The Tragedy of the Commons

In 1968 Garrett Hardin, a biologist, wrote a seminal paper in the journal Science entitled “The Tragedy of the Commons”. The “commons” in the title referred to the English village common land on which all village inhabitants could graze their cattle and sheep in common.  The point of the paper was to point out that the commons tended to get overgrazed because for any individual farmer, the entire profit from grazing one more cow or sheep went to that farmer, while the cost of overgrazing was spread among everyone in the village. So there was a clear incentive to overgraze.  This paper established the general principle of “privatizing the gains” while “socializing the losses”. A factory owner, for example, who spews waste products into the water or air, is privatizing his gains (by not spending potential profits on cleanup gear) while socializing his losses (spreading the contamination costs across everyone in the neighborhood).

Why do I bring this up?  Because at root the worldwide unrest reflected in this unusual election is driven by just this effect, and the political parties need to come to grips with it if they are to remain in power.

When a factory automates or moves production offshore to a lower wage market, it is privatizing the gains (It lowers production costs, so the shareholders and executives make more money) while socializing the losses (the whole community and all the taxpayers bear the costs of all the unemployed and displaced workers who lost their jobs).  In the American tradition of laissez-faire capitalism, the company can do as it pleases, and its only obligation is to its owners and shareholders.

What clearly has to change is that – probably by law, because what company would do this voluntarily – when a company automates or moves production offshore, some of the additional profit it makes from this change needs to be funneled back into effective help for those workers displaced  (“made redundant” as the English say) by the change.

This is more than just a moral argument, though it is that too.  It is a practical and pragmatic argument for three clear reasons:

1)      Our capitalist economy depends on having markets to sell products to.  Unemployed people with no income provide no market for goods. It is in the interests of everyone, but especially the businesses that produce goods, to have as large and as wealthy a potential market as possible for their goods.

2)      Americans can tolerate a fairly large disparity between those who are rich and those who are not, but there is a limit, and I think we are reaching it.  Stability in any nation depends on not having too large a proportion of disgruntled people.  This election is showing that that proportion is getting fairly large in this country, perhaps even large enough to elect a demagogue like Donald Trump.

3)      Unemployed people are wasted productivity and talent.  Economists have long pointed out that an hour of work lost can never be recovered – it is economic waste, and in an increasingly competitive world economy any nation that wastes talent by keeping some of its workers unemployed is reducing its competitiveness.

However this strange election ends, both political parties need to come to grips with this fundamental problem if they are to retain any long-term political leverage in the nation.

Recommended: The Ballad of Barack and Hillary

Mark Landler has written a book : Alter Egos: Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and the Twilight Struggle over American Power.  I have not read the book yet , but I found the review by Roger Harrison in The America Interest, The Ballad of Barack and Hillary, quite thought-provoking.

In my last post I suggested that Hillary as president would be a predictable quantity.  This article lays out just what we can predict, at least in foreign policy, so it is worth reading.

Now it's official

Ok. Now it is official. We the America voters have only two practical choices for our next President – Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump, as sorry a pair of sociopaths as one could imagine.  Yes, there is a Libertarian Party and a Green Party as well, but a vote for either of these is just a throw-away vote. (On the other hand, my state will go Democratic in the electoral college no matter what, so my presidential vote really doesn’t matter that much.)

That is the choice we are stuck with. And in fact the runner-up alternatives, Bernie Sanders and Ted Cruz, weren’t any better, though Bernie was at least likable in a sort of crazy-uncle way, which is more than I can say for any of the others.

On the surface it might seem better to elect Hillary, despite her sleazy past, paranoia, and choice of incompetent loyalists.  She will of course continue President Obama’s push to aggregate yet more power to the Presidency and away from Congress, and as a dedicated progressive she will continue to push for more Federal involvement and control and regulation in all aspects of our lives. And she is a Cold War hawk, which means she will be more likely to get us yet more involved in the Middle East tar baby.  But we do know pretty much what we will get with Hillary – more of the same. She won’t upset her corporate and Wall Street backers with any effective reforms, she won’t rile the cozy Washington insiders club, and she and Bill will no doubt continue to enrich themselves and their close friends by selling access and influence, just as they have been doing up to now. 

On the other hand, she won’t upset our allies, she won’t impose any crazy protectionist tariffs or start unnecessary trade wars, she is unlikely to provoke by mistake or an intemperate remark conflicts with Russia or China, and she will probably keep our military adequately funded. And except for some rich-person-entitlement gaffs, she is unlikely to embarrass the nation too much.

Donald Trump is unpredictable, ego-driven, and thin-skinned, and Hillary’s jab that one can’t trust a man who can be baited with just a tweet is right on target. On the other hand, he is upsetting the incestuous Washington establishment, and it badly needs upsetting.  Republican politicians have gotten wildly off-message with their obsession with the conservative culture wars over the past couple of decades, and have forgotten that they were supposed to be the party of fiscal responsibility, less-intrusive government and individual freedom.  Oh, they still spout those values in campaign speeches, but when actually in power they are not loathe to use the government to try to impose their own religious views on everyone else, nor to increase federal spending without increasing taxes to support it.

So the gamble is: would a Trump presidency really shake things up enough to change the Washington culture for the better? On the other hand, would a Trump loss, and to such an unpopular opponent at that, force a major revolution and re-examination in the Republican party?

As an independent, I want there to be two healthy, competitive parties.  I think the nation profits from that. We don’t have that now.  The liberals are still pitching decades-old wealth-redistribution ideas that clearly don’t work and don’t address today’s economy.  The conservatives are off in never-never land with their culture wars. Both parties are badly out of touch not only with the real world situation, but with their own voter bases, which is why this has been an unusual primary season.

It is a true dilemma.  Go with the establishment, rotten as it is, or try someone unpredictable, without any guarantee that he will make things better, and might well make them worse.

Recommended: The Social Conquest of Earth

Wilson, a noted biologist, winner of two Pulitzer Prizes and author of over 20 books, explains why social organization was the evolutionary step that led to human (and ant) dominance in the biosphere. It is a profound but quite readable discussion of the effects of evolution by natural selection not only on individuals but on cooperating groups to produce what we think of as “human civilization”, a delicate balance between individual competitiveness and altruism toward the “tribe”.

This book is important not only for a better understanding of the subtleties of evolution, but because it explores the role of tribalism in the evolution of human society. Those who hope somehow to end war and violence need to better understand how deeply tribalism is rooted in the human psyche, the same tribalism that has fueled ethnic, religious and political conflict throughout history.

Press hyperventilation

Sometimes this election seems really surreal. Donald Trump, in one of his ironic moods during a press conference, invites Russia to publish all Hillary's "missing" emails, and the liberal press goes wild with outrage.

Does anyone really think Russia needs his invitation? Does anyone really think Russia (and China, and North Korea, and...and...) haven't already been hacking any government sites they can get into - including no doubt Hillary's unsecured home server for all those months she was Secretary of State? 

What this manufactured outrage really shows is how shallow the reporting is in this election.  Yes, Trump's statement was probably dumb and intemperate (so what else is new?), but hardly the threat to civilization and life-as-we-know-it that the press would like to make it. The unbelievable incompetence of Hillary and of the Democratic National Committee in using such insecure systems that can so easily be hacked - now that would be real news.

After the conventions

Well, the conventions are finally almost over (thank goodness!).  What more do we know now about the two candidates?

Donald Trump came across pretty much as he has all through the primaries – a short-tempered ego-driven, relatively ignorant sociopath with a short attention span, spouting wildly unpredictable and often contentious programs from day-to-day, but with an amazing ability to use the press to market himself. Nothing new there.

Hillary Clinton came across as the quintessential Washington elite insider, a sociopathic serial liar willing to say or do whatever is necessary to gain power, a relatively uninspiring speaker selling the same old economically-unworkable progressive programs that haven’t worked in the past. Nothing new there either.

The fact, revealed in the leaked emails, that the Democratic National Committee, supposedly neutral in the primaries, was in fact actually trying to sink Bernie Sanders isn’t surprising. Both Trump and Sanders threatened the political establishment of both parties and one would expect the establishment to try to protect its power and perks by all means at its disposal. The Democratic establishment was just better at it - and they should have been, since they are in power right now (good thing for Hillary, or she might have been indicted after all).

Of more concern, perhaps, was the fact that the Democratic National Committee protected its internal communications so poorly that hackers, perhaps Russian, were able to read everything they were writing. In the light of Hillary’s own indiscretions in this area, I’m not impressed with their competence.

The fact, also revealed in the leaked email, that some prominent members of the press who pretended they were doing unbiased reporting turned out to be coordinating their work with the DNC was also not really surprising.  Most of us no longer trust the press, even the old “Gold Standards” of supposed objectivity like the New York Times. News has become heavily politicized, largely toward the liberal side, over the past decade.

My current prediction, (prediction, not preference!) is that Trump will win the election.  Hillary has been spending a lot more money (about 15:1 against Trump), and has a much larger organization, yet most of it seems ineffectual. She has spent something like $57 million in ads to date, yet is dropping in the polls. Even compared with Trump’s shambolic election organization she and her campaign team appear to be unusually incompetent. Even more telling is that, in spite of Trump's unexpected ability to harness the simmering discontent in the country, Hillary and her team still seem not to understand what has happened or how the mood of the electorate has shifted.

Against that, Trump has cleverly bet that there will be more terrorist attacks and chaos over the next few months (probably a safe bet), and built his campaign accordingly. He is betting that security issues and economic discontent in Middle America will outweigh all of Clinton’s wonky progressive policy proposals in the minds of the majority of voters. It is probably a good tactical move.

No doubt the country will survive whichever one of these sociopaths gets elected. The odds are the winner will be a one-term president, and that Congressional  and bureaucratic obstruction will keep much of anything from really changing.

Gingrich's proposal

In 1993 Samuel Huntington, then director of Harvard's Center for International Affairs, wrote the seminal book The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, in which he predicted future conflicts along the boundaries between major civilizations.  At the time many of the politically-correct progressive elitists in Washington rejected his hypothesis, and a few even claimed he was racist or xenophobic. Move forward to today and it is abundantly clear that he was right.  We have a religious war spreading out from the Middle East, China newly assertive, and the old Russian bear risen from the ashes of the Soviet era to cause trouble again.

Huntington died in 2008, but his last book, published in 2004, is probably as important as his 1993 book.  It is Who Are We? The Challenges to America's National Identity. The core argument is focused on the danger to the nation of becoming divided into two (or more) distinct cultures, fostering just the same kind of racial and nationalistic tensions that are causing civil wars, ethnic cleansings and the like all over the world. It was the Latino immigration that worried him then, but a massive influx of Middle Easterners, as Europe is facing these days, would have the same consequences. Once again, of course, the politically-correct internationalist crowd were outraged, though Huntington probably reflected fairly accurately the worries of the average American.  In fact, he argues in this book that the progressive ruling elite of the country have become completely disconnected from the concerns of the average citizen, and the current political scene would suggest he was right.

I bring all this up because this morning Newt Gingrich proposed that all Muslims who adhere to Sharia Law should be deported, echoing a similar proposal from Donald Trump some months ago.  That of course produced the predictable unthinking outrage from the liberal wing of Washington politics, but I think it deserves a more thoughtful consideration.

Sharia Law is in fact incompatible with Western, and especially America, values.  It is incompatible in many ways, such as the subservience of secular law to religious law and the inferior position of women.  But the single point on which it is most incompatible is that, followed scrupulously, it requires endless war on all non-Muslims until all are converted or killed. Moderate Muslims simply ignore these parts, just as moderate Christians ignore some of the more illiberal parts of their religion.

It won’t have escaped the open-minded that we already have problems in America with some Christian believers wanting to impose their peculiar religious views and values on the rest of us in issues like birth control, divorce, gay marriage and abortion (and more lately, exactly where transgender people can pee!).  Nor that some Christian religions still accord woman second-class citizenship. So this isn’t just a Muslim issue.

America’s success has been due in large part to its ability to absorb immigrants, who then within a generation or two adopt wholeheartedly the “common America values” (whatever they are) and language, so that we remain one nation with more-or-less one common culture and common language.  Europe’s problem at the moment is that many European nations have absorbed immigrants who have not adopted the culture of their adopted country, and have ended up as foreign ethnic conclaves within their new nations, hotbeds of dissention and dissatisfaction, ripe for exploitation by groups like ISIS.

It seems to me not unreasonable to insist that anyone who wants to come to live in America and become an America be required to adopt both the American common language (English), and the essential American cultural beliefs - things like the rule of law, the protection of property rights, individual liberty, religious freedom, etc. etc.  Not to require that as an essential prerequisite to being made an America is foolish, and will lead in the long run to just the sort of problems Europe now faces.

This doesn’t mean that immigrants can’t bring with them and enrich all of us with their cultures, their languages (as a second language), their foods, their traditions and their religions, to the extent that they don’t violate American laws. But it does mean they can’t come here and then try to change this nation back to what their old nation was.  If they want to do that, they ought to just stay back in their original home in the first place.

Looked at in that light, Gingrich’s proposal isn’t off the wall.  In fact, it is simple common sense.  If Muslims want to live under Sharia Law, they should live in a nation that is ruled by Sharia Law.  If they want to live in America, they need to accept America’s language and America’s laws, and American cultural norms (no honor killings or child marriages or stoning adulterers or cutting off the hands of thieves or killing those who leave their religion, for example.). Is that so unreasonable?

Comey's decison was wrong!

Only FBI Director James Comey knows why, after detailing a solid case for indicting Hillary Clinton for mishandling classified material, he decided not to recommend indictment. It may have been because he thought of the greater good, as Scott Adams proposed here. Or it may have been because he thought of his own future career, as a number of other writers have suggested. Or it may have been that someone got to him with a threat or an inducement and put the fix in. Only he knows his reasoning.

After thinking about it for a few more days, I have decided it was the wrong call.  Yes, indicting Hillary would probably have ended her race , though that might not have been such a disaster  - perhaps the Democrats would have gotten Biden or some other reasonable candidate to replace her and given us all a better set of options in this election.

But whatever the consequences, it is obvious to all but Hillary’s True Believers that she was guilty as hell – of lying, of mishandling classified material, of trying to evade the Federal Records Act requirements – and that she did all this knowingly and deliberately.  No amount of Clinton lawyerly weasel-word arguments (it depends on the definition of “is”) can evade the facts.  Comey argued that she didn’t do it with any intend to harm the nation – but that certainly hasn’t been a defense for lower-level people who have gone to prison for much less. He argued that she was simply “terribly careless” – how is that different from the “gross negligence” which is specifically called out in the relevant acts?  He said there was no evidence of “clear intent” – doesn’t hiring someone to set up a private server in your New York home show “clear intent”. And besides, the relevant federal statutes don’t require intent – only the commission of an act – whether intended or not -  that puts classified information at risk.

Hillary should have been indicted, and at the very least fined and perhaps had her security clearances removed.  That is what would have happened to any ordinary federal worker who did what she did, and we all know that.

Scott Adams argues that a government needs credibility to function effectively.  I agree, and Comey’s decision to give Hillary a pass on such egregious violations of Federal statutes certainly weakens the credibility of this government. It proves once again that in this government the Washington elite are above the law, just like in any banana republic around the world.

Scott Adams and the FBI

For those who, like myself, were completely bewildered by FBI Director James Comey's 15-minute press conference in which he spent the first 14 minutes explaining in great detail all the ways Hillary Clinton lied, broke the law, covered-up and willfully mishandled classified information, and then announced that the FBI was recommending no indictments, I suggest reading Scott Adam's latest post "The FBI, Credibility and the Government". It gives an entirely different perspective on the whole affair.

Adams points out that Comey's decision not to recommend indictments means that the voters will determine who the next  president is rather than the FBI Director (on the quite reasonable assumption that indictments would have ended Hillary's chances for good).  And I agree that is the better outcome, because then the  election result, whatever it is, will have more credibility with the nation, and government needs credibility to function.

But if the majority of voters are foolish enough to overlook what Hillary has done, in this case and in previous scandals, they will get what they deserve.  Not that Trump is any better a choice, of course.

Sure enough - the fix was in for Hillary

By storing sensitive government information on her private server, which didn’t even have security features on it for some months, Hilary almost certainly violated at least three federal statutes 18 U.S. Code § 798 — disclosure of classified information, 18 USC 793 — gathering, transmitting or losing defense information and 18 U.S. Code § 2071 — concealment, removal or mutilation generally of classified material. She also violated the Federal records Act by deleting many of those records.  But the FBI announced today that they would recommend no action against her – not even a fine or withdrawing of her security clearances.

General Petraeus, another Washington insider who got special treatment, gave notebooks full of classified material to his biographer/mistress. He pleaded guilty on a misdemeanor charge of mishandling classified information and received no jail time but paid a $100,000 fine.

On the other hand ordinary underlings, without insider pull, got much harsher treatment:

·         Bryan Nishimura, a California Naval reservist, was sentenced to two years’ probation and a $7,500 fine after he pleaded guilty to removing classified material and downloading it to a personal electronic device.

·         Chief Petty Officer Lyle White pleaded guilty to storing classified documents on a nonsecure hard drive in Virginia. He received a suspended 60-day sentence and a suspended $10,000 fine in return for the plea.

·         NSA employee Tom Drake was prosecuted for leaking information to the Baltimore Sun about what he considered mismanagement at the agency. In the end it turned out the government had deliberately and willfully destroyed documents key to his defense, and so his case was reduced to a misdemeanor plea, but not before he was ruined financially.

·         State Department contractor Stephen Kim was sentenced to 13 months in federal prison for providing information to Fox News about North Korea

·         In 2010 CIA employee Jeffrey Sterling was sentenced to 42 months in federal prison (of which he served 30 months) for providing Iran information to the New York Times.

Clearly the fix was in for Hillary, but I expected that with a Democratic administration in power and Hillary now the presumptive Democratic nominee for president. It’s about as blatant a case of Washington inside corruption as could be imagined. And if we, the American voters, allow this to go on without some sort of backlash, we will deserve the government we get.

A new word for a form of rule

We went to dinner with some good friends last night, and in the course of the evening’s discussions I discovered that he had recently invented a new word that the world now needs.

In describing forms of rule we  have “democracy”, “aristocracy”, “meritocracy”, “monarchy”, “oligarchy”, and “theocracy”, among others.

If Hillary wins we might have “kleptocracy”.

What my friend adds is a new word to use if Trump wins: “egocracy”, rule by an ego.

Hillary's fatal flaw

Disclaimer right at the start – this piece is not an argument in support of Donald Trump.  I have just as serious reservations about him as well.

The Clintons continue to be surrounded by controversy, as they have been all through their political careers.  This past week Hillary was finally interviewed by the FBI about the classified materials on her home server, probably almost a last step before they decide whether to press charges.  And Bill muddied the waters yet more by having an impromptu private meeting with attorney general Loretta Lynch, who has the final say on whether to indict Hillary or not. Whether that discussion was innocuous or not, the perception is that once again the Clintons are rigging the system in their favor. (and why would Bill Clinton delay his own flight for half an hour just to have an “innocuous” friendly discussion with the attorney general about grandchildren on the airport tarmac?)

Next week a former secret service agent who worked in the Clinton White House is publishing a book which portrays Hillary in private as paranoid, vengeful, angry, brutal to staff (including the Secret Service agents who protected them) and family, and at times out of control. Hillary supporters are already trying to downplay this description, but in fact it is perfectly consistent with descriptions others have given over the years of Hillary’s private behavior, so it is most likely fairly accurate.

Hillary supporters and yellow dog Democrats will of course vote for her anyway, either not believing all of this or somehow excusing it all away (perhaps as a “vast right-wing conspiracy”, as Hillary herself always tries to do).  But for the rest of us it is clearly unsettling to think that our possible next president would come into the White House with so much unsavory baggage.

But the real question is: could we trust her competence as president?  Sure, she and Bill will no doubt continue to enrich themselves with “contributions” from foreign countries and others to the Clinton Foundation, the family slush fund – the “pay for play” stuff that has been going on all along, even while she was Secretary of State. Sure, she will no doubt protect the Wall Street firms who paid her outrageous speaking fees.  Sure, Bill will no doubt continue to have mistresses around the White House.

All of this will continue to provoke constant scandals and media coverage, but in the end it will not really matter that much in the larger scheme of things.  The real question is how Hillary would do in managing the really serious world affairs (the Russia threat, the China threat, ISIS,  the Brexit consequences, etc) and domestic affairs (unemployment, wage stagnation, climate change, tax policy, gun control, discrimination, etc.).

For foreign affairs we do have some history while she was Secretary of State. The “Russian reset” was a disaster, showing a great deal of naiveté, but perhaps more on Obama’s part than on Hillary’s part. The administration clearly underestimated the ISIS threat at the beginning, but again that may have been more Obama’s fault than Hillary’s. In fact, if one looks carefully, Clinton really did almost nothing of note on her own accord while she was Secretary of State – Obama appointed others as “czars” to handle most of the really important stuff.  (such as Alan Bersin to handle the boarders, Carol Browner to handle energy policy, and Richard Holbrooke to handle Afghanistan and Pakistan) She flew around a lot, made herself look important, met a lot of foreign leaders, but really didn’t make much difference to real policy.  We do know that she was (and probably still is) much more inclined to get us further into the Middle East tar baby than Obama was.

For domestic affairs it is clear that she will simply follow the establishment progressive line, which in effect means she won’t attack any of the real economic problems in ways that might discomfort her wealthy private and corporate sponsors, or especially any of the people who are “contributing” to her personal wealth.

The fatal flaw that worries me most is that because of her paranoia she will undoubtedly continue to surround herself with loyalists who won’t stand up to her and tell her when she is doing something stupid.  That has been her pattern in both this campaign and in the last – she picked people who were loyal and subservient rather than competent (a competent staff would never have let her get into her current FBI problems in the first place). Given her anger and paranoia, having a set of weak, ultra-loyal advisors around her incapable of restraining her worst tendencies seems to me fairly dangerous in today’s world.

As I said at the start, this isn’t a plug for Trump, who has his own serious failings. But it is a warning, since Hillary may indeed become our next president.