Search results for the tag, "Published Writing"
February 27th, 2004
A version of this blog post appeared in the Hamilton College Spectator.
In last week’s Spectator, Toby Taylor objected to my support of late term abortion (“The Pious Politics of George W. Bush,” 2/13/2004). From what I and others can piece together, his argument is as follows. Late term abortion is “medically unnecessary” because it takes just as long to abort as to deliver via a cesarean section; so why not deliver?
First, time is irrelevant here; all that matters is the mother’s choice—however long she needs to make it. To be sure, no one advocates abortion as birth control; we who are pro-abortion rights say that it is a mother’s right to choose how to dispose of her body, of which the fetus is necessarily an appendage.
Second, Dr. Taylor says that a “third trimester child . . . no longer has to be a ‘parasite.’” Yes, it doesn’t “have to be”—but it is. Yes, a fetus in the third trimester can live independently, or is “viable,” in the Supreme Court’s definition. But the fact is, It’s not living independently; its vital functions remain an aspect of its mother’s body. And, as Leonard Peikoff has observed, “That which lives within the body of another can claim no prerogatives against its host.”
Rather, as Dr. Richard Parker notes: The fetus is “within the mother and connected to her via the placenta and umbilical chord. It is directly physically dependent on the mother for all of its life sustaining needs—oxygen, energy and safety from the external environment.” This is a crucial distinction. It is, in Ayn Rand’s formulation, the difference between the potential and the actual. Life is not personhood, as ReligiousTolerance.org notes.
Third, in its Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report from December 8, 2000, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimated that only 1.4% of abortions occur after 20 weeks (the third trimester begins at 24 weeks). Of this 1.4%, almost all abortions occur (1) when continuing the pregnancy threatens or aggravates the mother’s health, inducing malignant hypertension, uncontrollable diabetes, heart failure, serious renal disease, etc.; or (2) upon discovery of serious fetal anomalies, like genetic disorders, thus inducing a short, painful, and/or impaired life if carried to term.
Finally, Dr. Toby alleges that the American Medical Association recently “condemned” “partial-birth” abortion. Really? According to its Web site, as of December 17, 2003, the “A.M.A. recommends that abortions not be performed in the third trimester except in cases of serious fetal anomalies incompatible with life.” Quite a condemnation. On the other hand, the A.M.A. cautions that the phrase “partial birth” “is not a medical term. The A.M.A. will use the term ‘intact dilatation and extraction’ (or intact D&X).” And since we’re calling on arguments from authority, intact D&X is strongly supported by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, which represents nearly 40,000 physicians who provide health care for women; the American Nurses Association, which represents the nation’s 2.7 million registered nurses, and the American Medical Women’s Association, which represents 10,000 women physicians and medical students.
Addendum (8/18/2005): According to the Guttmacher Institute, a research group that supports abortion rights, of abortions performed in 2000, D&X accounted for less than two-tenths of one percent.
February 26th, 2004
In the aftermath of the Watergate scandal, Congress amended existing campaign finance laws to limit the amount that could be contributed to, or spent by, political campaigns. The Supreme Court considered these regulations in Buckley v. Valeo (1976) and made a momentous hash of the legislation. The verdict therefore both protects and violates free speech rights, though its arguments for the former (expenditures) apply equally to the latter (contributions).
Those who want to limit contributions argue that, in contrast to expenditures, contributions are less connected to my speech; only indirectly does my check, after proceeding through the local campaign office to the national office to an advertising firm, really express my views, or my own voice. Yet, as Chief Justice Burger observes in his dissent, the distinction between contributions and expenditures “simply will not wash.” It is more semantic than substantive. Limits are limits, regardless of their consequences or one’s intentions.
Second, political contributions of any size are still a form of speech, as the Court implicitly acknowledges in allowing up to $1,000 (now $2,000) of it. “Your contribution to a candidate,” notes the radio host Andrew Lewis, “is de facto the publication of your ideas.” Thus, however a candidate uses your money, however it reaches him, however “symbolic” it may be in constitutional parlance, it’s still your money—which means it’s still your speech. If you give money to a candidate, you bolster his candidacy; if you withhold your financial sanction or contribute to another candidate, you implicitly sap the former candidacy. This is how people communicate politically in a representative republic.
Thus, as writer Michael Hurd argues, the “extent to which we ban money from campaigns is the extent to which we ban our . . . ability to express ourselves”;[3] the only proper limits are each individual’s willingness to spend the fruits of his labor. A free society cannot survive as such without the expression of ideas unfettered.
Furthermore, as the Court itself argues regarding expenditure limits, a cap “naively underestimates[s] the ingenuity and resourcefulness” of those who seek vicarious political influence. According to Todd Gaziano, Director of the Center for Legal and Judicial Studies at the Heritage Foundation, caps are “like trying to dam a stream with a pile of sticks. Campaign spending eventually will flow through the dam, over the dam, or find another path.” Indeed, as Bradley Smith shows in Unfree Speech: The Folly of Campaign Finance Reform, caps affect the channels through which money reaches political campaigns, rather than the total amount of money.
Still, the Court argues that because its cap still leaves people “free to engage in independent political expression,” pursuing other avenues such as resource-rich advertising, caps do not have “any dramatic averse effect,” like undermining “the potential for robust and effective” campaigns “to any material degree.” But it doesn’t matter if caps preserve some speech. As Barry Goldwater declared, “[E]xtremism in the defense of liberty is no vice! And . . . moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue!” Accordingly—especially as the last bulwark against tyranny—free speech is too sacred to be restrained or subjected to a cost-benefit analysis; it needs no checks or balances, for it is its own.
Finally, the appellants argue that contributions exceeding $1,000 tend toward bribery. Since running for office requires significant donations, politicians increasingly offer pork barrels to those who underwrite their campaigns. Both the “actuality and appearance” of this influence peddling thus “undermine[s]” the “integrity” of and our “confidence” in the government. After all, how can I, a college student with a $25 check reserved for my favorite candidate, compete with Fortune 500 companies that contribute (however indirectly) hundreds of thousands of dollars—to multiple candidates?
Now, concerns that electoral contributions amount to quid pro quos are legitimate. The need to curtail the pressure-group warfare that engulfs Washington is urgent. Yet the criteria the Court use employ the yardstick not of the First Amendment—which should guide all discussion of free speech issues—but of its consequences. Consequences are important, but we cannot eliminate a problem by manipulating its effects.
Rather, we must consider the root cause. The Court believes this cause is unlimited contributions, in which “corruption inhere[s].” But, in fact, corruption inheres in unlimited government, toward which ours increasingly tends. Thus, to take money out of politics, we should take politics out of money. As journalist Frank Pellegrini explains: “The thicket of bendable laws [and] targeted tax breaks . . . are what keeps the campaign checks in the mail and the lobbyists in the corridors of power. When one tweak in one bit of fine print can save a corporation millions, how can we expect them to stop trying to secure that advantage.” Concludes writer Edwin Locke: only when politicians “have no special favors to sell will lobbyists stop trying to buy their votes.”
Unpublished Notes
by reducing the scope of government, we reduce the power of politicians
Statism gives the state the power to dispense favors, and so compels entrepreneurs to secure, as Time magazine put it in 1992, the “backing of big, sophisticated companies that know which bureaucratic buttons to press and which deep [governmental] pockets to pick.”
Third, the appellees argue that a cap reduces the costs of campaigning and, hence, the chance for corruption. Similarly, the Court says bribes concern “only the most blatant and specific” acts, and that disclosure laws are only a “concomitant” (612). These scanty laws thus necessitate caps that prohibit all forms of corruption. But bribery, in whatever form, has been illegal since time immemorial. Moreover, in trying to stanch all corruption, the cap stanches the free speech rights of citizens who seek no influence, but simply to be left alone.
In this way, a cap also “necessarily reduces the quantity” and “diversity” of political speech and the “size of the audience reached” (610).
Compare caps to Prohibition
As Bill Safire once put it, “Money talks, but money is not speech.”
You can’t change the consequences without changing the cause.
What first strikes me are the criteria the Court uses. For instance, in his per curiam decision, Justice Souter refers to state “interests,” which if “sufficiently important” (612), may override the rights of the people. Yet for a country whose Declaration of Independence proclaims man’s rights to be inalienable, invoking these illusionary “interests” is utterly contradictory; dictatorships, not free countries, have “interests,” which they typically use to rationalize their despotic rule.
Rather, the state cannot ban anything except acts that violate individual rights.
Expenditures
Appellees argue that expenditure limits serve a “public interest” by equalizing the financial resources of candidates.
Court said money spent must necessarily vary according to the “size and intensity” of support for the candidates.
Ceilings also handicap minor candidates lacking name recognition
The definition of an “expenditures” is unconstitutionally vague.
Publicly Financed Elections
Additionally, presidential campaigns would, for the first time in American history, be eligible for public funds.
saddling the country with our present dysfunctional system of election finance.
Upheld a public-financing scheme for presidential elections that patently discriminates in favor of the established Republic and Democratic parties—by paying them in advance of the elections—and against third parties, who must gain at least five percent of the national vote before being compensated for any of their expenditures in the course of the campaign.
One consequence is that millionaires, constitutionally protected in unlimited spending on their own campaigns, are given significant advantages over less wealthy opponents. And, of, course, the existing two parties were given a major hedge against possible third-party competition—unless headed by the Texas billionaire Ross Perot.
Buckley increased the prominence of many unusually wealthy candidates who swamped less affluent opponents, not to mention the disgust expressed by nonwealthy candidates over the increasing amount of time they had to spend raising money in self-defense.
January 30th, 2004
A version of this blog post appeared in the Hamilton College Spectator (January 30, 2004), in the Utica Observer-Dispatch (February 3, 2004), and on SOLOHQ.com (February 5, 2004), and was noted on the Hamilton College Web site (February 3, 2004).
With 11 other Hamilton students this past weekend, I volunteered for Sen. John Kerry’s presidential campaign in Keene, NH. Listening to the Democratic candidates in person and their supporters’ questions, mixed with many personal conversations, including phone and front-door solicitations, led me to some general reflections on American politics.
First, just because you like political science doesn’t mean you’ll like political activism. In the former, one debates whether Saddam was a threat or whether we could have contained him. In the latter, one lambastes either the absence of weapons of mass destruction or the people lambasting that absence.
Second, slogans trump substance. Howard Dean declares himself “pro-education.” John Kerry asks, “If George Bush wants to make foreign policy an issue in this campaign, I say, ‘Bring it on!’” Al Sharpton refers to “weapons of mass deception.” Yet while these sound bites generate applause, they say nothing. Who, after all, could be anti-education in the broadest sense? We may laugh, but we learn nothing about a candidate’s positions.
Third is the job known as “visibility.” It’s as simple as it sounds: you stand in a well-trafficked public place waving a big sign featuring your candidate’s name. Yet while such advertisements may quickly inform passersby of a candidate’s relative popularity, they appeal to a herd mentality: vote for Dean because everyone else is.
Fourth, asking volunteers why they support a candidate or why they abhor Bush or how Kerry differs from Dean reveals an uninformed populace. Typical answers cite not political positions but personalities.
Fifth, supporters criticize their opponents more than they promote their own candidate. On one particularly flagrant occasion, while I took a break to read a book for my history class titled Inside Hitler’s Germany, one man asked me, “Reading about Bush, huh?”
Sixth, presidential campaigning requires the skin of an oak tree, the excuses of a Hamilton student pleading for an extension on a final paper, and a lockjaw smile. Remember, though, that we all have skeletons in our closets, and they’d tumble out if scrutinized by every reporter across America.
In the end, I’m glad I went, because I experienced politics at its best—no place is busier politically than Iowa or New Hampshire during caucus and primary season—and politics at its worst: mud-slinging and anti-intellectualism. Of course, I can say these things only because I harbor no political aspirations.
January 23rd, 2004
A version of this blog post appeared on Dollars and Crosses (January 7, 2004) and in the Hamilton College Spectator (January 23, 2004).
Earlier this year Saturday Night Live ran a skit on Islamic terrorists, who Osama bin Laden has just dispatched to martyr themselves for Allah—and for the 72 dark-haired virgins that await them in paradise. When somebody asks the bin Laden character why he isn’t sacrificing for the cause, he fumbles over his words, screams out something about Allah, and proceeds to dispatch another group of martyrs to die—in his stead.
Indeed, since the start of the Second Gulf War, whenever we heard from Saddam Hussein, he invariably exhorted friends, Romans and countrymen to fight the infidel—to sacrifice in the cause of a greater good. And yet, when we found him last night, the ex-dictator was in disguise and hiding, crouched in a six-by-eight-foot spider hole. Sure, he had a pistol, but even at this point of no return, he refused to martyr himself.
Ayn Rand explains, through Elsworth Toohey in her novel The Fountainhead (1943). “Don’t bother to examine a folly—ask yourself only what it accomplishes. . . . It stands to reason that where there’s sacrifice, there’s someone collecting sacrificial offerings. . . . The man who speaks to you of sacrifice, speaks of slaves and masters. And intends to be the master.”
Social theorist Chris Sciabarra draws the political implications. “Hussein, bin Laden, and other leaders of Islamic terrorism are fully capable of sacrificing their own people; they most assuredly do not wish to die themselves.” (Stalin, too, was a physical coward, terrified of death and gunfire, even of flying in airplanes.) It is therefore reasonable, Sciabarra continues, “that pointing a nuke at Baghdad”—the U.S. Cold War policy of mutually assured destruction—“can still have the required effect of keeping Hussein in check . . . Why would he have so many tunnels and escape routes under his various castles if living were not a priority?”
Addendum (11/24/2004): “For all the talks of virgins, paradise, and beautiful suicides, most of those who survived American firepower in Fallujah chose to run, hide, or be captured. After all, suicide is for young zealots, not pudgy men to whom life has become altogether too dear with its money, fame, and women in the here and now” (Victor Davis Hanson, “Misplaced Metaphors,” National Review Online).
Addendum (5/4/2011): True to type, when Navy Seals raided the million-dollar compound where bin Laden was hiding, they found him in a room on an upper floor, while his operatives tried to fight off the Seals on the first floor. Asks Christopher Hitchens, “Has there ever been a more contemptible leader from behind?” “Not for him,” Hitchens wrote years earlier, “the baring of the chest to the Crusader-Zionist bullets.”
Addendum (4/27/2012): While publicly calling for young men to join his holy war, bin Laden was privately advising that his son decamp for the prosperous kingdom of Qatar (Peter Bergen, “The Last Days of Obama bin Laden,” Time).
Addendum (8/30/2012): More details from the moments before U.S. bullets brought justice to the alleged prophet: “Searching bin Laden’s neatly organized room, Owen [a Navy Seal] found two guns—an AK-47 and a Makarov pistol—with empty chambers. ‘He hadn’t even prepared a defense. He had no intention of fighting. He asked his followers for decades to wear suicide vests or fly planes into buildings, but didn’t even pick up his weapon. In all of my deployments, we routinely saw this phenomenon. The higher up the food chain the targeted individual was, the bigger a pussy he was.’”
January 19th, 2004
A version of this blog post appeared on Dollars and Crosses (January 19, 2004) and in the Hamilton College Spectator (January 23, 2004).
How do today’s politicians rationalize their politics? In a recent New York Times op-ed titled “Second Thoughts on Free Trade,” Charles Schumer, the senior Democratic senator from New York, and Paul Craig Roberts, an assistant treasury secretary under President Reagan, give us a glimpse: “[T]he United States may be entering a new economic era in which American workers will face direct global competition at almost every job level—from the machinist to the software engineer to the Wall Street analyst. . . . When American companies replace domestic employees with lower-cost foreign workers in order to sell more cheaply in home markets, it seems hard to argue that this is the way free trade is supposed to work.”
Of course, these “second thoughts” are old-hat; protectionism, whatever the rationalization, amounts to a money-grab.
It’s also racist, as Harry Binswanger observes in an essay titled “‘Buy American’ Is Un-American.” As Binswanger writes, “Economic nationalism, like racism, means judging men and their products by the group from which they come, not by merit.”
Furthermore, one big reason American businesses transfer labor overseas is because the relative cost of doing business stateside is artificially high. Why artificially? Because the federal government, via tariffs, subsidies, minimum wage laws and countless other statist mechanisms, insulates myriad domestic industries from the global market.
Yes, Indians and Chinese will probably always work longer hours for cheaper wages. (As the land of opportunity, the U.S. should welcome these assiduous “foreigners,” instead of heaping the welfare state on domestic moochers.) Yes, Japan will heavily underwrite its automobile industry, as will the European Union vis-à-vis Airbus. But Americans—we titans of industry—rather than fear competition, should embrace the challenge.
November 14th, 2003
A version of this blog post appeared in the Hamilton College Spectator on November 14, 2003.
In my second semester of college, I began writing letters to the editor of the Spectator; it was and is a wonderful way to express one’s ideas without the usual complements of introduction, body, conclusion, etc. I soon turned to all-campus e-mails, an even less-demanding medium. Using my privileges as president of the Objectivist Club, I would preface our meeting announcements with short hooks to Hamilton. Yet I never really acted on my love for my writing—until now.
A few weeks ago, in my European Intellectual History class, I raised an objection to a point Professor Al Kelly had just made. He responded with characteristic wit: “Watch your straw men, Jon.” In elaborating, Professor Kelly explained that enlightened discourse proscribes arguments that are weak or imaginary, like straw, setup only to be summarily confuted. Still, we all resort to such recourse from time to time, since straw men are far easier to tackle than the ambiguities and contingencies and qualifications that make up reality.
Yet felling straw men says more about the feller than the felle. After all, you can judge a person not only by the enemies he makes, but by those he chooses. And if one addresses only the weakest arguments, one betrays the weakness of one’s own arguments. For instance, some hold that all feminists dismiss science as a male attempt to rape nature. But this notion simply upholds the most vocally irrational aspect of modern feminism, and reifies it as if it were the whole. Only dogmatists and demagogues waste time with such caricatures.
Scholars, on the other hand, refuse to engage in what the philosopher John Stuart Mill, in 1859, declared the gravest injustice of discourse: “to argue sophistically, to suppress facts or arguments, to misstate the elements of the case, or misrepresent the opposite opinion.” Scholars, as political theorist Chris Matthew Sciabarra remarks, “use an intellectual scalpel, rather than an ideological bludgeon,” to engage honestly and thoroughly with the most forcible criticism. As Aristotle counseled, “The fool tells me his reasons; the wise man persuades me with my own.”
Unpublished Notes
* We “would do better to raise serious, as opposed to spurious, questions . . . and to formulate our responses on the basis of meaningful knowledge and verifiable evidence rather than fantastic speculation and vacuous generalities.” [1]
* “He covers virtually every aspect of the issue, and does so in a way that conveys both a firm commitment to his own conception of justice as well as a resolve to do justice to opposing views.”[2]
* “[Cicero] has left it on record that he always studied his adversary’s case with as great, if not with still greater, intensity than ever his own. . . . He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that. . . . If he is unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side; if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion.”[3]
* “He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that. His reasons may be good, and no one may have been able to refute them. But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side . . . he has no ground for preferring either opinion. The rational position for him would be suspension of judgment, and unless he contents himself with that, he is either led by authority, or adopts . . . the side to which he feels most inclination. Nor is it enough that he should hear the arguments of adversaries from his own teachers, presented as they state them, and accompanied by what they offer as refutations. That is not the way to do justice to the arguments, or bring them into real contact with his own mind. He must be able to hear them from persons who actually believe them; who defend them in earnest, and do their very utmost for them. He must know them in their most plausible and persuasive form; he must feel the whole force of the difficulty which the true view of the subject has to encounter and dispose of; else he will never really possess himself of the portion of truth which meets and removes that difficulty. . . . . All that part of the truth which turns the scale, and decides the judgment of a completely informed mind . . . is [only] . . . ever really known . . . [by] those who have attended equally and impartially to both sides, and endeavored to see the reasons of both in the strongest light. So essential is this discipline to a real understanding of moral and human subjects, that if opponents of all important truths do not exist, it is indispensable to imagine them, and supply them with the strongest arguments which the most skilful devil’s advocate can conjure up.”[4]
* “Any fool can write learned language. The vernacular is the real test.”[5]
[1] Mouin Rabbani, “Head in the Sand,” in Brian Klug et al. “Debating a World Without Israel,” Foreign Policy, March-April 2005, p. 59.
[2] Irfan Khawaja, [Review of An Eye for an Eye? The Immorality of Punishing by Death, 2nd ed., by Stephen Nathanson], Teaching Philosophy, June 2003, p. 200.
[3] John Stuart Mill, On Liberty and Other Essays (Oxford: Oxford University, 1991).
[4] John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, 4th ed. (1869), in David Wooton (ed.), Modern Political Thought: Readings from Machiavelli to Nietzsche (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1996), p. 626.
[5] C.S. Lewis.
November 14th, 2003
A version of this blog post appeared in the Hamilton College Spectator (November 14, 2003), the Syracuse Post-Standard (January 22, 2004), and What We Think: Young Voters Speak Out (College Tree, 2004). The post also was noted on the Hamilton College Web site on September 28, 2004, and January 22, 2004.
On Monday in Beinecke, the Hamilton chapter of Amnesty International asked me for money to buy a water buffalo for a farmer in Nepal. The scene reminded me of a comparable event I wrote about last year. “So, we donated spare change in water buckets at the dining halls, we fasted, we volunteered for Utica’s soup kitchen. But something was missing—an ingredient so implicit in our bounty that we overlooked its necessity. That manna is capitalism. For capitalism, in contrast to the quick fixes of Hunger and Homelessness Week, is a long-term panacea.”
Indeed, world hunger is not a problem of redistribution. As psychotherapist Michael J. Hurd observes, people don’t go hungry “because you throw out half a stick of butter or an unfinished Coke.” In the same way, malnutrition does not develop into abundance when you donate one of those shiny new $20 bills to some charity. As they say, Give a man a fish, and feed him for the week. Teach a man to fish, and feed him for a lifetime.
To wit, though the specifics vary from country to country, the root cause of hunger is always the same: not lack of handouts, but lack of a market economy. Consider sub–Saharan Africa. Echoing Julian Simon in The Ultimate Resource 2, philosopher Andrew Bernstein argues, “Africa has the identical natural resource fundamentally responsible for the West’s rise: the human mind.” Yet the continent lacks the social system that allows the mind to flourish, which liberates it to invent and innovate. What Africans, like other starving people, desperately need, therefore, is to marry the mind to the market.
For to the extent that it has existed, the free market has enabled abundance unmatched in human history. When was the last time a famine occurred in any capitalist nation? It is no coincidence that the hungriest countries—Somalia, Afghanistan and Haiti—are the most averse to economic and political freedom.
Now, I don’t doubt the sincerity of my fellow students. But if your heart bleeds for the tired, the poor, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free to whom Emma Lazarus dedicated our Statue of Liberty, then give them the gift of capitalism and watch their cups runneth over. We can debate the details later, but let’s call a spade a spade. To paraphrase Ayn Rand, the haves have capitalism; the have-nots have not capitalism. To rephrase President Clinton, It’s capitalism, stupid. To rephrase Karl Marx, Workers of the world unite for capitalism; you have nothing to lose but your hunger.
Unpublished Notes
1. Robert Wright, “Poverty and the Middle-class Terrorist,” Slate, September 10, 2002, in Robert Wright, “A Real War on Terrorism,” Slate, September 3-September 13, 2002.
But one thing aid has generally not done, as the economist William Easterly showed in The Elusive Quest for Growth, is make a clear contribution to lasting economic development—to the market-driven modernization that tends to be lacking in terrorism-exporting countries.
Nor has aid dramatically contributed to the freedom and democracy that are also lacking in terrorism-exporting countries. In fact, when aid passes through the hands of dictators, a large chunk has a way of winding up in the hands of their cronies, consolidating autocratic rule. According to calculations reported by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Hilton Root in the National Interest, “every dollar of per capita foreign aid improves an incumbent autocrat’s chance of surviving in office another year by about 4%.”
2. Pedro Sanchez, “The Next Green Revolution,” New York Times, October 6, 2004.
3. The traditional kind of foreign aid simply does not work. It does not encourage the recipient nations to reform their legal systems, or their markets; it does not help them to become industrialized.
4. Gary Dempsey and Aaron Lukas, “Promoting Afghanistan,” Center for Trade Policy Studies, January 23, 2002.
The real source of poverty and isolation in much of the world lies in the unwillingness of many states—especially Muslim states—to make themselves competitive in the global economy. Poor countries, in other words, have adopted poor policies. The key to fighting poverty doesn’t lie in foreign aid, which often merely helps recalcitrant governments avoid necessary reforms. Developing countries must reduce trade barriers, establish the rule of law, protect private property, curb inflation, cut wasteful spending and corruption, and stop meddling in domestic markets. A trade deal wouldn’t prompt those changes overnight, but it would introduce external discipline to get the basics right.
Right now the United States imposes its highest trade barriers on exports that are most important to poor countries, such as sugar, footwear, clothing, and textiles. In the World Trade Organization’s Agreement on Textiles and Clothing, for instance, the United States pledged in 1995 to phase out all textile and apparel quotas over a 10-year period. Only a tiny percentage has been scrapped so far. On average, developing countries face tariffs on their manufactured exports that are nearly four times the tariffs facing exports of developed countries. Because of that inequitable pattern of protectionism, Thomas W. Hertel and Will Martin of the World Bank have concluded that developing countries would capture around 75% of the world economic benefits from further trade liberalization in the manufacturing sector.
In other words, Washington could deliver far more important and long-lasting “aid” to poor farmers and workers around the world by allowing them to sell what they produce duty-free in the U.S. market.
Aid’s long-term prospects are much bleaker. When Harry Truman took enormous political risks in 1947 to push the Marshall Plan through Congress, he was dealing with nations very different from Afghanistan. If massive government spending could work anywhere, it was in post-war Europe: Skilled labor was widely available, the rule of law and property rights had a long history, and the customs of a commercial society were recoverable. All Europe needed was physical capital. Afghanistan currently lacks all of those things, so massive foreign aid won’t achieve much. It would likely create an addiction to freebies among Afghanistan’s political elite that they would eventually use to blackmail the West: Give us more money or “the bad guys might come back.”
5. John Blundell, “Africa’s Plight Will Not End with Aid,” Scotsman, June 14, 2004.
Without the rule of law, private property rights, an independent judiciary, limited government and an infrastructure for basic transportation, water, electricity and communication, Americans would also be a diseased, broken and starving people.
6. Marian L. Tupy, “Poverty That Defies Aid,” Washington Times, June 19, 2005.
“poverty that defies aid”
7. Victor Davis Hanson, “Misunderstanding America,” National Review Online, February 25, 2002.
“Everyone from Swedish relief officials to Bono whines that in proportional rather than absolute amounts of foreign aid, we American are tightfisted and do not give generously to the Third World countries. Forget the billions that we do hand out—and whether such blanket donations without the prerequisite conditions of Westernization make countries like Egypt, Palestine, North Korea, and Pakistan worse rather than better. Instead consider that Americans, unlike Europeans, spend billions in defense that in real terms are not directly tied to the security of the United States but rather ensure global trade, tranquility and security.
“Just how much ‘foreign aid’ is a multibillion-dollar carrier battle group, when it patrols the Mediterranean or the Sea of Japan and so has the effect not of stealing foreign resources but rather of ensuring that Turks and Greeks are not at war, that Koreans do not blow each other up, or that China keeps away from Taiwan and Japan? Unlike simple food or money, this type of ‘foreign assistance’ is quite risky to its benefactors—and more likely be resented, caricatured, or misrepresented. Sending in an air wing to Kosovo can save thousands; sending in the Red Cross or the U.N., tragically, cannot. G.P.S. bombs, not Amnesty International, are more likely to keep killers away from Big Ben and the Vatican. Should we not deploy carriers, frigates, and planes the world over, both the Europeans and the Third World would not enjoy a stable global community, but one that would either sink into the chaos of a Mogadishu, Monrovia, or Kabul, or find its stability only in the law and order of a Baghdad, Peking, or Havana.
8. The historical record suggests that foreign aid promotes perpetual dependence.
9. Ugandan President Yoweri Musevani, during a 2003 meeting with President Bush.
“I don’t want aid; I want trade.”
February 1st, 2003
A version of this blog post appeared in the Hamilton College Spectator (February 2003) and Capitalism Magazine (March 31, 2003).
Last semester Raja Halwani gave a lecture at Hamilton on what he called “the just solution” to the Israeli-Palestinian crisis. Last week Daniel Pipes did the same. For those unfamiliar with the former, consider Mr. Halwani’s comparison with others in that lecture series. Ben Barber, author of Jihad vs. McWorld, a text many Hamilton professors use in their courses, spoke on globalization. George Borjas, director of a program on urban poverty at Harvard, spoke on today’s urban neighborhoods. Doug Massey, among America’s leading demographers of immigration, spoke on immigration. Victor Hanson, author of Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power, spoke on the relationship of past wars to the current war.
And then we had Raja Halwani, who, according to the blurb for his talk, “has published numerous articles” about “aesthetics, ethics, and the philosophy of sex and love.” The connection to Israel? Mr. Halwani, the professor who announced his visit informed me, “is a scholar who has written on issues in ethical theory and political theory which have been published in peer-reviewed journals.”
But does a PhD and publication in peer-reviewed journals on ethics and politics qualify someone to speak expertly on Israeli-Palestinian affairs? If so, then the Mideast punditocracy just grew exponentially. Surely, to speak under the aegis of Hamilton’s Arthur Levitt Public Affairs Center and the philosophy department, both of whom sponsored Mr. Halwani’s talk, requires higher standards than this. In short, speakers should speak on the subject of their expertise.
Yet the further I researched Mr. Halwani’s credentials, the clearer it became that he lacked them. It seems instead that a personal friendship occasioned his visit. Indeed, in the Q&A after his speech, Mr. Halwani thanked—not the Levitt Center or the philosophy department—but the aforesaid professor.
On a related matter, consider these words from an op-ed Mr. Halwani penned in October 2001. “Anyone . . . familiar with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict must know the kind of oppression that the Palestinians have to endure under Israeli rule. The U.S. has supported Israeli hegemony over Palestinian lives without so much as lifting an eyebrow.”
While Mr. Halwani is entitled to his opinion in the first sentence, facts make his second sentence false. To give just one example, he simply ignores the existence, since 1949, of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), an organization whose most generous sponsor—contributing more than a quarter of its $400 million 2002 budget—is the United States.
His lecture evinced further overt selectivity. It also reeked of superciliousness, as when Mr. Halwani told a student, in response to a question regarding the size of Israel vis-à-vis its neighbors, “Well, I’ll communicate your wishes to the Palestinians, and get back to you.”
By striking contrast, Daniel Pipes is director of the Middle East Forum, a think tank, has lectured in 25 countries, and his work has been translated into 18 languages. He has published considerably in peer-reviewed journals, and authored 12 books on the Middle East and Islam. The Wall Street Journal calls him “an authoritative commentator on the Middle East.”
I began my introduction for Dr. Pipes by noting, “Regularly, speakers lecture at Hamilton College. Rarely, however, do they bring to the Hill a viewpoint that is a breath of fresh air—especially on an issue that many intellectuals have made noxious.” As it happened, my words had an even larger meaning than I originally foresaw. The night before Pipes’s visit, Professor of Anthropology Douglas Raybeck had sent an all-campus e-mail attributing a racist motive to Mr. Pipes. Wrote Raybeck: “Mr. Pipes became the bête noire of U.S. Muslim organizations after writing an article for the National Review in 1990 that referred to ‘massive immigration of brown-skinned peoples cooking strange foods and not exactly maintaining Germanic standards of hygiene.’”
Alas, Professor Raybeck, a man of generally impeccable scholarship, though he mentioned Pipes’s Web site, omitted the context for this quote. In fairness, I circulated Pipes’s response via another all-campus e-mail: “My article points to two Western fears of Islam, one having to do with jihad, the other having to do with immigration. I dismiss the former, then move on the latter, which I then characterize in the words [Raybeck] quotes. This is my description of European attitudes, not of my own views” (my emphasis).
Thankfully, Associate Professor of Art Steve Goldberg also replied to the campus—with disheartening accuracy: “It never ceases to amaze me who on this campus ‘pipes up’ to caution us as to the possible biases of visiting speakers. Notice that when it is a left-of-center speaker, he is considered to be neutral and unbiased, thus requiring no ‘sagely’ cautionary advice. However, stray ever so slightly to the right and our so-called liberal instructors feel it their duty to protect us from thinking for ourselves.” Indeed, it’s a sad day when people, above all educators, allow their political ideologies rather than the facts, as they clearly exist, to guide them.
January 21st, 2001
More pics here
Wyatt is a miniature schnauzer. Yet as he props himself up hind-legged, he can without fail paw me awake. Through our roughly two years side by side, he has developed a répertoire of innocent-appearing techniques to get me up. He can quickly develop a sneezing fit, or, if that doesn’t work, he can bay deep-mouthed enough to wake the dead. But his most successful approach is the simplest. He sits quietly beside the bed and stares into my face with sweet and forgiving aplomb; I come out of deep sleep with the feeling of being watched. If I even blink, he puts his noble scimitar of a nose close to my ear and licks; opening my eyelids, I am confronted with an insinuated snout that usually means “Why” would like to salute a tree or, if I move too slowly, a couch. Often the contest of wills goes on for minutes, I squinching my eyes shut and he knowingly persisting. In the end “adogableness” prevails, and in the company of a heartbeat at my feet, I amble to the front door to let Wyatt go about his ceremony.
He doesn’t have to think to do it well; in fact, in some respects Wyatt is more intelligent than I, and in others he is abysmally ignorant. He can’t read, can’t drive a car, and has no comprehension of mathematics; on the contrary, as Ezra Pound once testified, “When I carefully consider the curious habits of dogs / I am compelled to conclude / That man is the superior animal. / When I consider the curious habits of man / I confess, my friend, I am puzzled.” To be sure, in his tour of duty that he is now practicing on the familiar brick flowerpots, the slow, imperial smelling over and anointing of an area, followed by the ambivalent turning this way and that to perfect range and trajectory, “Sir Wupford of Wayforth” has no peer. He may be a dog, but don’t tell me that he doesn’t have a real grip on life. Of course his horizons are limited, but how wide are mine?
When Wyatt is washed, he is as pleased with himself as is a woman newly patinaed by a beautician. His legs are combed columns, his salt-and-pepper hair is like silken velvet, and he carries the pompon of his tail—which is not much, although I’m attached to it—like the baton of a bandmaster. A chin of neatened whiskers gives him the air of an aristocrat. I happen to know, however, what this cavorting beauty looks like without the decking out. His paws matted and coat mildewed by the rain, he is a runt. Behold, under those brawny towers of legs are spindly shanks, thin and not too straight. His tail, trimmed too short at infancy, contrasts his Dumbo ears; with his chest ruff stripped, one can see the stomach of a growing boy. His whiskers become shaggy, and his seemingly proportionate rumpus rotund. But if Wyatt is in the least aware of his imperfections, he is complacent.
Wyatt reflects this bravado in eating, which, like all his undertakings (and many of ours), is paradoxical. Outdoors, where to him the world is a smell, never is his insatiable appetite slaked and he will ravenously accommodate twigs and branches. Indoors, where our wine-and-cheese prince is dished up sirloin and salmon, he scrutinizes such delicacies with fastidiousness. Rejecting canine chow altogether, he extracts, with the precision of a D.N.A. scientist, all human food from his thoroughly mixed bowl. No shrinking violet, Wyatt has us convinced that he is a person with fur.
Indeed, this “dog,” with his wet, delicate, exploratory nose, is to his limbs an investigative reporter—mischievous, assertive, and, above all, acutely curious. With high-hat gravitas, he pontificates in his self-appointed job of sentry, even as he shrinks in fear at his shadow. He is without question a coward, so deep-seated a coward that he has patented a technique for concealing it. Still, this alpha gives every indication of wanting, in the middle of the night, to go out and murder the strident animals that prowl our backyard and that outweigh this bite-size pooch ten to one.
And yet Wyatt’s perceptions are keen; he is a mind reader. Before a plan is half formed in my mind, “Wupsters” knows about it, namely, whether he is included. I know too well his look of puppy purity and dejection—an animal can express more with its tail in seconds than a human can with his tongue in hours—when I have just thought that I must leave him at home. In actuality, not everyone thinks him as much a person as my mother and I do. But like me, like my pooch, for as the French say, the best thing about a man is his dog.
Dogs love company; they place it on their nominal list of needs. So scratch “Why,” and you’ll receive permanent employment; find the spot behind the ears that he delights to have rubbed, and you’ve thereby replaced me. In Wyatt there is such affability, such loving kindness, such a way of crouching along to lay his force, his courage, and his heart at my feet, that it is a dog who has clarified my concept of friendship. Incapable of deceit and full of fidelity, he is, as Lord Bryon said of his furry friend, “the firmest friend, the first to welcome, the foremost to defend.” He asks no questions, passes no judgment; to bestow his heart is his one aim. He offers love unflinching, and asks only for it requited. So he soils the carpets, chews my slippers? I wouldn’t have it any other way.
May 5th, 2000
I approached this valedictory with the query, “Why swimming”? Now, it is said that one shouldn’t answer a question with a question, but I demur: why life? For me, living means vigor—awakening in the morning and flexing and fanning out the biggest muscles in my back, stepping outside and, as my great uncle Marshall has told me he does, gloriously breathing in air to my lungs. The world is bright and brimming with life itself, and I am privileged, at this juncture of opportunity in my youth, to be not only of sound mind but also of sound body.
If memory serves, I was in the eight-and-under age group when Ben Eakley, who also attended Millburn High School and in fact lives a few houses down from me, gave his Seals valedictory. As I sat spellbound by many words I did not yet know, I understood that swimming meant a great deal to this Yalie; thenceforth, I have been mentally attempting to redact what swimming means to me. What should come naturally, however, is daunting; I now stand in the company of such alumni as Bethany Karl, whose emotive words touched every Seal, and J.D. McMillan, who called Brian Greene “a father.”
Swimming has appealed to me from childhood as an ageless arcadia. Its compulsion of pure body force against resistance—without the aid of a racket or spikes—suites my physique; its coordination of grace with energy poises my movements and manner. Especially now that I’m back in training—though I did skip practice this morning—I soak up the feeling of going somewhere purposefully and rhythmically, with little to distract me en route. To watch me swim is to understand who I am.
From a spectator’s view—not the open bleachers that Mr. Lawler populates Monday through Thursday nights, but, more fondly, the defectively ventilated and lighted observation deck from which Mary and Mike Nervi, Marge Reheis, and my mother replenished us swimmers with doughnuts and orange juice—it is six lanes, each divided by two lines going and coming, in which loop concatenated bodies, some masculine, more feminine—all skimpily, snugly clad, pallid, and sinewy. From a coach’s eye—probably Marty’s—my elbow should be extended further, I am still breathing with every stroke, and why am I still on the wall? From the swimmer’s outlook, such scenes evoke the utter bliss that is vibrantly, uniquely swimming. For this is the Summit Area Y.M.C.A. natatorium in which I have grown from a diffident and clumsy freestyler, flailing his erratic laps through heavy, humid, crowded water, to an assertive two-time captain, powering through practice in a place as familiar as my home town and as comfortable as my home.
I came to Seals as a seven-year-old attired in swim trunks below my knees. My mother had heard about the program through the Y, where I played soccer in what is now the main exercise room. Having spent my summers at Jefferson Lake Day Camp, where the swimming lessons my great uncle Marshall taught me on the weekends propelled me to the highest level of water instruction, I was not unfamiliar with water but with the jargon of swimming: who knew that freestyle was the same thing as crawl?
Tryouts were held on a September weekday. My lap of choice was breaststroke, for which I simply copied the form of my nearest competitors, my only concept of the stroke being that of my mother’s summertime technique. To my mind, I paled in comparison with the other aspirants, many of whom already knew each other through previous years on the team. After I changed rapidly in the crowded locker room—in those days, I would race in any endeavor and hence often wore my wet suit home—I climbed the stairs and befriended the vending machines that would regularly supply ruin to my dinner. As my mother and I waited in the cramped lobby, Hank called the names of those accepted; finally, toward the end, he announced “Jonathan Feder,” and I was a Seal. I made my way through the crowd to receive my prized packet, and walked out of the Y that crisp night beaming. My mother hugged me; I jumped with joy—and with apprehensiveness.
Today, such joie de vivre is unqualified; like my miniature schnauzer Wyatt, practice is a panacean pleasure. On particularly stressful days, the pool is both a Nautilus and a Tylenol. Here, accolades are often redundant, since one’s stroke divulges one’s mood: is Jeff kicking so forcibly as to blur my foresight from behind; is Abby pushing off the wall before the interval? In water, be it at practice or drifting, head back, miles downstream with the ocean current, I feel free, unbounded by neither time nor space.
Swimming, also, is ideal as a social outlet, “where the troubles are all the same and everybody knows your name.” Rewarding it is to reciprocate the support of teammates and coaches—friends—in the crucible of the competitive arena. We may vie against one another, but when practice ends, we carpool home, chat online, and fall asleep energetically; the following morning, still smelling faintly of chlorine, muscles usually sore, we exude vitality. For us, this ambiance is tantamount to oxygen; and the sport and the program are simply a way of life, which they enlarge.
The weekday endurance training during Friends and Seinfeld, the weekend technique calisthenics when we should be sleeping—how does the repetitive pulling and kicking back and forth, back and forth, hour after hour, remain, after eleven years, a seven-month-season, six-day-a-week regimen? In conceptual terms, swimming is principally a function of time; we race against the clock, and measure our speed in those inestimable milliseconds only sprinters can appreciate. Thus the swimmer values orderliness. But more than disciplining, swimming alleviates loneliness; it is an isolation that is comforting. Insulated from any sight or sound other than the vague perspectives of water and the muted thunderclap of our arm strokes and breathing, we swimmers tunnel onward amid silvery bubbles. Others may swim alongside—unavoidably, magnified eyes meet via goggles or one’s toes rub up against another’s arm—but their distinctiveness tends to refract away. Often, nonswimmer friends marvel at our ease of progress through seeming crises, for we swimmers see the world through our cool, measured pace in the pool.
And so, this is swimming—a religion, the backbone of my positivity, focal point of my day, ambrosia to my soul, a passion that transcends life’s obstacles and facilitates unbridled enthusiasm, intense drive, and enduring solace. But who facilitates the opportunity for these qualities?
I first want to thank my teammates, all of whom made practice worth coming to—the power naps beforehand; the speeding to maneuver Summit’s streetlight patterns; the cherished locker-room gossip; the culminating sauna, shower and turquoise dispenser-shampoo; the sliding down the Y’s front two railings; the frigid walks to cars, without socks, with a wet head; the post-practice ravenous appetites. When, after my disappointing freshman year I was resolved to quit swimming, Hank needed only to refer to this community, for without teammates, ambitions lose import.
Indeed, the man we all know quietly as Hank is the patriarch of Seals. Having weathered changes in teammates, coaches, weight rooms, locker rooms, the record board, pools, and practice schedules, I will above all miss our abiding head coach, who himself has repeatedly weathered sickness so that he can again be with us. Kind and affable, Hank has steered me not only through athletics but also during several situations through life. His trademark humor is frequently an antidote, his gentle spirit contagious, and his devotion inspiring. When I asked him for a letter of recommendation for college swimming—although my request was but two weeks before the decisions were to be mailed—Hank knowledgeably wrote about me in terms sure to convince any coach, if not of my Olympic times, then of my Olympic personality. Perhaps my fondest memory of Hank is at the eight-and-under championship mini-meet in Pennsylvania; there I attribute my record in the fifty free to at least two things Hank: the Seal he drew on my left shoulder and his classic motto, Winning isn’t everything, but the will to win is.
Likewise, I have nothing but appreciation for the many other coaches, past and present, of Seals: Marty, whose love for the sport induces motivation and whose reminiscences of the team it was a pleasure to discuss at dinner this year in Charlotte; Dave, whose blunt approach forced me to decrease, somewhat, my lap- and wall-skipping; Laura Ridel, whose comments to me on wearing a Speedo endowed confidence in a modest eight-year-old; Greg, who wouldn’t allow me to give up on myself—lest Ellen beat me—during an afternoon weekend practice this year; Mrs. G., whose smile symbolized others’ happiness; Laura Figler, whose walking the laps I was swimming spurred me forward; Bill, whose Saturday morning practices introduced me to the famous medicine balls; Brian, whose indefatigable spirit permeated each practice and whose support, in and out of the pool, turned many tough days laughable; and Mrs. Diamond, whose coaching, because she had just finished her own workout, was continually cheery.
Finally, to my family—my mother Barbara, my late grandmother Loretta, my grandfather Sidney, and my great uncle Marshall—I give the gratitude of my very being. Upon my shoulders rests a world of appreciation to you four for your confidence in me as a son. Without your munificent love and support and time, I would be nothing.
Grandpa and grandma, thank you for your untiring encouragement and optimism. Uncle Marshall, thank you deeply for the pineapple that nourished me during mini meets and your sincere interest in my times. Mom, you spent countless hours driving me to practices and meets. We share a lack of a sense of direction, but, somehow, we always reached our destination—even that time in Princeton when I missed one of my two events. I remember how proud I felt when long ago, the bus—this was when Seals employed buses for transportation to away dual meets—never returned to collect the team; having just won the meet, we were hungry and so you treated the team to lunch. And, throughout, despite my protests, you saved every article in which my name appeared, a thankless task of which I now see the poignancy.
Never did my family pressure me—an example I hope I can one day emulate—but instead they conferred up my years of athletics a prerequisite for success and the characteristic that makes any endeavor worthwhile: fun. No child, especially with an estranged father, could ask for a more loyal and loving family.
Time will not fade the memories of Summit Area Y.M.C.A. Seals swimming; most likely, time will give rise to indelible gratefulness for the fostering environment in which I was both student and teacher. To a new generation of Seals—especially to you slackers whose cramps arise during long sets—it is with sad happiness that I wish you the best and expect to read about many of your achievements in the newspapers. Carry your team’s name with pride, in the full knowledge that you are part of something special. I sincerely hope your experiences on this team have been, and will be, as thoroughly rewarding and delightful as mine have been.
Thank you.
Posted by Jonathan Rick in 
Scholars “use an intellectual scalpel…