, since most media have not been covering it. In addition to military expenditure authorization, it includes controversial provisions about the detention of terror suspects; as summarized by Spencer Ackerman at Wired:
But far more dramatically, the detention mandate to use indefinite military detention in terrorism cases isn’t limited to foreigners. It’s confusing, because two different sections of the bill seem to contradict each other, but in the judgment of the University of Texas’ Robert Chesney — a nonpartisan authority on military detention — “U.S. citizens are included in the grant of detention authority.” …
So despite the Sixth Amendment’s guarantee of a right to trial, the Senate bill would let the government lock up any citizen it swears is a terrorist, without the burden of proving its case to an independent judge, and for the lifespan of an amorphous war that conceivably will never end. And because the Senate is using the bill that authorizes funding for the military as its vehicle for this dramatic constitutional claim, it’s pretty likely to pass.
This development is disturbing in many dimensions. Note the narrowing and weakening of the long-standing habeas corpus protections of citizens against unlawful detention that our legal system inherited from English common law going back to the Magna Carta. The U.S. Constitution in Article 1, Section 9, states that “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.” Maybe this “cases of invasion” exception is the reason why Senator Lindsay Graham, one of the most vocal supporters of these detention provisions, argues “Is the homeland the battlefield? You better believe it is the battlefield.” A consequence of this position is, as Conor Friedersdorf notes at the Atlantic,
That quote is important, for Graham is saying that as long as terrorists are trying to recruit on American soil, our homeland is a battlefield. That means a perpetual state of war. Here are the senators who refuse to affirm that American citizens retain the right to due process during this war that is supposedly being waged everywhere on earth and that has no foreseeable end in sight.
He then provides the roll call on one of the amendments that would have limited these detention powers over U.S. citizens. Note also that many of the Senate supporters (and the House supporters of the version passed there earlier this year) claim to be supporters of limited government, but are indeed here codifying increased government powers to wage perpetual war. How can they, and we the voters, not see the hypocrisy and venality inherent in these positions?
Glenn Greenwald highlights another disturbing dimension of this legislation — or, more accurately, of the detention and military powers of the U.S. government. He points out that President Obama may veto this legislation, not because it includes gross violations of the civil liberties of American citizens, but because it represents Congress claiming oversight of executive powers that the Obama Administration (like the Bush Administration before it) asserts to already possess: “… the Bush and Obama administrations have already successfully claimed most of the powers in the bill, and courts have largely acquiesced … this bill would codify indefinite military detention, but the actual changes when compared to what the Executive Branch is doing now would be modest.” Greenwald observes:
But, with a few exceptions, the objections raised by the White House are not grounded in substantive problems with these powers, but rather in the argument that such matters are for the Executive Branch, not the Congress, to decide. In other words, the White House’s objections are grounded in broad theories of Executive Power. They are not arguing: it is wrong to deny accused Terrorists a trial. Instead they insist:whether an accused Terrorist is put in military detention rather than civilian custody is for the President alone to decide. Over and over, the White House’s statement emphasizes Executive power as the basis for its objections to Levin/McCain.
It’s truly disturbing to consider how much centralized political and military power we have allowed to build over the past decade. If the issues surrounding the NDAA are new to you, I recommend Greenwald’s post as a thorough discussion of the substantive and procedural issues. Sheldon Richman’s thought-provoking analysis at the Freeman is also a worthy read.
Finally, note (as do the articles linked above) the bipartisan nature of the support for this increase in government power and authority; a public choice theory-based analysis would easily lead you to that conclusion. Both the Republican wing and the Democrat wing of the Authoritarian Party have offered substantial support for perpetual war and the associated funding and power accompanying it, for both the executive branch and the “representative” branch. The discipline that’s supposed to be provided through our ability to “vote the bums out of office” seems incredibly weak here … or is this state of perpetual war truly the will of the people?
Maybe Orwell was right after all, although I thought most people saw his writing as cautionary tales rather than how-to manuals.
At Reason.com, social psychologist Jonathon Haidt writes about the foundational moral concerns that animate the Zuccotti Park protestors. Working from a Moral Foundations Theory* perspective, which Haidt and several others have developed, he said, “In my visit to Zuccotti Park, it was clear that the main moral foundation of OWS is fairness, followed by care and liberty. Loyalty, authority, and sanctity, by contrast, are very little in evidence.”
The Occupy Wall Street protests and its progeny are famously leaderless and consensus based, meaning the exact meaning of the movement remains a bit hazy. Politicians left, right and libertarian have stepped into the resulting void to explain what it all means (usually the explanation is that the politician has been right in his views all along, and the explanation seems to serve left, right and libertarian politicians whether the politician is speaking in support of or in opposition OWS).
Haidt attempts a somewhat less self-interested attempt at understanding the basic moral feelings that are motivating participants in the protests. I remark on it here mostly as a complement to Lynne’s thoughts collected here: “A political economy model for Occupy Wall Street.”
*Haidt explains Moral Foundation Theory as, “outlin[ing] six clusters of moral concerns—care/harm, fairness/cheating, liberty/oppression, loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, and sanctity/degradation—upon which … all political cultures and movements base their moral appeals.” More information is at www.MoralFoundations.org.
Steve Horwitz continues to provide excellent focal point arguments about political protests and crony corporatism. In his Freeman column yesterday, he elaborated on the arguments that I developed here earlier in the week and that others have made elsewhere, that the core problem underlying corporate power is its connection to government power:
The question is just what is the nature of their objection to the role of corporations and the bailout culture. To complain about bank bailouts while also arguing, as some have, for student-loan debt forgiveness would suggest the problem is not that government shouldn’t bail out failed investments, only that it shouldn’t bail out failed investments by corporations. (It would be interesting to see if the Occupiers opposing bailouts also oppose agricultural subsidies and subsidies for alternative energy like wind and solar.)
This point gets to the larger issue at the core of the Occupiers’ criticisms of corporations: Is the problem corporations per se or is it that they align themselves with government? One other tension we see in these protests is that even as they object to corporate power, they make use of technology and social media that are the products of the very corporate form they critique. This is not necessarily hypocritical, no more than libertarians using various government-supplied goods that we think would be better supplied by the market. However, it does suggest that the Occupiers should be asked why some corporate products are good and others not. …
Perhaps the problem is best phrased as “corporatism.” The core complaint seems to be that corporations have too much power over people’s lives. This is a complaint that libertarians should not dismiss; corporations do have too much power. But as Sheldon Richman has noted, the only way they get that kind of power is be in cahoots with government. Corporations, whether Apple or Bank of America, that are forced to compete in a genuinely freed market would have to work to please consumers and would have market power only to the extent that we grant it to them by purchasing their products. Market power thus granted can also be taken away. (Ask Borders).
Just saying “corporations have too much power” is insufficient. Much of that excess power is a result of their ability to manipulate government power to their own benefit. As Steve rightly notes, in the absence of this corporatism, the only power that companies can amass is the power derived from consumers who choose freely to buy their products.
While a lot of people envision a model of politics as a form of noble savagery that is corrupted by evil people who stubbornly refuse to play the game the “right” way, the kinds of intrigue that have the Occupiers (and the Tea Partiers) so exercised are (to borrow from Steven Horwitz again) features of political society, not bugs. As the economist Gordon Tullock has argued, what should puzzle us is not that politicians are for sale. What should puzzle us is that the supply side of the market for political favors is so competitive that favors can be had for such low prices.
What’s a political economy-oriented economist to make of Occupy Wall Street? So far I’ve found two complementary commentaries that reflect my analysis of the deeply flawed policies of the past couple of decades that have enabled the crony corporatism that seems to be at the core of the protest (just in my phrasing it that way you can see what my model is). The first is summarized in this Venn diagram from James Sinclair, in his insightful post about the false dichotomy between Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party:
In other words, aren’t these two groups—Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party—raging against different halves of the same machine? Do I have to draw a Venn diagram here? …
Yeah, I’m oversimplifying, but only a little. The greatest threat to our economy is neither corporations nor the government. The greatest threat to our economy is both of them working together. There are currently two sizable coalitions of angry citizens that are almost on the same page about that, and they’re too busy insulting each other to notice.
Hitting a complementary note (and hitting the nail on the head, from my perspective) is Sheldon Richman at the Freeman, noting that Wall Street couldn’t have done it alone:
To: Occupy Wall Street:
Wall Street couldn’t have done it alone. It takes a government and/or its central bank, the Federal Reserve System, to:
Create barriers to entry for the purpose of sheltering existing banks from competition and radical innovation, then regulate for the benefit of the privileged industry;
Issue artificially cheap, economy-distorting credit in order to, among other things, give banks incentives to make shaky but profitable mortgage loans (and also to grease the war machine through deficit spending);
Make it lucrative for banks – and their bonus-collecting executives — to bundle thousands of shaky mortgages into securities and other derivatives with the knowledge that government-sponsored enterprises Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and other companies, all subject to powerful congressmen looking for campaign contributions, will buy them after a government-licensed rating cartel scores them AAA;
Inflate an unsustainable housing bubble by the foregoing and other methods, enticing people to foolishly overinvest in real estate.
Work closely with lending companies to establish a variety of programs designed to lure people with few resources or bad credit into buying houses they can’t afford;
Attract workers to the home-construction bubble, setting them up for long-term unemployment when the bubble inevitably bursts;
Implicitly guarantee big financial companies and/or their creditors that if they get into trouble they will be rescued;
Compel the taxpayers to bail out those companies and/or creditors when the roof finally falls in.
No bank or group of banks could do these things on its own in a freed market. It takes a government-Wall Street partnership – the corporate state — to create such misery and exploitation.
So demonstrators, you are right. Something is dreadfully wrong. But your list of culprits is far from complete. So go ahead and protest outside Goldman Sachs and Bank of America. But also spend some time outside the White House, the Fed, the Treasury, and the Capitol Building. Together they are responsible for our current economic woes. These are the entities that control our fate and over which we have no real say. It’s time for things to change.
The freed market is the alternative to what you properly despise.
American militants like Anwar al-Awlaki are placed on a kill or capture list by a secretive panel of senior government officials, which then informs the president of its decisions, according to officials.
There is no public record of the operations or decisions of the panel, which is a subset of the White House’s National Security Council, several current and former officials said. Neither is there any law establishing its existence or setting out the rules by which it is supposed to operate.
If you know British constitutional history, this secret panel sounds disturbingly similar to the Star Chamber court in Britain:
Finding its support from the king’s prerogative (sovereign power and privileges) and not bound by the common law, Star Chamber’s procedures gave it considerable advantages over the ordinary courts. It was less bound by rigid form; it did not depend upon juries either for indictment or for verdict; it could act upon the petition of an individual complainant or upon information received; it could put an accused person on oath to answer the petitioner’s bill and reply to detailed questions. On the other hand, its methods lacked the safeguards that common-law procedures provided for the liberty of the subject. Parliaments in the 14th and 15th centuries, while recognizing the occasional need for and usefulness of those methods, attempted to limit their use to causes beyond the scope or power of the ordinary court.
It was during the chancellorship of Thomas Wolsey (1515–29) that the judicial activity of Star Chamber grew with greatest rapidity. In addition to prosecuting riot and such crimes, Wolsey used the court with increased vigour against perjury, slander, forgery, fraud, offenses against legislation and the king’s proclamations, and any action that could be considered a breach of the peace. Wolsey also encouraged suitors to appeal to it in the first instance, not after they had failed to find an efficient remedy in the ordinary courts.
The Star Chamber played a crucial role in facilitating the corruption and power-mongering of Henry VIII’s reign, but attracted more opposition in the 17th century when it enabled Charles I’s reign to execute religious dissenters. It was finally eliminated in the mid-17th century.
