Colby Cosh examines Peter Arnett’s professional courtesy.

Briefing the media from Centcom, Brig. General Vincent Brooks, who would likely take exception to Jeffery Tucker’s characterization of him as a slave.

In an attempt to bolster a case against the war, Jeffery Tucker likens the terms of employment in the volunteer armies of the US and the UK militaries to those of Saddam’s army:

All modern armies are essentially totalitarian enterprises. Once you sign up for them, or are drafted, you are a slave… This is remarkable, if you think about it. Imagine that you work for Wal-Mart but find the job too dangerous, and try to quit. You are told that you may not, so you run away. The management catches up to you, and jails you. You refuse to go and resist. Finally, you are shot. We would all recognize that this is exploitation, an atrocity, a crime, a clear example of the disregard that this company has for human life. The public outrage would be palpable…

… The British defense secretary, Geoff Hoon, claims that the coalition armed forces are made up of “men and women who made a free choice to serve their country,” whereas Iraqi forces “are motivated either by fear or by hatred.” It’s hard to say what motivates Iraqi forces (perhaps the desire to repel invasion?) but what he says about coalition troops is simply not true.

I’m happy to join the libertarian ranks of any and all who wish to point out the coercive nature of all government, especially as it impacts everyday, non-military citizens in this country. As someone who has yearly been forced to hand over every dime I make from January through May, I quite soundly acknowledge that anyone who is coerced to pay the highwayman in such a way can be considered conscripted or enslaved. In that loose, but accurate sense of the term slave, Tucker would be on the right track.

However, in this stroll down the well-manicured path of abstract exercise, I would stop short of deluding myself into the realm of the fantastic. Tucker continues to venture on in his speculation that most soldiers based in Iraq would probably desert, post haste, if they didn’t fear the heavy hand of their own state.

I disagree. Those who comprise the volunteer army are educated adults, well able to make a serious decision about whether or not to sign on with the armed forces and would not balk, even if they could do so with zero consequence to themselves.

There has been virtually no public whinging among the troops, even as they pull the most dangerous duty in Iraq. A case in point is that of the two Third Infantry Mechanics who were stranded for the past week in the Iraqi desert. When finally discovered by the Marines, “They just kept saying that they wanted to return to their unit as soon as possible to be part of the battle.”

When reason gives way to emotional desperation, there’s blatant equivocation to be endured. We’re seeing a fair amount of it from the anti-war side of the fence. They are distraught. The evidence of it fills their websites and resonates in the air of those curious, commie embracing, public demonstrations.

I fully understand the idea that one simply cannot contract away rights which are inalienable. This is not what I dispute in Tucker’s assertions. What I find objectionable is the equation of the US, with all it’s statist faults, to the far more hideous regime of Saddam Hussein.

A fine or jail sentence for going AWOL falls nowhere near being shot, having your ear or tongue cut off, or having your child tortured for going AWOL. There are reasonable arguments to be made against this war, but those who equate Bush with Saddam or equate the US forces with Saddam’s sadistic defenders miss it by a mile.

In a draft of his next book, Future Imperfect, David Friedman explains how ecash can solve the problem of spam:

My email contains much of interest. It also contains READY FOR A SMOOTH WAY OUT OF DEBT?, A Personal Invitation from make_real_money@BIGFOOT.COM, You’ve Been Selected….. from friend@localhost.net, and a variety of similar messages, of which my favorite offers the answer to all your questions. The internet has brought many things of value, but for most of us unsolicited commercial email, better known as spam, is not one of them.

There is a simple solution to this problem so simple that I am surprised nobody has yet implemented it. The solution is to put a price on your mailbox. Give your email program a list of the people you wish to receive mail from. Mail from anyone not on the list is returned, with a note explaining that you charge five cents to read mail from strangers� and the URL of the stamp machine. Five cents is a trivial cost to anyone with something to say that you are likely to want to read, but five cents times ten million recipients is quite a substantial cost to someone sending out bulk email on the chance that one recipient in ten thousand may respond.

The stamp machine is located on a web page. The stamps are digital cash. Pay ten dollars from your credit card and you get in exchange two hundred five cent stamps�each a morsel of encrypted information that you can transfer to someone else and that he, or someone he transfers it to, can eventually bring back to the stamp machine and turn back into cash.

A virtual stamp, unlike a real stamp, can be reused; it is paying not for the cost of transmitting my mail but for my time and trouble reading it, so the payment goes to me, not the post office. I can use it the next time I want to send a message to a stranger. If lots of strangers choose to send me messages, I can accumulate a surplus of stamps to be changed back into cash.

How much I charge is up to me. If I hate reading messages from strangers, I can make the price a dollar, or ten dollars, or a hundred dollars �and get very few of them. If I enjoy junk email, I can set a low price. Once such a system is established, the same people who presently create and rent out the mailing lists used to send spam will add another service�, a database keeping track of what each potential target charges to receive it.

Billy Beck declines the honor of enumeration.

Kennedyarchy, eh? You have like the sound of that. Swann is apparently doing a three part special on it, so you may want to check in with him from time to time.

Swann has clarified now that the war he favors is a Crime, which I can only take to mean it is Evil, a necessary and justifiable evil. Trouble is, the very idea of necessary of justifiable evil is incoherent. How can the necessary be evil? How can evil be justified?

I don’t happen to think the war on Iraq is necessary, but I am not here are arguing that it is unjustifiable. What I’m pointing out is that if this war is justifiable then it is just - not Evil, and not a Crime.

Swann says the choice of a lesser crime, a lesser evil, is justified because otherwise we risk losing the West in perpetuity. But there are always risks, and the risk of losing one’s own life is the risk of losing that life in perpetuity.

As I said before, I sometimes find Swann confusing. He thinks the war is a Crime, but he favors it. So when he calls my prescribed course of action criminal I suppose we can’t rule out the possibility that he considers it justifiable, and even desirable. After all, just because something is a Crime, just because it is Evil, doesn’t mean it isn’t necessary, justifiable, and desirable. According to Swann.

According to Swann, Crime can be justified. If that’s so, then to call something a Crime is not a moral objection because there are Crimes we ought to commit, and thus Swann has not raised any moral objections to what I’ve written.

That being the case, I’m not sure what it is I’m expected to respond to.

Some brief thoughts on GW2, thus far:

• The “war” is best conceived of as the greatest hostage rescue in world history, with the Iraqi people as the hostages and Saddam as the leader of the kidnapper gang holding them hostage.
• Thanks to the IRA, the British military is the best in the world at fighting urban terrorists such as the Saddam loyalists in Basra, who have been trying to suppress an anti-Saddam uprising.
• The best possible strategy for dealing with Baghdad would be a double encirclement, one ring around the Republican Guard positions 50 miles around the city, and another one between the Republican Guard and Baghdad itself, thus preventing the RG from resupplying from the city’s stockpiles and/or retreating into the city for urban warfare. Unfortunately, this inner ring will have to be achieved solely from the air, or via long-range artillery, which may be difficult. I don’t know whether it will be doable, we’ll have to wait and see.

Radley Balko argues persuasively for economic privacy in the realm of political expression…

We can argue about whether or not money is speech. But if you believe financially supporting a political candidate is a form of political expression, then it seems inconsistent to me to believe that that particular form of speech shouldn’t be permitted to be expressed anonymously.

…but the argument really needs to be taken much further. Why shouldn’t all finance be likewise recognized as private expression?

If government officials were as virtuous as whores they would never need to know the depth of your pockets.

Greg may wonder if I’ve forgotten him, but of course I have not. Greg Swann writes:

“If I swipe your purse, to forcibly recover it, you would have to force you way into my home and compel my person. Your purse is yours, and you have every right to recover it. But my house is not yours, nor is my body. The injuries you inflict upon things that are not your property are Crimes”

No sir, in such a case it is you who have willfully and wrongly interposed your self and your property between me and mine, and thus you are responsible for any inconvenience you suffer during the recovery of my property so long as I act in a measured and reasonable fashion. You cannot justifiably expect the recovery to cost you nothing, in fact it may be reasonable for me to impose some punitive damages to make such offenses manifestly unprofitable.

You will of course call this a crime, but I point out again that your position is in principle incompatible with your support of this war. I may consider war on the Iraqi regime justifiable in and of itself while recognizing that the means of mounting this war are unjust, but you cannot consider this war as anything but a great Crime and remain consistent with the principle you assert.

(Viva BECKSTRAVAGANZA! This article was originallly published 3/17/98)

I am struck by the image of a pair of F-15’s or F-16’s ($100M+)
being herded around by an AWACS operation ($XXXM+) on loan from
NORAD ($XXXM+) . . . and the picture of said high-performance
machines pulled up steep with full flaps, landing gear, and snow-shovels
sticking out in the wind, in a Dumbo attempt to hang in the air
next to a twin-prop Piper Comanche. Of course, one easy option
would be to simply blow the poor windmill bastard into the drink
with a single 20mm cannon shot . . . and I suspect they will get
around to that soon enough.

However, I am necessarily drawn into history, and the corollary
image of F-4 Phantoms and F-105 Thunderchiefs, designed for Cold
War tactical nuke ops and high-altitude bomber interception, thrown
against an ant-like string of coolies rolling bicycles down the
Ho Chi Minh Trail. The very idea of a handful of superbly designed
and expertly wrought high-tech systems trying to nose around in
the weeds to kill a guy with a bike is manifestly absurd. But
. . . that did not stop the "best and the brightest" from trying
it.

Of course, they had to cover themselves. In testimony before the
Senate, Daniel Ellsberg put his finger squarely on the blazing
irrationality of the command hierarchy which reinforced the notions
of the policy makers. He pointed out the species of "insanity"
cultured at the top of an information structure bred to produce
only those data which reinforce its own self-worth and which serve
to rationalize its own existence. The top of the pyramid heard
only what it wanted to hear, and it acted on what it heard. The
resulting positive-feedback loop never saw Tet ‘68 coming down
the Trail under the noses of the Thuds and Phantoms every night.
Instead, it reveled in "body counts" and the specious assertions
of politicians posing as combat commanders in- country.

Along the whole bloody saga, nobody of serious import ever questioned
the fundamental political and ethical premises of the adventure.
These premises were realized to be perfectly defective by kids
in the streets and Muhammad Ali, while the insanity at the top
brought us the madness of Nixon on his promise to "end the war".
Admissions of mortal error were left to the reflection of old
age, and McNamara’s Confession twenty-five years after the fact.
I suppose we might be charitably grateful to McNamara for whatever
degree of honesty that he was able to dredge up in posting that
particular moment of truth. It is, however, a puny contribution
not fit to wipe the dust off that black granite gash cut low in
the Mall at Washington D.C.

What new gash are they cutting today?

Clearly, America is becoming a nation of prisons, rung up with
the body counts of a new war. The news is full of every new Phu
Bai, Cu Chi, Hue, and Khe Sanh . . . posed up in front of the
TV cameras amid piles of white bags and bundled cash, analogs
to the body counts of old. Images of every new seizure and arrest
play to the lurid attention of news media in a concrete-bound
effort calculated to ignore the deeper political and ethical questions
which were, in fact, answered in the experience of Prohibition
and Repeal. In the very same way that the nationalist implications
of the Vietnam conflict were never addressed by the "best and
the brightest" (but only admitted later by McNamara), the ethical
premises of the War on the Twenty-First Amendment are completely
beyond the understanding of the modern MACV ("Military Assistance
Command - Vietnam") which conducts its "conflict" right here at
home. The former blindness committed 58,000 American souls to
death. The current ignorance does not labor against such grisly,
weekly carnage, for its victims languish in myriad corners of
darkness hidden from the popular understanding which gave rise
to such spectacles as maimed Veterans heaving their combat medals
at the feet of power.

Everyone understood that moment.

Today, very few understand, or even contemplate, the implications
of a person whose life has been destroyed by a mandatory sentence
for the "crime" of selling a bag of reefer to a friend. This is
because that person never appears as one whose pursuit of his
own values cannot be legislated against, without universal submission
of the very concept of values to the insanity at the top of the
command pyramid.

The American people have been sold on a new "domino theory". The
same military machine serves the theory now, at home. In the same
ways that escalation bred resistance in the Asian paddies, it
has brought us increased imports (cocaine & heroin), domestic
cultivation (marijuana), and domestic production (amphetamines
and hallucinogenics) here in America. The dynamic is different
(market response vs. political action), but the result is precisely
similar. So is the command reflex.

"What?…the flow of supplies down the Trail is increasing?

Well, we’ll simply bomb ‘em into the stone age."

"What?…the flow of drugs has not abated? Well, lets get

NORAD and JTF-Bravo into the game. That will show `em."

The very same insanity of "body count" rationalization serves
the purposes of command. The very same "strategic hamlet" approach
to "pacification" turns up in government housing projects and
neighborhoods throughout the land.

And, the very same cultured ignorance of the premises the "War"
will remain to, someday, publish its "In Retrospect - The Tragedy
and Lessons of [The Drug War]" under the pen of some new McNamara.

For now, however, scramble the F-16’s, and damn the consequences.

Radley Balko recommended Randy Barnett’s paper on constitutional legitimacy. Barnett rightly points out that discussions about the Constitution nearly always duck the issue of legitimacy.

The work is divided into three parts, in the first two parts Barnett satisfactorily demonstrates “(a) that consent to the sort of lawmaking process established by the Constitution is nonexistent and impossible and (b)the dispensation of benefits by lawmakers does not generate a duty to obey their commands in the absence of consent.” Most of Barnett’s points here were made by Spooner and few if any were unfamiliar to me, but I appreciated Barnett’s lucid presentation of the arguments.

In the third part of his work Barnett attempts to discover a moral foundation for constitutional legitimacy without consent, but he fails. Barnett argues for two types of morally legitimate regimes: “laws that are produced by unanimous consent regimes, and laws that are produced by regimes whose legitimacy rests solely on their procedural assurances that the rights of the nonconsenting persons on whom they are imposed have been protected.” But the former are not regimes or governments at all, they are indistinguishable from private businesses and associations. Spooner has already demonstrated that the latter are nothing but wind, because rights are an objective moral consequence of man’s nature, and:

“Lawmakers, as they call themselves, can add nothing to it, nor take anything from it. Therefore all their laws, as they call them, — that is, all the laws of their own making, — have no color of authority or obligation. It is a falsehood to call them laws; for there is nothing in them that either creates men’s duties or rights, or enlightens them as to their duties or rights. There is consequently nothing binding or obligatory about them. And nobody is bound to take the least notice of them, unless it be to trample them under foot, as usurpations. If they command men to do justice, they add nothing to men’s obligation to do it, or to any man’s right to enforce it. They are therefore mere idle wind, such as would be commands to consider the day as day, and the night as night. If they command or license any man to do injustice, they are criminal on their face. If they command any man to do anything which justice does not require him to do, they are simple, naked usurpations and tyrannies. If they forbid any man to do anything, which justice could permit him to do, they are criminal invasions of his natural and rightful liberty. In whatever light, therefore, they are viewed, they are utterly destitute of everything like authority or obligation. They are all necessarily either the impudent, fraudulent, and criminal usurpations of tyrants, robbers, and murderers, or the senseless work of ignorant or thoughtless men, who do not know, or certainly do not realize, what they are doing. “

Our moral obligations and rights are what they are as a consequence of our nature and no legislation can add anything to or subtract anything from those rights and obligations.

With regard to the U.S. Constitution Barnett concludes: “It is an open question whether the U.S. Constitution either as written or as actually applied is in fact legitimate.” Balko is not undecided on the first point, he asserts: “The U.S. Constitution as written certainly meets those criteria”

I cannot fathom how any reasonable person can think the legitimacy of the Constitution as applied can be an open question if Barnett’s standard is to be applied. Clearly the laws existing under the Constitution as applied do not assure that individual rights are not violated, since individual rights are routinely violated by laws which in practice are confirmed as constitutional.

The question of whether the Constitution is legitimate as written isn’t really open either. The Constitution grants the power of taxation to the government, but taxation can’t occur without the violation of rights for reasons that Barnett has already demonstrated.

And if the Constitution as written were congruent with individual rights it would be of no moral consequence. As Spooner demonstrated, it could not modify men’s rights or moral obligations in any way.

Bob Murphy writes:

Finally, my dad pointed out that Saddam Hussein was a bad guy. He told me that he had heard (and perhaps seen footage; I don�t remember) that after taking power, Saddam had presided over an assembly of the Iraqi government. Apparently, Saddam had simply pointed out certain individuals in the crowd, and his men proceeded to take these men outside and kill them.

What is ironic about this argument for the present invasion is that Saddam�s alleged behavior concerning other Iraqi officials is the exact way Bush is behaving with regard to Iraqi officials. Saddam had leaders in the Iraqi government killed to further his political aims, just like George W. Bush is having leaders in the Iraqi government killed to further his political aims.

Yeah, they both kill Iraqi officials; does that make the actions morally equivalent?

Murphy’s idiosyncratic pacifism has always been riddled with contradictions. He admits there are situations where he would choose to employ violence. He’ll go out of his way to intentionally free-ride on the violence production of police as a strategy to avoid violence himself. Gandhi wouldn’t even recognize this pacifism.

I tried to explain to Bob once that it makes good sense to work to limit the violence in one’s life but that the pursuit of non-violence to the exclusion of all other values is self destructive.

By the way, does anyone know where that footage can be found on the web? I’ve seen it on the History Channel and elsewhere.

Currently on the main page of LewRockwell.com:

Comrade Frum Orders a Purge Among those refusing to go: Justin Raimondo, Thomas Fleming, Karen DeCoster, Peter Brimelow, Christopher Manion, Gene Callahan, Myles Kantor, and Lew Rockwell.

Purge?

Frum urged conservatives to turn their backs on paleos. How is this any different from Raimondo urging paleos to turn their backs on conservatives less than a year ago? I don’t recall LRC calling that a purge.

They’re refusing to go? Out of the conservative ranks? If Raimondo was ever in he walked out. Callahan isn’t a conservative. De Coster isn’t a conservative. Does Rockwell want to be a conservative? Few of his writers do.

Some purge. Yawn.