Twisting history

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This is a terrible idea:

“…efforts are being made to commemorate the suffering of Germans driven from Eastern Europe. Led by the Association of the Banished, the plan is for a museum and centre dealing with the expulsion of Germans from countries which include the former Czechoslovakia and Poland.

Erika Steinbruch, conservative MP and head of the association, told The Observer: ‘We want to make it clear what happened to these people, the 15 million who were thrown out of their homelands in the Baltics, Romania, so many countries. They were chased out because of their German ethnicity.

‘This discussion is necessary. Every life is equal. The Jews who suffered in Germany were German. There were Germans in the Balkans who lost their homelands after the Hitler-Stalin pact. These were Germans who suffered under Hitler.

‘There is a more relaxed discussion now. That’s necessary. It is part of the process of self-discovery, of the very complicated moral problems Germany has with itself. This is only just starting. I’m very optimistic we can do this.'”

Yes, bad things have happened to Germans and ethnic Germans, during and after the war, not to mention those who went to the concentration camps even before the war. But the people heading the “Association of the Banished” have never really been able to understand that all this would never have happened without the holocaust and the other horrors of an aggressive war started by Germany. Many of those who suffered after the war had been among the active perpetrators of the Nazi atrocities, and also those who didn’t participate in them but approved of what happened, so indiscriminately commemorating them effectively amounts to an attempted white-wash. And saying that “The Jews who suffered in Germany were German” goes even further; it is simply repulsive because it lumps together the perpetrators and their victims (not that every German was a perpetrator, but she isn’t even trying to make a distinction between victims and victimizers).

Having said all that I do disagree with the concept of collective guilt. Bill Quick links to the same article and approvingly quotes this comment at lucianne.com:

Reminds me of the definition of CHUTZPA (ie nerves)– which is a man convicted of killing his parents asks the judge for mercy because he is an orphan.

In my comment at Daily Pundit I wrote :

“This is about individual suffering (and guilt). You basically say that German back then were collectively guilty and deserved whatever they got. There is no collective guilt, though, you have to look at individual cases to decide who was guilty or not. Remember, Hitler also wasn’t elected by a majority and seized power. Dissenters were sent to concentration camps, too, so many simply didn’t dare to speak up. For that reason it was simply wrong to indiscriminately drive out or murder people just because they were German.”

Like I wrote above, it would never have happened without the holocaust and World War II, and its perpetrators needed to be punished. Also, it simply is human to want revenge, and not to look too closely if all of the people you are taking revenge on are guilty or not. It also is understandable that Poles and Czechs didn’t feel like living together with Germans anymore. But, looking back more than fifty years later it is not asking too much to differentiate instead of using a blanket-condemnation.

Update: Bill has told me by now to read Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s book “Hitler’s Willing Executioners”, on German collective guilt for the Holocaust. Well, here’s a choice quote on Goldhagen and his book:

In his most recent book, Hitler’s Willing Executioners, Goldhagen asserted that blame for the Holocaust should be placed on ordinary Germans and their unique brand of anti–Semitism. When contemporary historians from both sides of the Atlantic challenged him on this point, he eventually conceded that he had underestimated how factors other than anti–Semitism helped lead to the Third Reich’s crimes. “I skirted over some of this history a little too quickly,”

This is from a review of his article “What Would Jesus Have Done? Pope Pius XII, the Catholic Church, and the Holocaust” in the New Republic.

Anti-semitism was an important factor, but in no way the only one, that contributed to the shaping of German society over the ages. I also can’t see why some people see his book as the only authoritative source of information on the issue.

Back to blogging

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Due to problems with my computer and lack of spare time I had to take a long blogging break. I think I have sorted it all out by now and hope to be able to post again with some regularity.

Photo

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balance

Another Assault on Property Rights

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A group of NIMBY enviro lawyers in Florida is trying to generate support to amend the state constitution. They want to subject major zoning reclassifications to approval by local referendum.

While I’m generally opposed to zoning, for property-rights and practical reasons (zoning tends to ossify the civic status quo), I was initially sympathetic to these guys because I thought their scheme might introduce more openness, consistency and accountability into the politicized zoning process. Let citizens have only themselves to blame for major zoning decisions.

But then I looked at the group’s web site and realized that my initial impression was naive. I had thought that the idea here was to make the system more accountable. However, the referendum advocates appear to be most interested in making the zoning reclassification process so burdensome as to halt development. They want to limit development to only those projects which are approved by socialist master-plans drawn up by unaccountable local-government planning agencies. They believe that a referendum requirement for major zoning changes would make it extremely difficult to change those master plans, and that this rigidity would be a good thing.

Read more

Politicians vs. Information

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Martin Devon comments thoughtfully about an innovative approach to evaluating geopolitical risk. He also quotes a couple of idiot pols who are agin’ it.

If you can create a real-money market in risk evaluation, it’s usually a good idea to do so, if only for price-discovery (in this case, risk discovery) purposes. People in the aggregate, voting with their own money, generally make better bets than do individuals who are merely writing position papers. And creating a market in risk assessment facilitates the pooling and hedging of risk. Of course these are the same principles that underlie insurance markets, which may be why some pols don’t like them. Imagine: individuals and businesses dealing with risk on their own, without needing politicians to “help” them. Too bad there’s no organized market for hedging away Congressional risk.

UPDATE: From Instapundit’s post on this topic and the comments here, there seem to be several objections to this idea. I paraphrase some objections (italics), below, and then respond. (Feel free to leave additional comments if I left anything out.)

Moral hazard: terrorists or other bad guys might cash in by betting in advance of their own terror attacks, or by committing terror attacks solely to make money. There is also incentive for govt officials, journalists, et al to manipulate the market by hyping nonexistent risk and then taking the other side of trades made by people who are betting on an attack.

There may be reason for concern, but it’s already possible to bet on terrorism: all you have to do is buy a large quantity of stock-index puts. And trades of this type, especially in a market dedicated to terrorism risk, would serve a valuable function by telling the world that something was up (in much the same way as an out-of-nowhere jump in the price of a stock may suggest that a takeover bid is imminent). The more narrowly tailored the market was — e.g., an assassination market for a particular leader — the more useful the information so transmitted would be. I think the benefit would probably outweigh the moral hazard, though I may be wrong.

With respect to people falsely hyping nonexistent terror attacks, markets are effective at discriminating this kind of false alarm. The first time it happened the market would probably move significantly, but after one episode of crying wolf the same tactic might not work again. It might also be possible to create legal penalties for false alarms. Such penalties wouldn’t deter everyone, but would at least impose a high expected cost on anyone who had something to lose, e.g., government officials and journalists, who are also the kinds of people most likely to be able to move the market by hyping terrorism concerns.

Innocent people might avoid participating in the market because there is a hypothetical risk that they would be arrested for knowing too much if they profited from terrorism predictions.

I don’t know. Whether this is an issue probably depends on how many people use this market and how much sense the government has. And it’s only a problem if they arrest innocent people. If they arrest guilty people it’s a benefit.

Information about pending terrorism is by nature private, and therefore public markets such as the envisioned terrorism-futures market would not be useful to predict attacks. As Glenn Reynolds put it:

An InstaPundit reader who is too smart to be in Congress emails with a more meaningful criticism: the futures market won’t identify “unknown unknowns,” since the betting — as with ordinary futures markets — must take place within the context of standard “products.”

It’s true that a public market would not discount private information, a.k.a. “unknown unknowns.” That’s generally true of markets. However, markets have a good record of making predictions based on publicly available information. The mistake is to compare a futures market to a crystal ball. The real comparison should be between the futures market and “expert” analysts who have no accountability for their biases. Markets look good by this standard, and the government could still do its own private research, much as financial firms do proprietary research in stock and futures markets, to supplement what it learned from public terrorism-risk markets.

Also, private information may become public if there’s money to be made. That’s a big advantage of markets in this case, as publicizing incipient terror attacks brings better countermeasures or the possibility that the terrorists will call off their attack.

It’s wrong to bet on misfortune and people’s deaths.

If this assertion is true, insurance is immoral, as are futures markets in agricultural commodities (betting on crop failures!) and stock indices (betting on, um, misfortune and people’s deaths). These markets are insurance by another name and are just as useful.

The reinsurance industry already does what terrorism futures are supposed to do.

This is partly true, though the reinsurance market operates largely out of the public eye and therefore may not transmit information as well as a futures market would. But if it’s really true that a futures market is unnecessary, then a futures market won’t succeed. It’s impossible to know for sure without trying.

If we’re lucky, someone overseas, like Tradesports, will start offering systematic opportunities to bet on terror-attack odds. Unfortunately, DARPA’s idea has unleashed so much demagoguery by American pols that it may be some time before anyone will be willing to set up such a futures market, even outside of the U.S. Pity.

Virginia Postrel has additional relevant links here.