Jay Reding.com

Michael Totten, blogging from Baghdad, has a fascinating look at life in one Baghdad neighborhood:

“This is not what I expected in Baghdad,” I said.

“Most of what we’re doing doesn’t get reported in the media,” he said. “We’re not fighting a war here anymore, not in this area. We’ve moved way beyond that stage. We built a soccer field for the kids, bought all kinds of equipment, bought them school books and even chalk. Soon we’re installing 1,500 solar street lamps so they have light at night and can take some of the load off the power grid. The media only covers the gruesome stuff. We go to the sheiks and say hey man, what kind of projects do you want in this area? They give us a list and we submit the paperwork. When the projects get approved, we give them the money and help them buy stuff.”

Not everything they do is humanitarian work, unless you consider counter-terrorism humanitarian work. In my view, you should. Few Westerners think of personal security as a human right, but if you show up in Baghdad I’ll bet you will. Personal security may, in fact, be the most important human right. Without it the others mean little. People aren’t free if they have to hide in their homes from death squads and car bombs.

The “surge” is making progress, but that progress is normally hidden from public view by a media unwilling to report on it. Not all Iraq is as peaceful as the Graya’at neighborhood of Adhamiyah, or we wouldn’t be needed. The goal is to make as much of Iraq like Graya’at so that we aren’t needed any more.

What’s more important to note is that the kind of work being done here, interacting with local Iraqis and developing networks that help us identify and stop the terrorists, can’t be done from Kuwait or Okinawa or by a Predator drone flying at 35,000 feet. If we don’t have a presence in Iraq, we can’t do the things necessary to make life better for the people of Graya’at or anywhere else in Iraq. At the same time, terrorists will have unfettered access and will turn Iraq into another Afghanistan — a totalitarian hellhole in which radically austere Islamic law is enforced with the barrel of a gun or the blade of a knife.

For all the talk about how there’s no “military solution” to Iraq, most of what goes on in Iraq isn’t combat — it’s the sort of economic and political development activity that Totten witnessed in Graya’at. That sort of local-level development is ultimately what matters most in democratizing Iraq — a state can have the best-designed government ever put in place, but still fail as a democracy unless there is a civil society to support it. The goal of the “insurgency” in Iraq has been to disrupt the formation of civil society in Iraq by keeping everyone in fear — and slowly but surely that campaign is failing.

Totten’s on-the-ground reporting is exactly the sort of thing that the mainstream media should be doing — but have largely chosen not to. We in the States don’t get a balanced picture of what happens in Iraq, and most people are basing their opinions off of misinformation, disinformation, and gut-level feelings based on those faulty premises. If the American people truly knew what was going on in Iraq and could see it for themselves, those polling numbers would be the exact opposite of what they are now. That’s a message I’ve heard time and time again from those who have been in Iraq, and thankfully independent journalists like Michael Totten are doing the critical work of getting the fuller picture out.

David Bernstein notes that the head of US intelligence has warned that Hizballah has established sleeper cells in the United States, ready to strike if the US engages in military action against Iran.

I’m not particularly surprised about this — Hizballah is responsible for the murder of US citizens in Beirut and Saudi Arabia, and they have the Iranian financial backing to pull off even more ambitious acts if they wanted to. Getting into the United States is trivial — even after September 11, our visa procedures are still quite lax, and failing that we have two very porous borders with Canada and Mexico that make it easy for a foreign national to slip into the country.

That being said, I’m not sure that their plans would work as intended — if it were found that Iranian-backed agents were launching attacks in the US, it would make the American populace more rather than less likely to want to punish Iran for their actions. Then again, given the way in which the cancer of the blame-America-first mentality seems to have metastasized in this country, it could be that Hizballah knows us better than we know ourselves — certainly that’s the view al-Qaeda has of us, and we’re giving them every reason to believe it correct.

UPDATE: As Power Line notes, Hizballah has no problem finding a base of financial support in the United States, which makes it much less surprising that they would also have sleeper cells active here.

Investor’s Business Daily has an editorial noting polls showing an opposition to free trade and an increasing desire to increase taxes on the wealthy:

A Financial Times-Harris poll of more than a thousand people found that those in the U.S., Britain and France were three times more likely to think globalization hurts their country than helps it.

And “in response to fears of globalization and rising inequality,” wrote Financial Times reporter Chris Giles, “the public in all the rich countries surveyed . . . want their governments to increase taxation on those with the highest incomes.”

That is, people want to tax the rich — an age-old urge — believing it will somehow help feed the poor. Unfortunately for those who believe this, it doesn’t work that way.

“Taxing the rich” might be satisfying on some level, given the general level of envy people have for those who are more successful. But carried out as a matter of national policy, such ideas will have disastrous consequences for the world economy, leading to less growth, less investment, fewer jobs and lower standards of living.

It’s a well-established fact that globalization — simply another word for free trade — has been, overall, a major boon, raising both incomes and standards of living worldwide. And that includes rich countries as well as poor ones.

The problem is that most people don’t base their opinions on economic evidence, but on a combination of what the media tells them and unscientific feelings. Despite the fact that globalization has been one of the most important factors towards making the late-20th to early-21st Centuries a golden age of prosperity worldwide, people still use it as a convenient boogeyman. It plays on xenophobia in a time of uncertainty, which is virtually always a sure bet. Blaming globalization for the failure of socialism in places like France has been a staple of the left for some time — but even the socialistic French are embracing a more competitive worldview.

Likewise, the drive for higher taxes has a very simple explanation: jealousy. People want to take the successful down a peg in the futile hope that it will make themselves feel better. History and common sense makes it clear that such schemes never work, but that hasn’t stopped people from justifying tax policy on envy.

Yet there’s also a darker side to all this. Ilya Somin has a fascinating post at The Volokh Conspiracy on the economics of the Third Reich and how it matters in terms of policy debates today:

Two recent books further explain the socialist elements of Nazi economic policy, and will hopefully put the final nails in the coffin of the myth that the Nazis were “capitalists” or free marketeers. In The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy, historian Adam Tooze describes the statist nature of Nazi economic policy in great detail, and concludes that the Nazis imposed greater government control over the economy than any other noncommunist regime in modern history. (pp. 658-60). Tooze notes that, even before the outbreak of World War II, government military spending accounted for some 20% of the GDP, while much of the rest of the economy came under government control as a result of the Four Year Plan and other similar measures.

In Hitler’s Beneficiaries: : Plunder, Racial War, and the Nazi Welfare State, Gotz Aly argues on the basis of extensive evidence, that German support for Nazi rule was maintained by the creation of a massive welfare state funded in large part by plunder captured in Hitler’s foreign conquests, but also partly by means of “soak the rich” taxation within Germany itself…

These two new books are useful complements to Avraham Barkai’s 1990 work Nazi Economics, which explored the ideological origins of Nazi economic policy and showed how Nazi economic theorists explicitly advocated statism, while rejecting free markets. Like some modern opponents of globalization and free trade, the Nazis viewed economics as a zero-sum game between nations, where increasing wealth for one country could, in the long run, only be achieved by impoverishing or conquering others.

The same attitude seems to be popular today — which certainly doesn’t make anti-globalization advocates the same as Nazis — but allows for the kind of atmosphere in which totalitarian governments can flourish. Somin explains why this 60-year-old history is still relevant to today’s policy discussions:

Why does any of this matter today? The fact that the Nazis pursued socialist policies does not in and of itself discredit socialism, any more than Hitler’s apparent commitment to vegetarianism discredits the case against eating meat.

Nonetheless, the socialist element of National Socialism matters for three reasons. First, as noted above, some still claim that Nazism was a form of “capitalism” and try to use this association to discredit free markets. Second, and far more important, Tooze and Aly show that far-reaching state control over the economy was an essential element in Nazi policy, without which Hitler could not have carried out his plans for conquest and mass murder. It also helped quiesce potential German opposition to Nazi policies; both by imposing state control on economic resources that any opposition movement would need to support itself, and by “buying off” potential opponents through welfare state handouts (as Aly emphasizes).

The concentration of economic power in the hands of the state does not always lead to atrocities as extreme as Hitler’s. But it does significantly increase the risk that these types of abuses will occur - not to mention numerous lesser (though still severe) atrocities. In the twentieth century, both left-wing (communist) and right-wing (Nazi) forms of state domination of the ecoomy paved the way for war, repression, and mass murder. There is little reason to expect better results from similar policies in the future. This is an important point, given the recent renewed popularity of socialist ideas in some parts of the Third World, such as parts of Latin American.

While it’s unfair and inaccurate to say that anti-globalization forces are innately totalitarian, what can one say about the way in which many on the left are embracing the dictator Hugo Chávez at the same time he moves the country closer to one-party rule?

Ideas have consequences, and the consequences of a system in which states restrict free trade and engage in punitive taxation on the rich is that the state suddenly has a great deal more economic power. Whenever the state gains in economic power at the expense of the people, a measure of republican rule is lost and it becomes easier for the state to consolidate power. The state already has a virtual monopoly on violence (except in times of revolution) — giving them both the guns and the butter only makes it that much easier to take total control.

The problem with this globalization backlash is that it’s inevitably tied with increasing the power of the state — to control imports and exports, to manage the economy, and to regulate “fairness.” None of those things are acts which the state should be doing — a group of government bureaucrats are hardly the best people to be deciding what’s “fair” and what is not. By doing so, it expands the scope of government power and diminishes the power of the people. Not only is that economically unsound — there’s a direct correlation between high tax rates and economic under-performance — but it’s the sort of thing that makes it much easier for governments to become oppressive.

The lessons of the 20th Century make it clear that the keys to success are not in isolationism, but in an open society and a strong entrepreneurial ethic. The story of the 21st may be of how the increasingly decadent and self-absorbed West faded as the entrepreneurial Far East became the world’s superpowers — or it could be how in the face of economic problems, the same factors that led to the two most devastating wars in world history once again turned the world apart. As the great saying by Satayana goes, those who forget history are doomed to repeat it. The question is whether people are choosing to learn from history or make the same fatal mistakes once more.

UPDATE: Mitch Berg has more on the topic of what Hitler learned from the left. The mistake most people make is thinking that Hitler despised Communism because he disagreed with their economic theories — state control of production suited Hitler just fine. He wanted to exterminate the Communists (and the German labor unions who were heavily influenced by the Communists) because they posed a threat to his power.

It’s also important to note that the welfare state was a German invention — Otto von Bismarck is the intellectual heir to the welfare state as we know it now, and for Bismarck, the welfare state was ultimately a method of social control. By paying off the various groups in German society, the central government could rule freely. The Democratic Party in many ways tries to uphold the same general model — economic redistributionism as a way of centralizing society. Even if the Democrats don’t directly support the Bismarckian model, what they propose is virtually indistinguishable from it, and the results would likely be the same. Once the state seizes mass economic power, it’s much easier for that state to succumb to the autocratic and totalitarian temptations that every government has — which is why the Founders wisely restricted the scope and power of the central government to avoid that temptation. We undo that at our own peril.

UPDATE: And here’s another example of the “progressive” left shilling for Hugo Chávez.

John Bambenek is filing a complaint with the Federal Elections Commission against The Daily Kos, arguing that they are acting as a political committee and should be subject to FEC rules as such.

While I’m loathe to defend The Daily Kos and their hoards of raving, ravenous partisans, using the FEC as a hammer against political groups is a very bad idea. Bambenek explains his rationale in this way:

I first thought of this complaint during the Cindy Sheehan debacle over at Daily Kos, where Cindy pledged to run as an independent against Nancy Pelosi, and the Daily Kos basically turned on her. While some conservatives took great delight in this, I really didn’t care because it’s politics as usual. The right has thrown their fair share of people under the bus for not drinking the Kool-aid too.

However, the statement that the DailyKos was about electing Democrats stuck with me. I always assumed it was a standard left-wing group blog spouting the latest and greatest in left-wing diatribe. However, the statement that the blog exists to get Democrats elected is repeated in various places around the site, including statements by Kos himself.

Federal Election Commission rules apply for organizations that spend or contribute an equivalent of $1,000 per year in trying to influence elections for federal office. DailyKos is owned by Kos Media, a company, which makes it fit the definition of an organization. It surely spends at least $1,000 per year in hosting and based on what they charge (and get) for advertising, their support of candidates is certainly worth over $1,000 per year. Lastly, their self-identified purpose is to influence elections in the Democrats favor. They fit the criteria.

Some will argue that this is a slippery slope that will snare all bloggers. First, most bloggers aren’t organizations. Second, most bloggers are read by like 3 people and their posts are certainly not worth $1,000. Third, most bloggers don’t exist for the primary purpose of electing certain people to federal office.

Neither of those three are necessarily true — for example, Power Line is an organization of three writers located in different places. Power Line is one of the most influential blogs out there, worth well more than $1000, and they’re certainly a generally pro-Republican site (even if their goal isn’t specifically to get Republicans elected). Should Power Line be subject to the FEC?

Now granted, there’s some evidence that Kos’ recent warning to his fellow bloggers to “tone it down” might be a sign of collusion between Kos Media and Democratic operatives — that’s a much closer case. In cases where a blog is acting as nothing more than an agent of a political party, it’s a lot harder to argue that they shouldn’t be subject to FEC regulations. However, there’s still a question of just how much collusion there must be — simply getting one’s information from a party press release shouldn’t be enough. Talking with candidates or party officials shouldn’t be enough. Even if Kos Media has been pressured by Democratic Party leaders to keep the crazy to a minimum, is that enough to make The Daily Kos liable to FEC regulation?

I don’t think it’s categorically out of the question to subject a blog to FEC rules — at least not under the current state of the law — but to do so raises all sorts of problems in terms of how much protection political speech on the internet should have. I can’t stand The Daily Kos — I think that it’s a left-wing hate site that magnifies political vitriol and poisons our democracy. At the same time, I don’t want to have government further infringing upon the crucial democratic right to political speech. The Founders realized that political speech was absolutely essential and should be strongly protected — and even though the Kossacks are little better than the most vilest pamphleteers of the Founder’s day, they still deserve the same level of protection.

The answer to political speech that one doesn’t like isn’t to try to censor it, it is to speak back, and to do so more logically and respectfully than the other side. Fighting speech — even hate speech — with government censorship or regulation chafes against the First Amendment and should be done only in the most extreme of circumstances. Bambenek’s attempt to stifle The Daily Kos is understandable on some levels, but ultimately wrong. The government should not be in the business of regulating political speech on the internet so long as that speech is not threatening or in clear violation of the law — The Daily Kos may be disgusting, juvenile, and paranoid, but that hardly warrants the heavy hand of government placing a gag over it.

UPDATE: Eugene Volokh has more on the legal aspects on why bloggers are currently exempt from FEC regulation.

The New York Times Magazine has an interesting look inside the mind and the candidacy of Ron Paul. The Times makes an interesting reference to Hofstadter’s The Paranoid Style in American Politics and how many of Rep. Paul’s supporters trace their origins back to the far-right John Birch Society and other conspiracy-minded organizations.

Rep. Paul has managed to assemble a fringe candidacy — attracting everyone from radical libertarian activists to left-wing anti-war protesters. The problem with this, as the Times notes, is that the only thing that holds them all together is their dislike of the status quo:

“We’re in a difficult position of working on a campaign that draws supporters from laterally opposing points of view, and we have the added bonus of attracting every wacko fringe group in the country. And in a Ron Paul Meetup many people will consider each other ‘wackos’ for their beliefs whether that is simply because they’re liberal, conspiracy theorists, neo-Nazis, evangelical Christian, etc. . . . We absolutely must focus on Ron’s message only and put aside all other agendas, which anyone can save for the next ‘Star Trek’ convention or whatever.”

But what is “Ron’s message”? Whatever the campaign purports to be about, the main thing it has done thus far is to serve as a clearinghouse for voters who feel unrepresented by mainstream Republicans and Democrats. The antigovernment activists of the right and the antiwar activists of the left have many differences, maybe irreconcilable ones. But they have a lot of common beliefs too, and their numbers — and anger — are of a considerable magnitude. Ron Paul will not be the next president of the United States. But his candidacy gives us a good hint about the country the next president is going to have to knit back together.

The Ron Paul phenomenon is an interesting one from a political science standpoint because it shows how the paranoid style is still an active force in American politics. It isn’t because Rep. Paul is a political genius — the Times piece makes it clear that he’s not exactly up to speed on modern politics, not knowing what The Daily Show is or knowing about GQ Magazine. It’s because Rep. Paul has become a symbol for those who live on the paranoid fringes of American politics. His message is all about rejectionism — rejecting foreign entanglements, rejecting the war, rejecting the Federal Reserve, etc. His campaign is attracting the hard left and the isolationist right because they can both latch onto one of his positions and seem to care little about the others.

Ultimately, cranky radicals will be with us forever — there are always those whose sensibilities include seeing sinister conspiracies in common events. Rep. Paul simply attracts those sorts — and while those people may love posting to blogs and spreading their theories, they’re not a political constituency. Even Rep. Paul himself knows that he has a virtually nil chance of winning. However, he seems to have stumbled upon the right message at the right time to become a fringe candidate who has managed to garner the support of the disaffected in American politics.

At the same time, there’s a problem with that. The paranoid style is not a healthy style in American politics — the radicalism of the John Birch Society was not a healthy force in American politics during their Cold War heydays. The sort of conspiracy theories spun by Rep. Paul’s supporters — the 9/11 “Truthers,” the Federal Bank conspiracies, the anti-Israel lobby — all of those are comforting fictions to some, but fictions nonetheless. Those who buy into these alternate realities only feed their own paranoia, further isolating themselves from the American mainstream. While the vast majority of them are harmless — when that sort of paranoia spirals out of control, people like Timothy McVeigh end up taking action. It certainly isn’t the case that Ron Paul supporters are the equivalent of the Oklahoma City bombers — far from it. What is true is that an atmosphere of paranoia and conspiracy leads to more and more radicalism and less and less civic engagement.

Rep. Paul is hardly a bad guy — he’s a crank, but a harmless and affable one. His rise to pseudo-celebrity is less about his own political skills, and more about being in the right place at the right time. Certainly the idea that the government has grown too large and too intrusive isn’t crazy — in fact, it’s rather crazy to argue that the state of our federal government would be shocking to the Founders of this nation. The problem with Rep. Paul’s candidacy is that it is based out of that paranoid style in American politics, and that style isn’t a healthy one. Rep. Paul may end being the political heir to the Lyndon LaRouche movement, but that’s hardly a good position to be in.

Rep. Paul does have real principles, and some of his positions are workable. It would be nice to see some serious discussion about returning to the principles of constitutional federalism that our Founders intended. However, those realistic positions are washed away by the bizarre cult of personality that has grown up around Rep. Paul — and in some ways, that’s the tragic aspect of the whole thing. Rep. Paul’s success has been as an avatar for the political fringe, but that avatar may well end up swallowing the real Ron Paul — an affable country doctor with some interesting political views and a strong sense of public service.