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Brit historian, Paul Johnson, argues the case for nonintervention in foreign affairs. An international version of Daniel P. Moynihan’s idea of “benign neglect”.
A superpower with an emergency strike force, big airlift capacity and air superiority is always tempted to intervene in the internal affairs of Third World countries.
It looks so simple, especially for the U.S., which has a hyperactive media, noisy democratic institutions that clamor for “human rights” and a long tradition of intervention for humanitarian reasons. The Third World, especially the Muslim world, abounds in messy government crises in which mobs try to take control, troops open fire and people get killed. Congress and the media instantly call for a U.S. response, and the President finds his finger hovering over the action button.
It’s all too easy and satisfying to press that button. Troop carriers hurtle through the air, and presidential orders are obeyed instantly, producing impressive results. But after overthrowing a “wicked” Third World government, then what?
That is when the real problems begin. Small at first, they grow progressively larger—and are unending. Does anyone honestly believe that American intervention has solved the Iraq crisis? Or the Afghanistan crisis? Or that it ever will?
Cast your mind back to the 1950s, the last time U.S. policy was in the hands of an experienced and crafty general, who knew well the foolish advice military men often give civil authorities and could see through the machinations of the hydra-headed creature he baptized “the military-industrial complex.” General Dwight D. Eisenhower was President from 1953-61, a time when America’s superiority over the rest of the world was far greater than it is today. He received countless invitations and demands for U.S. intervention but always refused them. Only once, in 1958 and at the request of Lebanon’s president, Camille Chamun, did Eisenhower agree to station troops for a short while. He withdrew them as soon as possible, three months later, without having fired a shot. …
And Joel Kotkin, while watching the collusion between the likes of Google and Face Book with NSA, suggests ways to limit their powers.
For a generation, most Americans, whatever their politics, have largely admired Silicon Valley as an exemplar of enlightened free-market capitalism. Yet, increasingly, the one-time folk heroes are beginning to appear more like a digital version of President George W. Bush’s “axis of evil.” In terms of threats to freedom and privacy, we now may have more to fear from techies in Palo Alto than the infinitely less-competent retro-Reds in North Korea.
Once, we saw the potential unsurpassed human liberation available through information technology. However, Silicon Valley, as shown in the NSA scandal, increasingly has become intimately tied to the surveillance state. Technology has enabled powerful firms – including Verizon, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft and Google – to channel everyone’s email and cellphone calls to the national security apparatus.
“It’s as bad as reading your diary,” Joss Wright, a researcher with the Oxford Internet Institute, recently told the Associated Press, adding, “It’s far worse than reading your diary. Because you don’t write everything in your diary.”
Nor does the snooping relate only to national security. If my emails to friends and family arguably constitute a potential threat to national security, that’s one thing. The massive monitoring and largely unapproved tapping into our data for profit is quite another.
Google, which, in the first half of 2012, took in more advertising dollars than all U.S. magazines and newspapers combined, has amassed an impressive list of privacy violations, notes the Huffington Post. Even the innocent-seeming Gmail service is used to collect and sell information; Google’s crew in Palo Alto may know more about the casual user than most of us suspect.
Even Apple, arguably the most iconic Silicon Valley firm, has been hauled in front of courts for alleged privacy violations. For its part, Consumer Reports recently detailed Facebook’s pervasive privacy breaches, including misuse of information as detailed as health conditions, details an insurer could use against you, when someone is going out of town (convenient for burglars), as well as information pertaining to everything from sexual orientation to religious and ethnic affiliation.
Despite ritual denials about such invasions of privacy, the new communications moguls have little reason to stop, and lots of financial reasons to continue. As for concerns over privacy, the new oligarchs take something of a blasé attitude. Eric Schmidt, Google’s chairman, in 2009 responded to concerns over privacy with this gem: “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.” …
… The new Valley elite are simply the latest to refine and exploit information technology for their own, often enormous, personal benefit. Nothing wrong with making money, to be sure, but this ambition is no different than those of Cornelius Vanderbilt, E.H. Harriman, J.P. Morgan, Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, Henry Ford and Thomas Watson. Each innovated in a key industry, established oligarchic control and became fantastically rich.
But even by the standards of bygone moguls, the new oligarchs’ wealth has not been widely shared. Big Oil and the Big Three automakers created hundreds of thousands of jobs for a wide range of workers. In contrast, the tech oligarchs’ contributions to American employment are relatively negligible.
Google, for example, employs 50,000 people; Facebook, 4,600; Twitter, less than a thousand, while GM employs 200,000; Ford, 164,000; and Exxon, more than 100,000. Even in the current boom, new job creation has been relatively insipid. From 1959-71, Silicon Valley produced 100,000 tech jobs; by 1990 it generated an additional 150,000 and, in the 1990s boom, another 170,000. After losing more than 108,000 high-tech jobs from 2000-08, there has been a net gain of no more than 20,000 to 30,000 positions since 2007.
The geographical area enriched by the oligarchs has also narrowed. …
… These changes will require both Left and Right to change their attitudes. Progressives, for example, have tended to embrace the Valley’s population for its generally “liberal” views on social issues and the environment. They have largely ignored the industry’s poor record on hiring non-Asian minorities and the lavish, energy-consuming lifestyles of the oligarchs themselves.
Some on the left are seeing the light. Britain’s left-leaning Guardian newspaper has been in the forefront unveiling the NSA scandals and the complicity in them of the tech giants. Credit belongs to the EU, which, particularly in contrast with our government, has been asking the toughest questions about loss of privacy and the dangers of oligopolistic control. With Barack Obama secure in the White House, some American leftists have also begun to recognize the extreme inequality that has accompanied, and likely been worsened by, the ascendency of the digital aristocracy.
Conservatives, for their part, can only face up to the new “axis of evil” by stepping outside their ideology strictures and instinctive embrace of wealth. The increasingly monopolistic nature of the high-tech community, and its widespread disregard for the privacy of the individual, should concern conservatives, as it would have the framers of the Constitution.
What needs to be accepted, by both conservatives and liberals, is that privacy matters, as does the threat posed to democracy by oligarchy. Until people focus on the potential for evil before us and discuss ways to curb abuses, this small and largely irresponsible class, likely in league with government, will usher in not the promised cornucopia but a gilded-age reign of Big Brother.
Keeping up with IRS’ Lois Lerner, Eliana Johnson tells us how she used personal email for government business.
Embattled Internal Revenue Service official Lois Lerner sent official documents from her government e-mail address to a personal account, according to House Oversight Committee chairman Darrell Issa and his colleague, Ohio congressman Jim Jordan.
“This raises some serious questions concerning your use of a non-official e-mail account to conduct official business,” the GOP lawmakers wrote in a letter to Lerner demanding all documents from her non-official account for the period between January 2008 and the present. “Additional documents related to the Committee’s investigation may exist in these non-official accounts over which you have some control, and the lack of access to this information prevents the Committee from fully assessing your actions,” they explained. Issa and Jordan are requesting that Lerner produce the documents by August 27.
The use of personal e-mail accounts to conduct government work also has the potential to impede federal-records requests by the public because personal accounts are not archived by the government. Controversy erupted, for example, over former EPA administrator Lisa Jackson’s use of a government account under the name Richard Windsor which, like a personal account, would not be captured by records requests relating to Jackson. …
Independent Institute catches Bono making some sense.
… Just recently drawing upon his Christian faith (and possibly the economics influence of Professor Ayittey?), in a speech at GeorgetownUniversity, Bono altered his economic and political views and declared that only capitalism can end poverty.
“Aid is just a stopgap,” he said. “Commerce [and] entrepreneurial capitalism take more people out of poverty than aid. We need Africa to become an economic powerhouse.” …
James Pethokoukis agrees with Bono.
Lots of attention being paid to this quote from U2′s Bono:
“Aid is just a stopgap,” he said. “Commerce [and] entrepreneurial capitalism take more people out of poverty than aid. We need Africa to become an economic powerhouse.”
The above chart is from Gapminder and shows China’s per capita income growth since 1800 vs. that of the US and the UK. What happened to China toward the end of the 20th century? Well, it started doing what the America and Britain began doing some 200 years earlier. China started embracing what Bono calls entrepreneurial capitalism. Or as economist Deirdre McCloskey puts it:
“The Big Economic Story of our times has not been the Great Recession of 2007–2009, unpleasant though it was. … The Big Economic Story of our own times is that the Chinese in 1978 and then the Indians in 1991 adopted liberal ideas in the economy, and came to attribute a dignity and a liberty to the bourgeoisie formerly denied. And then China and India exploded in economic growth. … And contrary to the usual declarations of the economists since Adam Smith or Karl Marx, the Biggest Economic Story was not caused by trade or investment or exploitation. It was caused by ideas. The idea of bourgeois dignity and liberty led to a rise of real income per head in 2010 prices from about $3 a day in 1800 worldwide to over $100 in places that have accepted the Bourgeois Deal and its creative destruction.”
It’s August, so we have to deal with those who think the bombing of Hiroshima was a mistake. Michael Barone has it this year.
I couldn’t disagree more strongly with my Washington Examiner colleague Timothy Carney when he argues that we should not have dropped the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. My reading of the history of World War II has convinced me that Japan would not have surrendered if the bombs had not been dropped; even after that some in the military tried to prevent the Emperor from surrendering. American military leaders predicted that an invasion of Japan would have produced 1 million Americans killed or wounded. The Japanese had fought fiercely in Okinawa in the spring of 1945; 100,000 Americans and Japanese died in this one small island.
It’s worth reading this 1981 New Republic article by literary scholar and World War II infantryman Paul Fussell, who was scheduled to fight in Japan. So was the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who had enlisted in the Navy in 1945. “Was going to be sent to Japan,” he once told me. “Would have died!” …