the Red Cross's conclusions

The allegations of ill-treatment of the detainees indicate that, in many cases, the ill-treatment to which they were subjected while held in the CIA program, either singly or in combination, constituted torture. In addition, many other elements of the ill-treatment, either singly or in combination, constituted cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.

As quoted by Mark Danner in his great New York Review of Books piece, US Torture: Voices from the Black Sites (which contains numerous excerpts from the secret Red Cross report).

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Structured finance for beginners

Like many of you, I could care less about finance and the activities of Wall St. However, you can't swing a cat these days without hitting an article using the acronym 'CDO' and the terms 'credit default swap', 'tranches', 'AAA-rating', etc....Thus, a finance for dummies (i.e. me) would be helpful. Lo and behold, someone wrote one I found helpful. 

Incidentally, that blog, BaselineScenario is generally instructive. One of its main contributors, Simon Johnson, former chief economist at the IMF (sigh), has been getting a lot of attention for his article, The Quiet Coup, claiming that the oligarchs have a stranglehold on American political life.  Not news but, coming from an IMF dude who should know a thing or two about oligarchy, pretty significant.  The IMF, backed by the US, has a brutal history of 'persuading' governments to change their economic ways.  The same kind of medicine is merited in our current crisis, but it is no surprise that the US refuses to handle our case as we've been insisting other governments handle theirs.  

Or at least that's Johnson's claim.  The other theory is that the cases are the same:  they both share the idea that some nation's wealth is looted and redistributed to the richest citizens in the world, wherever they may reside.  The case that this is happening in the US is pretty strong; and we are all familiar with the IMF's history in developing countries.    

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Change you can believe in

From the blog, The Lift:

A group of 4 lawyers which are part of the ‘Association for the Dignity of Prisoners’ (Asociacion pro dignidad de los presos y presas de espana) Boyé Gonzalo, Isabel Elbal, Luis Velasco and Antonio Segura), filed a criminal complaint against Jay Bybee, Douglas Feith, Alberto Gonzales, David Addington, John Yoo and William J.Haynes II on the 17th of March at Spain’s Audienca nacionial for committing crimes under Chapter III of Title XXIV of the Spanish Criminal Code (”Crimes against protected persons and property during an armed conflict”). The lawsuit claimed the six former aides.

“participated actively and decisively in the creation, approval and execution of a judicial framework that allowed for the deprivation of fundamental rights of a large number of prisoners, the implementation of new interrogation techniques including torture, the legal cover for the treatment of those prisoners, the protection of the people who participated in illegal tortures and, above all, the establishment of impunity for all the government workers, military personnel, doctors and others who participated in the detention centre at Guantánamo”.
The case was not formally accepted by the court yet, but Baltasar Garzon has ordered the prosecution to start a criminal probe against the six. Gonzalo Boyé, one of the four lawyers who wrote the lawsuit, said the prosecutor would have little choice under Spanish law but to approve the prosecution.

“The only route of escape the prosecutor might have is to ask whether there is ongoing process in the US against these people,” Boyé told the Observer. “This case will go ahead. It will be against the law not to go ahead.” Boyé predicted that Garzón would issue subpoenas in the next two weeks, summoning the six former officials to present evidence.

If Garzón decided to go further and issued arrest warrants against the six, it would mean they would risk detention and extradition if they travelled to Spain or any of the 24 nations that participate in the European extraditions convention (it would have to follow a more formal extradition process in other countries beyond the 24).. It would also present President Barack Obama with a serious dilemma. He would have either to open proceedings against the accused or tackle an extradition request from Spain.
Philippe Sands, whose book Torture Team first made the case against the Bush lawyers and which Boyé said was instrumental in formulating the Spanish case, said yesterday:

“What this does is force the Obama administration to come to terms with the fact that torture has happened and to decide, sooner rather than later, whether it is going to criminally investigate. If it decides not to investigate, then inevitably the Garzón investigation, and no doubt many others, will be given the green light.”

Signatories to CAT [Convention Against Torture--mtn] have the authority to investigate torture cases, especially when their own nationals have been involved. The current criminal case evolved out of an investigation into allegations, sustained by Spain’s Supreme Court, that Spanish citizens had been tortured in Guantánamo.

Read the rest here.

More discussion at Opinio Juris.

If America doesn't pursue investigation into its own crimes--and shame on the Obama administration for not taking the lead on this--then thank God someone else will.

For good measure, take a look at Scott Horton's interview with Jane Mayer. Her book, The Dark Side, claims that the Red Cross concluded that the CIA's 'interrogation regime' is torturous. The torture part may not be news, but the declaration by a major international institution is.

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A Culture of Injustice by Matias Bulnes, NYC

The prevalent principle in politics nowadays is that letting the financial sector fail is, all things considered, the worst scenario for everybody, including the worst off. This was the principle president Obama availed himself of in his speech to congress when announcing he was going to bailout Wall Street in spite of his own fury. If in the sinking of a ship you want to save children and women first because they are the most vulnerable, in the sinking of the country the principle prescribes the exact opposite: let the strongest (same ones who caused the ship to sink) take the emergency boats; the rest of us can swim and hope they’ll manage to come back to rescue us.

The case of AIG executive bonuses is a particular application of the principle. While most of the country is drowning, we find ourselves having to stretch our air supply even more so AIG executives (same ones who caused us to be drowning) can have enough peace and piña coladas in Cancun to figure out how to get us afloat. It turns out, according to the principle, that unless we collect our last pennies and give them away to the same gang that drove us bankrupt, they might decide to move to other industries leaving us helpless.

It is almost impossible not to find the principle funny. If only because it implies incentives that go beyond perverse: “twisted” seems a better word for them. In the hypothetical case that saving Wall Street first will in turn get the country afloat, it will be in the best interest of Wall Street executives to be as ruthless as they have been in making money next time round. The principle guarantees their capacity to extort the country if things don’t go well again. “We take the risk, they take the losses” could well be their motto.

Still, the principle might turn out to be true. Pundits seem to be pretty sure it’s true, including pundit in chief, Ben Bernanke, who is said to be an authority on the subject. For him or president Obama to even contemplate presenting a principle like this to the public he needs to pair it up with a promise of reform guaranteeing that the conditions that allowed the financial sector to drive us down will not repeat. Only this can placate the perversity of the incentives thus engendered.

On pain of exposing my ignorance I shall not challenge the pundits. Instead I want to ask a question that grants their backward principle: Is it possible that our social organization is set up to safeguard the interest of an elite? If the principle is true, could it be true in virtue of a type of social organization whose ultimate goal is to protect a few?

The hypothesis suggested is admittedly speculative but, if true, it would depict our society in a guise bleaker than commonly assumed. It would entail not that social injustice is an unfortunate byproduct of Capitalism but that the collective well-being is a fortunate byproduct of the American brand of Capitalism. In simpler words, if correct, this would imply that the system allows for the collective well-being to increase only insofar as it does not interfere with the well-being of the elite. This would reverse the order of priorities usually thought to represent our social organization.

In fact, this order of priorities is invariably assumed in political rhetoric as well as academic debate. Our standard, if somewhat chauvinistic, historical account says that the modern democratic society is the result of centuries of social struggle leading to the vindication of the powerless masses. We all tacitly take pride in living in the age of reason when finally humanity has arrived at a social organization whose ultimate goal is the collective well-being and where the enrichment of a few is only accepted when conducive to this goal. We are heirs of the French Revolution—we like to believe.

By questioning this historical account, however, I do not intend to suggest that the economic elites somehow conspired to cheat us all into believing that the system works for us while it really works for them. On the contrary, I take the hypothesis to be compatible with this system being more or less inevitable: the spontaneous result of the flaws of alternative systems. In sum, it is possible, if perhaps implausible, that the system has been tweaked to protect the elite in a corruption-free manner.

Evidence for the hypothesis that our social organization is set up to safeguard the economic elite can be found in diverse considerations. If indeed the principle that the future well-being of the country depends on the well-being of the financial sector is true, as most experts believe, it will seem to entail the impossibility of pursuing the interest of the country without at the same time pursuing the interest of the “big banks.” This would appear to be prima facie evidence for the hypothesis.

Moreover, the fact that it is only the “big banks” that need to be protected at any cost adds support to the hypothesis. If it were Wall Street as a whole that needed to be protected to salvage the economy one could argue that there is enough flow of people to and from Wall Street to represent a stable elite. But while this line of argument seems empirically dubious when predicated of Wall Street as a whole, it would seem plainly false when predicated of the “big banks.” The admission barriers for this elite seem insurmountable by the regular citizen regardless of her talents: e.g. having family connections, having attended Harvard Business School, having a certain golf handicap, etc.

Another obstacle my hypothesis needs to hurdle is the steep taxation rates of modern democracies. The redistribution of wealth resulting from such taxation rates seems to support the view that it is the collective well-being that has priority over the well-being of the economic elite in the inner workings of our social organization. While this argument may well carry some weight applied to countries with moderate inequalities (e.g. Sweden, Finland, Denmark, etc.) it seems entirely insufficient applied to the US. Not only does the US exhibit record inequalities but also its social mobility (i.e. the likelihood of moving up or down in the social structure) is remarkably low. In fact, the social mobility within the higher classes of American society is even lower than within middle and lower classes. This, on the contrary, further supports the hypothesis.

I realize that the evidence presented in this article may not suffice to prove the hypothesis under consideration. Still, I believe it is important to countenance such a bleak possibility in the light of the allegedly necessary injustices the country has reluctantly funded. What does seem clear from the discussion, however, is the demise of the American Dream: the US resembles less a land of opportunities than a land of well-paid servants. Perhaps we fail to see this in times of economic prosperity because we are absorbed in a culture of injustice.

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Climate disruptions by Ornaith O'Dowd, NYC

If you've blinked in the last several days, you will have missed media coverage of the Climate Change Congress, which took place on March 10-12 in Copenhagen. Climate scientists gathered there to assess the latest evidence of climate change. The message that emerged from the Congress was stark: we are facing (at least) the IPCC's worst case scenario. Climate disruption is worse than we had feared, even in 2007, and that was bad enough. Unsurprisingly, this has garnered far less attention than the economic crisis. The right insists that neoliberalism be shored up, restoring business as usual as possible. The Keynesian center (or center-left, depending on where one is standing) argues for massive public investment to create jobs and boost consumer spending. Contemporary Keynesians acknowledge the climate crisis and advocate a "green stimulus," with investment focusing on public transport and clean energy. As far as it goes, this makes sense, but it does not go far enough to begin addressing the problem on an appropriate scale. (The severity of the problem warrants significant reductions in energy consumption, all told, as well.) I want to discuss an aspect of the issue that usually goes unmentioned in the mainstream, but is essential to an adequate response: global justice and the long history of exploitation by the global North of the global South.
China recently became the world's largest emitter of carbon; other "developing" countries are following suit as industrialization and car use increase. Clearly, these countries cannot continue on this path if we are to tackle climate disruption. However, they are understandably piqued that "developed" countries grew rich precisely by expanding polluting industry and car use-- but without any restrictions or penalty.
Moreover, as a recent editorial in the UK Guardian points out, much of the carbon emanating from "developing" countries comes from the manufacture of goods destined for consumption in "developed" countries like the United States, often by foreign corporations (or their subcontractors). As is well known, U.S. (and other) corporations have chased lax environmental and labor regulations, as well as cheap labor, around the globe to maximize their profit margins. All the more galling, then, that the global North should deliver lectures to the rest of the world about carbon emissions.
All of this should be viewed in historical context: most importantly, the seamless narrative of the global North's economic exploitation of the global South, from the classical colonial period to the present. The global North exploits the South's resources-- labor, forests, diamonds, oil, rubber, coffee, and on-- and reaps the benefits (profits and cheap raw materials and goods), leaving the South to bear the burdens (depleted resources, impoverishment of workers, debt, and pollution). The narrative is seamless because there has never been any recompense or reparation for the resource theft (among other things) perpetrated by colonial powers: in fact, the theft has continued, albeit under a veneer of legitimacy. Because there has been no recompense, the global South, especially thepostcolonial global South, has been left with few options: develop on the North's terms, or not at all. (Latin America's leftward shift may seem to offer another story, one in which countries can develop on their own terms, but defiance of the North, especially the U.S., has always been punished. On the other hand, there is an ever-growing group of left-leaning governments in the region, and they represent an increasingly formidable force politically.)
There are many interesting issues surrounding reparations (most often discussed with respect to slavery in the United States). To enumerate them all would require a post by itself; here, I wish to stress the point that the colonizers have not paid at all for their crimes; in fact, colonial powers have benefited, and continue to benefit, from them. (So the justification is not merely backward-looking, but tied to the present effects of colonialism.) Try to imagine an alternative history of Britain, for example, if it had not had an empire. In short, no industrial revolution. Without an industrial revolution in the 18th and 19th centuries, what would Britain's economic position be today? Hard to tell, of course, but we can hazard a guess that it would not be in the G8. Now try to imagine the difference between the two "possibleBritains ": this is, very roughly speaking, the magnitude of what the global North owes the global South. (I am not necessarily suggesting this as a method for calculating reparations due, but as an aid to the imagination.)
So, the global North-- especially the colonial powers and slave trading powers-- owes the global South a lot of wealth and resources. An industrial revolution's worth, one might say. But the planet cannot afford any more industrial revolutions of the kind experienced in the global North: too much harm has already been done. The global North owes the global South the means for sustainable development (whatever that means-- the very language of development and growth are at least suspect from an ecological point of view). What's more, the global North bears the responsibility for the environmental damage caused by its own industrialization. Remember, too, that climate disruption will have (indeed, is already having) a disproportionately severe effect on the global South: tsunamis, drought, and so on.
Paying these debts would undoubtedly overturn the existing hierarchy of global power, and that is not on anyone's "realistic" political agenda. I do not expect to see these sorts of ideas discussed at the Copenhagen summit later this year: anything stronger than the Kyoto agreement would probably be an achievement, diplomatically. However, the scale of the crisis demands something much closer to the former than the latter. I do not think it has ever been more important to talk about what ought to happen-- and what must happen, if catastrophe for billions of people is to be avoided-- even if it seems very unlikely.

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Responsibility for viciousness

In a recent article, ‘From Captive to Suicide Bomber’, the Washington Post implicitly raises the fascinating question: How much responsibility does the US bear for the violent actions of those released from Guantanamo? (For a related article, go here).

There are two conflicting positions on this question, each of which bears some truth, but neither of which is complete or satisfactory.

The subject of the Post piece is Abdallah Saleh al-Ajmi, a kid picked up in Pakistan in 2001 and then shipped to Guantanamo from which he was subsequently released—4 years later. In March 2008, he was responsible for a suicide bombing which killed 13 Iraqi soldiers and wounded 42 others.

The first kind of position will use the very fact of the suicide bombing as sufficient evidence that he was, all along, a vicious terrorist. Character is destiny, they argue, for no person of moral virtue can become someone who contemplates arbitrary killing (let alone carries it out). The crucial mistake was to have released such a person in the first place. Even if there was not sufficient evidence to prosecute Ajmi in a court of law, we now know, from the standpoint of ashes, that his incarceration was justified.

One can have some sympathy for this view, on the grounds that it is difficult to imagine the kind of transformation it would require to yield a vicious murderer from an innocent. The view holds that there was no transformation; the alleged innocent must have ‘had it in him’ all along. If so, the US is not culpable for what he became or for the actions that flowed from what he became.

The Post article, however, suggests a very different picture. In the initial stages of his incarceration, the boy was, by most accounts, respectful and hopeful. It was a consequence of, among other things, the humiliation, degradation and abuse suffered while at Guantanamo, that he morphed into the suicide bomber. On this picture, the US is responsible for either creating the man’s viciousness or, at the very least, bringing to fruition a viciousness that would have otherwise remained infant and unexpressed. Critics of US foreign policy often point to a vicarious version of this mechanism to support their claim that US action in Iraq is the greatest recruiting tool imaginable.

What can we make of this divide? Although we intuit that a traumatic experience can alter someone’s view of the world and, at the extreme, even ‘break’ him, it is nevertheless mysterious how character can be so extremely malleable. We use the word ‘break’ only as a stopgap in our understanding. For the hopeful kid picked up in Pakistan and the enraged man who bombed the Iraqi base are, for all the differences, identical--the memories are the same. Nevertheless, if not his identity something significant changed. But what, and more importantly, how?

I don’t know the answer to either question, but I can suggest a reason why the first view--that Ajmi had it in him all along--can seem so appealing. Our ethical understanding of alterations in character depends upon our ability to conceive it in ourselves. I can understand, for example, your remaining angry at the friend who betrayed you, because I can imagine how I would be in similar circumstances. However, when we reflect on our own character, it is (almost?) impossible for us to identify ourselves with, for example, the imagined driver of a truck loaded with explosives, who intends to kill as many people as possible, including himself. What could such a person be thinking and more importantly how can someone who used to find such thoughts unthinkable become one who not only thinks them but acts on those thoughts. There are pictures of despair, hopelessness and rage that fill out and help explain how someone could do such a thing, but seeing ourselves as we do, i.e. as ‘normal’, I am suggesting we cannot see from here how any such explanatory framework ever could apply to us. There is a large gap that cannot be filled by ethical imagination.

Of course, this doesn’t establish that Ajmi must have been vicious coming into Guantanamo. I don’t believe that. The evidence strongly suggests a transformation, and we can believe this because there is ample empirical evidence that such transformations can occur. To believe he transformed is partly to believe in the evidence of its possibility. This is different from being able to imaginatively project ourselves into his situation (a paradigm ethical move). From the evidential standpoint, we view the subject as an object that is completely subject to forces beyond his control. No longer an agent of his actions, he becomes a non-responsible kind of thing. If so, the US who created the conditions of duress which typically generate character change, should take some responsibility not only for what they did to him at Guantanamo, but additionally for the actions he committed after his release.

The adoption of the second picture requires that we take a clinical, and wholly objective, view of him. He, and his actions, were a product of forces beyond his control. This is a difficult view to sustain, for being human beings we cannot continue to see other human beings as mere objects who are the products of social forces. After all, Ajmi did not become an automaton. Even in his second incarnation, he had thoughts and he made decisions, ones for which we would typically hold him responsible. Once we view a human being as a product of forces beyond his control, it is difficult to know where to stop. Sure, the US contributed to making him who he became, but so did his parents and his community. Moreover, for those who were either victims of the suicide bombing or else knew them, we are hit with the truth that resentment needs a local target. Of course, it is possible, and I believe appropriate, to direct such anger at the US, but is it possible or appropriate to leave it at that? If the victims' loved ones continue to resent Ajmi, can we say that they are simply mistaken?

The tension between these two views does not mean we cannot adopt both of them. In fact, excepting those with an agenda or who are personally connected, moral ambivalence attends familiarity with these kinds of cases. Ajmi became vicious and intended to kill, and for that he is subject to blame; however, when we learn of the horrific circumstances which nurtured and conceivably gave birth to his viciousness, we (want to?) believe that blaming him is inappropriate. Neither is wholly satisfactory, but neither are completely unfounded either.

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Obama's Choice of Reason

We cheerfully welcome President Obama’s decision to end Bush’s funding barriers to stem cell research. Even more important is Obama’s pledge that during his administration public policy will be decided on the basis of scientific evidence as opposed to religion or ideology. This is extremely important not only because it makes it more likely that science will be able to find cures for various degenerative deceases but because it restores the rule of reason inside the White House. For too long, the US had been submerged in times of obscurantism reminiscent of the Middle Age. This was absolutely unacceptable for a modern, secular democracy and worrisome as a sign of decline. Fortunately for the US and the world as a whole, religious dogma will no longer hobble the prospects of a better life for many.

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The Pretense of Knowledge by MT Nguyen, The Empire, CA

The title comes from the Austrian economist, F.A. Hayek’s, Nobel Prize winning address. I like the title and the sentiment it expresses. Hayek applied it specifically to economists of his era, and I would like to apply it, although in a different context, to economists as well, including to Hayek himself.

For those who are not familiar with Hayek (I wasn’t until about a month ago), the one interesting thing to know is that he is something of a hero to the right wing. His attack on socialism, The Road to Serfdom, is a classic; his work on economics forms one cornerstone in what is known as the Austrian School (roughly, anti-Keynesian economic theory). In trying to learn something about the large clash of ideas that is occurring now because of our economic crisis, one could do far worse than spend some time studying his writings.

Much can be gleaned from what Hayek concludes in his Nobel address:

The recognition of the insuperable limits to his knowledge ought indeed to teach the student of society a lesson of humility which should guard him against becoming an accomplice in men's fatal striving to control society - a striving which makes him not only a tyrant over his fellows, but which may well make him the destroyer of a civilization which no brain has designed but which has grown from the free efforts of millions of individuals.

This should be understood as a call for skepticism, a wariness of human arrogance in matters of knowledge. In Hayek’s case, he applied this skepticism to economic knowledge, asserting that we cannot have the kind of knowledge that many economists claim. This epistemic hole implies, Hayek claims, that governmental economic market manipulation is (more or less) always unjustified. Grounding this skepticism is his assertion that the market-place possesses its own kind of ‘wisdom’. Specifically, markets can sum up the totality of human economic intentions and communicate them to all economic players in the form of prices. This is the coordinating function at which it is uniquely master. According to Hayek, the only way acquire the ‘wisdom’ of the marketplace would be to know the intentions of each individual market player, and since that is possible only for God, if such there be, it would be overreaching (to say the least) to insinuate oneself, as the government does, when it fixes prices, attempts to manipulate wages, prevents capital flight, or performs any number of other interventionist actions.

Many have used Hayek to draw the conclusion that government should never interfere with the marketplace. This is highly misleading. First, Hayek himself was quite clear that exceptions existed, e.g. when the costs of a business venture cannot be summed up by price (pollution is a classic example because a polluting business does not solely bear the costs of its pollution, but gains all the profit); and, when the enjoyment of a good cannot be efficiently charged to its recipient (e.g. signposts and roads). In such cases markets fail to do their job, and government has a role to play. Second, and rather surprisingly, he believed a strong case could be made that government should provide a safety net against catastrophic loss, i.e. a kind of insurance against shortfalls in basic material necessities. I take it some of his followers will take him to task for his alleged inconsistency on this matter. It is unclear to me how far he is willing to go, but it makes his position interesting and far from the dyed-in-the-wool anti-interventionist his followers want and paint him out to be. On both counts, therefore, he was not, as he repeatedly says, a proponent of laissez-faire economics.

Aside from the exceptions just noted, generally he thought that there was a positive role for government: it should be like a gardener tending to his garden, cultivating the conditions necessary for (economic) growth. Nevertheless, the exceptions and cultivating activities are, for Hayek, necessarily protracted and limited.

Leaving those not insignificant nuances aside, we can ask the question whether it follows from this type of economic theory that governmental intervention is generally wrong. On the face of it, it is easy to say no. Governmental intervention is wrong only if we make the striking conclusion, one which I have argued before there is no reason to accept, that a true economic theory implies economic justice. That is, that allowing true economic theory to dictate policy necessarily benefits everyone. This is a Platonic fantasy to which we shouldn’t be beholden.

When the mechanisms of the marketplace lead to unjust economic distributions, there is good reason why government should interfere. The reason is simple: government should be in the business of achieving justice. It is important to digest the truth that economists for all their pretensions of knowledge, all their mind-numbing econometric models, really, I mean really, have no special competence and hence no authority to say anything about how economic goods should be distributed.

I just said that governments are in the business of justice and concluded that economists are not and so should shut up (or at least make clear that when they are dispensing ethical advice, they don’t pass it off as grounded in some mathematical model or, worse, some a priori truth born out of reflection on the nature of rationality). But here’s the rub. Many of the most influential 20th-century economists from von Mises to Murray Rothbard, to Hayek, to Milton Friedman have philosophical pretensions. Look at the titles of their influential works and there can be no doubt: “Socialism” by von Mises, in which he purports to establish the irrationality and immorality of all forms of socialism; “For a New Liberty” by Murray Rothbard in which he purports to establish libertarianism as a philosophical doctrine; “The Road to Serfdom” by Hayek, as I said earlier an attack on socialism; “Capitalism and Freedom” by Milton Friedman, in which he defends the idea that economic freedom is a necessary condition of political freedom.

This whole cast of ‘liberal’ economists suffer a pretense to knowledge, namely, that they can make true claims about social justice. Turning again to Hayek, when he asserts that government interference may make it a ‘destroyer of civilization,’ he does not mean just a destroyer of economies. He means that governmental interference unjustly restricts individual liberty, and thus casts an inextricable totalitarian shadow over the whole of political life. In the end, Hayek proposed fairly moderate policies. This cannot be said of his heirs. This is why there now exists a more severe strand of conservatism (or libertarianism, nee classical liberalism) a la Grover Norquist which aims, in Norquist’s famous quip, to “drag [government] into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub”. On this radical view, the business of economics cannot be separated from that of justice; for government to intervene in economic transactions just is for it to destroy liberty and send us all on the short road to serfdom.

Whatever is to be said on either side of this debate, and much ink has been spilled, my point is to note the movement to an entirely different habitat than the one in which the academic economist lives. What we have here is an ethical/political theory, one which posits a conception of happiness and the necessary steps to achieve it. We are in the domain of philosophy in the grand Platonic/Nietzschean sense (as opposed to the narrow academic sense). To his credit, in the original preface to ‘The Road to Serfdom’ Hayek explicitly acknowledges that its content stands outside the ken of his specialty, academic economics. That however didn’t stop him from writing the rest of the book, nor did he repeat that qualification in the subsequent editions—after it had enjoyed its successes. These philosophical ambitions, perhaps, explain the longevity of their ideas, and why they persist even though the economic basis of the ideas have fallen out of favor.

In a recent interview, Paul Krugman quipped that no special license is required to identify oneself as an economist. This truth applies to an even greater extent to identifying oneself as a philosopher. Our 'liberal' economists, not content with the small deliverances of their own discipline, seem to want to ‘play the master’ (to use Nietzsche’s phrase) and fancy themselves philosophers. This is ironic since for all their railing against government planning out and directing individual lives, these people have taken on the ultimate synoptic perspective: that of the philosopher who knows the good for man and aims in their activities to make that vision real. Plato would be proud.

Hayek rightly chided economists for their ‘scientism’, that is, their pretending that economics can deliver knowledge on a par with physics. I think he should have chided them, and himself, additionally for pretending to have the wisdom of philosophers. Assuming such a wisdom exists, there is no special reason to think that economists have it, and thus no special reason to listen to them when they make philosophical claims. Of course, we need not deny that as individuals these economists can have philosophical insight; but, since there can be no sound inference from true economic theory to a sound ethical theory, any philosophical claims must be diligently distinguished and judged on their own merits. I intend on tackling some of their more interesting philosophical claims in my next essay.

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the Human Rights regime and its difficulties

Yesterday, the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Sudan’s president. This is the first ever warrant for a sitting head of state. Among a whole host of other grim crimes (but curiouslynot genocide), he is charged with crimes against humanity. Hardly anyone, except perhaps President Bashir himself, thinks he’s innocent. But, little if anything will happen to him in the near or perhaps even distant future. In this regard, the warrant has little force. This expresses one difficulty of the human rights movement. While it clearly enjoys a kind of moral authority (in the sense that no sane person would deny the moral wrongness of, say, genocide) in most parts of the world, human rights documents have yet to enjoy the kind of legal authority which national constitutions enjoy. To be sure, as a UN member, Sudan is legally bound by the arrest warrant, and therefore has the legal obligation to arrest Bashir. However, that’s as likely as Bush endorsing a Truth Commission.

An effective human rights regime cannot be bootstrapped into existence, and without inter alia the internal acceptance of the relevant parties, the appearance of impartiality, and a mechanism for enforcement its more or less impotent motivational capacity will be once again reaffirmed.

I said ‘more or less impotent’ since the endorsement human rights do enjoy in most quarters does effect a not insignificant motivational force on the recalcitrant. Although Bashir rejects the authority of the ICC, he can come to believe in it if sufficiently ‘advised’ by his peers. Unfortunately, many African leaders are reluctant, for various reasons, to hold him to account: the specter of colonization and the strident nationalism it engenders is, rightly so, a very powerful political tool.

But there are other international supporters, e.g. China, that can bring to bear their significant persuasive powers. This is true even though China itself is far from a prime mover in the human rights movement. Moreover, there is some talk that Bashir’s generals are ready to throw him overboard, but that seems unlikely since they are likely implicated in his crimes. Motivating them would require assurances that they are not next on the warrant list. This is another difficulty of the human rights regime. Leaving aside the recalcitrant, its effectiveness depends upon reaching a threshold among all others: many, many nations, individuals, corporations, organizations, etc.., have to be on board before it can play even a limited normative role. The lesson however is that the creation of a human rights regime does not require only true believers; we need only some of those and some others who can come to have a reason to comply. In a sense that is encouraging, since it is easier to effect.

The human rights movement is still in its infancy, and so the gap between its aims and what it can effect can seem enormous. Nevertheless, knowing the difficulties it faces should make us place emphasis on persuading others of its great importance.

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