Israel v. Palestine. Will we ever have clarity on this?

Melanie Phillips is always "in your face" confrontational

Here she takes the fight to the British PM, who has been tagged in the media as anti-Jewish. Maybe he is, maybe he isn't. And this piece is a little too hot for my taste - weakening the case, for example, by using phrases like Jewish "rightful inheritance". Ancestral homeland appeals mean nothing to the "left" and are already conceded by the "right" (at least in the U.S.). The essence of Phillips's argument, concerning the current situation, and concerning the historical background, is correct. And the latter is better supported by noting a few basic points.

1. In the period leading up to 1948 there was considerable support among the Arab residents of Palestine for Jewish immigration. Why? Because it led to profitable land sales (and increased the value of land owned) and because it led to increased employment and economic growth in the region. The Zionist appeal to the Arab population was precisely along these grounds touting peaceful and mutually advantageous coexistence. It is important to note that the sole basis of the steady Jewish immigration during the period of the Yishuv in the late 19th and early 20th century, was the voluntary and profitable sale of land to the Jewish immigrants, something practiced even by those Arab leaders who in public condemned the immigration, while, in private, profiting from it.

2. This general attitude became increasing undermined over time by extremist right wing Arab leaders, the most notorious of whom was Haj Amin, the grand Mufti of Jerusalem, one-time confidant of Hitler, who authored and broadcast a series of genocidal radio broadcasts in Arabic from Berlin. He became the most important Arab leader (of the AHC - the Arab Higher Committee), successfully and tragically drowning out (and violently suppressing) substantial Arab opposition to him. Under his leadership the Arab residents became increasing violent in their protests against the proposed partition of Palestine into two states - a Jewish and a Palestinian state (sound familiar?).

3. This violence was directed not only at the Jews, but also at the British occupiers of Palestine. The British response was to move more closely to the Arabs' position. Whether this was anti-Semitism, as it clearly was in some notable individual cases (for example Prime Minister Bevin), or whether it was expediency - not wishing to commit to resources and effort to confront the Arabs - is less important than that it meant the abandonment of the British commitment to the Jewish project of peaceful immigration and, in the more urgent situation, to the saving of countless Jewish lives. Either way the record is shameful, but perhaps understandably political.

4. Mr. Cameron is consciously or unconsciously echoing this performance.

Perhaps that is how Ms. Phillips might have argued.

PS. For source material on the above see Ephraim Karsh, Palestine Betrayed Yale University Press, 2011.

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From: lawrence rosenbloom [mailto:lawrence.rosenbloom@gmail.com]

Sent: Saturday, May 28, 2011 4:10 PM

Subject: Open letter to David Cameron. Worth a read

About Melanie

Melanie Phillips is a British journalist and author. She is best known for her controversial column about political and social issues which currently appears in the Daily Mail. Awarded the Orwell Prize for journalism in 1996, she is the author of All Must Have Prizes, an acclaimed study of Britain's educational and moral crisis, which provoked the fury of educationists and the delight and relief of parents.

An open letter to the Rt. Hon. David Cameron MP

May 2011

Dear Prime Minister,

I was interested to read that, when you met Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu this week, you said:

‘Britain is a good friend of Israel and our support for Israel and Israel's security is something I have described in the past, and will do so again, as unshakeable.’ I wonder, therefore, if you make a habit of threatening your friends? For you also said that unless Israel ‘engages seriously in a meaningful peace process’ with the Palestinian Authority, the more likely it is that Britain will endorse the ‘State of Palestine’ for which the PA is expected to seek recognition at the UN in September. This is not the behaviour of a friend so much as the kind of intimidation that is more reminiscent of a Mafia protection racket.

First of all, you have incomprehensibly decided to pressurise the victim in this conflict to make peace with her aggressor, even though the victim is the one party that constantly tries to make peace while the aggressor does not. It is the PA which has refused to negotiate with Israel, not the other way round, on the spurious grounds that Israeli expansion of Jewish homes beyond the ‘Green Line’ is a bar to negotiations

I wonder whether you might explain to both Britain and the Jewish people why you do not insist that Mr Abbas ‘engages seriously in a meaningful peace process’ by unambiguously renouncing – in both English and Arabic – his repeated assertions that his people will never accept Israel as a Jewish state, the casus belli of the entire conflict?

I wonder also if you might explain to both Britain and the Jewish people why you implicitly endorse the racist ethnic cleansing inherent in the putative ‘State of Palestine’ which the PA says it will declare – a state in which Mr Abbas has repeatedly declared that not one Jew will be allowed to live -- but which you have now threatened to support? I’m sure the British people in particular would be interested to know when you decided that racism and ethnic cleansing were part of your modernising programme for the Conservative Party.

Next, I wonder if you might clarify for us exactly why the British government has welcomed the alliance entered into between Hamas and Mr Abbas’s Fatah, and why you believe that this will advance the cause of peace. As you know, your government still regards Hamas as a terrorist organisation. More than that, Hamas is explicitly committed to the destruction of Israel and the genocide of the Jews, a platform from which is has explicitly stated this week that it will not resile. And as you know, following the killing of Osama bin Laden the leader of Hamas in Gaza, Ismail Haniyeh, condemned the ‘assassination of a Muslim holy warrior’ -- while for their part the Al Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, the terrorist department of the Fatah organisation that you do not appear to think is an obstacle to peace, called bin Laden’s death ‘a catastrophe’ and vowed to step up the jihad to establish the dominance of Islam in the world.

I’m sure we are all agog to learn why you, a Conservative Prime Minister and the supposed ally of America in the defence of the free world, have chosen not only to applaud and promote a coalition which includes genocide fanatics who are in bed with both al Qaeda and Iran, but why you are also threatening their victim, Israel, that Britain will endorse a state run by this genocidal coalition unless Israel itself enters into negotiations with it. To carry on with the Mafia analogy, this is akin to threatening someone that if they do not put a gun in their mouth and pull the trigger you will set the Mob on them to achieve the same result.

I’d be grateful if you could explain to us why you support the killing of the leader of al Qaeda, as well as sanctions against Iran on the grounds that both represent an unconscionable threat to the free world, and yet at the same time demand of Israel that it makes concessions to a coalition made up of the allies of Iran and al Qaeda. I’m sure we’d all like to know, if this is how you treat your ‘friends’, how you would treat your enemies.

I realise, Prime Minister, that before you achieved high office your knowledge of and interest in foreign affairs was hovering around the zero mark. As a result, it is likely that your only knowledge of the Middle East comes from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, which has a history of virulent antagonism towards the Jewish people. I would also expect, however, that you have an eye to your own place in history, and that you would probably like to be viewed by future generations as the British Prime Minister who stood shoulder to shoulder with the victims of genocidal aggression against their destroyers, rather than the other way round.

If you are to get this the right way round and thus avoid such posthumous infamy, it is vital that you come to realise the key point about the Middle East impasse. To arrive at a solution, it is imperative first of all correctly to identify the problem. The problem in the Middle East is not the absence of a state of Palestine. Were that the case, the problem would have been resolved when such a state was first mooted long before World War Two. The problem is instead that the Arabs wish to destroy the State of Israel. The solution, therefore, is to stop them from continuing to try to do so. And to achieve that, it is essential that the west stop rewarding them for their attempts.

For the single most important reason for the never-ending nature of the Middle East impasse is that, uniquely, for more than nine decades the west has rewarded the Arab aggressors and punished their Jewish victims. And from the start, the western leader of this infernal process, I’m afraid to say, was Britain.

It was the British who, out of sheer breathtaking malice against the Jewish people, first incited the (hitherto mainly benignly disposed) Arabs against the Jews returning to their ancestral homeland in Palestine in the early years of the 20th century. It was the British who set out to undermine and reverse their own government’s policy to re-establish the Jewish national home in the land of Israel. It was the British who reneged on their internationally binding treaty obligation to settle the Jews throughout Palestine – including the areas currently known as the ‘West Bank’ and Gaza – with the result that they kept out desperate Jews trying to flee Nazi Europe, causing thousands to be murdered in the Holocaust. At the same time, they encouraged Arab immigration from neighbouring countries and turned a blind eye to the pogroms carried out by these Arab newcomers against the Jews whose land it was supposed to be –thus laying the groundwork for the false claim that the Arabs were the rightful inheritors of the land. And all the time, the British cloaked this vicious treachery in the honeyed fiction that they were the true friends of the Jewish people and had their interests at heart.

The history of the British in this terrible conflict between Jew and Arab is not merely a chronicle of the utmost perfidy and malevolent Judeophobic bigotry. It is also directly responsible for the continuation of the conflict to this day. For Arab aggression against the Jews has been rewarded and encouraged from the start, by robbing the Jews of their rightful inheritance and giving great chunks of it to their aggressors. But if aggressors are rewarded, the inevitable result is more aggression until they achieve their final terrible aim.

And that very same process is in evidence today, with Britain’s grotesque endorsement this week of the coalition for genocide and your government's unconscionable pressure upon Israel to negotiate its own destruction with its mortal enemies. Prime Minister, the virus of Judeophobia is now rampant once again throughout Europe – let alone in the Arab and Muslim world. And the fuel for this fire is the set of genocidal falsehoods about the Arab and Muslim war of extermination against Israel, a Big lie which has turned victim into aggressor and vice versa. Appallingly, the British government is helping stoke this vile inferno by endorsing many of these falsehoods -- and now, worse still, by actually promoting the coalition of genocide and turning the screw on its victim. The similarities with the 1930s and 1940s are uncanny and horrifying – similarities not just with what was allowed to develop in Europe, but also what happened in Palestine itself, the source of today’s terrible impasse.

Prime Minister, if you are not very careful indeed history will judge that you re-established a direct line back to the malevolence of the British in Palestine; back to that terrible time when Britain so foully betrayed the Jewish people and became a party to genocide; back to the approach which gave genocidal fanatics hope that victory was within their grasp. To stand up against all this -- the defining madness of our times -- would demand of you, I know full well, the utmost statesmanship and moral courage. But the alternative is to earn the contempt of decent people everywhere and the scorn of posterity. The choice, Prime Minister, is yours.

Sincerely,

Melanie Phillips

Immigration at a price?

Gary Becker has just published a short monograph for the IEA entitled The Challenge of Immigration: A Radical Solution (see also here). Like most of Becker’s proposals it has a penetrating simplicity and compelling logic to it. I want to consider it briefly (for my earlier assessment of the immigration issue see here).

Here is the Executive Summary:

• Despite substantial economic growth in underdeveloped countries, there are still huge differences in wage levels between poorer and richer countries.
• Low fertility, especially in Europe, is also likely to lead to pressures that will encourage migration in future decades.
• Net migration has grown dramatically in recent years. In 1980, net migration to the UK was approximately zero and by 2005 the figure was 190,000 per annum. In the same period net migration to the USA more or less doubled to 1.1 million per annum.
• There were very substantial migration flows in the late nineteenth century but the USA imposed restrictions from the 1920s onwards. Those restrictions are onerous and involve bureaucratic controls.
• Given the extent of welfare states in countries with higher incomes, it would be difficult to go back to a policy of free migration.
• There would be many advantages to a policy of charging immigrants a fee. If a fee of (say) $50,000 were charged, it would ensure that economically active migrants who had a real commitment to the country were most attracted. This fee could be used to lower other taxes.
• Charging a fee would be a much more efficient way of controlling economic migration than the use of quotas and other bureaucratic systems of control.
• Even a fee of $50,000 would allow people on relatively low earnings to enter the USA if there were skill shortages. Given the level of wage differentials, such a fee could be paid back in a few years or in a decade or so.
• Certain categories of migrant might be allowed to benefit from a loans system to enable them to pay the fee over a period of years. This could operate rather like a student loans system in higher education.
• One advantage of using a fee rather than administrative controls would be that illegal immigrants would have a strong incentive to regularize their status – and would be allowed to do so legally. Such people would have to pay the required fee but would then be free to choose much more remunerative occupations. As such, the use of the price mechanism in migration policy could alleviate the scourge of illegal immigration.

My general reaction to this proposal was quite negative for a few reasons.

1. It appears to solidify the role of government in “centrally planning” the immigration market. Any kind of central planning smells bad – incentive and knowledge problems – abuse, corruption, unavoidable errors of judgment, etc. It also means that government officials get to decide how many immigrants is the “right” number, rather than leaving this to the market.
2. The immigration fee would be paid to the government and would become a source of revenue for it. Becker suggests that this revenue (which could be substantial) could be put toward the budget deficit and obviate the need for some taxes going forward. This argument is surprisingly naïve. It is almost certain that the government will simply expand its commitments to include the revenue. In other words it will simply fuel the expansion of government. This is a proposal for expanding government revenue, not one for simply redistributing the way that revenue is used, as is the case with vouchers.
3. The proposal is basically a mechanism for allocating immigrants between the legal and illegal categories. The higher the fee, the more likely it is to deter legal migration, leaving the potential migration two, not one, options; not to migrate or to migrate illegally.
4. Becker suggests a government funded, or supported, loan program for lower income immigrants to be able to pay the fee. (At $50,000, even low income earners would be able to pay this loan in a few years.) Who needs another government loan program? Most certainly this would turn into a dei facto subsidy.
   

Further thought, however, has inclined me more in favor of the proposal for the following reasons (referring to the list above).

1. The role of government will be diminished. So while it is clearly not ideal it does reduce the necessary bureaucracy and its scope of decision making. Responses to the level of the immigration fee set could be made public and as a way to use “market data” to adjust the number of immigrants admitted. I still don’t like this at all; but I have to concede it is a lot better than what we have.
2. Expanding government revenue by this proposal remains a big problem for me. This could be made much more palatable with a more detailed circumscribing of the use of this money; keeping it out of general revenue. Maybe it could be used for a comprehensive education voucher program. [In the high welfare states, like California, they would want use this money to pay for health-care and education of immigrants. I would resist this, since immigrants are likely to pay for them themselves in their taxes.]
3. The proposal definitely creates a mechanism by which illegal immigrants could regularize their status. It seems it would also avoid the thorny question of amnesty and the moral qualms surrounding it. At $50,000 it is likely to all but remove the illegal immigration problem.
4. One need not have government involved in any loan program. If immigration were economically profitable private companies would fund loans for the fee.

So, all in all, it seems to me this proposal would be a vast improvement over what we have. It is clearly much more politically palatable and likely than more the more radical changes that many of us would like to see along classical liberal lines. Would it foreclose such changes completely? Is it worth taking that risk? Though my heart is not in it, I would have to say yes. What do you think?

The case for climate change policy is slowly unraveling

The case for climate change policy is slowly unraveling, even as the climate alarmists continue to dominate the policy agenda. They have made up their minds and don't want to be confused by facts and logic. I say climate change POLICY (rather than global warming as a phenomenon) because, even if we grant the case for global warming (which has by no means been scientifically made), there are still three other questions that we need to answer clearly in the affirmative before we have a case for global warming POLICY. As I have explained here:

In order to make a case for government policy to mitigate Global Warming all of the following questions have to be answered in the affirmative:

1. Is the global climate warming?
2. If yes, is this (partially) caused by CO2 emissions?
3. If yes, is there anything we can do to significantly slow this down or even reverse global warming?
4. If yes, is it worth the effort?

Each of these questions poses a tough burden to meet, appropriately so before we embark on policies that will disrupt hundreds of thousands of lives (read the blog). I would now add an important fifth challenge.

5. Can we answer #4 above definitively?

This is another way of saying, do we really know what the hell we are doing?

Have a look at this op-ed from today's WSJ for a dose of humility in this regard.




REVIEW & OUTLOOK
APRIL 21, 2011
Climate Refugees, Not Found
Discredited by reality, the U.N.'s prophecies go missing.

In 2005, the U.N. Environment Program (UNEP) published a color-coded map under the headline "Fifty million climate refugees by 2010." The primary source for the prediction was a 2005 paper by environmental scientist Norman Myers.

Six years later, this flood of refugees is nowhere to be found, global average temperatures are about where they were when the prediction was made—and the U.N. has done a vanishing act of its own, wiping the inconvenient map from its servers.

The map, which can still be found elsewhere on the Web, disappeared from the program's site sometime after April 11, when Gavin Atkins asked on AsianCorrespondent.com: "What happened to the climate refugees?" It's now 2011 and, as Mr. Atkins points out, many of the locales that the map identified as likely sources of climate refugees are "not only not losing people, they are actually among the fastest growing regions in the world."

The program's spokesman tells us the map vanished because "it's not a UNEP prediction. . . . that graphic did not represent UNEP views and was an oversimplification of UNEP views." He added that the program would like to publish a clarification, now that journalists are "making hay of it," except that the staffers able to do so are "all on holiday for Easter."

The climate-refugee prediction isn't the first global warming-related claim that has turned out to be laughable, and everyone can make mistakes. More troubling is the impulse among some advocates of global warming alarmism to assert in the face of contrary evidence that they never said what they definitely said before the evidence went against them.

These columns have asked for some time how anyone can still manage to take the U.N.-led climate crowd seriously. Maybe the more pertinent question is whether the climateers have ever taken the public's intelligence seriously.
Copyright 2011 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Illegal Drugs - Ivry Man (IM) asks Dr. Know (DK) for Guidance

Ivry man finds himself in the park and, as expected, sees Dr. Know seated on his usual bench looking absent minded.

IM. Dr. Know, how are you? It’s been quite a while since we spoke.

DK. [Warm smile] Indeed it has my dear friend. The responsibility for this lies with the guy who writes this dialogue. Apparently he has been very busy with other things and could not find the time to bother with the likes of us. Who am I to argue with that?

IM. [Looking confused] I am not sure I understand.

DK. Never mind. The fact that we are here must mean that there is something bothering you. Did you want to speak to me about something?

IM. [Serious] Yes, indeed. I just read this morning about two Americans who were killed in this drug-war that is going on in Mexico. It doesn’t seem as if the Mexican government is doing enough to keep its citizens, and now ours, safe, and to stamp out this drug epidemic.

DK. [Looking thoughtful] Maybe we should look at this a little more carefully. What do you suppose this “war” is all about?

IM. Well, it’s obvious, isn’t it? These drugs are addictive, people are prepared to pay lots of money for them even though they shouldn’t have them, and so unscrupulous criminals have made a very big business out of it and are willing to go to war to defend that business. We have to do what it takes to put them out of business – step up to the plate!

DK. Well now let me get this straight. There are some people who want these drugs very badly and there are other people who want to sell to them. So what’s the problem exactly?

IM. [Exasperated]Are you deliberately being stupid? The problem is that we can’t simply allow people to sell and buy these very bad substances.

DK. And why is that?

IM. What is the matter with you? Don’t you think addictive drugs are terrible?

DK. Well yes, as a matter of fact I do. I think they are a curse. I can say nothing good about them. I am talking about hard drugs like heroine, crack, acid, etc. and various concoctions of over-the-counter stuff as well. I think cocaine is probably borderline and I think marijuana is pretty harmless.

IM.  How can you say that? Surely you know that marijuana is a gateway drug, a stepping stone to harder stuff. If you open the flood gates, what then? [Dr. Know grimaces at the mixed metaphors]

DK. As a matter of fact my dear Ivrey, I think that is completely false. I see no hard evidence that marijuana is itself addictive or leads to addiction of other substances. Nor do I see any credible evidence that it is unhealthy. Excess pot is surely less harmful than excess alcohol and alcohol can be dangerously addictive. And pot is certainly no more harmful than garden variety tobacco found in cigarettes, pipes and cigars. And we know that it has certain beneficial medicinal uses, for example in the treatment of pain and nausea. For the life of me I cannot even begin to understand why this stuff is illegal. We could save a lot of law enforcement dollars on this one.

IM. [Looking peeved] Well I can see I am not going to win this one. You do admit though that those other things are very bad?

DK. [Looking earnest] Indeed I do. Very bad.

IM. [Indignant] So, at least for the hard stuff, prohibit it?

DK.  No, my friend. This is an imperfect world. There are lots of dangerous temptations in it. Being a free person means having to make hard choices and bearing the consequences of one’s actions. We cannot, and do not try, to protect people from all that is bad in the world particularly when it is the result of their own bad choices. Who are we to decided for people what is good for them and what not? Should we prohibit the eating of red meat for everyone who has high cholesterol? We tried prohibiting the purchase and sale of alcohol and you know where that led. Isn’t this exactly the same as “Prohibition?”

         How long has this “drug-war” been going on? At least 30 years. Every successive administration, Republican or Democrat, pledges renewed efforts to control the sale and use of hard drugs; yet they are still with us, in the inner cities and in the affluent suburbs. The drug-war has not been won, cannot be won, and costs more and more in terms of dollars, corruption and human lives with each passing moment.

IM. [Incredulous] So what are you suggesting, that we just turn a blind eye to users and pushers?

DK. Think about it Ivrey. How could the harms and suffering of allowing free sale and use even begin to compare with the mounting costs of this war? I doubt we could accurately assess this cost. In addition to dollar expenditures and loss of life and limb (over twenty thousand people killed in Mexico alone since the war moved there from Colombia, many of them uninvolved innocents) we have to add the devastating loss of freedom and privacy as drug-enforcement thugs knock down doors and strip-search suspects, the costs of incarcerating hundreds of thousands of perpetrators, and the incredible degree of police corruption caused by the drug-enforcement situation.

IM. What do you mean?

DK  There is probably not a single urban police force in this country (and certainly not in Mexico) that is not seriously infiltrated by cops in the pay of drug-lords. How can local government (or even the federal government) compete with the kind of money the drug trade offers? And for what?

         Even more important, this is not something that should be a preoccupation of our secretary of state and an important aspect of our foreign policy as we lean very heavily on foreign governments to bear the brunt of this war. The demand for drugs in the U.S. and our attempt to stamp out the trade has resulted in major destruction to the economies of other countries, like Colombia and Afghanistan and now, to an even greater degree, Mexico. We, the U.S., have destroyed civil society and peaceful living in northern Mexico. We have made them pay dearly for our “problem.”

IM. [Red in the face] I just can’t believe you would allow people to be abused by these criminals without even trying to protect them.

DK. [Sad, concerned] If there were any likelihood of winning this war or even confining it to a low boil, one might make an argument for persisting; but after thirty years of war it is definitely time to declare defeat and choose the lesser evil – allow people to decide what to buy and ingest as long as they do it peacefully. And if you want to try and persuade them to make better choices, to “educate” them, that is your choice, with your dollar. Even if we used a fraction of the tax-payer dollars we now spend on enforcement for this educative effort, it would probably be more effective and sensible that this senseless “war.”

         Don’t you see Ivrey, if you criminalize something you attract people with a comparative advantage in being criminals. That is why there is so much horrifying violence. If it were decriminalized the violence would be unnecessary. The price would fall. Even low income addicts probably wouldn’t have to rob people to get their fix as often as now. The trade would be visible, like alcohol.

IM.  Don’t you think this will result in a huge increase in experimentation and addiction, especially among our vulnerable children?

DK. So dramatic. No I don’t actually. My best guess is that in the beginning there will be some spike in use and abuse, but in a short time this will smooth out. In the end we may actually have fewer users. But even if the number of users goes up this is no reason to persist with this craziness. And our children are already highly exposed to all manner of addictive substances, wherever they are.

IM. I should have known I was getting into trouble. So what is your specific proposal?

DK.  I propose officially decriminalizing the production and sale of all addictive substances and letting people make up their own minds. I suppose this is a non-starter. Then at least we can do this de-facto by putting drug-enforcement way behind the back-burner to where it is basically invisible.

IM. [looking thoughtful] It would take a lot of persuading to get to that point.

DK. Well that is why we are here you know (no pun intended). Our author decided to write this dialogue to do his little bit, just like he said he would when we last met (see here).

IM.  Well I hope to see you again soon. I see you looking at your watch. But I wonder if your argument about addictive drugs would not apply equally to prescription drugs (pharmaceuticals)?

DK.  As a matter of fact it would, and that will be the subject of our next discussion. Always a pleasure my good friend.

He rises and ambles off in the direction of … .

Immigration is an essential ingredient in American economic growth.

Within the space of 235 years (a blink of an eye in historical time) the United States of America has gone from an ex-colonial backwater to the greatest economic powerhouse in history. Its population has grown from about 3 million to over 300 million over this period. A sizable portion of this growth has come from immigration. The proportion of the foreign born (legal and illegal) has rarely been below 10% and has frequently been in the region of 20%. At any point in time a large proportion of working Americans were either born elsewhere, had parents who were born elsewhere, or had grandparents who were born elsewhere. This is an incredibly dynamic picture, a veritable demographic churning, with amazing cultural and economic implications.

Judging by my own experience and observations, there is a subtle inter-generational shift in cultural identity. Only by the third generation do people feel completely assimilated into the local culture. The immigrants never quite "make-it." I think of myself very much as an American. But I am frequently conscious that my accent and my experience causes me to stand out a bit - not in a bad way, but it is noticeable. Many of my fellow immigrants feel this to a greater extent. It makes for cultural tensions, but also for an exciting dynamism, an infusion of cultural DNA into to social gene pool. My children are American. But even they, as children of South African immigrants, carry an extra bit of background baggage. They feel just a little bit different, in possession of something unique (the tacit and conscious knowledge of another culture). You see this most clearly in the way they gravitate to other first generation Americans in their social circles. By the third generation the children are full Americans. Their grandparents might as well be from another planet.

This pattern is repeated over again in each generation of America's population. It has been a necessary part of the ongoing vitality of the American experience, including its entrepreneurial component. Without it American exceptionalism, and the rate of value-creation, of economic growth, will not be sustained.

Illegal immigration is not a problem. It is an opportunity.

We are America

President Obama told business leaders Monday, "I want to be clear: Even as we make America the best place on earth to do business, businesses also have a responsibility to America... As we work with you to make America a better place to do business, ask yourselves what you can do for America. Ask yourselves what you can do to hire American workers, to support the American economy, and to invest in this nation."

This is really annoying - he just doesn't get it. And the businessmen he was speaking do, don't either. They just want to make a deal that will let them run their businesses and make profits. In this speech to the US Chamber of Commerce Obama echoed John F. Kennedy's famous inaugural speech about not asking what your country can do for you but, rather, what you can do for your country.

This gets it exactly wrong!! A system that depends on individual duty and sacrifice to function properly, is likely to malfunction badly, and to be abused by the worst elements of society. This Adam Smith already knew, and this, Milton Friedman already made crystal clear in his 1962 classic Capitalism and Freedom. In the first sentences of the Introduction he writes as follows:

In a much quoted passage in his inaugural address, President Kennedy said, "Ask not what your country can do for you - ask what you can do for your country." Neither half of the statement expresses a relation between the citizen and his government that is worthy of the ideals of free men in a free society. The paternalistic "what your country can do for you" implies that government is the patron, the citizen the ward, a view that is at odds with the free man's belief in his own responsibility for his own destiny. The organismic, "what you can do for your 'country" implies the government is the master or the deity, the citizen, the servant or the votary.

To the free man, the country is the collection of individuals who compose it, not something over and above them. He is proud of a common heritage and loyal to common traditions. But he regards government as a means, an instrumentality, neither a grantor of favors and gifts, nor a master or god to be blindly worshiped and served. He recognizes no national goal except as it is the consensus of the goals that the citizens severally serve. He recognizes no national purpose except as it is the consensus of the purposes for which the citizens severally strive.

The free man will ask neither what his country can do for him nor what he can do for his country. He will ask rather "What can I and my compatriots do through government" to help us discharge our individual responsibilities, to achieve our several goals and purposes, and above all, to protect our freedom? And he will accompany this question with another: How can we keep the government we create from becoming a Frankenstein that will destroy the very freedom we establish it to protect?

This should be required reading at the White House.

Walking the tightrope between left and right.

Today’s editorial in the WSJ by the president of the United States can be understood on at least two levels.

On one level it is an exercise in reasoned persuasion, on the basis of sound evidence and logic, to move the economic policy in a more sensible direction. If this is the intention, it must be judged an abysmal failure. As my annotations at the link below suggest, the reasoning is faulty, the assertions are vague and unsupported - the rhetoric reads like something out of Orwell's 1984 - "newspeak" - terms that mean the very opposite of what they say.

On a second level, this is a rhetorical play – a big one. I have said for a while that one of my biggest fears is that Obama will reinvent himself as a candidate of the “moderate middle” regain the support of the “moderates” and independents and win reelection in 2012. Is seems to me this editorial is all about that reelection. All form and no substance, it is an attempt to appeal to those who are worried about his commitment to a healthy economy. It is an attempt to allay these fears while not alienating the anti-business crowd too much. He is cleverly walking a tightrope, looking right and left and hoping not to fall.

Will it work?

You can find the editorial, together with my annotations, at the link below.
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You cannot replace God with Science - don't try.

Sam Harris is at it again. For those who don't know him, Harris is an American neuroscientist best known for his critical work on religion. In his books The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation he provides devastating critiques of traditional religious beliefs. Though not new, his arguments are candid and compelling - at least to me. Reading his work (like the work of his fellow "New Atheists," Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and Daniel Dennett) leaves me wondering about two "mysteries" of life.

Mystery number 1 is how on earth reasonable people can believe the types of things claimed by the teachings of the traditional religions. I am talking factual things, not moral truths, like the stories of creation, revelation, miracles, etc. when the evidence and common sense is so compellingly against such things. I suppose I don't really expect to get a satisfying answer to this question. The explanation probably lies in the cognitive-emotional makeup of human beings. Which begs the question, why do some believe so fervently and others think that it is all nonsense and superstition? Leave that aside.

Mystery number 2 arises out of the realization that while the "answers" given by traditional religion may be patently unsatisfactory, or, actually, not really answers at all, no good answers to the "big" questions exist. There are many things in heaven and on earth that remain unknown, and perhaps unknowable. The ratio of what we know to what we don't know about what there is to know, might be pathetically low. This would not be surprising to me. And about the really "big" questions I imagine there can never be an answer. "How was the universe created?" or more accurately, "Why is there something rather than nothing?" or more mundanely, "From where does matter come?" are questions that tease us but whose coherence may be in doubt. They suggest some sort of transcendent infinite regress. I am content to say "I don't know, nobody knows, we will probably never know."

So much for the New Atheism. But Harris is not content to confine his argument to a penetrating critique of pretended knowledge. He also wants to attack the morality of religion. On some of this I find his arguments quite reasonable. Some religious teachings strike us "reasonable" folks as simply medieval. However, as I have explained before, here, what Harris fails to realize is that this kind of criticism, criticism of moral values, is of a whole different category from criticism of factual beliefs. Morals belong to the world of tastes and values informing us about how the world ought to be; factual beliefs belong to the world of facts informing us about how the world is. These are categorically different. As the British philosopher David Hume taught us, you cannot get an "ought" from an "is." You cannot decide how things ought to be simply by looking at how they are. Matters of value are different from matters of fact. "Harry is a thief" may be a fact. "Harry ought to be punished" is not. And the second sentence does not follow from the first without the insertion of some personal judgment.

Roughly the last third of The End of Faith is devoted to the futile exercise of trying to deduce morals from "scientific" facts. And now Harris has written a whole new book on this: The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values. Notice the subtitle. It is a straight-out denial of Hume's distinction between facts and values. How does he do it? With a very clumsy slight of hand, that is how.

He begins by equating morality to that which fosters "well-being" - since deep down everyone believes that we should be concerned about well-being. Hence if you find the scientific determinants of well-being you can find a scientific basis for morality! QED. One can use the objective filter of science to determine what is moral and what is not on the basis of the effect of various behaviors on well-being. Simply examine the states of people's brains under different conditions to find out what makes them "happy" and you can write the book on a scientific morality - as he perceives himself to have done.

It is clear from his references and sources, that in addition to work on neuroscience, Harris relies on work in what has been called Behavioral Economics. This includes recent work on so-called "happiness research" and the "new paternalism." Using laboratory methods (simulated realities with volunteers) these researchers claim to be able to discern enduring truths about human perception and decision-making. Maybe they can. Its what follows that is often problematic in the extreme. For example, from the observation that people often seem to make what the experimenter knows to be irrational decisions - because they are inconsistent (dependent on the way the decision problem is framed) or because they are clearly against the subjects' self interest, these behavioral economists would like to make paternalistic laws to guide people in their own interests to make "better" decisions. Science has become God and he wants to put Big Brother in charge. (see for example here.)

Harris's project is flawed before it gets started - it has two major flaws. 1. "well-being" is an amorphous, non-scientific concept. It is a futile attempt to objectify the subjective. We don't know and cannot know what it is that people "really want." To presume we do is to court extreme dangers of moral coercion; depriving people of moral autonomy. 2. Even if we could somehow determine what well-being is for each and every human being, we cannot assume that what enhances well-being is automatically moral. This is to illegitimately ignore the fact-value distinction. I mean one can make this assertion - that morality is simply the enhancement of well-being - but it is a lame assertion based simply on itself and nothing else but the belief that everyone would agree with it. I don't.

What supreme irony! To start a project aimed at dethroning dogmatic belief systems only to end up peddling another - one just as dangerous.