Interesting exchange between our co-blogger Don Boudreaux and his co-blogger Russ Roberts. Have a look.

A nice one-two from Harriet Miers' most brilliant man alive:

BUSH: Some have also argued that extremism has been strengthened by the actions of our coalition in Iraq, claiming that our presence in that country has somehow caused or triggered the rage of radicals.

I would remind them that we were not in Iraq on September the 11th, 2001, and Al Qaida attacked us anyway.

....

The government of Russia did not support Operation Iraqi Freedom, and yet militants killed more than 180 Russian school children in Beslan.

Which do you find more troubling, the notion that he thinks you're this stupid, or the alternative?

According to David Frum (admittedly not my favorite source), Miers has suspect views on racial preferences. This is not surprising given Bush's appointment of Alberto Gonzales who pushed, energetically, and successfully, for the wrong side in the infamous University of Michigan preferences case.

If true, will this rile conservatives enough to actually sink the Miers nomination? I doubt it. Conservative movers and shakers have so closely tied themselves to Bush because of the Iraq war that there is probably no turning back. I suspect that they will rally around him in his hour of need (as they always have).

Nicholas Cage, who has named his son Kal-el. Awesome.

Dear Friends:

The issue today on which libertarians are most divided is the war in Iraq. I am decidedly in the anti-Iraq-war camp; others – many of whom are people whose opinions and judgment I respect enormously – are in the pro-Iraq-war camp. Quite a few of these friends take issue with me for opposing the war. "Don’t you understand," they ask, "the unseen costs of not going to war? Didn’t Chamberlain’s appeasement of Hitler teach you anything?"

I’m well aware that failure to take action when it should be taken can cause ill consequences just as much as can taking action when action should not be taken. I am also aware that being weak and irresolute invites bullying. Nevertheless, the truth of these general principles is insufficient to justify this war.

Before I spell out my reasons for believing the war in Iraq to be unjustified, I emphasize that I am no pacifist. That is, I don’t believe that love (or negotiation) can conquer all; I don’t believe that violence used in self-defense is inappropriate; I don’t believe that proclaiming a commitment to peace is sufficient to prevent others from aggressing against you; and I do not believe that the fist used by Saddam Hussein to crush the Iraqi people was anything other than iron. Hussein is a beast who deserves no mercy.

Still, the war in Iraq is unjustified. By this I mean that the justifications offered for the war by the Bush administration have proven to be mistaken or empty. Most obviously, Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction. Nor is there any credible evidence that the 9/11 attackers were in any material way aided by Saddam Hussein. And while it’s true that Hussein was an evil tyrant, this fact is neither among the chief reasons first offered by the administration for going to war in Iraq, nor is it a sufficient reason for going to war.

The world is full of evil tyrants. But given the nature of government, it’s not the role of government A to sit in judgment of government B. The most legitimate role for any government is to protect its own people from violence. Whenever Uncle Sam unleashes his mighty military in foreign countries for the purpose of protecting foreign citizens from their own governments, he weakens his ability to protect Americans.

This weakening takes place on three fronts. One is that troops, munitions, and other resources are diverted away from the task of protecting Americans. Even a country as wealthy as the United States does not have unlimited resources to devote to military excursions.

The second (and I think more serious) reason that such interventions imperil Americans is that no one – often including the intended beneficiaries of our intervention – likes a powerful entity unilaterally throwing its weight around. The reasons for resenting even well-intentioned foreign interventions by powerful militaries are complex, likely involving a suspicion that the intervening military really has a hidden motive, or that despite its good intentions, a foreign power has too little understanding of the nuances of the situation to do anything beyond kill today’s bad guys.

Who among us trusts a powerful and heavily armed foreign behemoth – an alien giant capable of killing millions in short order – merely because the behemoth assures us that it means well? Who among us would not be inspired to do all that we can to terrorize that behemoth if we feared (accurately or not) that it really intends to harm our homeland and loved ones?

The third and related way in which even ‘benevolent’ foreign interventions put Americans in deeper peril is that our interventions are too likely to backfire. Even if everyone from the President down to the junior janitor at Lockheed Martin intends only to help foreigners escape the grips of their home-grown tyrants, political and cultural situations are always more complex than politicians imagine them to be. Why was Saddam Hussein ruling Iraq? Were Iraqis just incredibly unlucky that such a vile dictator somehow grabbed power and ruled ruthlessly for so long? Or was Hussein’s tyranny at least as much a consequence as a cause of a dysfunctional cultural, political, and economic situation? If so, then removing the dictator does not remove the complex underlying causes that fueled his tyranny.

Removing a dictator is child’s play for a military as awesome as that of the United States. So Hussein is now history. But because the underlying causes that put him in power to begin with are still in place in Iraq, that country likely will soon revert to another dictator – one different in name and different in style, but a brute nevertheless. He will oppress, kill, and impoverish. (The notion that a poweful military can uproot dysfunctional cultural, political, and economic root causes of tyranny strikes me as naive in the extreme. Just as your local policeman can protect Ms. Jones from her husband's physical abuse but can't hope to counsel their marriage into a happy one, so, too can a military remove a tyrannt like Hussein but can't hope to cure that society of what really ails it.)


And Americans will be blamed for this tragedy. The fact that our President meant well will matter little to people tyrannized by the government that replaced the one we abolished. Americans will be hated more intensely, and suffer greater danger of terrorist attacks.

Of course, the Bush administration insists that removing Hussein from power was done not just to help ordinary Iraqis but also to help protect Americans – that this war is in America’s self-interest.

Perhaps. Those of us not privy to the intelligence that the President receives cannot say for certain that, in early 2003, it was unreasonable to suppose that Hussein posed a serious-enough threat to Americans to justify a military invasion. The fact that weapons of mass destruction were not found in Iraq doesn’t prove that the risk that was then perceived wasn’t high enough to justify the invasion.

But surely in matters of war we must hold leaders to a super-high standard of accuracy. Because military intelligence is secret (meaning that ordinary people have no knowledge of its details), it's simply too easy for politicians to lie about it or to misrepresent it -- to use it for political purposes. This reason alone counsels that we insist that those who exercise power in a free society be especially cautious before launching military invasions.


But when combined with the fact that even many people who distrust the government to deliver mail and regulate factory safety lose their reservations of that same government when it is off on military adventures, the case for heightened skepticism of military adventures grows even stronger.

Why should we believe George Bush that Saddam Hussein’s regime posed a significant threat to Americans? Because he says so? He also says that ‘price-gougers’ are a real villains who should be punished. Why should we believe him when he assures us that U.S. troops and guns will eventually bring freedom and prosperity to Iraq? Because he says so? He also said that steel tariffs will help the American economy.

What reason is there – beyond the mere will to trust leaders who send troops into harm’s way in foreign lands – to believe that these politicians are acting wisely and non-politically?

Without very hard evidence that American lives were at real risk of violent attack by Saddam Hussein, I cannot help but suspect that those in power in the U.S. have abused the vast trust that Americans give them in military matters. Libertarians properly don’t trust government to run our pension plans, to deliver health care, to educate our children, or to provide disaster relief. Why be so trusting of government to wage war?

Sincerely,
Don Boudreaux
(originally posted at Cafe Hayek)

Amongst those injured (& killed) in the Bali bombings of the 1st October, were a number of people from Newcastle, New South Wales, where I live. Some of those injured were prominent locally: one was the head of a substantial construction firm, another the head of a very large law firm, with offices in several cities & towns. None of those involved were known to me personally, but Newcastle has many of the characteristics of a small town & many people will be affected, directly & indirectly.

What happened: A group of parents & children were on a joint holiday in Bali. Most of the children (of all ages) attend a well-known Catholic school in Newcastle. Parents were waiting for dinner to be served at a beach restaurant, when the suicide bombings occurred. Many of the children were, fortunately, at the hotel. Many of those injured are still seriously ill in hospitals in Bali, Singapore, & Darwin (in the Northern Territory in Australia.)

Indonesians were, of course, the largest single group amongst those hurt & killed. There were Japanese, Koreans, one or two Americans; -- more information will, of course, emerge shortly.

The President of Indonesia condemned the bombings, as did senior Muslim clerics in Australia. The bombings are, of course, purely political: the group involved want to overthrow the present -- relatively less ‘Islamic’ -- regime in Indonesia, & have a strict ‘Islamic’ government instead:- as _they_ define ‘Islamic’. And once again, innocent people are caught in the political crossfire & suffer grievously -- because someone wants political power, -- because of all that power brings.

Alvaro Vargas Llosa discusses in a new article what allows for reforms in developing countries. In particular, he addresses a new IMF study that

"looked at sixty-five countries that have undergone institutional reform in the last three decades, asking itself what determines institutional change. This is where the study runs into some trouble. To answer this question they conducted econometric exercises mixing the data from the various countries and coming up with certain patterns."

However,

"The problem is that econometric exercises don’t really work with factors that have to do with ideas, choices, and historical contexts rather than numbers."

Llosa says the real answer lies in leaders and crises.

Far more disturbing than the Bush administration's decision to give away the store with regard to Katrina relief are the increasing calls to weaken the Posse Comitatus Act, the longstanding federal statute that restricts the federal government's ability to use the military as a police force. That statute embodies the traditional American distrust of the use of standing armies to keep the peace domestically. But President Bush, Senator Warner, and others want to see it abrogated for the purposes of disaster relief. That could lead to collateral damage of civilian life and liberty. Worse, it could lead to further domestic militarization. Once we normalize the idea that when civilian institutions do a lousy job, the proper response is to call in the troops, we've undermined a fundamental principle of republican government. Small r, of course. For more on this issue, see here and here.

[cross-posted at Austro-Athenian Empire]

During the last Mises University I was interviewed by the dreaded MISEScreants -- known by day as GMU economics grad students Adam Martin and (Molinari Institute Research Fellow) Dan D'Amico. Click here to hear my idle musings on Aristotle, Kant, Wittgenstein, Mises, Hayek, Herbert Spencer, Benjamin Tucker, Gustave de Molinari, the Molinari Institute, the Mises Institute, the Auburn Philosophy Department, apriorism, anarchism, feminism, libertarian factionalism, and free-market anti-capitalism. (I had a bad cold that week, so please bear with my frequent coughing and even-worse-than-usual voice.)

Audiofiles of some of my Mises U. talks from that week are also now online: Mises versus Friedman on Method, Apriorism and Positivism in the Social Sciences, and Ethical Assumptions of Economics.