Category: reason

Opposing War With Russia Doesn’t Require Excusing Putin’s Aggression


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As a long-time critic of American military interventionism, I’ve been dismayed by the lack of moral clarity expressed by some libertarians and conservatives regarding Russia’s inexcusable attack on Ukraine. There’s a difference between opposing, say, direct American military interference with a nuclear-armed Russia and excusing its autocratic leader, Vladimir Putin.

Sadly, many of these folks haven’t just gotten close to the latter. They’ve gone over the line. It’s one thing to argue that perhaps the United States shouldn’t have pushed the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) to Russia’s borders and another to sound like those old Soviet commentators spewing unsophisticated agitprop.

For instance, former Reagan administration official Paul Craig Roberts made this argument in the, er, libertarian “anti-war” LewRockwell.com: “(T)he chance of a wider war would be far less if the Kremlin had committed all of the invasion forces and used whatever conventional weapons necessary regardless of civilian casualties to quickly end the war, while refusing to be delayed and distracted by negotiations and Western bleating.”

Using “whatever conventional weapons necessary” doesn’t sound like an anti-war idea, nor does the invasion fit Roberts’ description of a Russian “demilitarization” of Ukraine. That description is so absurd it reminds me of the cheesiest efforts of Saddam Hussein’s propagandist, Baghdad Bob, who always claimed that Iraqi was rousting American armed forces. I’m more concerned about war crimes than Western bleating, but what do I know?

Former GOP presidential candidate Pat Buchanan even called Putin “a Russian nationalist, patriot, traditionalist and a cold and ruthless realist looking out to preserve Russia as the great and respected power it once was and he believes it can be again.” That’s high praise from the nationalist, traditionalist Buchanan. His columns have blamed the Russian invasion on the United States, and excused Putin’s seizing of Crimea: “Teddy Roosevelt stole Panama with similar remorse.”

It’s far too easy to find glowing descriptions of Putin on the nationalist right, and not just from Donald Trump. “Remember that Zelensky is a thug,” Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R–N.C.) said recently. “Remember that the Ukrainian government is incredibly corrupt and is incredibly evil and has been pushing woke ideologies.”

It’s actually not that hard to understand this fascination with Putin and similarly minded autocratic leaders such as Hungary’s Viktor Orban. “See, this is the thing,” wrote American Conservative pundit Rod Dreher last year (who has made a pilgrimage to Hungary). “Putin, Orban, and all the illiberal leaders…are all completely clear and completely correct on the society-destroying nature of wokeness and postliberal leftism.” Well, the Italians were right about trains, but you know how that went.

Dreher has criticized the Russian invasion, but like other populist conservatives he doesn’t spend much time examining allegations that Putin’s government murders journalists, poisons political foes, and imprisons people who participate in peaceful protests. These far-right conservatives like that he’s a nationalist, so-called patriot tough guy who doesn’t put up with open immigration, “fake” media criticism, or anything, well, gay-related.

Many conservatives seem willing to toss aside our nation’s constitutional protections and market economy in favor of post-liberal autocrats because they’re frustrated by our nation’s cultural tilt. Prominent conservative writer Sohrab Amari famously tweeted that he’s “at peace with a Chinese-led 21st century,” because “(l)ate-liberal America is too dumb and decadent to last as a superpower.”

Liberal democracy is perhaps too messy for them. But what explains the views of many libertarians?

“(L)obbyists for the military-industrial-complex are already ‘explaining’ to a very receptive Capitol Hill audience why the Ukraine crisis justifies increasing the military budget to ‘counter the threats’ from Russia, China, and whoever else can serve as a convenient boogeyman,” wrote former congressman and libertarian icon Ron Paul, in a column remarkable for its level of free association.

Paul labeled Putin the “new coronavirus,” and seemed more worried that Big Tech companies were censoring people who “question the U.S. government’s claims regarding the Ukraine crisis” than he was about the Russian military’s attack on hospitals and apartments. Such thinking is harder to unpack, but I believe it stems from the habit of perpetual outrage at our own government’s abuses.

There are plenty of zany right-leaning hot takes that take an even more unusual view, such as this idea from a “Forbidden Knowledge TV” column: “Vladimir Putin is good friends with Henry Kissinger, the ultimate New World Order Deep State toady here, in the United States; the Rockefeller poodle who made his living serving as a shill for the New World Order.” Yes, that explains everything.

The Ukrainian situation is not a moral conundrum. It’s wrong for Russia to invade a neighboring country. The United States should avoid direct conflict but help Ukraine defend itself. Despite their flaws, democracies are better than tyrannies. The U.S. government does many awful things, but it isn’t actually to blame for everything. I remember when conservatives and libertarians used to understand those points.

This column was first published in The Orange County Register.

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Economic Penalties for Putin’s Aggression Threaten To Impoverish the World


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Casualties were inevitable the moment Vladimir Putin sent Russia’s army across the border into Ukraine. But after the initial tally in lost and shattered lives, destroyed homes, and depleted wealth, we’re likely to discover that we’ve also lost a world of expanded trade that pulled billions of people out of poverty by removing barriers to free exchange. The walls were already rising because of pandemic restrictions and politicians’ thirst for greater control, but the war in Ukraine has accelerated a process that threatens human freedom and prosperity.

Economic sanctions and the retreat of Western businesses in response to the invasion of Ukraine have left Russia largely isolated. But they’ve also made clear that the integration of the global economy in recent decades wasn’t inevitable and is vulnerable to political decision-making.

“The damage sanctions are doing to the Russian economy and the substantial costs to central Europe if Russia cuts off its access to natural gas and oil in response may make governments pursue self-reliance and disentangle themselves from economic connections,” warns economist Adam S. Posen in Foreign Affairs. He supports sanctioning Russia on ethical and national security grounds but predicts far-reaching consequences. That governments around the globe are likely to take lessons from the sanctions against Russia was emphasized by Putin himself.

“Now everybody knows that any assets could be basically stolen,” the Russian dictator seethed in a March 16 speech in response to the seizure of foreign reserves held overseas. He predicted that countries would respond by converting foreign reserves into physical stores of wealth, such as food, land, and gold that aren’t vulnerable to international action. There’s enormous irony in a national leader who violated rules against rolling tanks into neighboring countries caught off-guard by the confiscation of funds entrusted to other nations, but Putin wasn’t alone in predicting strong reactions. Predictably, some even see opportunity in encouraging disengagement with global systems.

“The harsh reality has sobering implications for developing countries vulnerable to sanctions,” economic columnist Huang Yongfu noted for China’s state-owned CGTN. “In order to secure strategic independence, developing countries should urgently coalesce around and collaborate with emerging countries such as China to develop alternative financial and technological infrastructures that make them sanctions-proof.”

It’s unlikely that anybody really believes that the Chinese government, which developed a social-credit system for keeping its own citizens in line, would balk at using financial clout to twist arms. But it’s probable that actions taken towards Russia make the weaponization of trade and finance seem inevitable and push some governments to seek like-minded partners, or at least alternative systems to which they can turn. That’s especially true since the world was already breaking apart.

Posen emphasizes that, starting well before the war, “populists and nationalists have erected barriers to free trade, investment, immigration, and the spread of ideas” and China tussled with the West over trade and security issues, resulting in barriers that corrode globalization.

To this you can add recent supply-chain disruptions largely caused by lockdown orders and other policy reactions to the COVID-19 pandemic. Relying on suppliers and partners across the world has come to seem enormously risky, spurring a return to local manufacturing, even if that means higher costs.

“COVID-19 has disrupted global value chains (GVCs),” four economists noted last year for the Center for Economic Policy Research’s VoxEU. “Some observers expect firms to respond by abandoning their pursuit of lower production costs in favour of building stronger resilience in production – by reshoring, nearshoring, and/or diversifying sources of production.”

That process has been encouraged in the United States by two consecutive presidents, first Donald Trump and then Joe Biden, wedded to economic nationalism. “When we use taxpayers’ dollars to rebuild America, we are going to do it by buying American: buy American products, support American jobs,” Biden vowed in the recent State of the Union address. He’s unlikely to get much pushback from the public; while support for free trade rose under Trump it has since declined, according to Gallup. More Americans (61 percent) see trade as good for economic growth than see it as a threat (35 percent), but the numbers swing more as a matter of partisan politics than according to principled commitment.

That’s a shame because free-trade advocates are correct. While a strong case can be made that free trade is a basic human right involving consensual relations among individuals, it’s also a miraculous cure for misery. Over the last half-century or so, economists have rediscovered comparative advantage and that “trade openness is a necessary—even if not sufficient—condition for economic growth and reducing poverty,” as Pierre Lemieux wrote for the Cato Institute’s Regulation in 2020.

“A dramatic increase in developing country participation in trade has coincided with an equally sharp decline in extreme poverty worldwide,” agrees the World Bank. Specifically, the organization found, “the global poverty rate, defined as the share of world’s population living below the [international poverty line], has dropped from 35.9 percent in 1990 to 10 percent in 2015 – more than a 70 percent reduction.”

But that progress ground to a halt in recent years as international commerce slowed. The number of people living below the poverty line ticked back up, while Americans experience economic pain of their own. Higher barriers and long-term reductions in trade can only make things worse.

“If the global economy splinters further and countries retreat, from a productive perspective, to a domestic or regional focus, the implications are quite large,” finance reporter Ron Insana comments at CNBC. “Prices for domestically made goods are generally higher that those that are produced abroad. That means a relative shift in inflationary pressures beyond the pandemic-induced price spikes we’ve already seen.”

“With less economic interconnectedness, the world will see lower trend growth and less innovation,” concurs Posen, who predicts that the world will fracture into competing economic blocs. “Domestic incumbent companies and industries will have more power to demand special protections.”

Economic and financial sanctions may cause Russia pain and add to the cost of invading Ukraine. But as governments around the world raise barriers and try to insulate themselves from future uses of weaponized trade and finance, the result is certain to be a world that is poorer and less free.

The post Economic Penalties for Putin's Aggression Threaten To Impoverish the World appeared first on Reason.com.

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Economic Penalties for Putin’s Aggression Threaten To Impoverish the World


sipaphotosthirteen212975

Casualties were inevitable the moment Vladimir Putin sent Russia’s army across the border into Ukraine. But after the initial tally in lost and shattered lives, destroyed homes, and depleted wealth, we’re likely to discover that we’ve also lost a world of expanded trade that pulled billions of people out of poverty by removing barriers to free exchange. The walls were already rising because of pandemic restrictions and politicians’ thirst for greater control, but the war in Ukraine has accelerated a process that threatens human freedom and prosperity.

Economic sanctions and the retreat of Western businesses in response to the invasion of Ukraine have left Russia largely isolated. But they’ve also made clear that the integration of the global economy in recent decades wasn’t inevitable and is vulnerable to political decision-making.

“The damage sanctions are doing to the Russian economy and the substantial costs to central Europe if Russia cuts off its access to natural gas and oil in response may make governments pursue self-reliance and disentangle themselves from economic connections,” warns economist Adam S. Posen in Foreign Affairs. He supports sanctioning Russia on ethical and national security grounds but predicts far-reaching consequences. That governments around the globe are likely to take lessons from the sanctions against Russia was emphasized by Putin himself.

“Now everybody knows that any assets could be basically stolen,” the Russian dictator seethed in a March 16 speech in response to the seizure of foreign reserves held overseas. He predicted that countries would respond by converting foreign reserves into physical stores of wealth, such as food, land, and gold that aren’t vulnerable to international action. There’s enormous irony in a national leader who violated rules against rolling tanks into neighboring countries caught off-guard by the confiscation of funds entrusted to other nations, but Putin wasn’t alone in predicting strong reactions. Predictably, some even see opportunity in encouraging disengagement with global systems.

“The harsh reality has sobering implications for developing countries vulnerable to sanctions,” economic columnist Huang Yongfu noted for China’s state-owned CGTN. “In order to secure strategic independence, developing countries should urgently coalesce around and collaborate with emerging countries such as China to develop alternative financial and technological infrastructures that make them sanctions-proof.”

It’s unlikely that anybody really believes that the Chinese government, which developed a social-credit system for keeping its own citizens in line, would balk at using financial clout to twist arms. But it’s probable that actions taken towards Russia make the weaponization of trade and finance seem inevitable and push some governments to seek like-minded partners, or at least alternative systems to which they can turn. That’s especially true since the world was already breaking apart.

Posen emphasizes that, starting well before the war, “populists and nationalists have erected barriers to free trade, investment, immigration, and the spread of ideas” and China tussled with the West over trade and security issues, resulting in barriers that corrode globalization.

To this you can add recent supply-chain disruptions largely caused by lockdown orders and other policy reactions to the COVID-19 pandemic. Relying on suppliers and partners across the world has come to seem enormously risky, spurring a return to local manufacturing, even if that means higher costs.

“COVID-19 has disrupted global value chains (GVCs),” four economists noted last year for the Center for Economic Policy Research’s VoxEU. “Some observers expect firms to respond by abandoning their pursuit of lower production costs in favour of building stronger resilience in production – by reshoring, nearshoring, and/or diversifying sources of production.”

That process has been encouraged in the United States by two consecutive presidents, first Donald Trump and then Joe Biden, wedded to economic nationalism. “When we use taxpayers’ dollars to rebuild America, we are going to do it by buying American: buy American products, support American jobs,” Biden vowed in the recent State of the Union address. He’s unlikely to get much pushback from the public; while support for free trade rose under Trump it has since declined, according to Gallup. More Americans (61 percent) see trade as good for economic growth than see it as a threat (35 percent), but the numbers swing more as a matter of partisan politics than according to principled commitment.

That’s a shame because free-trade advocates are correct. While a strong case can be made that free trade is a basic human right involving consensual relations among individuals, it’s also a miraculous cure for misery. Over the last half-century or so, economists have rediscovered comparative advantage and that “trade openness is a necessary—even if not sufficient—condition for economic growth and reducing poverty,” as Pierre Lemieux wrote for the Cato Institute’s Regulation in 2020.

“A dramatic increase in developing country participation in trade has coincided with an equally sharp decline in extreme poverty worldwide,” agrees the World Bank. Specifically, the organization found, “the global poverty rate, defined as the share of world’s population living below the [international poverty line], has dropped from 35.9 percent in 1990 to 10 percent in 2015 – more than a 70 percent reduction.”

But that progress ground to a halt in recent years as international commerce slowed. The number of people living below the poverty line ticked back up, while Americans experience economic pain of their own. Higher barriers and long-term reductions in trade can only make things worse.

“If the global economy splinters further and countries retreat, from a productive perspective, to a domestic or regional focus, the implications are quite large,” finance reporter Ron Insana comments at CNBC. “Prices for domestically made goods are generally higher that those that are produced abroad. That means a relative shift in inflationary pressures beyond the pandemic-induced price spikes we’ve already seen.”

“With less economic interconnectedness, the world will see lower trend growth and less innovation,” concurs Posen, who predicts that the world will fracture into competing economic blocs. “Domestic incumbent companies and industries will have more power to demand special protections.”

Economic and financial sanctions may cause Russia pain and add to the cost of invading Ukraine. But as governments around the world raise barriers and try to insulate themselves from future uses of weaponized trade and finance, the result is certain to be a world that is poorer and less free.

The post Economic Penalties for Putin's Aggression Threaten To Impoverish the World appeared first on Reason.com.

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Wordle


miniswordle_publicdomain

Wordle, a game hosted on the website of creator Josh Wardle, is simple: The object is to guess a five-letter word using no more than six attempts. Once a guess is entered, the computer highlights the letters that appear in the solution. A correctly placed letter is shaded green. That’s it! Most puzzles take just a few minutes to solve.

So why has this straightforward game taken social media by storm? In mid-December, Wardle made it easier for players to share their scores without revealing the answers, creating considerable competition. It’s rewarding to win in four guesses—two, even more so. Entire Twitter threads are dedicated to furious debates over the ideal starter word. (This reviewer prefers stare; adieu is annoyingly popular among the unwashed masses.) There’s only one puzzle each day, so Wordle should never prompt complaints about screen addiction. It’s a wholesome, brief distraction—in an ideal world, exactly what social media would exist for.

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Wordle


miniswordle_publicdomain

Wordle, a game hosted on the website of creator Josh Wardle, is simple: The object is to guess a five-letter word using no more than six attempts. Once a guess is entered, the computer highlights the letters that appear in the solution. A correctly placed letter is shaded green. That’s it! Most puzzles take just a few minutes to solve.

So why has this straightforward game taken social media by storm? In mid-December, Wardle made it easier for players to share their scores without revealing the answers, creating considerable competition. It’s rewarding to win in four guesses—two, even more so. Entire Twitter threads are dedicated to furious debates over the ideal starter word. (This reviewer prefers stare; adieu is annoyingly popular among the unwashed masses.) There’s only one puzzle each day, so Wordle should never prompt complaints about screen addiction. It’s a wholesome, brief distraction—in an ideal world, exactly what social media would exist for.

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Four Hours at the Capitol


minis4hoursattheCapitol_HBO

Eduardo Nicolas Alvear Gonzalez, the dude in flag pants who was famously recorded smoking pot in the Capitol Rotunda on January 6, 2021, ended up pleading guilty to one nonviolent misdemeanor. In an HBO documentary about the Capitol riot, he explains that he became a Donald Trump supporter after learning that the president was battling a sinister cabal responsible for sexually enslaving 800,000 children a year.

Despite his wacky beliefs, Gonzalez counts as a voice of reason compared to many of the other Trump followers we see and hear in Four Hours at the Capitol. He comes across as a joyful, wonderstruck tourist rather than an angry rioter. He even takes credit for helping to calm things down by sharing his stash with other demonstrators.

This “insurrection” included lots of peaceful trespassers like Gonzalez as well as vandals and thugs who destroyed property, attacked police officers, and terrified legislators. Although former President Jimmy Carter recently claimed the invaders “almost succeeded in preventing the democratic transfer of power,” they never came close to doing that. Even the most aggressive of them acted haphazardly, literally not knowing which way to turn, let alone what their ultimate goal was.

The outrageous but hapless assault on the Capitol was a humiliating spectacle for the United States, indisputable evidence of Trump’s reckless self-absorption, and a fitting end to a ridiculous presidency. But this movie makes it look more like a temper tantrum than an incipient coup.

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Four Hours at the Capitol


minis4hoursattheCapitol_HBO

Eduardo Nicolas Alvear Gonzalez, the dude in flag pants who was famously recorded smoking pot in the Capitol Rotunda on January 6, 2021, ended up pleading guilty to one nonviolent misdemeanor. In an HBO documentary about the Capitol riot, he explains that he became a Donald Trump supporter after learning that the president was battling a sinister cabal responsible for sexually enslaving 800,000 children a year.

Despite his wacky beliefs, Gonzalez counts as a voice of reason compared to many of the other Trump followers we see and hear in Four Hours at the Capitol. He comes across as a joyful, wonderstruck tourist rather than an angry rioter. He even takes credit for helping to calm things down by sharing his stash with other demonstrators.

This “insurrection” included lots of peaceful trespassers like Gonzalez as well as vandals and thugs who destroyed property, attacked police officers, and terrified legislators. Although former President Jimmy Carter recently claimed the invaders “almost succeeded in preventing the democratic transfer of power,” they never came close to doing that. Even the most aggressive of them acted haphazardly, literally not knowing which way to turn, let alone what their ultimate goal was.

The outrageous but hapless assault on the Capitol was a humiliating spectacle for the United States, indisputable evidence of Trump’s reckless self-absorption, and a fitting end to a ridiculous presidency. But this movie makes it look more like a temper tantrum than an incipient coup.

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Brickbat: Dog Gone

In China, the government of the city of Huizhou has apologized after public health workers beat a woman’s dog to death and promised the workers will be counseled and suspended. The woman was forced to go to a quarantine center after her boyfriend tested positive for COVID-19, and she was not allowed to bring her dog with her. Meanwhile, two public health workers were sent to disinfect her home. Video shows the workers cornering the dog in its room and beating it with metal rods and a stick. At first, the dog whimpers and cries. But it eventually falls silent and stops moving.

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