“Maybe I should wait a couple weeks and see if it changes. Maybe he can get out his small varmint gun and drive those Guatemalans off his yard.”
Sen. John McCain on Mitt Romney’s latest immigration flip-flop in the NY Sun’s Latest Politics blog, 5/31/2007
I’ve noticed that typically Monday mornings tend to be pretty slow around here. Which isn’t surprising, as none of us are quite able to make a career out of blogging (yet), and need to go to our real jobs. So here’s the first of (hopefully) many Monday Open Threads…
I’ll give you the first theme. Words that raise the red flags in your mind when you hear politicians use them. My first comes from this post:
Unfair Competition
If you hear those two words come out of a politician’s mouth, you know that he’s not trying to create fair competition, he’s trying to put a stop to competition with regulation. They don’t want free competition, they want “managed” competition. I.e. no competition at all…
So what are yours? What phrases, when you hear a politician say them, make the hairs on the back of your neck rise up, as you know whatever follows them is bound to be very bad?
In today’s New York Times, Mark Helprin argues in favor of what effectively amounts to an extension of copyrights for an indefinite period. And does so by making what is, at best, an imperfect analogy:
WHAT if, after you had paid the taxes on earnings with which you built a house, sales taxes on the materials, real estate taxes during your life, and inheritance taxes at your death, the government would eventually commandeer it entirely? This does not happen in our society … to houses. Or to businesses. Were you to have ushered through the many gates of taxation a flour mill, travel agency or newspaper, they would not suffer total confiscation.
Once the state has dipped its enormous beak into the stream of your wealth and possessions they are allowed to flow from one generation to the next. Though they may be divided and diminished by inflation, imperfect investment, a proliferation of descendants and the government taking its share, they are not simply expropriated.
That is, unless you own a copyright. Were I tomorrow to write the great American novel (again?), 70 years after my death the rights to it, though taxed at inheritance, would be stripped from my children and grandchildren. To the claim that this provision strikes malefactors of great wealth, one might ask, first, where the heirs of Sylvia Plath berth their 200-foot yachts. And, second, why, when such a stiff penalty is not applied to the owners of Rockefeller Center or Wal-Mart, it is brought to bear against legions of harmless drudges who, other than a handful of literary plutocrats (manufacturers, really), are destined by the nature of things to be no more financially secure than a seal in the Central Park Zoo.
The most fundamental difference, of course, is that copyrights, unlike property rights in land, are purely a creation of the Constitution, which gives Congress the power to:
[P]romote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;
Rather than recognizing that this provision constituted the Founders understanding that copyrights and patents, rather than merely being a recognizing of already existing property rights were, in reality, the granting of monopoly power by the state and, for that reason, their duration should be limited to a period of time deemed sufficient to reward the creators for the effort and innovation involved in their work.
Helprin ignores this however, and continues with yet another bizarre analogy:
It is, then, for the public good. But it might also be for the public good were Congress to allow the enslavement of foreign captives and their descendants (this was tried); the seizure of Bill Gates’s bankbook; or the ruthless suppression of Alec Baldwin. You can always make a case for the public interest if you are willing to exclude from common equity those whose rights you seek to abridge. But we don’t operate that way, mostly.
The problem with this analogy, of course, is that it ignores the distinction between individual rights (to life, liberty, property, and free speech in the case of the examples cited) and a government created monopoly grant. It is arguably the case, and certainly something that the Founders were concerned about, that grants of monopoly power such as copyrights and patents actually infringe on the liberties of others —- even if were to come up with an idea, or a song, or a poem, completely independently, I would be prevented from profiting from it by virtue of the fact that someone managed to beat me to the Patent and Trademark Office by a few hours.
More importantly, though, how can the government grant a perpetual monopoly over an idea ? Thomas Jefferson himself noted this about intellectual property:
[ideas are] “like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density at any point, and, like the air in which we breathe, move and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation.â€
In other words, once it is in the public domain, whether protected by copyright or not, can anyone truly be said to “own” an idea ? Helprin tries to ignore this argument by making a distinction between ideas and “art”, but the point is the same.
Whether it’s the formula for Bayer Aspirin, though, or the text of To Kill A Mockingbird, there is no rational reason to extend copyright protection indefinitely. And, more importantly, such a proposal would seem to violate the clear limitations placed on Congresses power to grant these monopolies by the Constitution.
The Washington Post reports this morning that there were warnings two months before the start of the Iraq War that things might not go as planned:
Two intelligence assessments from January 2003 predicted that the overthrow of Saddam Hussein and subsequent U.S. occupation of Iraq could lead to internal violence and provide a boost to Islamic extremists and terrorists in the region, according to congressional sources and former intelligence officials familiar with the prewar studies.
The two assessments, titled “Principal Challenges in Post-Saddam Iraq” and “Regional Consequences of Regime Change in Iraq,” were produced by the National Intelligence Council (NIC) and will be a major part of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence’s long-awaited Phase II report on prewar intelligence assessments about Iraq. The assessments were delivered to the White House and to congressional intelligence committees before the war started.
(…)
The assessment on post-Hussein Iraq included judgments that while Iraq was unlikely to split apart, there was a significant chance that domestic groups would fight each other and that ex-regime military elements could merge with terrorist groups to battle any new government. It even talks of guerrilla warfare, according to congressional sources and former intelligence officials.
The second NIC assessment discussed “political Islam being boosted and the war being exploited by terrorists and extremists elsewhere in the region,” one former senior analyst said. It also suggested that fear of U.S. military dominance and occupation of a Middle East country — one sacred to Islam — would attract foreign Islamic fighters to the area.
The NIC assessments paint “a very sobering and, as it has turned out, mostly accurate picture of the aftermath of the invasion,” according to a former senior intelligence officer familiar with the studies. He sought anonymity because he is not authorized to speak about still-classified assessments.
The former senior official said that after the NIC papers were distributed to senior government officials, he was told by one CIA briefer that a senior Defense Department official had said they were “too negative” and that the papers “did not see the possibilities” the removal of Hussein would present.
This report is consistent with information we’ve received from other sources about the build-up and aftermath of the Iraq War. Throughout the time preceding the Iraq War, there was an apparent unwillingness on the part of its proponents — principally Wolfowitz, Cheney, and those around them — to give any consideration at all to the potential negative consequences that could follow the collapse of the Ba`athist regime and, as a result, there was absolutely no planning for such contingencies.
Many war opponents point to the fact that the justification for the war — the existence of a WMD program in Iraq in 2003 — turned out to be faulty, but they’re missing the point. All of the available intelligence, from the United States and elsewhere, indicated that Saddam Hussein was stockpiling WMD’s. His own evasive behavior seemed to confirm it.
The question isn’t whether we were right or wrong to start the war to begin with, the question is how our leaders could have been so negligent, to the point of almost being criminally negligent, in failing to plan for what might happen when the war was over. Because they didn’t we’ve been stuck in Iraq for four years, the nation itself is mired in insurgency, and we’ve placed ourselves in a situation where, the slogans of the protesters aside, there is no easy way out.
That’s what history will remember about George W. Bush’s adventure in Iraq.
Today, we celebrate 1776, and more specifically the 4th of July as the birthday of American freedom, the day that the American colonists courageously stood up to the most powerful monarch on the planet and declared the independence of the thirteen British colonies on the Eastern seaboard of North America.
The truth of the matter is that, even on that hot Philadephia day in July, the future of freedom in America was far from secure. The American Revolution had barely started and, only ten months before King George III had vowed before Parliament that the colonies would remain in the British Empire, and had dispatched the world’s most powerful Navy and Army, backed up by some well-paid Hessians, to make sure that his will would be followed.
In 1776
, David McCullough tells the story of that year and of a military campaign that, but for fortunate leadership and even more fortunate luck, could very easily have ended in disaster and snuffed the infant nation in it’s sleep.
The year started out well enough. The Continental Army, newly under the command of George Washington, had stood down the British in Boston and forced them to retreat from the city. That victory, though, came without a decisive battle and was merely a prelude to the confrontation that would come in New York.
For a time, New York was secure but that proved to be quickly short-lived when the British Army and Navy appear off the coast and quickly land on Long Island. What follows is a tale of what can only be called ineptness at times. The Americans were always outmanned and outgunned by the British but, on more than one occasion, the defeat they would suffer would be the result of bad decisions, even bad decisions by Washington himself.
In the end, Washington was forced to retreat. First out of New York, and then clear across New Jersey and the Delaware River. It was only thanks to an attack on Trenton that combined equal degrees of bravery and audacity that the Americans were able to end the year on a high note, even if the war itself didn’t end for another six years.
As with everything else McCullough has written, 1776 is both informative and enjoyable. Someone once said that history is a story, and McCullough does a great job of telling this one in a way that makes you want to keep reading on, even though we all know how the story ultimately ends. If nothing else, the book will make you appreciate just how brave the men who fought for American freedom were, and just how lucky we are they that they were successful.
