Wednesday, June 1, 2016

End War!--Put the Old Geezers in the Trenches! Or Not?


End War!—Put the Old Geezers in the Trenches! Or Not?


by

Eric Paul Nolte



Recently, we were sitting around the fire pit after dinner at a friend’s house when our host, a retired doctor and a passionately avowed leftie, offered his opinion that the way to decrease the likelihood of war is to impose a universal draft, on the assumption that if we can conscript the old geezers who now pull the levers of power, and send them out into the trenches to die, fighting our crazy wars, then surely the country would be less inclined to engage in the kind of blockheaded, cockamamie wars we now know only too well.

This is a provocative idea—threatening to make the old farts pay for their stupid wars by making them have to loft a rifle in the trenches and thereby put themselves in the line of fire! 

It is superficially plausible, as a means to reduce the likelihood of war, if we  make the old guys put their asses in the line of fire, instead of allowing them glibly to issue orders sending our treasured laddies and lassies out into the awful pit of death. 

But now what else happens if such a policy is imposed?  As usual, the lefties are deaf and blind to the consequences of their well-intentioned dictates.

Henry Hazlitt’s marvelous primer, Economics in One Lesson, shows us that the essence of clear thinking about any policy requires us not merely to ask what happens in the short term to the first group of people affected by a policy, but to look at how that policy affects everybody from the moment it is imposed until it plays out in the far future, and not only on the first group of people affected by that policy, but on all groups so affected.

I’m always impressed how left liberals seem to be oblivious to the actual results of their policies—that what truly matters to them is not the effects of their policies, but how well-intended their policies are. How their prescriptions play out in the future doesn’t seem to show up in the calculus of evaluating their policies. But it matters crucially whether one’s policies work in reality or not! Lefties, however, tend not even to notice what actually follows the passage of their piously motivated legislation. Self-congratulation for their lovely intentions is everything, as anybody can see from reading anything that Thomas Sowell has written.

What comes immediately to mind here are the well-known, unintended and perverse effects of policies like the minimum wage and rent control. 

Because it sounds plausible, at first blush, we believe that if only we raise the minimum wage, salutary effects must inevitably follow. But the reality is that when higher minimum wages are legislated, it causes unemployment to rise among the very workers the law is intended to help, and it hurts them more than any other group. 

If it’s a good idea to raise the minimum wage to $15, why not set it at $150? Or $1,500? The consequences are said not to be a problem, because, for one thing, wages are presumed to be extracted from the hides of greedy employers.

According to both Marx and Adam Smith—from whom Marx got his Labor Theory of Value—employers are parasites living on the backs of labor!

Now, when we piously pass legislation for rent control, to staunch the flow of blood going from renters to greedy landlords, we find that suddenly affordable housing is retreating into short supply. Sober economists tell us that if we actually want to destroy the housing stock, the only policy more effective than rent control is outright aerial carpet bombing. Think of the south Bronx, circa 1978, which looked like bombed-out Berlin in 1945--thanks to panicked landlords trying to wriggle free of their own destruction at the hands of New York City’s draconian rent control laws. Landlords were condemned by the City's rent control laws to losing money, so these property owners couldn’t hope even to sell their buildings because no sane investor would be stupid enough to buy properties that by law were condemned to losing money. In huge numbers, the landlords finally rebelled and burned the buildings to the ground. 

One could also point to the effects of almost any government regulation and note the similarly unintended and destructive consequences of these policies. 1.)

Now, back to the conversation with my friend and his argument for a universal draft that would make the powerful old guys go fight our wars. There are several ineluctable problems here.

For the sake of argument, if I grant that the rulers would be less inclined to start wars if it were they, instead of the sons of their poor constituents of color, who would be vulnerable to death in the trenches, this does not address the most terrible problem with this policy.

The essence of the problem here is that there is no acknowledgment of human rights! Every individual's rights!  

The doctor would appear not to care about the little matter of rights.

Apart from the revolution itself that followed its issuance, we have never institutionalized Jefferson’s formulation of human rights, in the words he formulated it in the Declaration of Independence. This crucial value never showed up explicitly written into the Constitution. Our Constitution does not embody this core value of the Declaration!

This arresting thought deserves a book, a movement, a political party that does not exist today! Our Constitution never explicitly embodied this ideal, unprecedented before John Locke, and so memorably captured by Jefferson’s formulation of it, that our rights are rooted in our nature as human beings, not as a gift from government, and are therefore unalienable.  

It has been a century since this idea was rejected by those who embraced the notion, promulgated by the likes of Oliver Wendall Holmes, Louis Brandeis, and Woodrow Wilson, that we have in our constitution, not a timeless North Star in our founding document, but instead a “living constitution,” in which the changing circumstances of history are said to allow us to rewrite the original document. By this intellectual sleight of hand, our country abandoned any unyielding idea that individuals possess rights to their own life, liberty, and property which are inalienable. Instead, rights are now seen merely to be conventional, merely the arbitrary gifts granted by the opinions of one's tribe. Rights, therefore, are the coincidental and generous blessings granted to us by the largesse of governments—which can be changed, added to, or revoked altogether, according to the whims of whichever gang has its hands on the levers of power, in this election cycle or the next.

So, at the end of the day, my friend’s suggestion that we send the old geezers to fight our wars is a chimera. Like almost everything else about contemporary politics, we are led to fascism—which means the nominal private ownership of the means of production, with Machiavellian control over every detail of that production, using others against their will for predatory advantage, and all of which is, in my humble opinion, the essence of evil. 

Think of the whole range of evil—genocide, murder, rape, slavery, robbery—every one of these evils is an example of a bad guy using other people against their will for predatory advantage. 

Where is Lady Liberty?  Where is the ideal of freedom? Far in the future, it would seem.

E  P  N

2016.0601

1.) for starters, think of Henry Hazlitt’s book I mentioned above, Economics in One Lesson; and for a more wide ranging, scholarly, and current account of these matters, Charles Murray’s Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950-1980.