The Effects of War on Liberty

by Anthony Gregory over at LewRockwell.com

Controversy on war and foreign policy still persists within some libertarian circles. The apparent difficulty seems to come with the assumption that the proper antiwar libertarian position is just too easy, just too simple – there has to be more to it than this. This assumption is implicit in such arguments for intervention as the ones seen in Randy Barnett’s widely criticized Wall Street Journal article from July.

Libertarians are accustomed, when arguing against domestic policies, to point to the practical as well as the moral issues involved. While many libertarians see themselves as primarily "consequentialist," on the one hand, or "moralist," on the other hand, all libertarians enjoy the benefit of a political philosophy with very strong arguments both practical and ethical. It is a beauty not just of libertarianism, but of human nature and the world around us, that what is moral is so very often what works. If slavery were actually economically efficient for society as a whole – which it isn’t – it would make for a sadder world and a harder time for libertarians. If property rights were efficient but ran counter to any consistently applicable ethical theory, it would also pose problems.

It is a wonder, then, that many who favor liberty, spontaneous order, voluntary human action, free trade and markets, and as little government as humanly and practically possible, do not see the full force of both the ethical and practical arguments against an interventionist foreign policy. In war, many friends of liberty have been tempted into siding with big government, with central planning, and with collectivist, rather than individualist, ethics. This exception to libertarian theory and ethics in the realm of foreign policy is a peculiar blind spot, and one that unfortunately has serious and negative implications for our work for liberty, since the warfare state has most likely been the biggest, most dangerous, most expansive and most disastrous government enterprise in modern American history.

Libertarian Ethics, War and Foreign Policy

Libertarians believe that individuals have a right to live their lives according to their own free will, so long as they do not initiate force on other individuals with the same right. From this moral first principle flows our entire social and legal theory – property rights; the right to self-defense; opposition to the modern leviathan state; and respect for civil liberties, due process and other checks on expansive government. Self-ownership and free self-determination form the ethical buttress of our case for free markets, free trade and personal liberty.

Because of our stern support for private property, libertarians view expropriation and trespass to be violations of human rights. Most people accept the basic premise that you should not steal from or trespass against your neighbor, but libertarians apply this ethic to the state. Taxation, being a coerced extraction of wealth, ultimately at the point of a gun, is a form of theft, and thus morally wrong from a libertarian standpoint.

Many government programs do not violate liberty in themselves – few people are forced, for example, to go to a public library or a government-funded university. However, even such relatively peaceful programs are funded coercively, through tax dollars. Libertarians oppose government spending on social programs, by virtue that it is government theft from individuals. We might even favor what a social program is attempting to achieve – a library is hardly objectionable to most people, in itself – but we must oppose the power of the state to forcibly seize the rightful property of some and give it to others. Even those of us who believe in a minimal government believe its taxing power should be shrunk as much as possible, with the ultimate ideal of eliminating it and replacing all taxation with voluntary financing.

War is typically an expensive government program. Estimates for how much the Iraq war alone will come to cost the American people range from about $400 billion to a trillion or more. According to economist Robert Higgs, the defense budget is even far larger than we might think, since so much of the warfare state’s costs are hidden as expenditures in other department budgets or "off-budget" items. Furthermore, Americans are still paying the debt for past warfare state spending. We are looking at more than a trillion dollars a year spent on the warfare state – almost 10% of the economy’s yearly output. At other times, the warfare state has cost much, much more as a percentage of the economy. During World War II, it was at about 40%.

By what moral principle can libertarians defend these enormous tax expenditures? More than $3,000 per American per year is being taken by force for the warfare state, no less than if that money were spent on libraries, food stamps or other public projects libertarians oppose. Every American taxpayer who opposes the war, for moral, religious, practical or whatever reasons, is being compelled to fund something against his conscience and judgment. This alone – the taxing side of the warfare state – presents huge problems for any libertarian who continues to attempt to reconcile his libertarian ethics and support for a large military establishment.

But when it comes to foreign policy, the moral issues go far, far beyond those of tax dollars. People – many innocents included – are killed in war. The government bombs neighborhoods knowing that it will kill hundreds or thousands of innocents. Infrastructure, private and public but in no case owned by the attacking government, is destroyed. Homes are invaded and blown to bits. Children are slaughtered. This isn’t all just what happens when particularly criminal soldiers commit atrocious individual crimes of rape, violence and torture – which also predictably happens to a grotesque degree during war. Most of the killing is just part of the policy. Bombing Baghdad or Belgrade has what legal theorists might call a "substantial certainty" of killing innocent people. Modern war is in fact in practically every case an example of mass murder. It must be opposed by the libertarian first and foremost for this reason. For not just Americans have individual rights to life, liberty and property; so too do all foreign non-aggressors, and so killing them, which is a predictable outcome of today’s typical military tactics, is gravely immoral according to libertarian ethics.

Some argue that when the fight is against a truly ghastly foreign regime, any innocents killed by the supposedly "good" government of the U.S. are "collateral damage." The true aggressor, according to this argument, is the enemy regime, not the U.S. government, which is acting in supposed defense of Americans.

One response is that historically, in most of its wars, the U.S. government has invaded or attacked a country that never attacked or credibly threatened to attack Americans on U.S. soil. Even by a collectivist analysis, whereby we look at nations, rather than individuals, when assigning guilt, the U.S. has more often than not been an aggressor.

However, to the libertarian, this is all of secondary importance. Libertarianism concerns individual rights and individual actions. States, nations, communities and so forth are abstractions and social constructs which do not act independently of the individuals they comprise. Only individuals act and only individuals have ethics or rights, and so it is a violation of an innocent person’s rights to bomb him, even if the government he lives under is aggressive and tyrannical. Certainly, the U.S. government was itself quite aggressive in the Middle East before 9/11, yet that in no way legitimized the 9/11 terrorist attacks, which killed innocent Americans for the crimes of their government. So, too, is it immoral to bomb a country with the substantial certainty that it will kill innocent foreigners, even if their government is aggressive.

Central Planning and War

Many will argue that these high moral principles are just impractical to the question of war, and that, furthermore, the U.S. government’s wars in particular have on balance protected more than violated the lives and liberty of a greater number of individuals, including foreigners "liberated" by U.S. wars. This is a collectivist ethical calculus and incompatible with libertarian ethics, but it also neglects the powerful practical libertarian arguments against government intervention and central planning. In fact, as experience and economic theory both show, the government is no more competent at centrally planning the protection of freedom and peace worldwide than it is at producing effective solutions to social problems in the domestic sphere.

Socialism fundamentally doesn’t work, as Ludwig von Mises revealed, because the state, as owner of the means of production, cannot make rational economic calculations. Without private ownership and exchange, there are no prices, and without prices there is no effective means to determine how and where to divert resources to their most urgent use. Mises also pointed out that one intervention in the economy often causes distortions that are later addressed by further interventions, causing yet more problems, and so forth.

The U.S. government’s attempts at collective security on the grand scale seen throughout the last century have amounted to a gigantic socialist experiment, and have revealed in foreign policy the failings of central planning that Mises identified as endemic in domestic intervention. The United States entered World War I and tilted the war toward the allies with great force, encouraging the harsh treatment of Germany after the war, leading to the backlash in Hitler’s rise to power and indeed the rise of fascism and communism – rather than a world safe for democracy – for the next decade. In World War II, the U.S. gave enormous support to its ally, the totalitarian Soviet Union, which ended up expanding and supposedly justifying the U.S. government’s horrifying actions in the Cold War. During the Cold War, the U.S. government supported anti-Communist strongmen regimes throughout the world, including dictators and future U.S. enemies, such as Saddam Hussein’s secular dictatorship, which became an enemy after the Cold War, and the Muhajadeen fighters in Afghanistan who became enemies after 9/11. The U.S. has found itself supporting Saddam against the Iranian theocrats, only later to oust Saddam to the benefit of the very same Iranian extremists. Now the U.S. is contemplating supporting Sunni thugs, once again, to counterbalance the Shiite threat. The madness goes on and on.

To believe that the U.S. government can bring about liberty and peace worldwide is to have a faith in government planning – in socialism – more impenetrable to individualist reasoning and historical experience than we can find even at the most leftwing college campuses in America. It is fitting, then, if still ironic, that conservatives and even some self-identified libertarians have defended the Iraq war on the basis of how many schools, hospitals and other civil infrastructure the U.S. government has helped construct in Iraq – after it destroyed what was there before, of course. People who oppose government intervention in the U.S. economy somehow believe in government intervention in the Iraqi economy, trusting that what the Iraqis need is more U.S. socialism. This adds up, insofar as buying into the warfare state leads one to inevitably have more faith in government planning per se.

Which raises another point. The advent of the warfare state means a reduction of economic liberty, an attack on free markets and a general move toward state power and away from freedom. With war come crushing taxes, business regulations, trade restrictions, new bureaucracies, myriad erosions of fundamental civil liberties, and even, at times, a nationalized, enslaved labor market in the form of the military draft.

The Effects of War on Liberty

The largest and most troubling expansions of government in America were mostly not the result of social programs. The Progressive Era and even the New Deal did not do as much as war to move America away from its relatively libertarian heritage of limited, checked and balanced government, free markets and individual liberty. The Civil War brought with it draconian censorship, a draft, inflation, the suspension of habeas corpus and a consolidated national government that signaled the end of true federalism. World War I introduced even wider censorship, conscription, deportations and spying. World War II gave us food rationing, conscription, citizen surveillance, censorship, and Japanese Internment. With the War on Terror, we have practically lost the Fourth Amendment and seen habeas corpus once again suspended. These are no light matters. The end of habeas corpus is itself a repudiation of a nearly millennium-long tradition in the Common Law. It was not terrorists who set the clock back to pre-Enlightenment times for American liberty – it was the warfare state.

In the economic world alone, war has been a terrible disaster for American liberty. The so-called "American System" of corporate subsidies and economic nationalism, championed by Hamiltonians in the early years of the republic, finally became implemented during the Civil War. World War I saw the advent of thousands of new federal bureaus and regulatory agencies, some important ones of which were resurrected for the domestic New Deal. The national public university system is largely an outgrowth of the post–World War II military industrial complex. Price controls, medical socialism, income tax, central banking and so many other economic evils made their debut during, or came around to stay largely due to war.

Aside from the violations of civil and economic liberties, war also brings about a moral debasement of the warring culture, which in turn weakens the people’s resistance to more government and more general incivility. As the moral standards become lowered as they usually do with war, utilitarianism takes hold and nearly anything is considered permissible so long as it is not as evil as the enemy, whose wickedness, for that matter, is often exaggerated.

Imperialism and war have done more than anything to propel the collectivist ideologies characteristic of the 20th century. Once a people come to tolerate torture and chemical warfare against a country that has never even attacked them, they will generally be less vigilant when it comes to other government and private evils.

In practice, U.S. war has been a plague on the lives, liberty and property of millions upon millions of Americans and foreigners. The inability of the state to centrally manage human affairs is no less prevalent in global crusades against evil or humanitarian nation-building adventures than it is in run-of-the-mill domestic matters. The failure of the Iraq war is not a consequence of bad management or unique incompetence in the Bush administration; it is representative of the expected failings of military socialism.

This all should make sense to the libertarian. The moral principles of individual liberty that are so obviously compromised by the vociferous taxing, regulating and mass killing of the warfare state are complemented by libertarian economic and practical arguments against war. Not only is war a violation of the rights of the individual – which we must always oppose on moral grounds – but on balance, it has failed to produce security, much less peace and liberty, for most people it has touched.

The libertarian bias, therefore, should always be against the next government war. History reveals a pattern of lies, deceit, abuse and tyranny surrounding virtually every U.S. war, yet many friends of liberty, who generally don’t trust politicians’ words or their power to do good in domestic affairs, for some reason trust them when it comes to war, the biggest and most corrupting of all government programs. Free-market theory explains why government projects usually fail to achieve their advertised goals, even when undertaken with good intentions. Libertarian morality tells us it is wrong to aggress against individuals, to trespass against their property rights or do them bodily harm if those individuals are not attacking us. The libertarian case against foreign intervention, the warfare state, and global governmental crusades for democracy or against evil is not, as some would have it, weaker than the libertarian argument against drug laws, the minimum wage or Social Security. Indeed, the libertarian case against war is clear, multifaceted and harmonious, internally consistent and reinforced by history. It is also the best case against war there is, which is why we must keep making it, in the name of peace and liberty.

Ron Paul and Immigration

It's time for a little honesty about Ron Paul, particularly his position on immigration. While Ron Paul is all the rage in libertarian circles right now (for some very good reasons), on certain issues he is more of a right-wing populist or paleo-conservative. Whenever he "deviates" it's in the socially conservative direction, on issues such as immigration. He certainly is the most libertarian person to be in congress for a long time, but one should also be aware that he has affinity with the Christian right and other such groups.

Immigration restrictionist policies (immigration quotas, illegalizing immigrant jobs, publicly-funded walls, federal control of state's borders, etc.) are government interventions, economically and otherwise, and therefore are outside of the realm of libertarianism. Interventionism X (welfare) does not justify intervention Y (police statism and protectionism). Ron Paul is appealing to the sentiment of right-wing populists like Pat Buchannan on this issue. Aside from those who follow Hans Herman Hoppe's immigration position, and many Ron Paulians, no libertarian in their right mind supports immigration restrictionism.

Like all anti-immigrationists, Ron Paul uses the welfare state (the real problem) as an excuse to persue other government interventions such as publicly funded walls and mass-deportation. His vote for things such as publicly funded walls should be pointed out as unlibertarian by any libertarian with two cents. The fact that people suck off the welfare state is not an excuse to forcibly remove them from their own property or illegalize their jobs. Domestic citezens are "guilty" of just the same, on a much larger scale than immigrants ever will be.

Furthermore, the arguement is nonsensical in that for the most part illegal immigrants do not qualify for those government services; it is the legal citezens who do, and it is the legal citezens who are at least partially responsible for supporting it. There is no moral difference between a legal citezen and an "illegal" sucking off of the welfare state. All of the welfare-related complaints about illegal immigrants apply equally to domestic citezens. Under this logic, therefore, domestic citezens should be deported and have their jobs illegalized as well.

Ron has fallen into the trap of interventionism on this issue. Mises's critique of interventionism applies here. That is, interventions are proposed as a solution to past interventions, rather than a repeal of the previous intervention. The initial intervention is the welfare state. But, while he has tried his best to oppose the welfare state, Ron Paul falls back on supporting new interventions as a "solution": government-funded walls, immigration quotas and deportation. If one seriously thinks that this is going to solve "the problem", then one is fooling oneself. In practise, this will result in a further march towards a police state, more growth in federal funding, and meanwhile immigrants will still get through "illegally", just like before.

That is only on the consequentialist side of the arguement. The other side of the arguement, and the more important one, is that it's a violation of property rights to (1) force someone off of their voluntarily aquired property or force a landlord to evict a tenant (2) to illegalize someone's voluntary employment agreement; this too violates the property rights of both the immigrant and the citezen associating with them (3) to siphon funds from the tax-payer to build walls (4) to initiate force on someone for crossing unowned land and (5) in general, to force people to dissassociate with eachother on their own property. What do all of these things have in common? They are inherent in anti-immigration policies.

Ron Paul's position on immigration is better then Pat Buchannan's, but it is not too far off from it. While he does not openly champion protectionism, he still supports the police enforcement side of the equation in the name of "constitutionalism", and makes a somewhat Buchannite arguement with respect to how the welfare state relates to immigration.

Save the Planet!

America: Free Market or Right-wing Socialism?

It is generally assumed without proof that the status quo, the current economic system in America, is capitalism. In the current political climate, the political left accepts this assumption and concludes that capitalism is bad because they see some negative things going on in the current system, some real and some entirely imagined. The political right accepts this assumption and concludes that the current system is good, that it is a free market economy, and they tend to have high confidence in the state of the economy because they see some good things going on in the current system, some real and some entirely imagined.

The trouble is, both of them are wrong. The left is under the illusion that the system they're attacking is capitalism. The right is under the illusion that the system they're supporting is capitalism. But the economic system of America is not free market capitalism, and argueably never was. If capitalism could be said to have ever existed as a system in America, it was roughly between 1750 and 1850, and it was never fully implemented, so we couldn't even say that the free market has ever really been implemented in full. That's because in order to get to the point of a pure free market, the state cannot exist.

This is important to point out. To the extent that there is a state, to the extent that there it has power over the individual, is the extent that the market is not free. To the extent that the government taxes, borrows, inflates, spends, legislates, subsidizes, prohibits, colludes, etc., is the extent to which the market is not free. To the extent that the government confiscates, claims ownership of or regulates property is the extent to which the market is not free. Every service that the government tries to provide, and monopolistically so, is a disruption of the voluntary economy. The enterprise of law and arbitration itself is a scarce resource like all others, and the existance of a government represents a disruption of a free market in this area.

So how can economic and governmental systems be evaluated? Boiling everything down to capitalism vs. communism is a bit oversimplistic. There certainly are systems that are somewhere in between the two. And it's not wise to red-bait people who are not necessarily red. However, it also must be emphasized that there is no such thing as a static equilibrium. Because no system is completely static, it is impossible to genuinely be "perfectly in the middle" of a political or economic spectrum. The advocation of such a position is contradictary and most certainly disingenuous.

One way to classify systems of economic organization would be to use a general spectrum of more vs. less economic control. A sensible interpretation may look as follows, in the order of the least economic control to the most:

The Free Market - No Economic Control. The free market is a system in which there is no government control of the economy. It is an economy based entirely on the voluntary decisions of those taking part in it. The free market is based primarily on private ownership of property, obtained through homesteading and voluntary exchange between property titles. To be carried out in practise, there can be no government in the commonly understood sense of the word.

Laizzes-Faire - Very Little Economic Control. Laizzes-faire is a system in which the government has strictly limited control over the economy. In it's most pure form, the only government services allowed is police, courts and defense. A laizzes-faire system largely has private ownership of the means of production and minimal if not negligable regulation.

Interventionism - Moderate Economic Control. Interventionism is essentially the process that leads towards socialism. It is not a permanent, static system perfectly in the middle, but rather a transatory system.

Socialism - Heavy Economic Control. Socialism is a system in which the government has considerable control over the economy. The government may own a significant portion of the means of production and it tries to centrally plan the economy.

Totalitarianism - Total Economic Control. There is no economic freedom in totalitarianism. The entire "economy" is completely determined, owned and regulated by the government. The state, in essence, replaces the economy entirely. There can be no "economy", in the commonly understood sense, to speak of.

But there are also various types of economic control. Economic control can be split up into government ownership and government regulation. Communism specifically involves government ownership, while Fascism specifically is based more on government regulation and collusion between private interests and the government. There are also various types of economic organization that are more specific than socialism or interventionism, which are forms of socialism or interventionism, or alternate forms of economic organization for stateless societies.

Syndicalism, for example, is a system based heavily or entirely on unions and worker-directed communes. Some anarchists believe that they can set up syndicalist and communist economic systems without a state. Pure free marketers tend to disagree, pointing out that both systems require force and confiscation, wether through a state or not, in order to be brought about. On the other hand, communist or socialist anarchists tend to make the claim that the free market is inherently coercive, and will lead to dictatorship. But in reality the free market is simply whatever the outcome is of people's voluntary labor and exchanges.

It should be clear that, no matter how totalitarian the government is, some degree of voluntary economic activity is going to take place, even if it is illegal. This is particularly obvious when we look at the case of prohibitions. It is illegal to voluntarily buy or sell certain drugs, but people find ways to do it anyways. It is impossible to completely stamp out free economic activity. On the other hand, illegal economic activity cannot be considered a true free market, because it is the consequence of government intervening to prohibit and/or limit the supply of a good or service. It becomes a free market as soon as the government ends the prohibition, and abstains for regulating it or claiming ownership over it.

There are many ways in which a government can erode the free market. To begin with, it's very existance disrupts it, because it's very existance and the continuation of that existance is dependant first and foremost on taxation, which siphons money away from the private sector, away from the original owner of the property. There are all sorts of different taxes. There are income taxes, property taxes, sales taxes, land-value taxes, inheritance taxes, capital gains taxes, and so on. There are also alternative ways for the government to accrue revenue, all of which disrupt the free market. It can borrow credit from foreign governments or banks, which also siphons money away from its private use. It can monopolize banking and print new money. It can also impose tariffs, which are essentially a tax on imports.

How the government spends this money disrupts the free economy, as it determines how the money will be redistributed away from its original owner and use towards new owners and uses. In short, government's revenue devices and it's spending of that revenue inherently creates a network of redistribution of resources. Government spending represents a reallocation of labor and goods and services other than would have voluntarily been chosen. First and foremost, this money goes to the primary functions of government such as police, courts and the military. Beyond this, it also goes to a whole host of other services such as public education, healthcare and roads. As the power of a government increases, it starts taking control of things that blatantly aren't really "necessities", such as space exploration and the arts.

Government services tends to be monopolized over time. The most obviously monopolized of these services would be the police. The government outlaws the private competition to the services that it provides. Furthermore, even if a degree of competition to a particular service is allowed, it is eroded by the spending of tax money on the public sector, which inherently erodes the capital of the private competition and warps the incentive structure. People often try to justify public services with the claim that there is no profitability in it, but they have it backwards. It is the public services that erode the profitability of the competition. If the public services were privatized, they would quickly become vastly more profitable, as well as vastly cheaper and more available to the masses.

Government spending for goods and services comes in all types. There is foreign aid, which transfers money and weapons from government to government. There is personal welfare, which gaurantees a direct redistribution of wealth between citezens. Modern warfare, of course, requires a whole lot of spending that goes to machinery, and to pay those in the army. It comes in the form of subsidies to agriculture, energy and various industries. It comes in the form of government contracts and bail-outs that go to buisinesses. As a piece of the pie, the money for all of this shows up in the paychecks of government bereaucrats. All of this involves a massive redistribution of resources, contrary how they would have been otherwise used and away from original ownership.

There seems to be no area that the government doesn't want to spend some money on, no matter how frivolous the cause in question is and regaurdless of wether or not it is necessary. It funds science, it funds the arts, it funds broadcasting, it funds sporting events. There is almost no special interest that the government does not collude with and redistribute resources to. Internally, the government expands the amount of people working for it, to run all of the departments and agencies, and mega-becreaucracies such as the department of homeland security. It all adds up.

There are many ways in which the government controls the economy without spending money. It can prohibit goods and services outright, or set a limit on their supply. It can impose wage and price controls. It can set minimum and maximim prices and wages. It can set quotas on imports and exports. It can use licensing to bestow the privilege of being allowed to legally work in certain fields. It can set up all sorts of regulations and requirements for goods and services. It can deliberately organize cartels. It can trust-bust buisinesses for having "predatory pricing", which can be defined subjectively however one desires, wether it's super lower prices or high ones. It can impose penalties and give out special rewards. It can control the rate of interest. It can force employers to hire certain people.

Governments can use conscription to either force people to work for it directly or for some other, private group. They can institutionalize and legalize involuntary servitude. They can control the hours of the workday. They can make union membership compulsory. They can impose compulsory consumption. They can restrict immigration, I.E. the amount of people and willing labor coming into and out of the territory. They can monopolize technology and intellectual property through the selective and privileged use of patent laws. They can use eminent domain on one's land and home property to either transfer ownership to the state or to some private lobbying interest and/or buisiness. They can put up barriers to unused resources and claim ownership of unused land. They can try to direct private investment.

America? A laizzes-faire haven? Give me a break. The American state, to varying degrees, engages in all of the kinds of intervention that's been mentioned. At best, it's an interventionist system quickly headed towards right-wing socialism. Perhaps a more sober examination reveals it already to be a right-wing socialist, fascist type of system. While the government in America does not own the means of production to the extent that a communist country would, it heavily redistributes, regulates and controls the economy in all kinds of ways. It has a long history of government-buisiness collusion and protectionism.

It's as if the left doesn't like right-wing socialism, but they think that right-wing socialism is the free market, so they want left-wing socialism or communism. And it's as if the right doesn't like left-wing socialism and communism, but they think that right-wing socialism is the free market, so they want right-wing socialism or fascism. The cliche idea that Republicans are die-hard free marketers hasn't had any truth to it for decades, since the 1950's at least, and even when the cliche had some truth to it, those weren't really the people who were running the party and in the mainstream of it. And the cliche idea that the Democrats are a bunch of commies doesn't necessarily hold up either, as they've historically been quite sympathetic to fascism and conservative brands of socialism.

It's time for people to understand what a free market actually is, in comparison to the current system, and that the current system is far from it.

A Debate on "The West" vs. "Islam" and War

This is exerpted from a debate on a message board, in which the person being debated with is trying to justify the following premises (1) that all Muslims inherently present a threat to "the west", and this alleged threat on "the west" is meant to mean a threat on me as an individual and (2) that not only are "the west's" current wars in the middle east justified, but war against the entire Muslim world is justified. Their statements will be in quotes and italics, mine will be without quotes.

It is amazing that people who are supposed to be the greatest enemies of collectivism buy into forms of hobbesian collectivism by putting forth a conflict model of society ("the west", whatever that's supposed to mean, vs. the muslim heathen). This is all about breeding social conflict where it didn't exist before or need not exist. I'm interested in avoiding social conflict, not increasing it.

"You have hit on a fascinating subject when you said “the west” and expressed doubt as to whether such a thing really exists."

The point is that the invocation of "the west" is an obfuscation. Taking the word to describe a geographical territory, I am part of "the west" in that I am within that territory. I am not directly or overtly effected by Muslim people thousands of miles away, and I never will be. To say that there is a "war against the west" is to imply that there is a war against me; it implies uniformity.

But I walk around all day without any Muslim attacking me; indeed, without coming into contact with any at all. To imply that "the west" and me are the same thing is to engage in collective obfuscation. I am an individual. I am not "the west". And if I am considered to be a component part of "the west" this does not mean that an attack on another component part is an attack on me; as an individual I am still independant from those other component parts.

"The conflict does exist whether you choose to acknowledge it, or avoid it."

What conflict? An inherent conflict between "the west" and the "middle east"? That's just collectivist nonsense, because again it presumes uniformity on the part of both sides, which is not the case. Everyone who is a Muslim or everyone who is in the middle east is not waging war against everyone who is not a Muslim or everyone who is not in the middle east. If you take a look at objective reality, it would become obvious that it is particular "western" governments that have engaged in war against particular middle eastern territories by invading, occupying and bombing them.

On the other hand, empirical reality tells me that the chances of me being a victim of muslim terrorism are less than my chance of winning the lottery or spontaneously combusting; and the chances of "America" being taken over by middle easterners and transformed into a muslim theocracy is zero. The chances for a Muslim in the middle east to be "collateral damage" in "western" occupations and internal strife is much much higher than the chances for me to ever have to worry about anything close to what they deal with on a daily basis.

"As I have already stated before, there are people who mean us ill."

Intent in itself is not a crime. To enact an aggression against someone simply because you think that they might aggress against you in the future makes you the aggressor. It is not legitimate to enact force on people simply because they have ill desires towards others. You can only enact force in defense once they have actually overtly presented the threat. If I punch you in the nose because you, while on your own property to boot, insulted my character verbally or advocated verbally that the institutions I personally like should be done away with, then I am guilty of assault. Justifying initations of aggression by alluding to intent or "psychic damage" is the oldest trick in the book.

"There is a war."

Indeed, there is. It is was initiated by the U.S. government against multiple countries that did not attack "us".

"It was declared by them against us."

I'm sorry, but this is pure horsedung. No Muslims have literally militarily invaded any "western" territory. Many "western" governments, on the other hand, have been occupying their territory for decades on end. In either case, "Us vs. Them" is a collectivist obfuscation that assumes uniformity on the part of both sides, which simply is not the case, and creates what I refered to as a conflict model above. There is no "us"; we do not all agree. There is no "them"; neither are they uniform. The conflict model pits groups against eachother, as if there is inherent conflict between them that is impossible to resolve without warfare.

I object, because I myself as an individual am variant with the other members of the group that I'm allegedly part of, and I see the capacity in man to "live and let live" with people of different asthetic preferances. Man contains the capacity for cooperation despite inequality and disagreement. Conflict models are hobbesian and obfuscate the individual and variance. They invent social conflict where they need not exist or did not previously exist.

"We are not bad people for defending ourselves."

Once again, who is "we" to begin with? "We" presumues a uniformity that does not exist; I have not been aggressed against by any Muslim, therefore I have no legitimate defense claim. It would not be legitimate for me to go shoot some Muslim fellow; that would be murder. Furthermore, if "we" means the people of the united states, or any western "nation", you are simply making a false defense claim. There has been no offense to defend yourself against. What you are doing is engaing in the classic tactic of trying to justify iniations of aggression with false (and collective) defense claims.

Muslims can shout "down with the west! down with the west!" all they like. That would not present anyone with a justification for enacting aggression on them simply because they insulted your character. Furthermore, if we would stop identifying with collectives (such as "the west"), we would understand that we are decieving ourselves to interpret insults of "the west" as an insult of our personal characters as individuals. "The west" is just a concept to describe a territory. No particulular individual and their character can be described with the phrase. Otherwise, one is engaging in an absurd kind of anthropromorphicism.

This "us" and "the west" stuff is simply the old trick of getting people to identify with the state, which leads to the idea that the state is defending "us" in engaging in offensive warfare. I refuse to identify with something that I am not part of myself, and I further refuse to act as if any group I may be part of requires uniformity (I.E. absolute conformity to the other component parts) on my part. I refuse to be insulted personally by attacks on an abstract concept that does not actually describe me as an individual. And I refuse to allow the illusion of national territorialism to force me sacrifice myself to such an abstraction. I will only sacrifice myself for what I value as an individual (I.E. self-interest), not to collectives.

"There are dangers to you posed by Islam in the form of an establishment of a muslim theocracy."

In America? Absolute lunacy. There is virtually zero chance of me being subject to Muslim theocracy as imposed externally. On the other hand, there is indeed a huge chance of me being subject to totalitarianism as imposed internally. Furthermore the logical result of the aggressive state warfare that you suggest would lead to increases in government power at home, and that in itself is what constitutes the true, direct threat to me right in my backyard.

"Intent IS the crime!"

Intent in itself can be nothing more than a thought. Intent is not a crime. Intent in itself does not effect me as an individual. A criminal is a criminal because they act out their ugly intentions. On the other hand, someone who simply has ugly intentions, but lacks the courage or willpower to actually carry them out in physical action against others, does not constitute a criminal. A low-life perhaps, but not an aggressor.

"Intent is at the center of what it means to commit a crime."

Not quite. I can simply wish death upon you, and not act this out. Intent does not necessarily lead to physical action. I can intend things all day and not actually do anything about them. Most muslims, and religionists in general, I think can be viewed this way. They are cowardly in this sense. Sure, they may shout incoherancies and advocate ugly things against "the west", but the bulk of them do not carry it out in action against those whom they preach hate against (out of cowardice, at best they can externalize the costs onto others to act it out for them, through the mechanism of an institution such as a government). Are you seriously trying to get me to believe that an entire collective deserves aggression to be enacted on them because of either (1) their hateful opinions in themselves or (2) the aggressive actions of a small group of people within their ranks? This cultural collectivism of yours has to be addressed. It is illogical.

"Someone who advocates killing you because you are a kafur invites a just retaliation as long as you confine your killing to just him."

Really now? So if someone simply makes the statement that "all Americans should die", I am justified in aggressing against that person merely because of their verbal advocation that I should be dead (which, again, hinges on me identifying with the nation and state, which I regaurd as a pile of collectivist bulldung)? Verbal advocation is not a crime. You can write all the pamphlets and advocate stuff verbally all you like. It becomes a crime when you start to act on it. Most people do not act on their verbal advocations. Now, if the person makes the verbal advocation on my property, then we can start to have a legitimate defense claim of some sort, insofar as I can have that person leave my property if I desire, forcably if necessary.

"As I will show, we did not start this war."

As can be seen from objective reality, the united states government invaded a territory, which contains some people who never did anything to any American (actually practically none of them have; zilch, zero). That is an initation of aggression. To argue otherwise is to make a grand obfuscation of what an initation of aggression is. The country that actually militarily invades another territory is the starter of a war, the initator of the war.

This should be quite obvious. A war is started by the initial act of invasion. No Iraqi (or Iranian) has invaded America, there has been no military invasion of America, and nor would it be legitimate to enact aggression against an entire group because of what one person in that group did (that would constitute an initiation of aggression against innocent bystanders). You go after the actual individual aggressors, not entire "nations", not everyone within an entire territory irrespective of their own responsibility as individuals.

"I will leave it at that and continue assembling my sources and references so that you can read and judge for yourself whether there is a threat, who constitutes that threat, if we may consider all of Islam as a rotten egg as regards their intentions towards us etc etc."

Here's a clue: it's the governments that set up the initial crises. All of them to one degree or another. On the other hand, governments are to be distinguished from "society" or "the people". Governments are a particular small band of individuals who control a monopoly over a given territory. The "society" that they rule over is constituted by a separate group; those who are subjects to the given territorial monopolist (I.E. state). None of the people in that group have aggressed against me, and therefore as an individual I cannot have a defense claim against that which has not actually aggressed against me. I am not justified in aggressing against people who never aggressed against me. It's that simple. It's really that simple.

I think your position hinges on collective territorialism and group-identity-think. What you are asking me to do, in essence, is sacrifice myself to a collective ("the west") in the name of fighting a collective ("the muslims") that has done nothing to me as an individual. When I think about it, the demand you're making of people is incredibly altruistic. To spell things out even more clearly: what you are advocating is genocide in the name of "preserving the west".

Trendy, Modern, Emergent Evangelicals Want To Bomb Darfur

by Bill Barnwell

Count me as a loud dissenter to one of the latest trendy causes of many younger Evangelicals: Darfur. I have no desire to push our already overstretched military to intervene and bomb foreign warring factions into peace, love, and happiness. Interesting how many of the same people who complain about our continued military presence in Iraq (and I join in their criticisms) want the UN or the US to start dropping bombs in Darfur to kill even more people in the name of humanitarianism.

Darfur is certainly a troubled region. You can read about this very unstable area of Sudan and its long and complicated background here. However, according to some younger "emergent church"-type Evangelicals and a coalition of other voices on the left and right, the situation isn’t really all that complex. We have the power to easily solve the crisis. What’s needed is "social justice," they say. Apparently the socially just thing to do is bomb Sudan, invade yet another country, and involve ourselves in yet another messy civil war. Alas, the facts are always a little more complicated than the humanitarian enthusiasts would have you believe.

So, while many progressive Evangelicals are calling for our exit in Iraq, they are also simultaneously calling for our entrance into Sudan. Their problem is not so much that bombs are falling; they are just are in disagreement with where the bombs are falling. Progressive Evangelicals will take issue with that statement and say they merely support sanctions and UN peacekeepers to start with, and then maybe the tanks and bombs. But if history is any judge, once we insert ourselves into a "UN peacekeeping mission," we seemingly never leave. A timetable is set and pushed back year after year. "Peacekeeping" also tends to be a prelude to "war-making." And as Richard Land (the Southern Baptist Convention’s head of their Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission) says, any peacekeeping mission will need the necessary "military teeth."

According to some of our anti-Iraq war, pro-peace Evangelicals, all we need to do is just give war a chance in Darfur. This turnaround is similar to the peacenik left-wingers who in '99 traded in their lava lamps, open-toed sandals and Grateful Dead CD’s for machines guns during their euphoria to bomb Serbia for "humanitarian" reasons. Of course, those laptop bombardiers weren't the ones actually going to war, just like the belligerent rightwing bloggers and radio personalities are not the ones serving in Iraq today.

Yet eight years later that region is still largely a mess and most the stated reasons for going into that war turned out to be exaggerations or untrue. We were told Milosevic was a "new Hitler" even though he was losing a province every couple of years and his country's economic and military strength was puny. Allegations of genocide were overstated and atrocities were revealed on both sides. There's certainly real atrocities going on in Darfur right now (and that are worse than existed in Kosovo), but I have no reason to believe that we are going to make the situation all better with tanks and bombs, and apparently neither do many of the aid workers actually on the ground over there.And what of all those millions of dollars raised by the "Save Darfur Coalition?" Well, according to this recent New York Times article, it's actually not getting to Darfur and not doing much if any relief. And what do relief workers think of this proposed UN military intervention being pushed for by various left-wing gunslingers and their hipster Evangelical buddies? They claim it will result in more carnage and more damage, not less.

Note that most people attracted to a particular cause think that war should be waged long before all other options are exhausted or facts on the table (See Iraq in the summer 2002–early 2003). Personally as a Christian, I really don't see the New Testament ethic pointing towards a promotion of military strife, certainly not before all the facts are in and all options exhausted.

For every Christian who plays some "gotcha" game with me by pointing to the various wars of ancient Israel, I ask them to actually look at what the New Testament has to say. Romans 13 grants the state the authority to punish its own transgressors, but I don't see this as giving blanket authority for waging undeclared do-gooder wars against other sovereign territories – wars that often cause more harm than good. And this is a disputed point, but some NT Greek scholars would contend that the "sword" being referenced in Romans 13 is a small defensive dagger. Whatever it is, its best application for today probably isn't Humvees and stealth bombers against foreigners and "collateral damage" (a.k.a. innocent civilians).

But I'm a realist, and I know war is not likely to go away anytime soon. As a practical matter, however, I don't see this one meeting a theological or constitutional smell test. Certainly not yet at least. If someone could actually make a convincing case that bombing the bad guys of Darfur would result in a net positive, even though it would probably inflict its own evils, I might entertain such utilitarian notions even though that kind of moral equivocating troubles me. But more likely you'd have a situation similar to what happened in Kosovo, an area most people today have long forgotten about which is still quite screwed up. Or you could have American ground soldiers get in the middle of a bloody and messy civil war. I think we're already in the middle of one too many of those as it is. There is also the unfortunate reality that even though America is big and strong, it is not able, nor should it try to correct all the wrongs in the world. And as we are now seeing, it doesn't always work to try and force people to resolve their differences and get along happily ever after, even when you try and force them with a government-paid-for gun. Also, whether we want to admit it or not, we are just too stretched economically and militarily to insert ourselves into a never-ending stream of global conflicts, even ones like Darfur that involve real human rights abuses.

Make no mistake, both the left and right love military force; they just love it for different reasons. Putting the humanitarian crusaders in charge would not necessarily reduce America’s involvement in foreign wars and entanglements. They too love to play the role of Globocop. Keep that in mind before you enlist in their brigades to hop aboard the Darfur bandwagon.

The internal contradictions of U.S. imperialism

http://antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=11152
by Justin Raimondo

When the history of the Iraq war is written, the question of who lost it and how it was lost will be paramount, yet the answer is clear enough even today. The seeds of defeat were sown long ago, and not just by the policymakers and authors of our present disastrous policy. The co-authors of defeat in Iraq are the politicians and the U.S. military, both of whom are constrained by the internal political dynamics of U.S. imperialism. The military deficiencies that some, like Sen. Harry Reid, have pointed to are not a matter of individual "incompetence" on the part of some generals: the inefficiencies are inherent in the system.

Via Matt Yglesias we hear the news that the U.S. is now ramping up the air strikes, a sure sign – according to William Lind – that we are losing and clueless:

"Nothing could testify more powerfully to the failure of U.S. efforts on the ground in Iraq than a ramp-up in airstrikes. Calling in air is the last, desperate, and usually futile action of an army that is losing. If anyone still wonders whether the 'surge' is working, the increase in air strikes offers a definitive answer: it isn't."

Civilian casualties are way up – but who cares? Not the Americans, who are so fixated on the internal politics of the war – the "battles" raging in Washington, D.C. – that they don't have either the time or the inclination to pay attention to the "metrics" coming out of Iraq.

Besides which, as Yglesias reminds us, the Pentagon doesn't bother keeping track of Iraqi casualties. In a war for hearts and minds, however, the civilian casualty rate is a big indicator of American (or insurgent) success: the higher the rate, the lower are the chances that the U.S. can pull it off. After all, we are aiming – presumably – to give the Iraqis the security within which they can resolve their intractable political situation and begin to stand up (so we can stand down), but the bureaucratic and political imperatives of the imperial system that is evolving – in Iraq and everywhere else the American footprint is large – override the strategic requirements of fighting a successful war, as this story makes all too clear:

"The Air Force feels left out of the counterinsurgency debate. What's particularly galling to some officials is that the role of air power was relegated to a five-page annex at the back of the new Army and Marine Corps counterinsurgency manual. Setting out to rectify that perceived shortcoming, the Air Force is drafting its own manual for irregular warfare, due out this summer. And officials are speaking out about air power's contribution to labor-intensive irregular warfare, seen as the domain of the U.S. military's ground pounders."

The war on the ground in Iraq must take a back seat to the ongoing war within the U.S. military between the "air power" boys and the "ground pounders." Everybody wants a piece of the action – except, of course, when it comes time to take responsibility for defeat, which is even now looming large in the Pentagon's nightmares.

One of the chief weaknesses of imperialism is that empires have their own internal dynamics, which don't always conform to the requirements of external military and diplomatic policy. The only hearts and minds the American military seems to care about are those in Washington: winning over the Iraqi people is incidental, because the incentives work the other way. The Air Force has to show it is part of the solution in Iraq, whether or not it can actually play a significant positive role on the battlefield, because that is the road to increased pull on the Hill and in the White House, which means more funding. Within the Empire are all these little empires, competing for tax dollars, prestige, and political primacy, and it is this civil war – always being fought, albeit at various levels of intensity – that is the ultimate undoing of the imperial order.

It doesn't matter that air power exacerbates the problem in Iraq, rather than solving it. It doesn't matter that we're alienating ordinary Iraqis, who often are the victims of U.S. air raids; all that matters is that the Air Force's rivalry with the Army (and the Navy) requires air strikes. What determines our "strategy" is a shifting concatenation of competing agencies and political factions that meet on the battlefield of congressional committees and the higher councils of U.S. policymakers. The outcome of this war – the intra-bureaucratic turf war – determines the strategy and conduct of the external war. And that is the road to certain defeat.

Rent by internal contradictions, the American Empire contains within it the seeds of its own destruction, and these are sown and nurtured by the sheer scope of it. I am reminded of an anecdote Rose Wilder Lane tells in her 1936 polemic Give Me Liberty: she had gone to Russia a convinced Communist and supporter of the October Revolution and was astonished to find that the "liberated" workers and peasants didn't share her enthusiasm for the proletarian state. She got into a debate with a Russian peasant, who appeared impervious to the lure of Leninism:

"I drew for him a picture of Great Russia, to its remotest corner enjoying the equality, the peace, and the justly divided prosperity of his village. He shook his head sadly. 'It is too big,' he said. 'Too big. At the top, it is too small. It will not work. In Moscow there are only men, and man is not God. A man has only a man's head, and one hundred heads together do not make one great big head. No. Only God can know Russia.'"

The American Empire is being undone by its bigness – no one can centrally plan such an enormous undertaking. The physical holdings of the Pentagon alone are so vast that they constitute a nation unto themselves, a huge empire as complex and far-flung as Great Russia then or now. The regime-changers in Washington are no better at planning the reconstruction of the Iraqi state than the central planners in the Kremlin were at building a modern industrial state out of a peasant-based economy.

The American Empire will end just as certainly and ignominiously as the Soviet Empire did – and, perhaps, even more rapidly, on account of the economic factors involved. It's true that our enormous wealth – i.e., the boundless productive capacity of capitalism – masks the true economic cost of war, to some degree. Yet, in the end, we may wind up being destroyed by the very market forces we are so intent on globalizing.

Empires cost money, and this one, as Garet Garrett wryly observed half a century ago, is unique in that "everything goes out and nothing comes in." The Romans exacted tribute from subject nations, seizing gold, slaves, and anything not nailed down. The American Imperium, on the other hand, is the Bizarro Empire, where U.S. taxpayers pay tribute to America's local satraps, such as Egypt and Israel – the two biggest recipients of our "foreign aid" program. We defend Japan and South Korea, allowing them to shelter under our military umbrella while they export finished goods to the American market – and lend us the money to build an empire of bases around the world.

As Ron Paul tirelessly points out, the American welfare-warfare state is built on the shifting sands of an economic pump-priming perpetual motion machine, i.e., government debt. We are selling our children into slavery and bankrupting the nation: this is the price of empire, at least in purely economic terms. The price in blood– ours, the Iraqis, and perhaps the Iranians and others in the not-too-distant future – is higher still. Whether the American people are prepared to pay it is a question that is currently torturing our elites: this is the real heart of the Iraq war issue in American politics, and both parties seem committed to persuading us that the price of empire is worth it. The Democrats propose to do it on the cheap. They solemnly vow to fight future wars of conquest "smartly," while the Republicans are more extravagant and daring, with a devil-may-care attitude about the expenditure of troops and treasure in pursuit of "global hegemony," as the neocons like to put it.

The rise and fall of the Bizarro Empire is going to be an object lesson in how greatness, and liberty along with it, is lost. The story promises to be Spenglerian in its tragic denouement yet oddly inspiring in that the old republic survived as long as it did – up until at least the fatal year 1917, when we were dragged into the Great War and the seeds of the next were planted. The beginning of the end was when America embarked on its long overseas crusade to make the world safe for democracy against the villain of the day. Twice the villains were Germans, and since then the Russians, the Iraqis, and now the "Islamofascists" have all had their turn.

Tomorrow it may well be the Russians again, and then there's always the Red Chinese, whom the Fates have entrusted with much of our debt – a weapon more deadly than any H-bomb.

America, having exhausted itself militarily, economically, and spiritually, will one day be found washed up on some foreign shore, a hapless Gulliver overrun by hordes of angry Lilliputians and bound by a thousand threads to their feuds. When the history of the American Empire is written, any fair and objective author will have to concur that it didn't have to turn out that way: if we choose the prerogatives of Empire over the ascetic ideals of our republican tradition, we go willingly to our doom.

Ron Paul in Kansas City

Ron Paul in 3rd GOP Debate

The Giant Gas-Gouging Gaffe

By Robert P. Murphy

On Wednesday the House passed a bill that would make price gouging by oil and gas companies a federal crime. The legislation called for jail time and fines of up to $150 million a day for charging "unconscionably excessive prices" and taking "unfair advantage" of consumers.

As frequent readers of this website already know, this proposed legislation is horrendous and would do nothing to help the American motorist. In this short piece I'll outline some of the major problems.

VAGUE LANGUAGE

The most obvious difficulty is the arbitrariness of the "crime." Say what you will about outright price controls, at least they're explicit. In contrast, how's the owner of a gasoline station supposed to know if he's charging "unconscionably excessive" prices? After all, if he's taken a basic economics course, he might think that any market-determined price is quite reasonable. If this bill becomes law, sellers here will be at the mercy of the FTC the way drivers are at the mercy of traffic cops — you can always get written up for something.

While we're at it, let's just spend a moment on the wording of this bill. Why isn't it a crime to merely charge "somewhat excessive" prices — though perhaps not receiving the same penalty as unconscionably excessive ones? (After all, it's a crime to murder someone, but it's also a crime to punch someone in the face.) Come to think of it, shouldn't we also punish unconscionably low prices — after all, they're unconscionable by definition! And if you can't imagine what that would mean, maybe an unconscionably low price is one where mom and pop gasoline stations can't stay in business. (You know, kind of like unconscionably cheap imports from China that we have to keep out for reasons of "fair trade.")

And let's not forget the other clause, taking "unfair advantage" of the consumer. Shouldn't it also be a crime to take "fair advantage" of the consumer? (After all, you're still taking advantage of the consumer in this case.)

My point, of course, it that this language refers not to objective behavior, but merely reflects arbitrary subjective judgments on the part of the government official meting out the punishments. Adding on a layer of uncertainty and vague threats of massive fines and possibly jail time won't increase the supply of gasoline, and hence won't help motorists.

WHY ARE PRICES SO HIGH?

Before using the guns of the federal government to try to force them down, people ought to first consider why it is that gasoline prices are so high. The usual explanation — "The oil companies are greedy and want to screw over the hapless drivers!" — makes no sense. After all, oil companies were greedy during the whole 1980s, when the price of a barrel collapsed to under $11 (in nominal terms) in July 1986. And automobiles weren't invented in the last three years, so it's not as if the US "addiction" is something new.

The general causes for high oil prices are pretty straightforward: Supply is restricted because of the mess in the Middle East (not to mention environmental and other regulations), while demand is booming as China and other developing countries grow much more quickly than people had anticipated years ago (when oil infrastructure decisions were made). On top of these "real" factors, the general uncertainty about the Middle East — especially the possibility of war with Iran — has caused speculators to push up the price even higher.

Now high oil prices explain gasoline prices in part; if oranges are really expensive, you can bet that orange juice won't be cheap. But what is particularly strange is that oil prices are actually a lot lower than they were just last July ($64 and change as of this writing, compared to highs of $78 in July), yet prices at the pump are at all time (inflation-adjusted) highs.

The immediate answer is that refineries can't keep up. (If there were a major strike at Tropicana packaging plants, then the price of orange juice would be higher still, than would be justified by higher orange prices.) There are all sorts of reasons people have given, such as the lingering effects of Katrina, new environmental regulations about diesel fuel, restrictions on new refinery construction, and so on.

PRICE CAPS CAUSE SHORTAGES

But regardless of the specifics, the thing to remember is that market prices are not arbitrary. The market price is the one that (tends to) equate quantity demanded with quantity supplied. If a gas station can charge "whatever the market will bear" at $3.15 per gallon, but only charges $2.85 out of fear of fines, then it automatically follows that this gas station will have to sell people fewer gallons than they want to buy at the lower price. In other words, the proposed legislation will cause dreaded shortages of gasoline.

The only thing I've "assumed" to reach this conclusion is that people buy more gasoline at lower prices. If you grant me that, then you have to admit that government efforts to reduce prices below their market levels will cause shortages, and that means (as in the 1970s when the great Republican Nixon imposed price controls) long lines at the pump and arbitrary rationing schemes.

This is an important point so let's make sure we follow it: The market price is the one that matches supply with demand; it's the one where gas stations want to sell the same amount of gallons that motorists want to buy. So if the government forces the gas stations to lower this price, then motorists want to buy more gallons than they would have at the higher price. So unless you think a gas station owner would be willing to sell certain stockpiles of gas for (say) $2.50, but he wouldn't want to sell them at (say) $3.15, you have to admit that this legislation will lead to lines at the pump.

Incidentally, this isn't academic speculation. This is exactly what happened during the hurricane season, when people in the Gulf states tried to flee to safety. Certain gas stations (out of fear of punishment or perhaps misguided altruism) didn't raise their prices, even though their business was astronomical (since everyone was headed for the highways). The result? These gas stations got drained fairly quickly, and consequently many of the fleeing motorists ran out of gas and were stranded on the interstates.

TAKE IT TO THE LOGICAL EXTREME

I'll wrap up this article with a simple question: If all it takes is a stroke of the pen for Congress to magically lower gas prices back to "conscionable" levels, why not go further? Why not make it a crime to charge "moderate" prices too, so that we're left with very cheap gasoline? Woo hoo, break out the SUVs!

Once you think through the logic of why a government-imposed cap of (say) 25 cents per gallon wouldn't work, it's not much harder to see why a cap of $3 would be bad too.

The reason for high prices is increased scarcity. The way to solve that is to make it worthwhile for producers to increase supplies. No one in his right mind would spend billions looking for new oil fields, laying pipelines, hiring geologists, etc. if it looks like Congress might tax "windfall profits," impose price controls, or artificially stimulate demand for a competitor's products.

The oil industry involves long time horizons, and investors don't want to be exposed to a fickle public. Property rights serve a purpose, after all.

The solution to high oil and gas prices is to get the government out of the way. Ease restrictions on new refineries and oil drilling, get rid of taxes on gasoline, and stop threatening to nuke Iran. That would solve the "crisis" very quickly.

Ron Paul in 2nd GOP Debate

Ron Paul in NH

Senate Opposes Free Trade In Pharmacudicals

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/ap/politics/4782946.html

WASHINGTON — In a triumph for the pharmaceutical industry, the Senate on Monday killed a drive to allow consumers to buy prescription drugs from abroad at a significant savings over domestic prices.

On a 49-40 vote, the Senate required the administration to certify the safety and effectiveness of imported drugs before they can be imported, a requirement that officials have said they cannot meet.

"Well, once again the big drug companies have proved that they are the most powerful and best financed lobby in Washington," said Sen. David Vitter, a Louisiana Republican.

The vote neutralized a second amendment, later passed on a voice vote, that would legalize the importation of prescription drugs manufactured in Canada, Australia, Europe, Japan and New Zealand.

Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., called the certification amendment, introduced by Sen. Thad Cochran, R-Miss., a "poison pill" for the drug-imports legislation. Sen. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., acknowledged it nullified his bid to allow the purchase of drugs abroad.

"This is a setback for us. But the drug industry is one of the strongest industries in this town," Dorgan said.

Sen. Mike Enzi, a Wyoming Republican, said the requirement for a safety certification was essential to protect the public.

"Under both Democratic and Republican administrations, secretaries of Health and Human Services have declined to certify that foreign drugs — like those allowed under the Dorgan Foreign Drug Act — are safe for American consumers. They realized, as I do, that close enough isn't good enough," Enzi said.

The maneuvering occurred on broader legislation to renew the FDA's ability to collect fees from the drug industry to defray the cost of reviewing new drugs. Lawmakers have seized on the bill to overhaul the agency, including its handling of drug-safety issues highlighted in the wake of the withdrawal of the painkiller Vioxx.

Advocates of drug importation have argued for years that an existing ban is more a protection for the drug industry than a safety issue.

Overseas, drugs can cost two-thirds less than they do in the United States, where prices for brand-name drugs are among the highest in the world. In many industrialized countries, prices are lower because they are either controlled or partially controlled by government regulation.

Dorgan said allowing imports would drive down the price of U.S. brand-name drugs. He said 90 doses of the cholesterol drug Lipitor costs $321 in the U.S. — about twice the cost in Canada.

The idea of allowing prescription drug imports enjoys broad popular support. However, lower prices overseas would not automatically translate into large savings for domestic consumers, according to a 2004 study by the Congressional Budget Office.

The study found that allowing drug imports from a broad set of countries would cut U.S. drug spending by $40 billion over 10 years, about a 1 percent savings. It said foreign governments could limit drug exports to protect their own domestic supplies, and that U.S. drug companies could respond to an importation bill by increasing prices abroad.

The pharmaceutical industry vehemently opposes allowing drug imports, arguing that they could leave the nation vulnerable to dangerous counterfeits.

Similar drug-import legislation is pending in the House.

David and Goliath

Why Ron Paul will not be elected: my reaction to the Debate

Many people may believe that the reason Ron Paul will not make the GOP primary is because his opinions are to “extreme” or it would be “throwing your vote away.” There are several reasons why Ron will never be commander-in-Chief, the main one is money. Ron would never be able to raise the kind of funds that Hilary Clinton or John McCain would garner on the trail. This discrepancy has also blocked 3^rd party candidates out of the presidential primaries. There are some politicians that talk vaguely about the corruptions of “fund raising” but will turn around and abuse soft money policy.

Another reason is media coverage of campaigns and exposure. Which is a direct consequence of his inability to fund raise to the level of the other candidates. The Republican Party has not “endorsed” him as there front man. So far it seems that they are behind McCain or perhaps even Giuliani if he steals the primary. Many core Republicans find Giuliani to be “controversial.” Ron on the other hand, also shares that weakness but in a slightly different fashion. He is far too high browed, talking about inflation and intent of the constitution. Most people don’t know what either of those ideas entails in the context of US policy.

Perhaps the last reason is that he has said very openly that he wants to abolish the welfare state. That has not gone over well with many people who see those services as vital. In the long run ending those programs or turning them over to the states would be best for all who are concerned but the masses do not seem to understand.

There are a number of more difficult and complex reasons dealing with voter efficacy, party ID, and candidates. I however feel that sometimes simplicy is best in these situations.

The Republican Debate

The Republican debates on MSNBC was definitely already rigged in favor of the main contenders (particularly McCaine, Guliani and Romney). Certain canidates were given more questions and longer times than others, and there was little to no room for actual one on one debate between the canidates, I.E. there were little follow-ups. Essentially, the media has already chosen the canidates for us, and that seems to be how our system works unfortunately.

As I expected, Ron Paul outshined his contenders in the debate. Every one of them accept for Ron Paul maintained support for the war in Iraq and advocated economic and military hostility towards Iran, while some of them took the meaningless and watered-down position in favor of "better management" (code language for continueing the war, just with a switch in personell) in Iraq. In short, most of them put forth their crackpot ideas as to how to micro-manage the war. There was a point when McCaine and Romney were war-mongering viciously.

The same old propaganda about "islamists" and "terrorists" was repeated by most canidates. Ron Paul stood as the one canidate who clearly held firm to a non-interentionist foreign policy, and this was the central theme of his. He made the important point that increased foreign intervention actually decreases defense. And he compared himself to a more respectable conservative such as Taft rather then the cliche of Ronald Reagen.

On taxes, a number of canidates, particularly Sam Brownback, supported the fairtax or some variation of it. Others concentrated on eliminating the alternative minimum tax, while others simply boasted about their records as governors. Ron Paul took a much firmer position: eliminate the income tax and even more importantly, eliminate the inflation tax and return to sound money. The importance of this was probably lost on most viewers, and this was the only mention of monetary policy in the entire debate.

On immigration, most contenders supported a national I.D. card. Ron Paul never got to put forth his full position on immigration. Sam Brownback surprisingly opposed the national I.D. card idea. Ron Paul came out strongly against it and emphasized the importance of protecting the personal privacy and secrecy of the citezens rather than the government. Paul emphasized avoiding the police state at home. He also mentioned the danger of regulating the internet, because of the important of free association.

There was some talk about stem cell research. Some on stage wanted the government to ban it, others wanted the government to subsidize it, particularly John McCaine and Guliani. Ron Paul was the only one that took a well-explained position on stem cell research: that we should neither prohibit or subsidize it. As is typical of Republican politics these days, some time was spent pontificating on faith. Fortunately, Paul didn't really involve himself in it. Most canidates pontificated on the ideal of a "strong man" executive, and of course the typical worshopping of Ronald Reagen.

The three most mainstream contenders leave us with a dire picture of possibilities. John McCaine is a pandering "centrist" who ultimately supports the military industrial complex. Rudy Guliani is like a social liberal (in every bad implication of the term; he was the one canidate who supports government funding for abortion) with a neoconservative "law and order" streak. Mitt Romney is a war-monger who oppurtunistically changed his positions on countless issues within the past few years. The rest of the people running are interventionists on foreign policy and not particularly economically libertarian. The only worthy person on stage was Ron Paul.

For the most part, this debate didn't cover too many issues of substance outside of the war on terrorism. Too much time was spent on abortion to allow for discussion of other pressing issues. The only good thing to come of this is that America got to see a tiny peek of Ron Paul, the anti-war canidate. The central question in the current climate really should be over foreign policy, and Paul was the only sane canidate on foreign policy (and everything else). While all other canidates proposed more government in one way or another, Ron Paul resisted government consistantly.

Fascist America, In 10 Easy Steps

http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,,2064157,00.html

Fascist America, in 10 easy stepsFrom Hitler to Pinochet and beyond, history shows there are certain steps that any would-be dictator must take to destroy constitutional freedoms. And, argues Naomi Wolf, George Bush and his administration seem to be taking them all

Last autumn, there was a military coup in Thailand. The leaders of the coup took a number of steps, rather systematically, as if they had a shopping list. In a sense, they did. Within a matter of days, democracy had been closed down: the coup leaders declared martial law, sent armed soldiers into residential areas, took over radio and TV stations, issued restrictions on the press, tightened some limits on travel, and took certain activists into custody.

They were not figuring these things out as they went along. If you look at history, you can see that there is essentially a blueprint for turning an open society into a dictatorship. That blueprint has been used again and again in more and less bloody, more and less terrifying ways. But it is always effective. It is very difficult and arduous to create and sustain a democracy - but history shows that closing one down is much simpler. You simply have to be willing to take the 10 steps.

As difficult as this is to contemplate, it is clear, if you are willing to look, that each of these 10 steps has already been initiated today in the United States by the Bush administration.
Because Americans like me were born in freedom, we have a hard time even considering that it is possible for us to become as unfree - domestically - as many other nations. Because we no longer learn much about our rights or our system of government - the task of being aware of the constitution has been outsourced from citizens' ownership to being the domain of professionals such as lawyers and professors - we scarcely recognise the checks and balances that the founders put in place, even as they are being systematically dismantled. Because we don't learn much about European history, the setting up of a department of "homeland" security - remember who else was keen on the word "homeland" - didn't raise the alarm bells it might have.

It is my argument that, beneath our very noses, George Bush and his administration are using time-tested tactics to close down an open society. It is time for us to be willing to think the unthinkable - as the author and political journalist Joe Conason, has put it, that it can happen here. And that we are further along than we realise.

Conason eloquently warned of the danger of American authoritarianism. I am arguing that we need also to look at the lessons of European and other kinds of fascism to understand the potential seriousness of the events we see unfolding in the US.

1. Invoke a terrifying internal and external enemy

After we were hit on September 11 2001, we were in a state of national shock. Less than six weeks later, on October 26 2001, the USA Patriot Act was passed by a Congress that had little chance to debate it; many said that they scarcely had time to read it. We were told we were now on a "war footing"; we were in a "global war" against a "global caliphate" intending to "wipe out civilisation". There have been other times of crisis in which the US accepted limits on civil liberties, such as during the civil war, when Lincoln declared martial law, and the second world war, when thousands of Japanese-American citizens were interned. But this situation, as Bruce Fein of the American Freedom Agenda notes, is unprecedented: all our other wars had an endpoint, so the pendulum was able to swing back toward freedom; this war is defined as open-ended in time and without national boundaries in space - the globe itself is the battlefield. "This time," Fein says, "there will be no defined end."

Creating a terrifying threat - hydra-like, secretive, evil - is an old trick. It can, like Hitler's invocation of a communist threat to the nation's security, be based on actual events (one Wisconsin academic has faced calls for his dismissal because he noted, among other things, that the alleged communist arson, the Reichstag fire of February 1933, was swiftly followed in Nazi Germany by passage of the Enabling Act, which replaced constitutional law with an open-ended state of emergency). Or the terrifying threat can be based, like the National Socialist evocation of the "global conspiracy of world Jewry", on myth.

It is not that global Islamist terrorism is not a severe danger; of course it is. I am arguing rather that the language used to convey the nature of the threat is different in a country such as Spain - which has also suffered violent terrorist attacks - than it is in America. Spanish citizens know that they face a grave security threat; what we as American citizens believe is that we are potentially threatened with the end of civilisation as we know it. Of course, this makes us more willing to accept restrictions on our freedoms.

2. Create a gulag

Once you have got everyone scared, the next step is to create a prison system outside the rule of law (as Bush put it, he wanted the American detention centre at Guantánamo Bay to be situated in legal "outer space") - where torture takes place.

At first, the people who are sent there are seen by citizens as outsiders: troublemakers, spies, "enemies of the people" or "criminals". Initially, citizens tend to support the secret prison system; it makes them feel safer and they do not identify with the prisoners. But soon enough, civil society leaders - opposition members, labour activists, clergy and journalists - are arrested and sent there as well.

This process took place in fascist shifts or anti-democracy crackdowns ranging from Italy and Germany in the 1920s and 1930s to the Latin American coups of the 1970s and beyond. It is standard practice for closing down an open society or crushing a pro-democracy uprising.
With its jails in Iraq and Afghanistan, and, of course, Guantánamo in Cuba, where detainees are abused, and kept indefinitely without trial and without access to the due process of the law, America certainly has its gulag now. Bush and his allies in Congress recently announced they would issue no information about the secret CIA "black site" prisons throughout the world, which are used to incarcerate people who have been seized off the street.

Gulags in history tend to metastasise, becoming ever larger and more secretive, ever more deadly and formalised. We know from first-hand accounts, photographs, videos and government documents that people, innocent and guilty, have been tortured in the US-run prisons we are aware of and those we can't investigate adequately.

But Americans still assume this system and detainee abuses involve only scary brown people with whom they don't generally identify. It was brave of the conservative pundit William Safire to quote the anti-Nazi pastor Martin Niemöller, who had been seized as a political prisoner: "First they came for the Jews." Most Americans don't understand yet that the destruction of the rule of law at Guantánamo set a dangerous precedent for them, too.

By the way, the establishment of military tribunals that deny prisoners due process tends to come early on in a fascist shift. Mussolini and Stalin set up such tribunals. On April 24 1934, the Nazis, too, set up the People's Court, which also bypassed the judicial system: prisoners were held indefinitely, often in isolation, and tortured, without being charged with offences, and were subjected to show trials. Eventually, the Special Courts became a parallel system that put pressure on the regular courts to abandon the rule of law in favour of Nazi ideology when making decisions.

3. Develop a thug caste

When leaders who seek what I call a "fascist shift" want to close down an open society, they send paramilitary groups of scary young men out to terrorise citizens. The Blackshirts roamed the Italian countryside beating up communists; the Brownshirts staged violent rallies throughout Germany. This paramilitary force is especially important in a democracy: you need citizens to fear thug violence and so you need thugs who are free from prosecution.

The years following 9/11 have proved a bonanza for America's security contractors, with the Bush administration outsourcing areas of work that traditionally fell to the US military. In the process, contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars have been issued for security work by mercenaries at home and abroad. In Iraq, some of these contract operatives have been accused of involvement in torturing prisoners, harassing journalists and firing on Iraqi civilians. Under Order 17, issued to regulate contractors in Iraq by the one-time US administrator in Baghdad, Paul Bremer, these contractors are immune from prosecution

Yes, but that is in Iraq, you could argue; however, after Hurricane Katrina, the Department of Homeland Security hired and deployed hundreds of armed private security guards in New Orleans. The investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill interviewed one unnamed guard who reported having fired on unarmed civilians in the city. It was a natural disaster that underlay that episode - but the administration's endless war on terror means ongoing scope for what are in effect privately contracted armies to take on crisis and emergency management at home in US cities.

Thugs in America? Groups of angry young Republican men, dressed in identical shirts and trousers, menaced poll workers counting the votes in Florida in 2000. If you are reading history, you can imagine that there can be a need for "public order" on the next election day. Say there are protests, or a threat, on the day of an election; history would not rule out the presence of a private security firm at a polling station "to restore public order".

4. Set up an internal surveillance system

In Mussolini's Italy, in Nazi Germany, in communist East Germany, in communist China - in every closed society - secret police spy on ordinary people and encourage neighbours to spy on neighbours. The Stasi needed to keep only a minority of East Germans under surveillance to convince a majority that they themselves were being watched.

In 2005 and 2006, when James Risen and Eric Lichtblau wrote in the New York Times about a secret state programme to wiretap citizens' phones, read their emails and follow international financial transactions, it became clear to ordinary Americans that they, too, could be under state scrutiny.

In closed societies, this surveillance is cast as being about "national security"; the true function is to keep citizens docile and inhibit their activism and dissent.

5. Harass citizens' groups

The fifth thing you do is related to step four - you infiltrate and harass citizens' groups. It can be trivial: a church in Pasadena, whose minister preached that Jesus was in favour of peace, found itself being investigated by the Internal Revenue Service, while churches that got Republicans out to vote, which is equally illegal under US tax law, have been left alone.

Other harassment is more serious: the American Civil Liberties Union reports that thousands of ordinary American anti-war, environmental and other groups have been infiltrated by agents: a secret Pentagon database includes more than four dozen peaceful anti-war meetings, rallies or marches by American citizens in its category of 1,500 "suspicious incidents". The equally secret Counterintelligence Field Activity (Cifa) agency of the Department of Defense has been gathering information about domestic organisations engaged in peaceful political activities: Cifa is supposed to track "potential terrorist threats" as it watches ordinary US citizen activists. A little-noticed new law has redefined activism such as animal rights protests as "terrorism". So the definition of "terrorist" slowly expands to include the opposition.

6. Engage in arbitrary detention and release

This scares people. It is a kind of cat-and-mouse game. Nicholas D Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, the investigative reporters who wrote China Wakes: the Struggle for the Soul of a Rising Power, describe pro-democracy activists in China, such as Wei Jingsheng, being arrested and released many times. In a closing or closed society there is a "list" of dissidents and opposition leaders: you are targeted in this way once you are on the list, and it is hard to get off the list.

In 2004, America's Transportation Security Administration confirmed that it had a list of passengers who were targeted for security searches or worse if they tried to fly. People who have found themselves on the list? Two middle-aged women peace activists in San Francisco; liberal Senator Edward Kennedy; a member of Venezuela's government - after Venezuela's president had criticised Bush; and thousands of ordinary US citizens.

Professor Walter F Murphy is emeritus of Princeton University; he is one of the foremost constitutional scholars in the nation and author of the classic Constitutional Democracy. Murphy is also a decorated former marine, and he is not even especially politically liberal. But on March 1 this year, he was denied a boarding pass at Newark, "because I was on the Terrorist Watch list".
"Have you been in any peace marches? We ban a lot of people from flying because of that," asked the airline employee.

"I explained," said Murphy, "that I had not so marched but had, in September 2006, given a lecture at Princeton, televised and put on the web, highly critical of George Bush for his many violations of the constitution."

"That'll do it," the man said.

Anti-war marcher? Potential terrorist. Support the constitution? Potential terrorist. History shows that the categories of "enemy of the people" tend to expand ever deeper into civil life.
James Yee, a US citizen, was the Muslim chaplain at Guantánamo who was accused of mishandling classified documents. He was harassed by the US military before the charges against him were dropped. Yee has been detained and released several times. He is still of interest.

Brandon Mayfield, a US citizen and lawyer in Oregon, was mistakenly identified as a possible terrorist. His house was secretly broken into and his computer seized. Though he is innocent of the accusation against him, he is still on the list.

It is a standard practice of fascist societies that once you are on the list, you can't get off.

7. Target key individuals

Threaten civil servants, artists and academics with job loss if they don't toe the line. Mussolini went after the rectors of state universities who did not conform to the fascist line; so did Joseph Goebbels, who purged academics who were not pro-Nazi; so did Chile's Augusto Pinochet; so does the Chinese communist Politburo in punishing pro-democracy students and professors.
Academe is a tinderbox of activism, so those seeking a fascist shift punish academics and students with professional loss if they do not "coordinate", in Goebbels' term, ideologically. Since civil servants are the sector of society most vulnerable to being fired by a given regime, they are also a group that fascists typically "coordinate" early on: the Reich Law for the Re-establishment of a Professional Civil Service was passed on April 7 1933.

Bush supporters in state legislatures in several states put pressure on regents at state universities to penalise or fire academics who have been critical of the administration. As for civil servants, the Bush administration has derailed the career of one military lawyer who spoke up for fair trials for detainees, while an administration official publicly intimidated the law firms that represent detainees pro bono by threatening to call for their major corporate clients to boycott them.

Elsewhere, a CIA contract worker who said in a closed blog that "waterboarding is torture" was stripped of the security clearance she needed in order to do her job.

Most recently, the administration purged eight US attorneys for what looks like insufficient political loyalty. When Goebbels purged the civil service in April 1933, attorneys were "coordinated" too, a step that eased the way of the increasingly brutal laws to follow.

8. Control the press

Italy in the 1920s, Germany in the 30s, East Germany in the 50s, Czechoslovakia in the 60s, the Latin American dictatorships in the 70s, China in the 80s and 90s - all dictatorships and would-be dictators target newspapers and journalists. They threaten and harass them in more open societies that they are seeking to close, and they arrest them and worse in societies that have been closed already.

The Committee to Protect Journalists says arrests of US journalists are at an all-time high: Josh Wolf (no relation), a blogger in San Francisco, has been put in jail for a year for refusing to turn over video of an anti-war demonstration; Homeland Security brought a criminal complaint against reporter Greg Palast, claiming he threatened "critical infrastructure" when he and a TV producer were filming victims of Hurricane Katrina in Louisiana. Palast had written a bestseller critical of the Bush administration.

Other reporters and writers have been punished in other ways. Joseph C Wilson accused Bush, in a New York Times op-ed, of leading the country to war on the basis of a false charge that Saddam Hussein had acquired yellowcake uranium in Niger. His wife, Valerie Plame, was outed as a CIA spy - a form of retaliation that ended her career.

Prosecution and job loss are nothing, though, compared with how the US is treating journalists seeking to cover the conflict in Iraq in an unbiased way. The Committee to Protect Journalists has documented multiple accounts of the US military in Iraq firing upon or threatening to fire upon unembedded (meaning independent) reporters and camera operators from organisations ranging from al-Jazeera to the BBC. While westerners may question the accounts by al-Jazeera, they should pay attention to the accounts of reporters such as the BBC's Kate Adie. In some cases reporters have been wounded or killed, including ITN's Terry Lloyd in 2003. Both CBS and the Associated Press in Iraq had staff members seized by the US military and taken to violent prisons; the news organisations were unable to see the evidence against their staffers.
Over time in closing societies, real news is supplanted by fake news and false documents. Pinochet showed Chilean citizens falsified documents to back up his claim that terrorists had been about to attack the nation. The yellowcake charge, too, was based on forged papers.

You won't have a shutdown of news in modern America - it is not possible. But you can have, as Frank Rich and Sidney Blumenthal have pointed out, a steady stream of lies polluting the news well. What you already have is a White House directing a stream of false information that is so relentless that it is increasingly hard to sort out truth from untruth. In a fascist system, it's not the lies that count but the muddying. When citizens can't tell real news from fake, they give up their demands for accountability bit by bit.

9. Dissent equals treason

Cast dissent as "treason" and criticism as "espionage'. Every closing society does this, just as it elaborates laws that increasingly criminalise certain kinds of speech and expand the definition of "spy" and "traitor". When Bill Keller, the publisher of the New York Times, ran the Lichtblau/Risen stories, Bush called the Times' leaking of classified information "disgraceful", while Republicans in Congress called for Keller to be charged with treason, and rightwing commentators and news outlets kept up the "treason" drumbeat. Some commentators, as Conason noted, reminded readers smugly that one penalty for violating the Espionage Act is execution.

Conason is right to note how serious a threat that attack represented. It is also important to recall that the 1938 Moscow show trial accused the editor of Izvestia, Nikolai Bukharin, of treason; Bukharin was, in fact, executed. And it is important to remind Americans that when the 1917 Espionage Act was last widely invoked, during the infamous 1919 Palmer Raids, leftist activists were arrested without warrants in sweeping roundups, kept in jail for up to five months, and "beaten, starved, suffocated, tortured and threatened with death", according to the historian Myra MacPherson. After that, dissent was muted in America for a decade.
In Stalin's Soviet Union, dissidents were "enemies of the people". National Socialists called those who supported Weimar democracy "November traitors".

And here is where the circle closes: most Americans do not realise that since September of last year - when Congress wrongly, foolishly, passed the Military Commissions Act of 2006 - the president has the power to call any US citizen an "enemy combatant". He has the power to define what "enemy combatant" means. The president can also delegate to anyone he chooses in the executive branch the right to define "enemy combatant" any way he or she wants and then seize Americans accordingly.

Even if you or I are American citizens, even if we turn out to be completely innocent of what he has accused us of doing, he has the power to have us seized as we are changing planes at Newark tomorrow, or have us taken with a knock on the door; ship you or me to a navy brig; and keep you or me in isolation, possibly for months, while awaiting trial. (Prolonged isolation, as psychiatrists know, triggers psychosis in otherwise mentally healthy prisoners. That is why Stalin's gulag had an isolation cell, like Guantánamo's, in every satellite prison. Camp 6, the newest, most brutal facility at Guantánamo, is all isolation cells.)

We US citizens will get a trial eventually - for now. But legal rights activists at the Center for Constitutional Rights say that the Bush administration is trying increasingly aggressively to find ways to get around giving even US citizens fair trials. "Enemy combatant" is a status offence - it is not even something you have to have done. "We have absolutely moved over into a preventive detention model - you look like you could do something bad, you might do something bad, so we're going to hold you," says a spokeswoman of the CCR.

Most Americans surely do not get this yet. No wonder: it is hard to believe, even though it is true. In every closing society, at a certain point there are some high-profile arrests - usually of opposition leaders, clergy and journalists. Then everything goes quiet. After those arrests, there are still newspapers, courts, TV and radio, and the facades of a civil society. There just isn't real dissent. There just isn't freedom. If you look at history, just before those arrests is where we are now.

10. Suspend the rule of law

The John Warner Defense Authorization Act of 2007 gave the president new powers over the national guard. This means that in a national emergency - which the president now has enhanced powers to declare - he can send Michigan's militia to enforce a state of emergency that he has declared in Oregon, over the objections of the state's governor and its citizens.

Even as Americans were focused on Britney Spears's meltdown and the question of who fathered Anna Nicole's baby, the New York Times editorialised about this shift: "A disturbing recent phenomenon in Washington is that laws that strike to the heart of American democracy have been passed in the dead of night ... Beyond actual insurrection, the president may now use military troops as a domestic police force in response to a natural disaster, a disease outbreak, terrorist attack or any 'other condition'."

Critics see this as a clear violation of the Posse Comitatus Act - which was meant to restrain the federal government from using the military for domestic law enforcement. The Democratic senator Patrick Leahy says the bill encourages a president to declare federal martial law. It also violates the very reason the founders set up our system of government as they did: having seen citizens bullied by a monarch's soldiers, the founders were terrified of exactly this kind of concentration of militias' power over American people in the hands of an oppressive executive or faction.

Of course, the United States is not vulnerable to the violent, total closing-down of the system that followed Mussolini's march on Rome or Hitler's roundup of political prisoners. Our democratic habits are too resilient, and our military and judiciary too independent, for any kind of scenario like that.

Rather, as other critics are noting, our experiment in democracy could be closed down by a process of erosion.

It is a mistake to think that early in a fascist shift you see the profile of barbed wire against the sky. In the early days, things look normal on the surface; peasants were celebrating harvest festivals in Calabria in 1922; people were shopping and going to the movies in Berlin in 1931.

Early on, as WH Auden put it, the horror is always elsewhere - while someone is being tortured, children are skating, ships are sailing: "dogs go on with their doggy life ... How everything turns away/ Quite leisurely from the disaster."

As Americans turn away quite leisurely, keeping tuned to internet shopping and American Idol, the foundations of democracy are being fatally corroded. Something has changed profoundly that weakens us unprecedentedly: our democratic traditions, independent judiciary and free press do their work today in a context in which we are "at war" in a "long war" - a war without end, on a battlefield described as the globe, in a context that gives the president - without US citizens realising it yet - the power over US citizens of freedom or long solitary incarceration, on his say-so alone.

That means a hollowness has been expanding under the foundation of all these still- free-looking institutions - and this foundation can give way under certain kinds of pressure. To prevent such an outcome, we have to think about the "what ifs".

What if, in a year and a half, there is another attack - say, God forbid, a dirty bomb? The executive can declare a state of emergency. History shows that any leader, of any party, will be tempted to maintain emergency powers after the crisis has passed. With the gutting of traditional checks and balances, we are no less endangered by a President Hillary than by a President Giuliani - because any executive will be tempted to enforce his or her will through edict rather than the arduous, uncertain process of democratic negotiation and compromise.

What if the publisher of a major US newspaper were charged with treason or espionage, as a rightwing effort seemed to threaten Keller with last year? What if he or she got 10 years in jail? What would the newspapers look like the next day? Judging from history, they would not cease publishing; but they would suddenly be very polite.

Right now, only a handful of patriots are trying to hold back the tide of tyranny for the rest of us - staff at the Center for Constitutional Rights, who faced death threats for representing the detainees yet persisted all the way to the Supreme Court; activists at the American Civil Liberties Union; and prominent conservatives trying to roll back the corrosive new laws, under the banner of a new group called the American Freedom Agenda. This small, disparate collection of people needs everybody's help, including that of Europeans and others internationally who are willing to put pressure on the administration because they can see what a US unrestrained by real democracy at home can mean for the rest of the world.

We need to look at history and face the "what ifs". For if we keep going down this road, the "end of America" could come for each of us in a different way, at a different moment; each of us might have a different moment when we feel forced to look back and think: that is how it was before - and this is the way it is now.

"The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands ... is the definition of tyranny," wrote James Madison. We still have the choice to stop going down this road; we can stand our ground and fight for our nation, and take up the banner the founders asked us to carry.

· Naomi Wolf's The End of America: A Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot will be published by Chelsea Green in September.