Stromata Blog

After the Flood

While visiting the Oregon coast last Spring, I chuckled at the “Tsunami Evacuation Route” signs. Now they don’t seem so amusing, and I hope that the local authorities are hard at work reorienting the ones that point in the wrong direction.

Also less amusing are the “Volcano Evacuation Route” markers near my sister’s home in Sumner, Washington. A lava flow from Mount Rainier would kill fewer people than the Indian Ocean tsunami, but the death and destruction would be mightily impressive.

Prudently I myself live in Chicago, Illinois, whose recorded history is free from tsunamis, serious earthquakes, hurricanes, volcanic eruptions and tornados. But we could be hit by an asteroid or irradiated by a nearby supernova. Or a new glaciation (the consensus climate prediction before Global Warming became fashionable) could bury us in ice.

And eventually and unstoppably, the Sun will expand to devour its children. That day is supposed to be a few billion years off, but we don’t know a fraction of everything about the mechanisms of stellar destruction. Astronomers will be only mildly surprised if the nova commences tomorrow.

The universe is a dangerous place for organisms, before one even takes into account their tendency to kill either other via disease, predation and war. If we tried to minimize all of the risks, we would have no time or resources left for anything else and would perish from famine. To take the Indian Ocean catastrophe as illustrative, a major investment in an early warning system would have saved tens of thousands of lives. On the other hand, the hundreds of millions of dollars thus deployed would not have been available to meet other needs, many of which would, until last week, have seemed more pressing. There had never been a major tsunami in the region; poverty and hunger are there every day. Would humanitarians ten years ago have liked the notion of forgoing relief of the immediately destitute in order to facilitate the construction of a “gold-plated” (as it would inevitably have been labeled) array of undersea sensors and ancillary devices? More likely they would have lamented potential damage to fish habitats and disruption of whale migration patterns!

Now that the improbable disaster has taken place, three reactions are inevitable: First, the local authorities (and the United States) will be denounced for having failed to anticipate it. Second, the developed world (and particularly the United States) will be denounced for doing “too little” to relieve it. Third, God (though probably not the United States) will be denounced for having allowed it to come to pass.

The idea that all ghastly contingencies can be foreseen and prevented is, I believe, new to our generation. Perhaps it is the natural presumption of those who, thanks to mankind’s unprecedented affluence, suffer less from misfortune than any of their ancestors. Applied to the governments of India, Indonesia and Sri Lanka, it is as ridiculous as when used to berate the Bush Administration. (Why didn’t the President stop 9/11? Why didn’t Don Rumsfeld know exactly what our enemies would do in Iraq after their military defeat?) Judging by my experience, people who think that way can’t be argued out of their position. They dismiss as “denial” the theory that the future is uncertain and contains more possibilities than can be embraced by any “plan”. Their faith in the godlike efficacy of planning coexists quite comfortably with their certainty that every actual planner is a self-interested bungler.

The same internally inconsistent sourness pervades commentary on relief efforts. We ought to be astonished by the willingness of Americans and other Westerners – rich relative to the rest of the world but rarely rolling in surplus wealth – to spend millions (or billions, as it will be in this instance) for the benefit of faraway people about whom they know little. Instead, bien pensants will tell them that they are “stingy”and will complain further when all suffering is not instantly alleviated. We will read in the New York Times about inefficiency and unfairness in the distribution of aid, about villages overlooked, about poor accounting controls, transport foul-ups and excessive overhead. The good news will be spiked, not because it is boring but because those who purvey our news don’t like to attribute good deeds to a society with which they are fundamentally out of sympathy.

I note, too, that people who demand infinite, monetarily instantiated compassion for people hit by “acts of God” mostly take a hands-off, no interference approach to similarly catastrophic acts of man. They want a maximum effort on behalf of Aceh and the Andaman Islands but to this day regret that the United States did anything for the millions oppressed by the Ba’athist regime in Iraq, and they would be outraged should we one day overthrow the hideous Robert Mugabe. Ousting a tyrant requires different measures from cleaning up after a storm, but does that difference make one set of victims less sympathetic than the other? Does compassion end when its exercise is unpleasant for anti-American despots?

Finally, the coming weeks will doubtless witness an outbreak of amateur theodicy along the lines of, If God exists and loves man, how could He permit these hundreds of thousands of men to die in this horrible fashion?

Answering that question is not intellectually difficult. It is, in fact, one of the great solved problems of philosophy. The reason why the solution is ignored is that secularists don’t want to let go of what they see as their high trump card against belief in God, while theists find it emotionally unsatisfying.

C. S. Lewis gives the answer in long form in The Problem of Pain, but it can be summarized succinctly: If matter and energy obey regular laws, events will occur that abruptly alter the environment, and organisms may be unable to cope with the results. In the particular case of the Indian Ocean, two tectonic plates struck each other, forcing one to sink and one to rise. The process created a huge wave that then spread until it came violently ashore.

That God could have created a universe in which no clashes of this kind would occur is not imaginable. He could still the waters, but a continual procession of miracles would make natural law unreal. The choice is between a cosmos in which law is the norm and miracle the exception or one in which constant divine action imposes pain-free harmony.

A little reflection reveals that life in the latter universe would be pointless. We would be denizens of an eternal nursery, with no reason to think or act. That fate would be worse than the risk of being struck down prematurely by flood, fire, pestilence or famine.

No one likes to say bluntly that pain is the price of meaningful life. It sounds like an abstract and unfeeling response to a gigantic human tragedy. The purpose of philosophical inquiry is not, however, to bestow comfort. It can only inform us that the universe has hard edges and would not be improved by being constructed of sponge rubber. For consolation after being cut and bruised, we must look elsewhere.

Do-It-Yourself Vote Fraud

The most patently absurd of all statements made about this year’s farcical governor’s race in Washington State came from “winner” Christine Gregoire:

I think we have been a model to the rest of the nation and the world at large about how an election system, as close as this one is, can be done with the highest of quality. . . This is the biggest display of democracy I have ever seen and I am proud of it and I think it’s an inspiration. [quoted, with undisguised astonishment, by Sound Politics]

Meanwhile, in this universe, the vote counting and recounting and re-recounting exposed procedures that were, at the very least, slovenly. That they might also be less than honest is suggested by the fact that nearly all of the “corrections” just happened to favor one party’s candidate, to an extent difficult to account for by chance.

We will never know for certain which candidate really received more votes properly cast by registered, eligible voters. One reason is that ballot box stuffing is no longer a centralized affair orchestrated by political bosses. Inattention to even to most elementary safeguards has bred do-it-yourself cheating. Jim Miller usefully outlines the problem in “A Review of Distributed Vote Fraud”. He lists six factors, some obvious and others controversial, that explain why fraud is easier and more tempting than ever and why it tends to favor Democratic candidates:

1. Not every person who wants to vote is honest.
2. Dishonest people are more likely to cheat if controls on cheating are weakened.
3. Controls on vote fraud have been weakened in recent decades, notably by the passage of the 1993 “Motor Voter” Act and by the increase in absentee voting.
4. Dishonest people are more likely to cheat if they view an election as important.
5. Voters, especially on the left, viewed the [last] election as more important than most.
6. Cheaters are more likely to be Democrats than Republicans.

The last point in particular may sound like partisan sniping, but –

Democratic leaders act as if it is true. Both nationally, and in most states, most Republicans want stronger controls against cheating than most Democrats do. In 1993, nearly all of the opposition to the “Motor Voter” Act came from Republicans. President George H. W. Bush had vetoed it earlier; President Bill Clinton signed it.

What was almost certainly “distributed vote fraud” proved crucial in the Washington race. Democrat Gregoire’s official “victory” margin is 130 votes. She picked up a net of over 200 votes entirely from a court decision allowing her campaign to track down purported mail-in voters whose signatures on their ballot envelopes didn’t match their signatures on file. In a few instances, the mismatch may have been a false negative, resulting from aging or illness, but it is overwhelmingly probable that, in the great majority of cases, somebody other than the “voter” signed. Those ballots may have been given away or extorted or sold. Whatever the cause, there is no justification for letting them cancel legitimate votes, yet all that the court asked was that party operatives obtain an affidavit ratifying the fraud after the fact. As a further example, reviews of voter data from King County, Washington’s liberal stronghold (Republican Dino Rossi carried the rest of the state by a hefty margin), show hundreds of apparently bogus voter registrations and other irregularities. According to Sound Politics, a spokesman for the Secretary of State’s office –

essentially confirmed that there are no safeguards to prevent these sorts of abuses from occurring. The only improvement in the process will be effective January 2006, when federal law requires that names and Social Security Numbers have to be matched against the federal SS database. Such checking will commence sometime in 2005. In the meantime, and certainly prior to our tainted election, there was effectively NO credible verification of identity.

Checking Social Security numbers isn’t a cure-all, since non-citizens who can’t legally vote can (and, if they wish to work legally, must) obtain Social Security cards. Still, it will help reduce fraudulent registrants in the future. As for the past, however,

While it is trivially easy for anybody to register and vote fraudulently, it is extremely difficult to cancel their registrations. The Sec. of State spokesperson explained that the elections officials do not investigate fraudulent registrations and voting; it’s up to other voters to file challenges and the burden of investigation and proof is very high.

The Washington GOP is, inevitably in this day and age, contemplating a lawsuit. Unlike most election-related litigation, this one might be a public service. As John Fund remarks in the OpinionJournal Political Diary (subscription only, but a bargain at $3.95 a month),

Any attempt to overturn Ms. Gregoire’s victory after three vote counts will face long odds. But the effort to uncover the flawed and fraud-prone procedures behind Washington State’s election debacle would provide a useful road map to the fixes the state will need to make in the future.

Washington isn’t the only place where a road map is needed. Distributed vote fraud bids fair to become a major anti-democratic (albeit pro-Democratic) force in 21st Century politics. Like Bolshevism, it should be strangled in its cradle.

Professor Flew’s Step Toward Jerusalem

From one point of view, Professor Antony Flew’s “conversion” to theism is an unimpressive event. The god in whom he now believes is strictly Aristotle’s Primum Mobile, immensely distant from the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. In an interview that will appear in the Winter 2005 issue of Philosophia Christi, he agrees that his new stance can accurately be labeled “deism”, meaning that he holds to a philosophy that played a key role in undermining Christian belief during the Enlightenment. Indeed, it is not obvious that a universe created by the Primum Mobile is morally distinguishable from the congeries of random phenomena envisioned by robust atheists like Richard Dawkins. As Professor Flew says in response to a question about the relationship between the Primum Mobile and the reality of evil,

Well, absent revelation, why should we perceive anything as objectively evil? The problem of evil is a problem only for Christians. For Muslims everything which human beings perceive as evil, just as much as everything we perceive as good, has to be obediently accepted as produced by the will of Allah.

That is also presumably the deist’s opinion. The atheist differs only in denying that there is any will behind the palpable evils of the cosmos. Either the atheist or the deist may rebel against those evils. Their reasons for doing so and their likelihood of success (whatever that word may mean in this context) are exactly the same.

Nonetheless, we must remember that every road out of Jerusalem is a road into Jerusalem. The acknowledgment that the universe is attributable to a rational nous is an immense step forward (as Christians define “forward”) for one who previously saw only the mindless interactions of particles and forces. Many traditional apologists, St. Thomas Aquinas among them, tacitly assumed that, once that much had been accepted, the rest of Christian doctrine followed naturally. While the experience of those for whom deism was a way station on the opposite path shows that this expectation was too optimistic, deists, particularly those who discern the flaws of atheism, have a defense against the psychological inertia of modern unbelief and thus are less barricaded than most moderns against the teachings of Christ. To that extent, “conversions” of the Flew variety are significant.

The Philosophia Christi interview does not deal at length with the theistic arguments that Professor Flew finds decisive. Essentially, he has been convinced by a familiar and often naively stated argument: that a universe containing rational consciousness is more believably characterized as a creation than as an accident. Either position is in many respects incomprehensible. We cannot imagine what a Creator is like, but neither can we imagine matter and energy either popping into existence or existing from eternity (which are two different formulations of the same unimaginable). Moreover, once we take matter and energy as a given, the structure within which they interact is so intricate that it is, again, more believable as design than as chance.

We are bereft of data to prove definitively that what appears plausible about the origin and pattern of the cosmos is actual reality. In the absence of proof, one can try to ignore the question, but, if it is faced squarely, there can be no rational justification for preferring the less plausible to the more plausible opinion. The atheistic position is more a leap of faith than the theistic one. Those who accept it either overlook its difficulties or count on future discoveries for their resolution, without having any good reason to think that the advance of knowledge will not aggravate them instead.

The faith of atheism has a shibboleth with which to counter doubts raised by theistic arguments from design: “the God of the gaps”. Supposedly, believers in God have in the past argued that He must exist because science is unable to explain this phenomenon or that. Later the mystery is solved, so theists move on to the next “gap”. Arguments like Professor Flew’s are, then, just the latest instance of an old, discredited tactical ruse.

The ruse, however, is the atheist’s. Theistic philosophers, as distinguished from unphilosophical believers straining to find an argument, never contended that God must exist because science could not account for wind or rain or the solar system. The central tenet of the argument from design has always been the incomprehensibility of an uncreated universe, and that riddle science is no closer to unraveling today than it was when St. Thomas formulated his “Five Proofs”. There is not a series of small, explicable gaps, but just one vast one, which has to be filled by either God or nothing.

Professor Flew has filled it with God, but not, he emphasizes, with a God Who can reveal Himself supernaturally or have any personal relationship with human beings. He does not find the case for Christian theism persuasive, though he evinces no hostility toward Christianity, which he sees as a force for good rather than a haven of bigoted obscurantism.

But it’s interesting to note that [David Hume] was perfectly willing to accept one of the conditions of his appointment, if he had been appointed, to a chair of philosophy at the University of Edinburgh. That condition was, roughly speaking, to provide some sort of support and encouragement for people performing prayers and executing other acts of worship. I believe that Hume thought that the institution of religious belief could be, and in his day and place was, socially beneficial.

I, too, having been brought up as a Methodist [his father and grandfather were eminent Methodist clergymen; the Rev. Robert Newton Flew is in the DNB], have always been aware of this possible and in many times and places actual benefit of objective religious instruction. It is now several decades since I first tried to draw attention to the danger of relying on a modest amount of compulsory religious instruction in schools to meet the need for moral education, especially in a period of relentlessly declining religious belief. But all such warnings by individuals were, of course, ignored. So we now have in the UK a situation in which any mandatory requirements to instruct pupils in state funded schools in the teachings of the established or any other religion are widely ignored.

He does not, let me note, advocate insincere religious instruction as a method of imparting moral values. “In the UK any effective program of moral education has to be secular because unbelief is now very widespread.” He seems to regret, though, that Constitutional interpretation has also driven schools to secularism in the predominantly believing United States.

This concern for morality is, it seems to me, a flaw in Professor Flew’s principal objection to Christianity: that it does not have an adequate answer t the problem of evil. Despite what one might infer from the quotation above (“why should we perceive anything as objectively evil?”), he does not regard morality as arbitrary. That is shown by his reason for rejecting one of the arguments for the existence of God that C. S. Lewis presents in Mere Christianity:

It seems to me that for a strong moral argument, you’ve got to have God as the justification of morality. To do this makes doing the morally good a purely prudential matter rather than, as the moral philosophers of my youth used to call it, a good in itself. (Compare the classic discussion in Plato’s Euthyphro.)

A morality “good in itself” must be accessible to all rational intellects, including the Rational Intellect that created the universe. Yet Professor Flew regards the deistic God as indifferent to evil, indeed as “producing a lot of it”.

Now, I cannot prove that a rational Primum Mobile would refrain from intentionally producing evil, but why would It not do only what It recognized as good? The concept of a First Cause susceptible to temptation and sin is fantastical, so the answer must be that evil is unavoidable in a universe whose matter and energy follow regular laws and that includes beings with free will. Yet that theodicy is no less satisfactory for the Christian than the deistic God. The difference is that, according to the Christian account, God has acted to remedy what He could not forestall.

Christmas is the celebration of what Christians believe was the advent of that remedy, the day when God entered into His greatest transaction with His creatures and took on our humanity that we might be transformed by His divinity. Starting from theistic premises, that Christian story of sin and redemption, while surprising in many respects and open to varying interpretation in its details, is not outlandish. The distance from Professor Flew’s remote deity to the God Who so loved the world that He gave His only begotten son is shorter than from atheism to deism. Is creating all things visible and invisible more or less incredible than the Atonement?

A Scanner in Your Pocket

New Scientist reports that Japanese researchers have developed a “scanner built into a piece of flexible plastic little bigger than a credit card”. Place it on a surface, connect to a power source and memory storage unit – the prototype uses a cell phone for those functions – and it captures the image beneath. Should the surface be irregular, just bend the scanner to fit.

The lightweight device, unveiled last week at an electronics conference in San Francisco, is the latest development in the field of flexible organic electronics, which exploits the electronic properties of conducting plastics. . . .

The new device, developed in Japan by electrical engineer Takao Someya and colleagues at the University of Tokyo, comprises a polymer matrix in which thousands of light-sensitive plastic photodiodes have been deposited 700 micrometres apart beneath a grid of plastic transistors. . . .

The plastic is transparent, so ambient light can pass through it to reach the object being scanned. Because the transistors sit on top of the diodes, shielding them from ambient light, only the light that reflects off bright areas strikes the photodiodes, which generate a current proportional to the greyscale light intensity.

The resulting charges are stored in the array of transistors and are then read out to construct an image.

The inventor thinks that the gadget is about three years away from commercial production but that it will cost practically nothing – ten dollars, he guesses, for a 2¾-inch square. What would be most useful for research is a larger size, big enough to cover half a page or so of a book but able to be folded up and carried in one’s pocket. Maybe that will cost fifty or sixty bucks.

I don’t do a lot of note taking in obscure archives but will happily buy one just to facilitate cataloguing my books and games. The tedium of typing thousands of titles keeps me from beginning the task. If I could walk about my apartment scanning them instead, the project would still be daunting, but it becomes almost imaginable.

Debate on the Merits, the Big Labor Way

Now that it’s down to about 10 percent of the private sector work force, I’m not sure that we should call it “Big” Labor any more. Be that as it may, the left-wing chiefs of the nation’s labor unions have picked up their notions of free and fair debate from the foreign socialists whom they so admire. From Knight Ridder:

Unions, which control billions of dollars in pensions, have suggested that pension fund trustees stop doing business with investment firms that advocate individual retirement accounts for Social Security. In 2001, the AFL-CIO targeted State Street Corp., a financial-services firm that had been leading the drive for individual retirement accounts. Within months, State Street reversed its position.

In a letter to 46 financial firms this week, AFL-CIO President John Sweeney leveled a veiled threat: “I encourage your firm to follow State Street’s example,” he wrote.

Actually, “unions” don’t “control billions of dollars in pensions”. They select members of boards of trustees that are supposed to make plan investment decisions in accordance with the fiduciary standards of ERISA. Selecting plan service providers on the basis of their political views is a pretty clear breach of the duty of loyalty to the interests of plan participants. Maybe Mr. Sweeney would grasp that point if the employer trustees (who must by law comprise at least half of the board) began refusing to deal with, say, investment bankers who contribute heavily to Democrats.

God and Christine Gregoire

The chairman of the Washington State Democratic Party, appearing yesterday on a liberal talk radio program, startled the host by declaring that “God has placed” Christine Gregoire in the state governor’s chair. Perhaps this is a sign that Democrats are starting to try to connect to religiously observant voters. Perhaps it indicates that chairman Berendt has a rather distinctive concept of deity.

The “god” who moved in these mysterious ways was the King County canvassing board, whose Democratic majority has continuously found new votes and reclassified old ones throughout the recount process. (Sound Politics has an eyewitness account of some of the strange goings on.) Mayor Daley (Richard J., that is, not the anemic Richard M.) used to do the same thing, but Da Mare had the finesse to produce his magical mystery ballots on election night itself. Another sign of how old-fashioned craftsmanship has decayed.

It is unlikely that Republican candidate Dino Rossi can do anything to reverse this outcome, fraudulent though it may be. King County’s slipshod election procedures make it almost impossible to separate deliberate cheating from sort of honest mistakes. In any case, the Democrats have several hundred late-found, not-yet-counted ballots in reserve.

Unless the state GOP has a tactical nuke in readiness, the wise course of action is to yield gracefully, as John Thune did when he “lost” the heavily tainted South Dakota Senate election in 2002. A prolonged legal battle will be chancy, and victory could well be Pyrrhic.

Instead of fighting on this ground, we need to look at how to prevent future fiascos of this kind. If “Governor” Gregoire unintentionally sparks a drive for genuine election reform, she will have done more good than she can do harm as chief executive of Washington State.

The clearest obstacles to reliable elections (aside from the incorrigible partisanship that inspires men to try to steal them) are mail-in ballots and slipshod procedures for verifying voter eligibility. Mailed ballots aren’t cast secretly and, as Washington’s experience demonstrates, pass through too many hands to be trusted. It is bad enough that voters mostly don’t have to present identification at the polls. It is intolerable that no one can know who really filled out one cast via the Post Office.

It would be a great surprise, to say the least, if a Democratic governor and Democrat-majority legislature took any steps to reform a system that has served them so well. One can only hope that reform will prove to be so potent issue in the 2006 election that King County can’t overpower the rest of the state. For federal elections, meanwhile, there is recourse outside Olympia. Congress has the ultimate authority to prescribe “the Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives”. Let me suggest a short, simple package of reforms:

1. All votes must be cast in person, unless the voter will be absent from his home county on election day for a good reason. Casting an absentee ballot without good cause should be a criminal offense. (That may sound drastic, but the practice needs to be reined in, and only criminal penalties will persuade voters and election officials to take a prohibition seriously.) To ease any burden that these restrictions may impose, states should be allowed to set up pre-election day polling stations, as Florida plans to do in future elections. Also needed are stringent standards to make sure that legitimate absentees, such as soldiers serving abroad, receive ballots in time to return them. Hundreds of Washington servicemen apparently lost their franchise this year because of state tardiness.

2. Every voter must present photographic identification at the polling place. Every state issues photo ID’s, so this requirement is no hardship.

3. Voters must register at least 30 days before the election, and states must verify that new registrants are eligible voters who are not registered anywhere else. Congress should also appropriate money – even if it means cutting a farm subsidy here or federally funded museum there – to pay for this process. We will need to figure out what to do about people who move within 30 days of an election, who of course should not be disenfranchised, but that is a detail.

4. Hand recounts, which are prone to unintentional or deliberate human error, should be permitted only under extraordinary circumstances.

These measures would not be a sure prophylactic against fraud. There are, for example, lots of fake ID’s in circulation. But they would make fraud more difficult. If we’re going to be cheated, at least let it be by professionals!

Incidentally, Washington has a Senate election in two years, with a Democratic incumbent whose victory had certain Gregoire-like features. Rossi in 2006 sounds good to me.

The Auto-Pen Kerfuffle & Other Thoughts About Mr. Rumsfeld

When I tossed off a few sentences about how Secretary Rumsfeld does not personally sign letters of condolence to the families of soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, I imagined that this pseudo-controversy was confined to fever swamp dwellers like David Hackworth (the most prominent figure quoted in the Telegraph story to which I linked). No one could possibly take it seriously.

I was wrong on that point. The secretarial auto-pen is a hot topic this week, having spread even to the ordinarily sensible NRO Corner. Ramesh Ponnuru calls it “appalling”, and Jonah Goldberg, who ought to know better (his wife used to work for a Cabinet member), nods in agreement. (Scroll up and down for varying points of view.) I can only shake my head in disbelief.

If one must address the merits of so preposterous a dispute, let me note that Pentagon condolences are not Donald Rumsfeld’s private expressions of grief over the loss of those near and dear to him. They are symbols of the United States Government’s appreciation of services rendered to our country, a form of military decoration. How they are signed and by whom is utterly irrelevant to their function. The Secretary delegates signing them for the same reason that he does not personally carry out much of the rest of his department’s business: His time is limited, and the logistics of delivering letters to him at a moment when he was not otherwise occupied would only complicate their production and delay their receipt by the deceased’s loved ones.

The Left proffers these complaints, I hardly need say, in less than good faith. If Mr. Rumseld signed each letter in his own hand, the Hackworths of the world would moan that his signature was perfunctory, or that he was talking to aides or visitors while he signed, or that he didn’t actually read the letters, or that the text was a standard form with no personal touches, and on and on. Seen through blue-tinted spectacles, Don Rumsfeld is an icon of American evil, and whatever he does is unacceptable. There will always be grounds for complaint.

This kerfuffle seems to me symptomatic of the worst traits of the American Left and Right. The Left is frivolous and vindictive, turning disagreements about policy into accusations of impropriety. In response, many on the Right act like dhimmis, that is, they shrink from forthrightly defending conservatives who come under attack and instead think up reasons of their own for dissatisfaction, lest they offend the leftist arbiters of taste.

The Rumsfeld regime at Defense has to its credit two victorious campaigns waged more swiftly and bloodlessly than almost anyone thought was possible. To its debit is the continuing terrorism in parts of Iraq. The latter would be a more substantial fault if critics were offering feasible ideas for obtaining better results. They aren’t. Those on the Left just want to skedaddle. Their tactical proposals are along the lines of filling the Iraqi army with Ba’athists. On the Right the most common refrain is “more boots on the ground”, unaccompanied by any concept of where those boots should go after they arrive on the ground in question.

“More men” is not a strategy for solving military problems, just as “more money” is not a solution to domestic ones. Our challenge in Iraq isn’t that we are outnumbered. It is that urban terrorism is easy to execute and difficult to thwart. We will never have enough troops to guard every vulnerable spot in a region the size of California or to keep watch over every suspicious-looking Iraqi. If the advocates of an expanded force don’t propose either of those futile courses of action, what do they suggest?

That Mr. Rumsfeld also doesn’t have a surefire answer is no reason to fire him. If the essential qualification for his job is knowing how to force terrorists to cease and desist – something that the Israelis, hardly an incompetent bunch, haven’t been able to accomplish in decades of trying – then no one can fill it. Aside from that, the incumbent Secretary of Defense saw further and more accurately than almost anyone else in Afghanistan and the conventional phase of the war in Iraq. Replacing him with someone acceptable to short-sighted second guessers like Senators McCain and Hagel does not impress me as a forward stride.

Further reading: PowerLine, “Rumsfeld’s Issues, and Sullivan’s”
Victor Davis Hanson, “Leave Rumsfeld Be”
Jed Babbin, “Let the Big Dog Run”

Happy Holidays – Bah, Humbug!

I’m not quite as discouraged as John Derbyshire. I have nothing against the sentiment “Happy Holidays” in and of itself. At least it’s a step above “Season’s Greetings” and contains a faint remembrance of holiness. In fact, I have in the past looked with some insouciance on the entirety of the annual anti-Christmas campaign. Still, there comes a time when one’s patience begins to snap and uncharitable thoughts rise to the forefront of one’s mind.

What would we think of someone who, placed in a predominantly Jewish community, studiously ignored Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur and reacted with annoyance to any public mention of those days? His bigotry would be self-evident. It would be amply confirmed if he made a point of trumpeting every non-Jewish day of note in whose vicinity the High Holy Days happened to fall.

I don’t think that “bigot” is too strong a word for people who seek to suppress the innocent customs of wishing others, of whatever faith, a Merry Christmas and sending out cards bearing images and inscriptions that highlight the origins of the feast.

There are reasonable arguments, little though I agree with them, for objecting to Christmas pageants in schools or Nativity scenes on public property. In an attenuated sense, those represent publicly supported advertising for Christianity, even if that is hardly their purpose or effect. Hence, their critics cannot be dismissed as bigots en masse.

I can think of no such excuse for the person who glares sourly upon being greeted with “Merry Christmas!”, and I can think of no good reason why his petty intolerance should be accommodated. He needs to learn that living in a pluralistic society entails courtesy toward all religions. If that lesson is too hard, well, he can emigrate to Saudi-controlled Arabia or some such land, where no whisper of Christ will ever sully his ears.

The High Price of Envy-Based Taxation

Today the IRS released Notice 2005-1, its initial guidance on new section 409A, about which I have said denigratory things before. The notice has unexpected good points and fully expected bad ones. On the one hand, it allows most stock appreciation rights plans to continue, though new plans will become unfeasible for nonpublic companies. That is a better result than the hints dropped over the past several weeks had foreshadowed. Less happily, though not surprisingly, deferral of gain on stock option exercise, a time-hallowed, nonabusive technique, was firmly ruled out, despite the fact that it does not conflict in any discenible way with the policy behind the statute and Congress had explicitly rejected proposals to bar it.

I’ll forbear trekking through the details. What most struck me as I read the document was how silly and pointless all of these new rules are. They don’t close revenue-draining loopholes; the estimated increase in federal revenues is $1 billion – over the next ten years. That is about as close to zero as revenue estimates ever get. Moreover, the estimate ignores the cost of compliance. I’ll be very surprised if companies don’t spend billions of dollars, in the aggregate, on lawyers’ and consultants’ fees as they redesign and rewrite their plans. Those fees will of course be tax-deductible. Meanwhile, the only people likely to pay additional taxes are those who don’t hear about the new law and blunder into one of its traps. All in all, resources will be diverted to unproductive ends, the government will lose money, and the only gainers will be people like me. I’m grateful for the subsidy but can’t quite understand why you all should be willing to provide it.

The Rumsfeld Silly Season

Have you heard the shocking revelation that Secretary Rumsfeld signs condolence letters with an auto-pen?

Anyone who has ever worked for the federal government knows that for a Cabinet member, or even an assistant secretary, to sign anything with his own hand is a rare event – and that one who tried to dispense with auto-signing would soon succumb to writers’ cramp.

If this kind of silliness can make the list of anti-Rumsfeld polemics, I remain confident that his enemies have very little to say.

Social Security Misdirection

As the debate over Social Security reform begins its escalation, I hope (but don’t expect) that liberals, instead of just shrieking, will bear in mind that the program’s current design was not the product of careful ratiocination based on progressive principles. FDR’s brain trust simply copied the features that were most common in private pension plans of the 1920’s. Hence, the system is a defined benefit plan based on career average compensation and funded on a pay-as-you-go basis by both employer and employee contributions. The main reason why it did not include individual accounts is that plans of that sort were extremely rare at the time. The best known was the Sears Roebuck plan, which invested only in employer stock. “Privatization” was not an option that was analyzed and rejected; it was never on the table.

Pension plan design concepts have advanced since 1933. Individual capital accumulation is rapidly becoming as important as employer promises, for reasons that are not completely different from those that impel Social Security reform: Offering a guaranteed lifetime income to retirees becomes a risky business as life expectancy lengthens and the ratio of active to former employees shrinks.

The way that Social Security is set up makes the effects of demographic change particularly acute, for it promises more than most other plans: a lifetime retirement income indexed to current workers’ wages. A corollary is that a decline in the number of workers per retiree necessarily increases the percentage of the workers’ income needed to support the program; higher wages stemming from improved productivity don’t fully mitigate the burden, because the wage rise increases benefits.

Reform would, in broad outline, refashion the present structure in this manner: Nothing would change for current retirees and workers within a few years of retirement. For younger workers, a share of current FICA taxes (12.4 percent of wages up to an inflation-indexed maximum ($90,000 in 2005)) would be deposited in individual accounts, which could be invested in an array (but not an infinite array) of mutual funds and insurance company pooled investment accounts. The individual account portion would be larger for younger workers. The remaining taxes would be applied, as at present, to pay current benefits. Future entitlements would be reduced by the economic equivalent of the private accounts’ anticipated future value, using reasonable actuarial assumptions. Eventually, government promises would be eliminated, except perhaps for a “longevity insurance” benefit beginning at, say, age 85, to reduce the risk that account owners will outlive their capital. Once the transition is complete, no generation will rely primarily on the generosity of the next as support for its old age.

The reason why Social Security needs repair is not that it faces an imminent threat. The current scheme can lumber along for another generation or so before it grows as costly as some of the European systems are today. But, barring a halt to current longevity trends, it is not self-sustaining in the long run. At its inception, the U.S. had 41 workers per retiree. Today there are three; 25 years from now, there will be two. Roughly speaking, people working in 2030 will have to shell out 50 percent more per capita for Social Security, in some combination of payroll taxes, income taxes, federal spending reductions and borrowing, than we do today.

There is no way to avoid coping with that burden, and reform advocates don’t pretend otherwise. Their goal to prevent Social Security’s relative cost from rising indefinitely as the worker-to-retiree ratio spirals toward one-to-one or less. The problem is so large and long-term that any solution has to begin now. If we wait until, say, 2050, the only options will be breaking commitments to newly retiring workers, stripping the active cohort of a huge share of its earnings or stopping medical progress. Liberals who coo over “the children” might want to think about those choices.

The preference of most left-of-center commentators so far has been not to think but to engage in misdirection, often tinged with hysteria. Four lines of mal-argument (as an Austrian economist might style it) are prominent:

A Final(?) Twist in Washington State

Three times since the counting of mail-in ballots began, the King County election board has stumbled upon unexpected caches of votes in Washington State’s eternal gubernatorial contest. The first put Democrat Christine Gregoire close enough to demand a machine recount. The second gave her a manual recount. Third time looks like the charm that will move her to Olympia. Nearly 600 “valid but previously rejected” ballots have mysteriously appeared. The story is that a clerk didn’t look in the right place for on-file signatures and mistakenly determined that the voters weren’t registered.

None of the other 38 counties has had any “magical mystery ballots” (as Sound Politics, the place to follow the twists and turns of this farce, calls them), much less three sets. The state Republican chairman isn’t being hyperbolical when he says that these strange events can only be the product of “either gross incompetence or vote fraud”.

I would bet on both, but it doesn’t really matter. Washingtonians are tired of this election. Republicans are just as tired as anyone, and their reaction to having the election snatched away in this dubious fashion will be a couple of days of complaining followed by stolid acceptance of the purported outcome.

That is probably the right response. Winning a governorship isn’t worth months of political and legal turmoil. It’s sadly true that many Democrats don’t feel that way, but we won’t improve matters by adopting their “to the death” mentality. What Republicans need to do instead is learn the lessons of this race and use them to form the basis for electoral reform.

As I have argued before, the clearest lesson is that near universal voting by mail is pernicious. The King County story illustrates how easy it is for mistakes, deliberate or unintentional, to undermine the reliability of the canvass. That problem merely compounds the principal objection: that mail ballots are not secret, stultifying one of the key protections for the democratic (but not, these days, Democratic) process.

Congress ought to outlaw the practice except in cases of clear necessity (e. g., soldiers serving abroad). Everyone else should vote at a polling place after showing positive identification. We can minimize inconvenience by having the polls remain open for several days, as Florida has just decided to do, but the dangerous “convenience” of conducting elections via the Post Office must end before it leads to worse fiascos than the one unfolding in the Pacific Northwest.

Update (12/15/04): John Fund, writing in the OpinionJournal Political Diary (subscription only but well worth $3.95 a month), counts a larger number of strange ballot discoveries in King County:

Voting Late and Often in Gregoire Country

The Washington Supreme Court yesterday unanimously rejected a Democratic lawsuit that called for some 15,000 invalid ballots to be reexamined as part of the statewide recount of the nation’s closest race for governor in decades. At last count, Republican Dino Rossi was leading Democrat Christine Gregoire by 104 votes out of 2.8 million cast.

But Democrats are optimistic they will prevail because yesterday for the seventh time election officials in Seattle’s liberal King County found extra votes they say should be counted. Monday’s treasure trove consisted of 561 absentee ballots that clerks say were wrongly disqualified. That number was revised upward to 573 ballots on Tuesday. Then, late yesterday evening, another pile of 22 previously undiscovered ballots were found at a recount facility. “Those 22 ballots should absolutely not be counted,” says Republican Party Chairman Chris Vance. “They have not been in a secure location. There is no postmark on them. We will absolutely contest those votes.”

Bill Huennekens, King County’s superintendent of elections, confirmed to reporters that 22 ballots were found but he had no information on whether or not the ballots had been secured.

John Carlson, a talk show host who was the GOP candidate for governor in 2000, says his callers have become deeply cynical about the recount process. “One said that King County might as well stand for Kiev County in Ukraine,” he said.

Russia Wanes

At the beginning of 1992, Russia was home to 149 million people. Over the next 12 years, it added a net of 5½ million immigrants. Today its population stands at 144 million, with 160 deaths for every 100 births. Writing in the Winter 2005 issue of The Public Interest [Warning: ephemeral link], Nicholas Eberstadt sees no likelihood of an uptick.

Despite the mitigating impact of immigration, Russia’s post-Communist population decline was larger in absolute terms than any other country’s over the past decade. Furthermore, continuing population decline – at a decidedly faster tempo – is envisioned for Russia as far as demographers care to project into the future. The only question is how steep the downward path will be. The U.S. Census Bureau, for example, offers the relatively optimistic projection of a “mere” 14 million person drop in Russia’s population between 2000 and 2025 – an average net decline of about 560,000 persons a year. The U.N. Population Division’s (UNPD) “medium variant” projection, by contrast, suggests a drop of more than 21 million over the same quarter century – about 840,000 persons a year for the period as a whole.

As the influx of ethnic Russians from the “Near Abroad” reaches its end (net immigration today is barely above zero), there is no counter to depopulation. The birth rate is a full one child per woman below the replacement ratio. A conservative estimate is that at least one-seventh of Russian couples are infertile. More pessimistic observers believe that sterility afflicts one-third of adults. The intractable causes of this widespread inability to reproduce are abortion and venereal disease. Abortion, “conducted under the less-than-exemplary standards of Soviet and post-Soviet medicine”, has long been the primary form of birth control, while the syphilis infection rate is 100 times that of Germany (which itself has one of the higher rates in Western Europe). As many as two million Russians may be HIV-infected. “One recent survey in St. Petersburg calculated that 15 percent of the college students questioned had at least one sexually transmitted disease.”

Even if the population could sustain itself, it is not clear that it would choose to do so. Marriage rates have been in precipitous decline, while divorce – not rare in Soviet days – has risen sharply. Russia now has a worse marriage-divorce ratio than the Scandinavian countries, and the Russian government, unlike its Nordic counterparts, cannot afford generous welfare benefits for single parents.

On the other side of the equation,

Over the four-plus decades between 1961-62 and 2003, life expectancy at birth in Russia fell by nearly five years for males; it also declined for females, although just slightly, making for an overall drop in life expectancy of nearly three years. . . . Age-standardized mortality tables cast an even grimmer light on Russia’s continuing health crisis: Between the mid 1960s and the start of the twenty-first century, these rates underwent a long and uneven rise, climbing by over 15 percent for women and over 40 percent for men.

Russia’s upswing in mortality was especially concentrated among its working-age population, and here the upsurge in death rates was utterly breathtaking. Over the three decades between 1970-71 and 2001, for example, every female cohort between the ages of 20 and 59 suffered at least a 30 percent increase in death rates; for men between ages 40 and 59, the corresponding figures uniformly reached, and in some cases exceeded, 60 percent.

A 20-year-old Russian has less than a 50/50 chance of reaching age 65 (compared to 80 percent for an American). According to U.S. Census Bureau projections, “life expectancy of Russian men over the coming two decades will approximate the levels for their counterparts in Bangladesh and Pakistan – and will remain steadily below the levels anticipated for India”. “Yet,” Mr. Eberstadt comments, “somber as these readings appear, they may nevertheless prove excessively optimistic.”

Comparing the mortality schedules of successive birth cohorts in Russia places the problem of “negative health momentum” in even clearer perspective. In industrialized Western societies in the postwar era, younger generations have come routinely to enjoy better survival rates than their predecessors. . . . By contrast, there has been no improvement in survival schedules for rising birth cohorts among the two generations of Russian men born between the late 1920s and the later 1980s. Quite the opposite: Over its life course, each rising cohort of Russian men seems to be charting out a more dismal mortality trajectory than the one traced by its immediate predecessors.

Mr. Eberstadt is surprised that these dire trends have provoked hardly any backlash against the government, which has paid little attention to the decline in the birth rate and none at all to the rise in preventable deaths.

Moscow’s feckless approach to its ongoing national health emergency would be regarded as a scandal in most foreign quarters. But to Western eyes it also constitutes something of a mystery. How is it possible that such a manifestly inadequate health regimen is tolerated in a still somewhat open and pluralistic political system?

He has no answer except “lack of perceived political concern by the public at large”, which is simply another way to phrase the mystery. But perhaps he underestimates the ability of politicians to find indirect ways to deflect embarrassing issues.

From the point of view of individual self-interest, narrowly conceived, average Russians have little reason to feel personal angst over depopulation. Their own choices to act selfishly – to marry later and less permanently, to engage in risky sexual conduct, to eat, drink and smoke too much – are largely to blame for the phenomenon. What we see as a public health crisis, the “victims” may regard as an explosion of freedom. They’ll be sorry when they suffer heart attacks or die of AIDS, but then they’ll be dead and in no position to complain effectively about “Moscow’s feckless approach”.

The one aspect of the crisis that might catch the voting public’s eye is its impact on Russia’s standing as a would-be great power. As its population falls, the collapse of the (partly illusory) superpower pretensions of the Soviet era becomes more and more evident. As a palliative, Moscow tries to maintain its influence over a larger region and to lead public opinion to believe that a “greater Russia” of over 200 million souls, including Ukraine and Belarus, maintains a palpable, if not de jure, existence. That is one reason why President Putin put so much money and prestige into this year’s Ukrainian election. As a substantive matter, who rules in Kiev is of little concern to Russia; economics guarantees that no Ukrainian regime will be hostile. As a matter of form, however, it is vital that Moscow appear to dominate. Otherwise, it cannot go on pretending to be more than a middling power, on a par with, say, Brazil.

Thus the population implosion makes Russia weaker but more assertive and hence more of a headache for the West at a time when we do not need distractions. All that I can think of as a remedy is benign neglect, which is an easier policy to adumbrate than to carry out.

A question of great interest is why the contemporary Russian pathologies have arisen. Here, too, Mr. Eberstadt says little. Pro-communist diehards may feel a certain glee, blaming Capitalism for having upset a tolerable equilibrium. That explanation has is appealingly ironic: Who would have thought that the day would arrive when the apostles of the Workers’ Revolution would praise their system for its stagnation?

If Marxist theory were correct, seven decades of Soviet rule should have made appreciable progress toward molding a new human psyche, one free of the contradictions and flaws of pre-communist man. Instead it seems to have broken down all restraints on egoism and self-gratification. Western libertarians may wish to ponder what happens when a society destroys traditional morality and tries to rebuild on a foundation of nothing but power and self-interest.

Calling in the Secular Arm

Via Christopher Johnson’s Midwest Conservative Journal, an excellent source of information about the ongoing breakup of the Anglican Communion, we learn that the Bishop of New Westminster, Canada, is not entirely pleased with the Canadian Supreme Court’s decision clearing the way for Parliament to recognize same-sex “marriage”. One of the court’s subsidiary holdings was that churches could not be legally compelled to bless such unions. To Bishop Ingham, “that means the ruling could be used as a shield to discriminate”. He would prefer that the law crack down on priests who disagree with his own notion that it’s all the same if a couple are pronounced “man and husband” or “man and wife”.

In all likelihood, His Grace will not be disappointed for too many years. As David Frum observes,

. . . what may be most remarkable about the Canadian debate has been its disingenuousness. I’ve been participating in this argument since the late 1980s. At every step along the way, it was obvious what the next step was – and what the ultimate destination would be. At every step along the way, proponents of same-sex marriage passionately denied that the next step was coming – or was even contemplated.

What is denied now is that anyone has any intention of making same-sex religious ceremonies legally compulsory. Yet compulsion in favor of the homosexual agenda has already overridden freedom of speech and the press.

Open debate is restricted: The federal government regulates radio and television to keep unwelcome opinions off the air. American programs that take a traditionalist view of marriage – Dr. Laura Schlessinger’s for example – were forced off the airwaves by government power. Individuals who express traditionalist views on the gay marriage question can be (and have been) harshly punished. (One Saskatchewan man was fined $5,000 for buying an ad in his local paper made up of verses from the bible.)

The court’s ruling is a feeble barrier against persecution. It is easy enough for a modern state to coerce effectively through indirect means. Ottawa might, for example, deny tax exemptions to nonconforming churches or refuse to grant civil recognition to marriages that they solemnize. Or the Supreme Court could simply change its mind on the ground that the further progress of enlightened opinion has rendered a vestigial “shield to discriminate” unacceptable.

In a climate where “nondiscrimination” takes precedence over the right to political debate, how long will freedom of religion persist? And how many modernist Christians will join the Bishop if New Westminster in applauding its demise?

Odds’n’Ends

■ If people read the transcript of Secretary Rumsfeld’s now famous Q&A about armored Humvees rather than the “Press Pile-On”, the incident would be utterly noncontroversial. New vehicles, fully protected, and upgrade kits for old ones are being produced and moved to the theater as rapidly as possible, and the Secretary clearly regards the matter as urgent.

I wonder what would have happened if, back before 9/11, the Bush Administration had submitted a Defense budget asking that all new Humvees be armored and the existing pool retrofitted. Wouldn’t there have been a chorus of complaint about the unwarranted expense? Critics would have pointed out, quite accurately, that there are many Humvee missions that don’t risk attacks by anti-armor ordnance and where additional weight would be a hindrance to maneuverability. Moreover, in the latest big U.S. deployment, in the Balkans, land mines were far more numerous than hostile RPG’s. Shouldn’t greater attention be paid to that threat, which requires quite different countermeasures? We would have wound up with (i) unarmored vehicles, just as happened in real life, or (ii) a smaller number of expensive pseudo-AFV’s designed to counter the menace of land mines, trivial in Iraq. Getting exactly what turned out to be needed would have been miraculous.

The moral is that half of all military spending is wasted. Unfortunately, until war breaks out, we don’t know which half.

■ I don’t wish to make light of the appalling news that laboratory tests have confirmed suspicions that Ukrainian presidential candidate Viktor Yushchenko was poisoned during the campaign, but there is one reassuring sidelight.

“There is no doubt about the fact that Mr. Yushchenko’s disease has been caused by a case of poisoning by dioxin,” said Dr. Michael Zimpfer, director of Vienna’s private Rudolfinerhaus clinic.

Zimpfer said Yushchenko’s blood and tissue registered concentrations of dioxin – one of the most toxic chemicals – that were 1,000 times above normal levels. [emphasis added].

For years and years plantiffs’ lawyers have been telling juries that dioxin is such a danger to human health that modest concentrations demand exemplary damages against polluters. Yet Mr. Yushchenko survived a larger dose than chemical processes ever emit. The facial disfigurement that he suffered is horrifying but not life threatening.

Perhaps the would-be assassins had read scare tracts about dioxin and concluded that it was as lethal as a gunshot, in which case the candidate may owe his life to environmentalist propaganda.

■ As a public service announcement (I own no stock in the company) for men who fear that “Laptop Computers May Affect Male Fertility”, there is a preventive: the Lapinator. No, it doesn’t make your lap cybernetic. It’s a thin cushion that conducts almost no heat, on which the laptop can safely rest. It seems to have been put onto the market only a week or two before the scare stories began to appear, so the inventors are either very fortunate or blessed with a devilishly clever PR guy. The introductory price is $24.95 (plus shipping, and sales tax for Illinois residents).

Drumming Up Debate

Left-wing blaguer Kevin Drum, annoyed by the thought that “conservative bloggers are feeling pretty smug” about liberal disarray on foreign policy [Smug? Actually, I’m alarmed that some guys on the Left may stumble across a clue and become harder to mock.], has posed a series of what he regards as “embarrassing questions” for the Right.

His threshold of embarrassment must approximate that of a Victorian spinster if he imagines that any conservative will be tied in knots by his queries. They seem to be predicated on the assumption that someone who favors a particular goal – political liberty in the Middle East, for example – can have no other goals and cannot tolerate the possibility that worthwhile goals may conflict or be difficult to achieve. There are words for the belief that the good is readily identifiable and will effortlessly prevail; “adult” is not one of them.

Anyway, here are my off-the-cuff responses to Mr. Drum’s eight questions. A number of right-of-center bloggers have replied already, but I haven’t cheated by peeking at their papers (except that I was directed to the quiz by Right Wing News and unavoidably skimmed its proprietor’s replies).

Drum: 1. Considering how Iraq has gone so far, do you still think that American military power is a good way to promote tolerance and democracy in the Middle East? Has your position on this changed in any way over the past two years?

Me: Considering how Iraq has gone so far, American military power has raised the level of tolerance and democracy in that country by several orders of magnitude since April 2003. (How many Iraqi bloggers or blaguers were there before the overthrow of the Ba’athists? How many free local elections? How many legal political parties? How much prospect for anything resembling a democratic choice of government?) Bringing about this improved state of affairs hasn’t been cost-free, because people who don’t like liberal (in the old sense) institutions at all are willing to bomb, kidnap and decapitate in an effort to derail their progress. They have killed more soldiers and bystanders than one would like (but fewer than the number whom Saddam Hussein murdered during comparable lengths of time). Casualties are a misfortune, but not a reason to change one’s position on the desirability of liberty and civilization.

Drum: 2. Shortly after 9/11, Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson said publicly that they thought the attacks were well-deserved retribution from God in response to moral decay — as personified by gays, feminists, the ACLU, and NOW. Do you worry that Falwell and Robertson are identified by many as the face of the Republican party? Do you think President Bush has sufficiently distanced himself from them and their followers?

Me: Which many? Where? It’s been over a decade since either Falwell or Robertson was a significant figure in Republican circles, and the statement that Mr. Drum quotes was widely derided by conservatives. In fact, it was the inspiration for the term “Idiotarian”. In the current election, neither man campaigned for President Bush or, so far as I can discern, for any Republican anywhere. Certainly, the Bush campaign didn’t pay either of them $87,000 for his help.

Drum: 3. Is democracy promotion really one of your core concerns? Just how far are you willing to go to demonstrate your credibility on this subject? Note: President Bush's policy toward either Pakistan or Saudi Arabia would be excellent case studies to bring this question to life.

Me: One, not the only. Right now, winning the War on Terror is also a priority. Let’s start with undemocratic regimes that aid and comfort terrorists, leaving till later those that are trying to help suppress them. I note that it is not perfectly clear into which category Saudi-controlled Arabia falls.

Drum: 4. On a related note, which do you think is more important to the Bush administration in the short term: preservation of a stable oil supply from the Middle East or spreading freedom and liberty throughout the region? Would you be interested in seeing the records of Dick Cheney’s 2001 energy task force to verify this? Please be extra honest with this question.

Me: See previous answer. A major disruption of Middle Eastern oil supplies would hinder America’s ability to act, retarding both the War on Terror and the spread of liberty. Hence, it should be avoided to the extent feasible. There is a certain irony in Mr. Drum’s dragging in the 2001 energy task force, as we shall see when we get to Question 8.

Drum: 5. A substantial part of the Christian right opposes any compromise with Palestinians because they believe that Jewish domination of the region west of the Jordan River is a precondition for the Second Coming. Is this a reasonable belief? Or do you think these people qualify as loons who should be purged from the Republican party?

Me: The number of Christians who hold such opinions is minute, and the number of Republicans who echo them smaller yet (roughly zero). If the number of political premillenialists in GOP ranks ever approaches one-tenth of the number of Democrats who believe that the purpose of the invasion of Afghanistan was to promote a natural gas pipeline, I will certainly advocate expelling them from all positions of influence in the party.

Drum: 6. Yes or no: do you think we should invade Iran if it becomes clear — despite our best efforts — that they are continuing to build nuclear weapons? If this requires a military draft, would you be in favor?

Me: Not knowing what the situation will be at that point, I can’t flatly say “yes” or “no”. If the likelihood is high that an invasion will succeed, if the Iranian arsenal becomes genuinely threatening rather than remaining a mullarchic goat feather and if other options – supporting the domestic opposition, covert operations, long-range air strikes – appear futile, my answer is “yes”. If invading won’t work, I’m against it. We will then have to relearn the lessons of nuclear deterrence (and doubtless endure a drumbeat of “Better Shi’ite than dead” anti-deterrence protests). In any event, restoring conscription in order to fight Iran would be ridiculous and would probably reduce rather than enhance our military power.

Drum: 7. If President Bush decides to substantially draw down our troop presence in Iraq after the January 30 elections, will you support that decision? Please answer this question prior to January 30.

Me: Obviously the answer depends on the situation in Iraq at that time. If the terrorists give up, we won’t need 150,000 troops there. If the President decides to leave because Michael Moore mesmerizes him, I won’t blindly applaud.

Drum: 8. Would you agree that people who accept Laurie Mylroie’s crackpot theories about Saddam Hussein’s involvement in 9/11 might be taking the threat of terrorism a little too seriously? What do you think should be done with them?

Me: Miss Mylroie’s theories are “crackpot” only because they aren’t (to the best of my knowledge) supported by evidence. Otherwise, they lack the indicia of crackpottery, viz., the attribution of implausible motives to far-fetched conglomerations of conspirators. Saddam Hussein had clear reasons for launching terrorist attacks against the U.S., though he almost certainly did not devise or carry out 9/11. Believing that he did is much saner than believing, say, that the Bush Administration’s energy policies were secretly authored by Enron and Halliburton. Absent evidence of insanity rather than mere error, I see no reason why anything “should be done with” Mylroie backers.

Other responses: Andrew Olmstead
Outside the Beltway
Citizen Smash
Dean’s World
Joe Grossberg
The Key Monk
Brainster’s Blog
riting on the wall
IMAO
Jon Henke
Right Wingnuthouse
Carnivorous Conservative
Being English in New York

Who’s Against Death Taxes?

As we are in the Advent season, a time of forgiveness and joy, it seems right to call attention to evidence that politicians are not always the monsters of self-interest that cynics imagine. In an article in Tax Notes [links not permitted], Martin A. Sullivan writes,

In contrast to the clear majorities in both the House of Representatives and the Senate that favor permanent repeal of the estate tax, the wealthiest members of Congress favor extending the tax. At the other end of the spectrum, many Republicans leading the battle for repeal have relatively little wealth and would be unlikely to enjoy any direct financial benefit from repeal of the “death tax.” When it comes to fighting class warfare in Congress, the rich are for the poor and the poor are for the rich. . . .

Eight of the 10 wealthiest senators have voted against repeal. Six of the eight are Democrats. Ironically, the wealthiest and the third wealthiest Republicans in the Senate – [Lincoln] Chafee [of Rhode Island] and John McCain of Arizona – are the only Republicans opposed to estate tax repeal.

In the House, the wealthiest member is Rep. Jane Harman, D-Calif. ($117.1 million). And House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., is also very wealthy ($16.3 million).

In sharp contrast, House conservative Republicans who will be leading the fight for repeal have relatively meager assets. After taking into account mortgages and legal bills, House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., and House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, R-Texas, have an estimated net worth of only $120,000 and $40,000, respectively. House Ways and Means Committee Chair William M. Thomas, R-Calif., has a reported net worth of zero.

Mr. Sullivan is wrong, of course, to state that, in this dispute, “the rich are for the poor”. Mulcting estates does the poor no good, unless envy makes the process vicariously satisfying. Nor are “the poor” really “for the rich”. Death taxes don’t harm rich decedents in the slightest. They are, after all, dead and no longer interested, on anybody’s theory of the afterlife, in treasures laid up on Earth. Government seizure of a portion of their wealth (the residue left after a lifetime of taxes paid on income) merely takes resources away from their heirs, with the same ill effects on incentives and efficient resource allocation as other taxes levied at exorbitant marginal rates. And that is before considering the waste entailed in devising and implementing elaborate tax-saving gimmicks that generate the worst of all outcomes: minimal government revenue coupled with the immurement of funds in unproductive foundations and other tax shelters.

It is heartening that legislators of modest means can discern the evils of resentment-driven tax policy. If only their wealthier colleagues were equally clear-headed.

Republicans Underground

Ben Stein, who has been a denizen of the Deep Blue Seacoast for 24 years, writes,

. . . a man on a forklift came by and winked at me. “Keep giving ’em hell,” he said softly. “There are more of us here than you think. Bush rules.”

This is the way it is here. We meet in smoky places. We give the high sign, we nod knowingly. We are like members of the Maquis in Occupied France. Or early Christians emerging from the catacombs in Caligula’s Rome. We are the GOP in Hollywood, and on the West Side of L.A. The culture here is so dominantly left-wing, PC, vegan, hate-America that many of us feel we have to behave as if we were underground.

At a self-help meeting where men and women confess to drug use, betrayals, thefts, homicides with cars, at a break, a woman stealthily came up to me last Saturday and motioned me into a corner outside the room in Malibu. “I want to tell you there are some of us who agree with you. We have to keep it quiet because we want to get our kids into the right schools, but we’re there. We’re there. And there are more of us every day.” Then she scuttled off into the night. Slamming crack can be spoken of with a smile, but not voting GOP. That could be dangerous.

Along the same lines is an anecdote that I heard last weekend. The chairman of a California science fiction convention wore a suit to one of the con events with an American flag pin in his lapel. Afterwards the Guest of Honor, a well-known author, took him aside and whispered, “May I ask you a personal question?”

“Sure. Go ahead.”

“Are you a . . . Republican?”

Whispering back, “Yes.”

Dropping to the faintest sotto voce, “So am I.”

Streaks of purple herald the dawn.

BTW, I have at last figured out the real significance of the not instantly intuitive use of red for conservative states and blue for liberal ones. The Cold War is over, thus rendering obsolete the identification of red with the Left. Instead, the media have raised from their collective subconscious memories of old maps, on which the British Empire, front line of civilization, spread across the globe in red, and French possessions were colored – what else? – blue.

Wi-Fi Socialism: Spreading the Word

The idea that there is something amiss with government subsidies for wireless Internet access is catching on. I was pleased – almost as much as I was surprised – to learn from my most devoted reader that my imprecation against “Wi-Fi Socialism” was quoted favorably in today’s Rocky Mountain News.

Blue State Tribalism

The aftermath of this year’s election exposed such a seam of seething anger on the American Left that watching it vent has become a form of right-of-center recreation. One can indeed say that the “blue” states earned that color with the incessant bitterness and pessimism that emanates from Boston, San Francisco, Seattle, Georgetown and Manhattan. Reading condescending screeds denouncing the primitive, superstitious, bigoted, ignorant, intellectually deficient “red staters” is a kind of pleasure, rendered slightly guilty, I’ll confess, by the realization that one is laughing at other people’s sincerely felt, albeit neurotic and preposterous, sense of despair.

Viewed as absurdist comedy, blue state polemics can scarcely be bettered. Here are rich people leading comfortable lives – the least exposed to non-self-inflicted pain of any in human history – in a country that places only the most relaxed constraints on their activities and asks little from them beyond the payment of what they unanimously profess to regard as insufficiently burdensome taxes. They are by and large free not merely from legal restrictions but also from what Tocqueville characterized as more tyrannical, the force of public opinion. The worst impingement that their freedom must endure is the knowledge that many of their countrymen, including its President, silently and unobtrusively disapprove of the way that they live and do not desire to emulate it. It is that lack of unanimous endorsement of their commitment to hedonism that drives blue state pundits mad, in all senses of that word.

The surest evidence that the blue mood of the blue statists is unwarranted is their boldness in expressing it. If they really believed that George W. Bush intended to summon NASCAR hooligans and fundamentalist busybodies to turn America into a dystopic rural Utah, would they dare to utter a word? Consider how careful they are not to offend Islamic fundamentalists, whose overt program of seventh century revivalism is retrograde by Jerry Falwell’s standards and backed by murder and mayhem. All that is would take for Evangelical Christians to gain the same dhimmi-like accommodation would be a few car bombs and assassinations. Then we would hear much about how Protestantism is a much maligned Religion of Peace and its critics mean-spirited racists. The blues rest happy, however, in the confidence that they will never face a Christian Osama bin-Laden.

They are equally unlikely ever to face up to the psychosomatic nature of their malady. The comedy shows every prospect of running for years or decades, but we shouldn’t laugh too heartily. Behind the farce lies a potentially serious problem for our country.

Among the ironic failures of the Enlightenment was that it fostered self-conscious, virulent nationalism. Humanity has always been divided into mutually uncordial tribes. The post-medieval mentalité has elevated their petty, traditional rivalries into ideological imperatives. In principle, of course, enlightened liberals are above tribalism and bound by no special attachment to their native land. In America they are proudly not patriots, much less nationalists. Yet behind that cosmopolitan façade we see the burning hatred of “the other” that one associates with the strife between Hutu and Tutsi or Serb and Croat. The tribal enemy, the “red stater”, is wholly loathsome, a figure whose malignity is obvious whether or not it has been revealed by malign deeds, whose purposes are irreconcilable to truth and justice and whose very language reeks of repugnant sentiment, if not of the “non-existent” category of “evil”.

The nearest prior parallel in our history is the Southern tribalism that preceded the Civil War. Contemporary political correctitude has reduced that conflict to a stark, simple caricature, in which the Union went to war to abolish slavery and nothing else mattered very much. That picture leaves out a crucial and incongruous fact: Secession was an irrational strategy for preserving legal slavery. Almost no one in the North favored eradicating the institution from the existing slave states. Yankee public opinion did not welcome William Lloyd Garrison and John Brown as prophets of liberation; it condemned them as wild-eyed agitators. The courts, well furnished with Southern judges, were unsympathetic to abolitionist claims. As the war broke out, several cases extending the Dred Scott precedent and promising to expand the rights of slave holders on free soil were working their way toward the Supreme Court. In short, there was no prospect that, within the foreseeable future, the national government would tamper with slavery where it was already established. President Lincoln, for all his personal detestation of the practice, had no more ambitious goal than to keep it from spreading further.

Southern independence, had it been attained, would have chilled this favorable climate for the slave power. A Union shorn of the slave holding states would certainly have repealed the Fugitive Slave Law, ceased to pay attention to Dred Scott and definitively outlawed slavery in the territories. For escaped slaves, emancipation would have lain just across the Ohio River, not in far off Canada.

These considerations were obvious at the time, were pointed out by contemporaries and were totally ignored by the White Southern tribe. As Mary Chesnut, wife of a secessionist Senator from South Carolina, put it, separation was the inevitable choice simply because “we hated the Yankees so much”.

That hatred was, of course, intimately bound up with slavery, but perhaps we tend to confound cause and effect. As is well known, Southern enthusiasm for the “peculiar institution” intensified as the 19th Century progressed. In 1800 a large segment of Southern opinion, including figures as unlike as Thomas Jefferson and John Marshall, deplored it and foresaw its eventual oblivion. By 1860 it was heralded as “a necessary good”, although, as Eugene Genovese has chronicled, Southern consciences were never entirely easy about its concrete embodiment. Part of the reason for the pro-slavery trend was economic self-interest and part an attempt to stifle moral misgivings through argumentation, but a third part was hatred of the North. Because the Yankees had abolished slavery and condemned it as immoral, Southerners embraced it all the more fervently.

Today we see very similar, if not identical, developments among the blue state elite: the same tendencies to exaggerate conflicts with their countrymen into grounds for separation and to grow steadily more extreme in supporting practices – abortion is the clearest example – that the “enemy” dislikes. So far, gabble about secession is only a pose, but the disproportionate and irrational rejection of “red state values” shows itself in other ways, particularly in much of the Left’s sullen attitude toward the War on Terror. Macaulay’s verses referring to the last days of Republican Rome could be prophetic for America:

Now Roman is to Roman
More hateful than the foe,
And the tribunes beard the high
While the Fathers grind the low.
As we wax hot in faction
In battle we wax cold,
And men fight not as they fought
In the brave days of old.

Macaulay’s coda was in fact wrong about Rome. Roman arms were never so dazzlingly successful abroad as when the state was verging on dissolution in civil war. The warning applies more aptly to 21st Century America, where military success is impossible without cooperation from the home front. Sulla, Lucullus, Pompey and Caesar did not have to be much concerned about civilian interference with their military decisions. General Sanchez has (and should have) no such latitude of action. A large portion of Blue America shows every sign of rejoicing in defeat and does what it can to make victory as difficult as possible – not because it shares the goals of Osama bin Laden but because it does not want any association with those of George W. Bush. It is a senseless course of action, one that will, if followed to its end, do more harm to the blues than the reds. Tribal hostility is, however, rooted in prejudice, and prejudice does not have to be justified by reason or even enlightened self-interest.

SMOFCon Jottings

SMOFCon 22 was supposed to have taken place in Annapolis, but that plan was scuttled by the Army-Navy Game, which, as the landlubberly concomm had failed to realize, fills up that burgh’s hotels with admirals, captains and midshipmen’s families. This was one of only four mistakes (the other three being too little Diet Coke in the con suite, the omission of home towns from name badges and an inconvenient time for the Fannish Inquisition) that can be laid to its charge. The site where the con wound up, the Wyndham Washington, is elegant, room rates were heavily discounted, and there was free wireless Internet. (Wired access in the sleeping rules is in the process of installation and was a bit flaky, though the Wyndham either waived or forgot about charging for it.) The Diet Coke shortage was amply offset by a bottomless stock of bheer (of no personal use to me these days, but one must think of the good of the con as a whole) and abundant lump crabmeat. Oh, and the programming was pretty well managed, too.

The “program book” was, in a where-we-are-headed touch, a CD-Rom containing a couple of hundred pages of handouts. Within a few years, such publications will doubtless be routine. The schedule was not, however, available as a download to one’s PalmPilot, as it was at Loscon.

My contribution to the proceedings consisted of appearances on two panels, one on “Rights and Licenses”, the other on “Working with Unions and Vendors”. I don’t actually know a lot about either topic, but my fellow panelists (Craig Miller and John Sapienza on the former, Craig, Deb Geisler and Elaine Brennan on the latter) were well-informed, and I was able to get away with only a minute store of knowledge (e. g., ASCAP’s URL and my one memorable story about Teamsters at Chicon IV).

The traditional Friday night mixer, hosted by Geri Sullivan, uniquely didn’t try to compel anyone to mix. It (therefore or nonetheless) encouraged more conversation and mingling than usual. Ironically, I meant a great deal of time talking to L.A. fans whom I saw at Loscon last weekend. There they were too busy running the con to chat for more than seconds at a time. Here they were at leisure.

The best program item, IMHO, was one from which I hadn’t anticipated a great deal: a timeline exercise led by Elaine Brennan. The gimmick was to fit all of the standard Worldcon milestones into the new two-year lead time. I’m not sure that everyone present drew the moral that 24 months is more than 12 months shorter than 36, but at least there was a dawning recognition that some tasks that concomms have been putting off until after being selected, particularly high-level recruiting, will henceforth have to start up before victory is assured.

As already noted, the Fannish Inquisition was not brilliantly scheduled. Originally, it was set for 2:30 p.m. on Sunday, meaning that attendees who weren’t staying well into the evening would miss it entirely. A reshuffle in response to complaints put SMOFCon site selection and presentations by seated Worldcons at 12:30 p.m., while the Worldcon bids were shifted to three o’clock. Kevin Standlee later suggested, quite sensibly, that the event be divided at future SMOFCons into its three natural components and that they be spread throughout the convention (say, Saturday morning for seated Worldcons, Saturday afternoon for Worldcon and NASFiC bids and Sunday morning for SMOFCon site selection).

Site selection this year was easy. It opened with competing bids for Portland and San Francisco and almost went to a vote (which would have been the first since 1995), but, after seeing the show of hands for Portland, San Francisco spokesman James Daugherty conceded. The dates for SMOFCon 23 are December 2–4, 2005. Competition among three downtown Portland hotels has driven the current low room rate offer down to $69 for regular rooms and $105 for suites. The organizers do not, alas, expect the final figures to reach zero.

For future years, there was the usual welter of announcements of bids that may or may not reify: Kansas City for 2006 (Margene Bahm and the rest of the KC in 2009 bidcomm), Boston in 2007 (Deb Geisler and the usual suspects), “somewhere in California” in 2008 (Craige Howlett and Glenn Glazer), Las Vegas in 2007 or 2008 (James and Kathryn Daugherty), San Antonio in 2008 or 2009 (Willie Siros), Phoenix in 2008 or 2009 (Bruce Farr) and Amsterdam in 2009 or later (Vince Docherty). I neglected, in the press of time, to mention Maui in 2011, which James Daugherty, Bobbi Armbruster and I proposed last year. James and Bobbi may have forgotten all about it or may not have been serious, but I haven’t and am.

The seated Worldcons had no earth-shaking news. Vince Docherty reported that Interaction has sold over 3,000 attending memberships to date, all but guaranteeing that it will be the biggest non-North American Worldcon ever. Hotel pickup is over 13,000 “bed nights”, which is incredible if it is synonymous with “room nights”, but it probably isn’t. L.A.Con IV has passed the 2,400 member mark. Nippon lags behind, with about 450 attending members from the world outside Japan. Promotion within the host country won’t begin until the next National Convention, after which the con will start to come into sharper focus.

Cascadiacon, the 2005 NASFiC, has about 750 attending members at this point. Pickup is likely to follow the pattern of a regional rather than a Worldcon, meaning that it is too early to predict attendance with any hope of accuracy. It could as easily be 3,000 as 1,500.

The crop of Worldcon bidders was unusually small, nothing but three bids for 2008 (Chicago, Columbus [not yet updated from the 2007 race], Denver) and two for 2009 (Kansas City and Montreal). No one showed up on behalf of Melbourne in 2010, and the prospective D.C. in 2011 bid remains dependent on the construction of a useful hotel adjacent to the new, gargantuan Washington Convention Center. Michael Nelson informed me that the Center’s board of directors last week agreed on a site, but that leaves much bureaucracy to be navigated before construction can get under weigh.

Scott and Jane Dennis, the Grand Inquisitors, tried a couple of new techniques: standard questions translated from Inquisition Latin to plain English (“What are your committee’s qualifications?” becomes “What makes you bozos think you can run a Worldcon?”) and a written questionnaire, the answers to which were read without identifying the respondents. The element of speculation provided by the latter was amusing, but anonymity did not persuade the bids to be any less “diplomatic” in answering. To the query, “Which recent Worldcon would you most like to emulate”, one replied that it wanted to take the best of each, which Scott pronounced a “fudge”.

I had to leave to catch my plane before open questioning and therefore don’t know whether any revelations emerged. What I do know is that the Chicago bid has completed its reorganization under new management, with Dave McCarty, Dina Krause and Alex Von Thorn as its board of directors. (Oddly enough, the Web site still shows the old organization, a situation that Dave assures me will be corrected RSN.) No decision has been reached on who will chair the convention itself, and none is contemplated until the middle or end of 2005, after which there will be a concerted effort to fill key division head positions before the voting takes place at L.A.Con. In the meantime, negotiations are proceeding with the Hyatt Regency Chicago and the Sheraton Chicago, located directly across the river from the Hyatt and connected by a walkable bridge. If the Sheraton doesn’t pan out, the overflow hotels from Chicon 2000, the Fairmont and the Swissôtel, remain available.

I’ve heard that Kent Bloom has encountered some resistance, or at least apathy, among Denver fans to the idea of seeking a Worldcon, which may partly account for the continued delay in launching the bid “officially”. Still, I expect that he will be able to put together a bid committee and a facilities package, and nothing that he or anyone else said at SMOFCon led me to think otherwise.

Whether the Columbus bid will emerge as a serious competitor remains to be seen. It did reasonably well in the 2007 race, as the alternative to a very expensive trip to the alien environment of Japan. (SF fans would rather read about “strange new worlds” than experience them.) Will it be able to establish credibility against two big league North American rivals? As a first step, it must campaign far more vigorously than it did against Nippon.

That Montreal showed up at the Inquisition is a sign that it hasn’t given up in the face of the Kansas City juggernaut. OTOH, it has yet to do so much as publish a Web site. KC remains the prohibitive favorite. Chairman Margene Bahm announced that there is a strong possibility that a large new hotel will be built near the Kansas City (Mo.) convention center before 2009, making downtown a viable alternative to the Overland Park facilities for which her committee mounted its 2006 bid.

No one appeared for any 2007 NASFiC bid, though St. Louis sent flyers. One of the prime movers of the Ocean City, Maryland, bid told me that it is effectively dead, because only he and one or two other Maryland fen were willing to do any work.

Among odds and ends I must not forget to note a curse that I heard for the first time: “May you chair an interesting Worldcon.”

Now, having just returned to Chicago, I must pack for tomorrow morning’s trip to Dallas (business, distinctly not pleasure) and see about catching a dollop of sleep. When are we going to stop traveling and conduct all business over the Internet? Please!

Blogs and Blagues

In today’s Wall Street Journal, Joseph Epstein [link probably for subscribers only] observes that blague is homonymous with blog (to Anglo-Saxon ears anyway). This fact suggests a new distinction: between worthy blogs, such as the ones on the roll in this one’s sidebar, and blagues of the Daily Kos, democrats.com, Donkey Rising ilk. I of course do not mean “blague” in any derogatory sense. At least, I don’t see how any of the sites so labeled can reasonably complain. The word is, after all, French.

Incidentally, I am currently at SMOFCon, the annual convention for people who run science fiction conventions, particularly Worldcons. One of this year’s attendees is New Jersey fan Gary Blog, who is heartily embarrassed at seeing his name used so freely in the media. He hasn’t yet hit on the idea of demanding royalties.

I’ll pass along any interesting news or gossip that I pick up this weekend but am too sleepy to do a lot of schmoozing tonight. I did learn from Kent Bloom that he expects the prospective Denver in 2008 Worldcon bid to launch its official campaign over Fourth of July weekend at the 2005 Westercon in Calgary. As a long-time critic of over-lengthy bidding, Kent evidently intends to conform his practice to his precepts.

Also, Kevin Standlee emphatically denies any intention to organize a San José in 2012 bid. Emphatically.

Strange New Vocabulary

A reliable colleague informs me that the process that used to be called “downsizing” and then became “rightsizing” is now described by cool consultants as “deleveling”.

Okay, I’m as open to euphemisms as the next guy, but WTH is the euphemistic image that this one is supposed to convey? If leveling means to make a surface smooth, doesn’t deleveling add bumps and craters? That may be a realistic picture of the outcome of many reductions in force (to employ a truly archaic term), but it surely isn’t what those who are told that their employer is about to be deleveled are meant to call to mind.

On a less perplexing note, the inimitable John Derbyshire has coined a term for the brief interval that passed between clicking on “Send” and conceiving a brilliant, pithy comment with which to round off an e-mail or blog post. It is a “pithisecond”.

The Calpers Rally

Yesterday’s stock market surge is probably explicable, to the extent that market movements ever are, on the basis of the drop in oil prices or something of that sort. I’d like to imagine, though, that the real cause was a larger event, the unexpected removal of Sean Harrigan from the board of the California Public Employees Retirement System. As Calpers’ CEO, Mr. Harrigan was all that an investment manager shouldn’t be. Not only did he exhibit more zeal for political crusades than ROI, as when he tried to turn Abu Ghraib into a corporate meeting issue; he also had no qualms about blatant conflicts of interest, using Calpers’ resources to intervene against employers facing strikes by the United Food & Commercial Workers Union, of which he is a senior official.

Those flaws are widely recognized but were not perhaps overwhelmingly significant by themselves. The worst aspect of the Harrigan regime was one for which Calpers is frequently praised, even by savvy investors who ought to know better: its purported devotion to overseeing corporate management and taking action against incompetence. As a major Disney shareholder, Calpers was an early and persistent critic of Michael Eisner. More surprisingly, it tried to oust Warren Buffett from the Coca-Cola board, because it disapproved of his actions as a member of the audit committee. Overall, it has played the part of a well-heeled upgrade of the classic corporate gadfly, haranguing corporate leaders not just at annual meetings but all the year round.

Superficially, it may seem sensible for a fund that holds a large bloc of a corporation’s stock to kibbitz management actively. The shareholders own the company, their interests should be its managers’ foremost thought, etc. That is all true enough. But does it follow that the stockholders should substitute their judgement for management’s? While extraordinary cases may arise now and then, it is foolish to hire others to run an enterprise and then, on an ad hoc, amateur basis, without day-to-day familiarity with what is going on, question their decisions. If the results that they obtain are unsatisfactory, the modern system of corporate ownership furnishes the unhappy investor with an easy and adequate remedy: He sells his stock and buys into what he regards as a better run operation. If the market generally agrees with his valuation, the price of the poorly managed company’s stock will fall until it accurately reflects the quality of its executives.

Calpers’ preferred modus operandi has been the opposite: to hold onto its shares and try to use their influence to bludgeon management into performing better. Unfortunately, its board members lack the information, whether or not they possess the aptitude, to formulate business strategies. They can offer only specific ideas, some of which may be good but more of which are likely to be of secondary importance or, on account of their interaction with other, unrecognized factors, positively detrimental.

An instance is Calpers’ insistence that a company’s auditors should never, under any circumstances, be hired for non-audit duties. Disregarding that precept was Mr. Buffett’s mortal sin. Let us suppose arguendo that it is a sound principle (which I find rather doubtful, but that’s a debate for another day). Nonetheless, adhering to it in every conceivable case will mean sometimes obtaining lower quality services at a higher price. Sean Harrigan evidently believed that the sacrifice invariably brings compensating benefits. Warren Buffett, as a member of Coke’s audit committee and familiar with the company’s actual needs and the capabilities of the available consultants, disagreed. Did Calpers truly enhance shareholder value by insisting upon its principle?

This meddling approach is a bad idea even when it keeps clear of political fads. Once in a long while, the part-timer may be right and the full-time professional manager wrong. Much more often, “shareholder activism” wastes management’s time and, where it prevails, misdirects corporate resources to unprofitable ends.

The optimistic view of Mr. Harrigan’s departure is that it is the first sign of the demise of a foolish activism and a return by institutional investors to the concept of a division of corporate functions. It is the job of operating managers to attract capital and of managers of capital to discern which management teams will operate most profitably. Each of those roles depends upon different, to some extent incompatible, skills, as well as immersion in different kinds of data. The less they are commingled, the better for the economy. That prospect is a good reason for a stock market rally.

Today the market did nothing, so perhaps it isn’t so hopeful about the fate of the Calpers philosophy after all. Well, I can dream, can’t I?