Month: July 2014

The recent water crisis in Detroit
has brought renewed attention to the plight of the city, where many
residents have not
paid their water bills and are in danger of having their pipes
shut off. It’s just one symptom of the disease that’s all but
killed the now bankrupt Motor City.

Republican Gov. Rick Snyder has prescribed a cure: the
installation of emergency city manager Kevyn Orr. Orr has broad
authority under state law to change city policy, cancel contracts,
slash spending, and privatize services.

That solution has rankled some on the left, who seem to have
rediscovered the concept of federalism now that they have an
instance of a Republican-controlled government taking over a
smaller municipality. Sally Kohn wrote in
The Daily Beast that the state takeover of Detroit amounts
to white Republicans stripping black people of their autonomy:

So in the fall of 2013, Detroit voters went to the polls to
elect a new mayor and City Council, but it didn’t matter. The
powers of the mayor and City Council have effectively been
suspended. Detroit’s emergency manager, Kevyn Orr, appointed by
Snyder, has all the power and then some. A Democratic city that
elected Democratic leaders is now controlled by the appointee of a
Republican governor.

Or, to put it differently, Detroit—a majority
African-American city—is now controlled by a governor
elected by a majority of
white voters in the state. It really doesn’t matter that
Kevyn Orr, the state-appointed emergency manager, is black, nor
that Mike Duggan, Detroit’s mayor, is white. What matters is that
half of the state’s black population lives in Detroit. So through
the state takeover, “half of black Michiganders have essentially
lost the right to vote,” says Ife Kilimanjaro, co-director of the
East Michigan Environmental Action Council.

I’m sympathetic to this argument. Local actors are typically
better positioned to address their community’s needs, and mandates
handed down from on high by distant government bodies are often
ill-advised. By the same logic, Kohn must surely oppose the
Affordable Care Act as an unjust usurpation of states’ sovereign
right to set their own healthcare policies? Alas, no: Kohn
found 317 million reasons to support the law.

Writing in
The New York Times, Yale University philosophy professor
Jason Stanley bemoans that the imposition of an emergency manager
has stripped Detroit residents of their “freedom and equality.” Woe
to our democracy:

The Nazi political theorist Carl Schmitt was a fierce critic of
liberal democracy. He argued that liberal democracy was incoherent
because of what he called the problem of the exception. In
emergency situations, there is not enough time to act
democratically. In an emergency, someone would have to declare an
exception to suspend the normal democratic process and handle the
emergency. Schmitt argued that whoever had the power to declare an
emergency situation and override the democratic process would be
tempted to overuse that power, and declare nonemergency situations
to be states of exception. This person would be in effect the
sovereign.

The language of the emergency manager laws is that of exception.
Calling the situation an “emergency,” and the undemocratically
selected financial manager an “emergency manager” is nothing other
than a declaration of the anti-democratic nature of what has
occurred. Detroit does not face an immediate threat from a hostile
invading army. To suppose that financial exigency or advancing an
agenda of privatization for corporate gain are reasons to suspend
democracy is to capitulate to its worst enemies.

Okay, democracy has been suspended. Meh?

I will note that prior to state intervention, Detroit languished
for decades under
extremely corrupt but technically democratic (and also Democratic)
management. Its city officials—from the lowest public employee
to the mayor—were not merely criminally negligent but also
negligent criminals. Evil bureaucrats bribed, stole, and swindled
Detroit into utter ruin. It seems inhumane to me that anyone could
think this result was what city residents deserved as long as some
chunk of them cast ballots authorizing it on behalf of everyone
else. What about all the people who didn’t approve of their city
government’s criminal dealings? 

Now, if people like Kohn and Stanley are actually suggesting
that Detroit suffers from too much big government
planning, I could work with that. Indeed, there’s a great
case to be made that large swaths of the city should be turned
over to private individuals with better ideas and management
skills. Privatization of city services is actually one of Orr’s
goals, and I look forward to the day when neither the state nor the
local government has much say over how city affairs are
conducted.

That’s not what these left-leaning critics of the
emergency financial manager law are suggesting, of course. It seems
they aren’t too concerned leaving Detroit to rot under the corrupt
tutelage of Kwame
Kilpatrick, Monica Conyers, or some other crime lord, as long
as precious democracy is maintained (in this case, at least).

For more on fixing Detroit, watch Reason
TV’s “Anarchy in Detroit.”

Another week, another botched killing under
the legal euphemism of capital punishment. After
macabre screw-ups in
Arizona and Ohio, it was Nevada’s turn last week, when
double-murderer Joseph
Rudolph Wood III took about two hours to die. The specific
problem this time around was an apparently unreliable “cocktail” of
the drugs used in the lethal injection process.

But let’s face it: There’s no good way to
kill a person, even one as completely unsympathetic as Wood (he
killed his ex-girlfriend and her father, shooting them at
point-blank range). As a libertarian, I’m not surprised that the
state is so incompetent that it can’t even kill people efficiently.
But I’m far more outraged by the idea that anyone anywhere
seriously thinks the death penalty passes for good politics or sane
policy. It’s expensive, ineffective, and most of all, deeply
offensive to ideals of truly limited government.

That’s the start of my
latest Daily Beast column. I run through arguments
about how expensive capital punishment is, its ineffectiveness on
murder rates, and the reality that innocent people are on death row
before offering up this:

The state’s first role—and arguably its only one—is protecting
the lives and property of its citizens. In everything it does –
from collecting taxes to seizing property for public works to
incentivizing “good” behaviors and habits—it should use the least
violence or coercion possible. No matter how despicable murderers
can be, the state can make sure we’re safe by locking them up
behind bars for the rest of their—and our—lives. That’s not only a
cheaper answer than state-sanctioned murder, it’s a more moral one,
too.

Read the whole thing.

• Before the
  House voted, largely along party lines, to authorize a lawsuit
  against President Obama, Rep.
  Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Tex.) suggested on the House floor
  yesterday that the lawsuit against the president was a “veiled
  attempt” at impeachment and claimed Democrats never tried to
  impeach President Bush even though he “pushed” America into the
  Iraq War. In fact, Rep. Lee co-sponsored a bill to impeach Bush in
  2008. Democrats continue to use the threat of impeachment,
  suggested by Democrats, to raise money and political support.
• In a town hall meeting yesterday, Governor
  Chris Christie (R-N.J.) warned that the state government won’t
  be able to meet all of its pensions obligations.
• The Peace
  Corps is evacuating from Liberia, Guinea, and Sierra
  Leone over concerns about the ongoing Ebola outbreak
  while Doctors
  Without Borders warns the epidemic is out of control.
• Israel says it will investigate the shelling of a U.N. school
  in Gaza. A
  government spokesperson said he was sure Israel would apologize if
  it finds it was responsible for the attack.
• Prosecutors in
  China have formally charged with “separatism” a Beijing-based
  Uighur professor who disappeared with seven students seven months
  ago, although there was no mention of the students.
• George Bush will be writing a book about his father,
  George Bush.

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here.

A man, an
American citizen, sits in his car as a U.S. Border Patrol agent
insists that he roll down his window. He refuses. Agents use
battering rams to smash the windows. Still, the driver refuses to
leave his car, so he is hit with a Taser from two sides. He
screams. It would be bad enough if this scene, captured on video
and shown recently on John Stossel’s Fox News special “Policing
America,” had happened right at a U.S. border. But it happened far
from the border. The U.S. government, writes Sheldon Richman,
regards a large part of the country as close enough to a border or
coast to justify treating individuals — citizens or not — as though
they have no rights whatsoever

A man, an
American citizen, sits in his car as a U.S. Border Patrol agent
insists that he roll down his window. He refuses. Agents use
battering rams to smash the windows. Still, the driver refuses to
leave his car, so he is hit with a Taser from two sides. He
screams. It would be bad enough if this scene, captured on video
and shown recently on John Stossel’s Fox News special “Policing
America,” had happened right at a U.S. border. But it happened far
from the border. The U.S. government, writes Sheldon Richman,
regards a large part of the country as close enough to a border or
coast to justify treating individuals — citizens or not — as though
they have no rights whatsoever

David Frum presents himself to the world as a level-headed
moderate, a man repelled by crazy fringe figures and conspiracy
theories. The center-right pundit and former Bush speechwriter also
recently spent a day declaring that three major media outlets were
faking images from the Gaza war, borrowing this analysis from a
blogger who thinks he once took
a snapshot of a ghost-cat as it was dematerializing.

Here’s the backstory. On July 24, Reuters, the AP, and The
New York Times all published photos of two brothers in
blood-soaked clothes at a Gaza hospital. The men’s home had been
destroyed in an Israeli airstrike, and the blood belonged to their
father, who had been heavily injured in the attack. Frum then fired
off a series of tweets pronouncing the photos fakes and speculating
about why Hamas’ propagandists had created them. The sole source
for his accusations was a blog
post by a fellow named Thomas Wictor.

I won’t waste your time describing Wictor’s argument, because at
this point even Frum doesn’t accept it. The photojournalism
site BagNews
thoroughly debunked the charges, and LobeLong scored
an interview with
Wictor that made it pretty clear that this was not a well-grounded
man. (In addition to confirming that his ghost-cat post was not a
joke, Wictor told LobeLong that you can safely conclude a
Palestinian is a Hamas operative if he has a beard with no
mustache.) Yesterday Frum finally
retracted his accusations in a post at The
Atlantic.

Frum’s retraction was headlined “An Apology,” but it’s one of
those yes-but apologies where the author spends most of his time
making excuses for his error. Frum explains his “skepticism” about
the images—that’s what he calls it, his “skepticism”—in great
detail, but he never acknowledges that his tweets were not simply
skeptical: They swallowed Wictor’s analysis uncritically, declaring
forthrightly that the pictures were fake. Readers might also notice
that while Frum apologizes to one of the photographers he accused
of deception, he doesn’t spare a single word for the people in the
photo, though it is if anything even more offensive to accuse them
of faking their grief.

Because I spend a lot of time writing about
political paranoia, I can’t help remembering the many times
Frum has written or said things like
this:

I realize there’s something absurd in trying to debunk
conspiracy theories. People don’t reason their way into them, and
they are not reasoned out of them.

Now he has spent a day promoting a
conspiracy theory of his own. And while he was eventually reasoned
out of it—apparently you can do that after all—his retraction may
still give you the impression he thinks the flood of bloody images
from Gaza is some sort of Matrix that would vanish if we all popped
the red pill.

Frum is also the guy who gave George W. Bush the phrase “axis of
evil,” in which those famous rivals, Saddam’s Iraq and the mullahs’
Iran, were supposedly secretly
aligned. (That’s what an “axis” is, you know. An alliance.) So
the man is no stranger to dubious conspiracy tales. But he
consistently describes
them as though they’re something those other people
do, not a phenomenon you can see among establishment figures like
Frum as well as fringy folks like Alex Jones. Let this episode be a
reminder that paranoia can flourish at the top as well as the
bottom of the social pecking order.