Month: July 2000

Does Technology Make Libertopia Inevitable?

    Some libertarians and capitalist anarchists claim that technology is inevitably winnowing away the power of the state. Dale Fitzgerald II wrote a piece for LewRockwell.Com the other day (Encryption, Finance, Freedom, and You) arguing that pervasive encryption would allow people to conduct financial transactions that would be impossible to trace (and hence tax). Jeremey Lott responded in a piece in WorldNet Daily (Against Libertopia) that, in fact, there are many ways for the state to interfere with this libertarian utopia. As Lott notes, we live in a country where the state can seize your property without trial on the mere suspicion that the property has been used in an illegal activity. How long before the state starts confiscating computer equipment of those it believes are violating the law (hint, the federal government has already done this on numerous occasions without a trial).

    Of course Lott and Fitzgerald are half right. On the one hand, it is relatively trivial for a committed state to prevent its citizens from using technology to circumvent government control. Contrast, for example, the former Soviet Union with North Korea. The Soviet Union had onerous regulations on everything from photocopiers to VCRs; North Korea has even more stringent regulations (radios sold in North Korea are supposedly hardwired to tune in only certain bandwidths, for example, to prevent North Koreans from easily listening to non-government approved broadcasts).

    Both countries faced a choice — relent to some extent on the regulation of technology to try to promote economic growth or clamp down and accept the attendant poverty. The Soviet Union chose the former course and disappeared. North Korea, China, Vietnam and Cuba have so far largely chosen the course, willing to accept significantly slower economic growth in order to preserve state control.

    Fortunately for those of us living in Western democracies — as Bill Clinton famously observed, it’s the economy, stupid. Those behind the scenes at the CIA, NSA, FBI, etc. would love to simply ban strong encryption, for example, but would have a revolt on their hands from businesses, and eventually voters, who need it for economic transactions. The problem for Western states wanting to extend control is that technology is a double edged sword, growing the economy which enhances the popularity of sitting governments while simultaneously increasing the power of those who want to escape the reach of the state.

    Of course we’re nowhere near the sort of system Fitzgerald imagines. How many people even bother to routinely encrypt sensitive personal or business correspondence? I’d be shocked if the number was higher than 1 percent. The sort of system required to place financial transactions beyond the purview of the U.S. government is probably 10 to 15 years or more away.

    On the other hand, if it ever arrives the modern state is going to be in a world of hurt. After all, millions of Americans already try to hide from the IRS cheating on their income tax forms or simply not filing them. The underground economy, where people trade exclusively in cash and don’t keep records, is also huge (I’m always impressed by the number of people I know who do part or full time work at a slight discount in order to be paid in cash and thereby avoid the reach of the IRS).

    There will always be ways for the committed state to try to tax citizens even in this libertopia, but the problem will be whether or not they are efficient or whether in its attempt to crack down on the technolibertarians will also entail unacceptable risks to legitimate commerce that would be political suicide. If this technotopia is constructed in a way that it is impossible to shut down without also shutting down large parts of the economy, then Fitzgerald is right — we’ve already won and don’t know it. If, on the other hand, the state rigs the system to make it easier to go after “rogue” citizens, then Lott is correct — the state will crush Fitzgerald’s libertopia like a bug.

Got Doctors?

    It’s kind of sad to see major media outlets get taken in by animal rights groups on such basic issues — in this case, what constitutes a physician. In this case the story revolves around Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine which is filing a petition with the Federal Trade Commission essentially arguing that claims made on behalf of milk in the “Got Milk?” advertising campaign are false. As PCRM president Neal Barnard laid out his case to the Associated Press regarding a “Got Milk?” ad featuring Britney Spears, “Britney’s ad might as well be captioned, ‘Oops, I did it again – sold out for an unhealthy product.”

    The problem is that the Associated Press story refers to PCRM as “a group of doctors opposed to dairy products” and the headline for the story on Yahoo! read “Docs Target ‘Got Milk?’ Ad Campaign” and on CNN “Anti-dairy doctors target ‘Got Milk’ campaign.” The only problem with this is that only about 10 percent of PCRM’s membership are actually physicians, and the group has been condemned for its anti-scientific rantings by the largest physician organization in the United States, the American Medical Association.

    If PCRM is a doctor’s group, then this site is about particle physics!

    The AP story also distinguishes between PCRM as a “doctors group” on the one hand and PETA as an “animal rights” group on the other, although PCRM was essentially a PETA creation with both Ingrid Newkirk and Alex Pacheco appearing as supporters on PCRM’s “Declaration of Concern and Support” (which included other prominent physicians such as Doris Day, Loretta Switt and singer Howard Jones!) Barnard himself has in the past served on the Boards of animal rights groups such as the New England Anti-Vivisection Society, coming onboard there after PETA’s successful 1987 takeover of NEAVS.

    PCRM isn’t some professional association concerned about American’s health, but rather an animal rights group bent on ending animal testing and the whole panoply of animal rights positions (and its stand on things like milk are equally intellectually bankrupt). It’s sad to see the mainstream media get taken in by PCRM’s public relations twist on animal rights.

Saddam Hussein Allegedly Using Rape for Political Purposes

The UK Sunday Times recently reported allegations that Iraqi dictator is using rape to intimidate opponents of his regime living outside of Iraq. The charges come from former Iraqi general Najib Salahi who fled Iraq in 1995 and now lives in Jordan.

According to Salahi, somebody sent him a videotape depicting an Iraqi intelligence officer raping one of Salahi’s female relatives. Salahi claims, and the Times quotes unnamed Washington sources as confirming, that other high ranking Iraqi defectors outside of that country have received similar videotapes depicting the rape of close female relatives.

If Salahi’s story is accurate, this is a clear case of a war crime and the members of the Iraqi state could and should face trial for instituting a policy of using rape as an instrument of terror. The United States is currently trying to bring a crimes against humanity prosecution against the Iraqi state and Salahi says he is willing to allow the videotape to be played in court as evidence of Iraq’s crimes at such at trial.

Source:

Saddam blackmails rebels with rape. Marie Colvin. The Sunday Times (UK). July 9, 2000.

(Why Don’t We) Hate The Rich

    In a recent Salon.Com article, Steve Bodow is aghast that in a Gallup poll 60 percent of Americans favored abolishing the federal estate tax (No relief). Only a vast right wing misinformation campaign could be responsible for such misguided views on the part of the American public. After all, the poor and middle class should hate the rich, not want to hand them an $850 billion gift (Bodow’s term for the tax cut).

    Why don’t people hate the rich anymore?

    Part of the problem is that in many ways the average American is rich him or herself by historical standards. In the lead-in to his anti-wealth diatribe, Bodow claims that the Congress wants to restore American to “pre-abolition America — where the rich were rich and the poor were chattel…” Of course by the economic standards of the 1850s, my neighbors who subsist on welfare are unbelievably well off. Rather than envy or hate prosperity, almost all Americans are the beneficiaries of unimagined levels of personal wealth and income levels.

    Second, thanks to the mass media and our own expanded interactions with people, Americans have connections with the rich and an understanding of how they got rich that previous generations didn’t. Bodow blasts the Heritage Foundation for claiming the estate tax will rob minority businessmen, while in truth according to Bodow it affects largely white men. Fine, but when he dies does Michael Jordan really deserve to have half of his estate confiscated by the state simply because he was wildly successful and entertained billions of people? Do Bill Gates or Steve Jobs deserve to have half their estate confiscated because they revolutionized the personal computer industry?

    On a smaller scale, I’ve met and talked with many people starting their own businesses who are working their butts off putting 60 to 70 hour weeks in to get off the ground. Some of them will fail, others will be wildly successful. What sort of screwy tax system reserves a special confiscatory tax only for the wildly successful of the bunch? Maybe to folks like Bodow this makes sense, but to a lot of Americans this seems downright bizarre.

    It’s even more bizarre, of course, to take that money and then give it to the federal government. This is almost worse than just taking the assets and burning them. I assume, for example, that Michael Jordan will probably want to leave assets for his children and family as well as putting a lot of his money into non-profit foundations. That makes a lot more sense than giving it to the U.S. government so they can buy attack helicopters to help death squads in Colombia or for creating a worldwide eavesdropping network such as Echelon (or just the run-of-the-mill pork barrel projects that tax money gets wasted on).

    The wealthy, like the rest of us, have already paid ridiculously high income and other assorted taxes throughout their lives. Making the most successful Americans cough up half their estates when they die in order to feed government coffers is an idea so profoundly stupid that people hardly need right wing think tanks to tell them it’s a bad idea.

Number of Animals Used for Medical Experiments Increases in the UK

The Labour government in Great Britain won’t win any friends among animal rights activists when it announces sometime in August that for the first time since the early 1970s, the number of animals used in medical experiments in the UK rose for two consecutive years. While courting animal activist votes in 1996, the Labour Party promised a special commission to reduce the number of animals used in experiments.

According to government figures, the number of animals used increased 1 percent in 1998 and could have increased up to 3 percent in 1999. Why?

Part of the problem is the way the UK counts the number of animals used in experiments. The big increase is occurring in areas of genetic engineering experiments. In many of these experiments an animals, such as a mouse, is genetically modified and then an experiment is conducted on the mouse. Under the way the UK measures the number of animals used in research, there is a strong possibility that the mouse will be counted twice — once when it is genetically modified and then again when the experiment is carried out.

Still even with this double counting problem, the sheer explosion in human knowledge about genetic engineering has probably led to an increase in the number of animal experiments being conducted in Great Britain and around the world. That should be hailed as a good thing, since it represents scientists getting ever closer to treatments for debilitating and deadly human diseases, but instead the Labour Party clearly fears the reaction from animal rights activists.

Meanwhile although the number of animals used for medical research is rising, it’s not rising nearly fast enough for medical researchers. More than 100 British scientists, including five Nobel Prize winners, recently signed a letter arguing that the UK’s onerous regulation of animal experiments was holding back important research that would inevitably be driven abroad unless the government streamlines the process. According to the letter.

Researchers using animals are already in a situation where overseas competitors can complete a series of experiments and be exploiting the results before permission to start would be given in the UK. If this situation persists or gets worse, as it has recently, it appears inevitable that a substantial part of the UK’s research effort, in many vital areas, will either become uncompetitive or forced abroad.

Animal rights activists such as the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection’s Michelle Thew reacted predictably that in fact the regulations don’t go far enough. “I’m staggered that they are calling for less animal regulation when the regulations we have aren’t working properly,” Thew said.

Professor Nancy Rothwell of Manchester University said that new paperwork requirements can cause research applications to run 50 to 100 pages in excruciating detail, and delay approval of research involving animals by 6 months or more.

Sources:

Red tape on animal experiments hold Britain back, say scientists. Nigel Hawkes, The Times (UK), June 13, 2000.

Animal testing appeal sparks protest. The BBC. June 13, 2000.

Second rise in animal experiments alarm ministers. Nigel Hawkes. The Times (UK). July 24, 2000.

Whaling Ban Likely to Fall

The latest meeting of the International Whaling Commission all but turned into a rout for anti-whaling forces and likely presages the sort of battles that will be fought around the world in coming decades over the best way to preserve endangered species.

It’s only slightly oversimplifying to say that the fight over whaling boils down to two incompatible positions — on the one side are countries and activists who maintain that whaling is simply wrong regardless of whether or not whales are endangered. On the other side are nations that advocate hunting whales as part of long term plans to sustainably maintain whale populations.

For those opposed to whaling under any circumstance, the main problem is that the IWC has been too successful. In 1986 it imposed a worldwide ban on whaling, although the ability of the IWC to enforce that ban is pretty much non-existent. Japan has in fact resumed hunting small numbers of whales on the pretense of doing so for purely scientific purposes and Norway opposed the moratorium in the first place and largely ignored it. Despite this, in large measure the conservation effort worked and many endangered species of whales have come back with a vengeance.

Now Japan, Norway and other nations say that the science is on their side — whale populations have recovered to a point to sustainably allow a resumption in commercial hunting. But many of the nations on the IWC oppose whaling because, as the BBC summed it up, “they regard whaling as inhumane, unnecessary, and deeply unpopular with their electorates.”

The Japanese representative to the IWC blasted this “no whaling at any costs” view, pointing out the hypocrisy of the Australian position given that Australia opposes any resumption of whaling but on the other hand slaughters millions of kangaroos each year. “Perhaps if we renamed minke whales the ‘kangaroos of the sea,’ the Australian public would support” a resumption in whaling.

Ultimately regardless of who is right about the scientific case, the IWC’s steadfast insistence on no whaling ultimately may backfire and result in less protections for whaling. As the even the IWC secretary, Dr. Ray Gabmell, told BBC News, the pro-whaling nations are likely to leave the IWC if it maintains its ideological opposition to the resumption of whaling. Whaling outside the purvey of the IWC would almost certainly be worse for the whales than hunting under the aegis of the IWC.

“I would think it much better that it was brought within international regulations and oversight,” Gambell said. “I think the commission will need to move forward on measures which would allowed controlled whaling, otherwise it will lose credibility. If the commission cannot set its house in order, people will start to ask: ‘Why do we need it at all?'”

This is not dissimilar to the issue currently facing species preservation plans in the United States, such as for wolves, where activists fight to bring a species back but then fight tooth and nail any attempt to control their population through hunting. Unfortunately, if political communities know that once an endangered species recovers that they will have no means to control its numbers, this creates an enormous disincentive to preserve endangered species, as well as leaving the impression that preserving endangered species is not about science but about Green sentimentality.

Around the world the self-interest of communities is being used to spur efforts to save endangered species, but the irrational attempt to ban culling and hunting of species once they have recovered threatens to reverse that progress.

Sources:

Australia accused of whaling hypocrisy. The BBC, July 2, 2000.

Whaling ban stans – for now. The BBC, July 6, 2000.

Whaling commission struggles to survive. The BBC. July 4, 2000.

Whale sanctuary rejected. The BBC. July 4, 2000.

Controversy swells around whaling commission meeting. ENN. June 29, 2000.