Thought du Jour

Via Greg Mankiw, here is a simple solution to the US fiscal crisis:

This year’s presidential campaign in the United States has been marked by calls from Barack Obama’s would-be Republican challengers for a radical transformation of American foreign policy. Campaigns are always more extreme than the eventual reality, but countries should be wary of calls for transformational change. Things do not always work out as intended. ….

We live in a world of diverse cultures, and we know very little about social engineering and how to “build nations.” When we cannot be sure how to improve the world, prudence becomes an important virtue, and grandiose visions can pose grave dangers.

In foreign policy, as in medicine, it is important to remember the Hippocratic Oath: first, do no harm. For these reasons, the virtues of transactional leaders with good contextual intelligence are very important. Someone like George H. W. Bush, unable to articulate a vision but able to steer successfully through crises, turns out to be a better leader than someone like his son, possessed of a powerful vision but with little contextual intelligence or management skill.

Joseph S. Nye, “What’s Wrong with Transformational Leadership?“, Project Syndicate, 8 March 2012.

Harvard political scientist Joseph S. Nye, Jr. (born 1937) is a renowned expert on foreign policy. His latest book is The Future of Power (PublicAffairs, 2011).

The hostility that evangelical Christians feel toward President Barack Obama is reaching dangerous levels. A friend forwarded me a particularly hostile – but not unrepresentative – blog post that illustrates this trend.

[P]erhaps the most accurate description of his [Obama's] antipathy toward Catholics, Protestants, religious Jews, and the Jewish nation would be to characterize him as anti-Biblical. And then when his hostility toward Biblical people of faith is contrasted with his preferential treatment of Muslims and Muslim nations, it further strengthens the accuracy of the anti-Biblical descriptor. In fact, there have been numerous clearly documented times when his pro-Islam positions have been the cause of his anti-Biblical actions.

David Barton, “America’s Most Biblically-Hostile U. S. President“, Wall Builders, 29 February 2012.

There follows a long list of “incidents of his preferential deference for Islam’s activities and positions, including letting his Islamic advisors guide and influence his hostility toward people of Biblical faith”.

The last incident that Barton lists seems particularly outrageous:

February 2012 – The Obama administration makes effulgent apologies for Korans being burned by the U. S. military, but when Bibles were burned by the military, numerous reasons were offered why it was the right thing to do.

The implication, to me, was that the US military confiscated and burned Bibles carried by its soldiers or, possibly, their chaplains. The source provided is CNN news story, which explains that the confiscated Bibles were written in Pashto and Dari, two common Afghan languages, so clearly intended for distribution to local Afghans, none of whom are Christian. It is clear that the military had no choice but destroy the Bibles. It takes a warped mind to label this as an act of “hostility toward people of Biblical faith”, since no Christian or Jew in Afghanistan could possibly read a Bible written in Pashto or Dari.

Military personnel threw away, and ultimately burned, confiscated Bibles that were printed in the two most common Afghan languages amid concern they would be used to try to convert Afghans, a Defense Department spokesman said Tuesday.

The unsolicited Bibles sent by a church in the United States were confiscated about a year ago at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan because military rules forbid troops of any religion from proselytizing while deployed there, Lt. Col. Mark Wright said.

Such religious outreach can endanger American troops and civilians in the devoutly Muslim nation, Wright said. ….

Military officers considered sending the Bibles back to the church, he said, but they worried the church would turn around and send them to another organization in Afghanistan — giving the impression that they had been distributed by the U.S. government.

“Military burns unsolicited Bibles sent to Afghanistan“, CNN, 22 May 2009.

The Korans that US soldiers burned in February 2012 had been removed from a detainee facility at Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan because of fears that they were used by prisoners for communication. This incident lead to violent riots, with several deaths, in Afghanistan.

David Barton (born 1954) is an evangelical Christian minister who believes that the United States was founded as an explicitly Christian nation and that constitutional separation of church and state is a myth. Barton claims to be an “expert in historical and constitutional issues” and “serves as a consultant to state and federal legislators” despite having no formal training in history or law. His education consists of a BA (1976) in religious education from Oral Roberts University and a diploma (1972) from Aledo High School in Aledo, Texas. He resides in Aledo with his wife, three grown children and a grandchild.

“I love Europe,” says Murray, “but I don’t want America to become like Europe. The odds are that we won’t get out of the mess we are in. If I were a betting man [sic], I would say 20 years from now the US will be indistinguishable from Europe.” I ponder this last comment – and its undertone of pessimism. I also feel confused about what Murray really wants. …. I resist the temptation to press the matter.

Instead, I ask about the state of the Republican party, to which Murray is something of a patron saint (indeed, Rick Santorum, the Christian conservative in the race, recently lauded [Murray's book] Coming Apart in a presidential debate). Murray’s expression drops as though I have just squirted tomato ketchup on his truffles. “I am really unhappy with Obama. I really think he’s terrible,” he replies, “but [Mitt] Romney and Santorum as the alternatives? Don’t even think about Newt [Gingrich] … I’m in despair. I mean, I’m a libertarian. I will take Romney over Santorum. And both of them over Newt. That’s not a ringing endorsement, I know, but what can you say about such a field?”

Edward Luce, “Lunch with the FT: Charles Murray“, Financial Times, 10 March 2012.

Political scientist Charles Murray (born 1943) is fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank in Washington, DC. He is best-known for The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (Free Press, 1994), a book that he co-authored with Harvard psychologist Richard Herrnstein (1930-1994). His latest book is Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010 (Crown Forum, 2012).

Max Rendall worked as a surgeon in Britain’s National Health Service, where he was exposed to small numbers of drug addicts. He also experienced the pain of heroin use and its treatment in his own family. Since retiring 8 years ago, he has worked in an independent clinic treating addicts, and has become a passionate advocate of legalization of drugs.

Dr Rendall has written a 176-page book on this subject, with no fewer than 107 bibliographic end-notes. Unfortunately the book is not easy to read. The text rambles, and is often disorganized, even repetitive. This is a pity, because the message is important and the book is well-researched. I provide the first paragraph of the introduction – and the three concluding paragraphs – to illustrate the book’s content and the author’s writing style.

The drugs problem has two heads – criminality and addiction. Firm concerted compliance with the cause for which this book argues will cut off one head: the use (or abuse) of drugs by adults will no longer be a crime anywhere in the world; and drugs will be available, under state supervision, at a price which undercuts any incentive for black-marketeers.

[snip]

Seventy-nine years ago, John D Rockefeller Junior, an impassioned advocate of temperance, who had spent great sums of his own money lobbying for the prohibition of alcohol, wrote a letter to the New York Times. In it he admitted the error of his investment. He had not changed his views on the evils of alcohol. But he insisted that it was essential to lift prohibition, ‘to restore public respect for the law.’ ‘[When] the Eighteenth Amendment was passed’, he went on, ‘I earnestly hoped—with a host of advocates of temperance—that it would be generally supported by public opinion’ and that abstinence from alcohol would eventually take hold. ‘That this has not been the result but rather that drinking generally has increased; that the speakeasy has replaced the saloon, not only unit for unit, but probably two-fold if not three-fold; that a vast army of lawbreakers has been recruited and financed on a colossal scale; that many of our best citizens, piqued at what they regarded as an infringement of their private rights, have openly and unbashed[ly] disregarded the Eighteenth Amendment; that as an inevitable result respect for all law has greatly lessened; that crime has increased to an unprecedented degree—I have slowly reluctantly come to believe.’

He commented that any ‘benefits’ from the Eighteenth Amendment were ‘more than outweighed by the evils that had developed and flourished since its adoption, evils which, unless promptly checked’ were ‘likely to lead to conditions unspeakably worse than those which prevailed before.’

This voice, speaking to us from three generations ago, is eerily relevant today. Rockefeller’s moral authority was such that his letter eventually led to the repeal of prohibition. We need men and women like him today on both sides of the Atlantic. Maybe they are beginning to raise their voices. Let us hope that the right people are listening.

Max Rendall, Legalize: The only way to combat drugs (Stacey International, London, 2011).

TdJ has numerous posts on this topic, most recently here and here.

QUOTATION OF THE DAY, courtesy of the New York Times:

“It’s a little late in the game to worry about anticorruption measures because what in the world is the alternative going to be? If you find people who aren’t corrupt it is largely because they haven’t had the opportunity.”

ANTHONY H. CORDESMAN, a defense expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, on the corruption that pervades Afghanistan’s business and political elite.

Corruption in Afghanistan generally goes unpunished. The Afghan government has never prosecuted, for example, the former surgeon general of its Army, Gen. Ahmad Zia Yaftali, who was caught stealing drugs from supplies intended for patients.

General Yaftali was suspended in December 2010 after Gen. David H. Petraeus, then the coalition commander, told [President Hamid] Karzai that NATO investigators had found that the Afghan officer had stolen tens of millions of dollars’ worth of drugs from the country’s main military hospital, an institution he ran and where Afghan soldiers regularly died from simple infections because they could not afford to bribe nurses or doctors to treat them.

The running of the hospital, like much of the Afghan Army, is financed by the United States, which last year spent $11.2 billion to pay, train and equip Afghanistan’s security force.

Matthew Rosenberg and Graham Bowley, “Intractable Afghan Graft Hampering U.S. Strategy“, New York Times, 8 March 2012.