Government as Pimp

Clare Chapham’s article, “If you don’t take a job as a prostitute, we can stop your benefits”, in the Guardian was forwarded by a friend; Todd Zywicki at Volokh also comments. Some see this as an argument for keeping prostitution illegal and others as evidence of a nanny state that can’t afford to keep up welfare payments with a 10% unemployment rate. My friend believes prostitution should be illegal. I am less opposed.

The essential problem, however, seems to me that coercion in many ways – some petty and some not – are likely to come when a state casts “safety nets” broadly. I don’t see how it can’t be coercive–if we do not have to face the bad consequences of our choices then soon the state will recognize that to survive we must not be allowed to make bad choices for which it takes the consequences. But life is full of complicated choices – is it a bad one to take unemployment pay and not work or is it a bad one to enter one of the more unattractive and dangerous professions (even ignoring the spiritual problems many might have). However, if we want the state’s money then we need to prove we “deserve” it by interviewing for jobs. And frankly, as a taxpayer, I do think that some requirements for such checks isn’t a bad idea.

I would prefer a world, however, where people felt work was dignified and sought it without the government’s push, where people felt prostitution (even though legal) compromised them and they had a strong enough sense of self not to compromise themselves. A world where, in other words, we made our own choices and took our own consequences.

But this brings us to another characteristic of broad state regulations: reputation and peer pressure count for nothing; everything is either approved and therefore encouraged or not – and then made illegal. Laws then govern all. Nuances that arise from peer pressure, the pressure of traditions, of our own peculiarities, of our own desire to say “I prefer not” will be submerged by what must be. We will do as we should–or someone will want to know why. This leaves little room for our petty vices and eccentric life-choices. Such a world is likely to have few compromises in the rules – only compromises in the self.

Those Idiot Iraqis

I feel sorry for those poor, deluded people of Iraq.

Yesterday, in my ignorance, I thought their election represented another step forward for their country, and perhaps the entire region. I admired the people’s bravery in going to the polls under a threat of death.

That was before I learned THE REAL TRUTH!

Surfing around the web today I learned that (1) the election was all sham, (2) even if it wasn’t a sham it meant absolutely nothing, (3) even if it does mean something, it just means the absolute best that the Iraqi people can hope for is an awful state of tyranny and oppression like suburban America. (Apparently, having the option of shopping at Walmart is a horrible fate beyond all telling. I never imagined!)

Yes, according to everyone from the kid behind the counter at Starbucks to the political-science professor who has never had a real job, the elections in Iraq are a complete waste of time, a non-event. But what about all those Iraqis who were thrilled and ecstatic to be voting for the first time?

Idiots and dupes, the lot of them.

I mean, they’re actually right there in Iraq! Can’t they see how awful everything is? If even the kid at Starbucks understands THE REAL TRUTH about the election, why can’t the great mass of Iraqis? Are they like brain damaged or something?

You know, we should take up a collection and arrange to fly all these earnest lefties who understand THE REAL TRUTH over to Iraq so that they can explain to randomly selected Iraqis just how awful their lives are, how stupid they are for hoping for a better and more democratic future, that the price they paid to get to this point was too high and, oh yeah, how they were really soooooo much better off under Saddam.

One can just images the faces of the Iraqis lighting up when THE REAL TRUTH strikes them. Even though they have personally lived through all of the events of the last 15 years, the striking intellect of the kid from Starbucks — who watches a lot of CNN — will overawe them and convince them that any hope they have for the future is just illusionary.

I really want to see that.
I want to film it and sell tickets.
From a safe distance.

The Transatlantic Rift

In September of last year, I posted on the efforts of Germany, Japan and Brazil to gain a seat on the UNSC. I wasn’t impressed. Neither, apparently, is David Frum. In his piece, The End of the Transatlantic Affair, he writes:

Over lunch at a Washington think-tank some time ago, a high-ranking German official told the room about his country’s determination to win a seat on the United Nations Security Council. The reaction? From the Americans present, indifference verging on boredom. For the Europeans, though, it was as if the official had dropped a concrete block on their toes.

It was a fascinating moment of culture clash that demonstrates some ominous truths about American-European relations. The first truth is the traditionalism of American policy elites. Even when the evidence is thrust into American faces, it is hard for them to accept that things have changed in the old alliance. From 1947 until 1991, US-European relations were guided by the rule that America would provide the protection and Europe the deference.

With the collapse of Soviet military power, the deal became obsolete. Yet this large geopolitical change has made little impression on American policy elites. Indeed, John Kerry won the backing of almost all of this elite by running a presidential campaign that promised that the alliance could be restored with just a few sweet words.

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I’d like to know . . .

I’d like to know why we don’t use the inked-finger system to reduce voting fraud in the USA. It’s not like we don’t have a fraud problem here.

In the early 1980s, a couple of weeks after the first election in El Salvador, I met a woman who had voted there. She showed us the ink that was still on her finger and my first thought was: Why don’t they do it that way in Chicago? It wouldn’t eliminate fraud but it would at least make multiple voting much more difficult.

The reason they don’t do it, I am speculating, is that for any given election one party primarily benefits from fraud, the other party usually doesn’t think the battle is worth fighting (and either wants to retain the fraud option or fears the anti-fraud rules could be used against it in the future), many voters also benefit from the fraud, and the voters who don’t benefit are not well enough organized or even aware of the problem. So while voting fraud is a serious problem in the aggregate, it is difficult, at any particular moment, to get a big enough constituency together to do anything about it.

Perhaps the Internet, by facilitating the flow of information and political organization, is increasing political incentives in the USA to do something systematic about election fraud. I hope so.

Delusions of De Soto’s Delusion

John Gravois over at Slate pronounces Hernado de Soto’s ideas a failure in alleviating poverty in the 3rd world. In doing so, Gravois makes what I believe to be a common error among those of the Left: mistaking the formal system for the actual system.

As we learned with “Privatization” and “Deregulation”, even in the 1st world, just because a politician slaps a label on some law doesn’t mean it will actually accomplish what the name implies. Just because a 3rd-world nation passes a law saying that people now have private property, and that specific individuals have title to specific lands, it doesn’t mean that the actual system works that way. If the actual system doesn’t function like something very close to a 1st-world property system then the new laws have failed to establish a working property system.

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