The Divine Conspiracy Blog

Niall Ferguson: The Regulated States of America

In “Democracy in America,” published in 1833, Alexis de Tocqueville marveled at the way Americans preferred voluntary association to government regulation. “The inhabitant of the United States,” he wrote, “has only a defiant and restive regard for social authority and he appeals to it . . . only when he cannot do without it.”

Unlike Frenchmen, he continued, who instinctively looked to the state to provide economic and social order, Americans relied on their own efforts. “In the United States, they associate for the goals of public security, of commerce and industry, of morality and religion. There is nothing the human will despairs of attaining by the free action of the collective power of individuals.”

What especially amazed Tocqueville was the sheer range of nongovernmental organizations Americans formed: “Not only do they have commercial and industrial associations . . . but they also have a thousand other kinds: religious, moral, grave, futile, very general and very particular, immense and very small; Americans use associations to give fetes, to found seminaries, to build inns, to raise churches, to distribute books, to send missionaries to the antipodes; in this manner they create hospitals, prisons, schools.”

Tocqueville would not recognize America today. Indeed, so completely has associational life collapsed, and so enormously has the state grown, that he would be forced to conclude that, at some point between 1833 and 2013, France must have conquered the United States.

More at the WSJ.

Can the Budget Ever Be Cut? by Veronique de Rugy.

President Barack Obama finally released his fifth budget in February. Like his four previous fiscal proposals, this one is stuffed with promises to “invest” in America and “our” children, to grow the economy, and to reduce the deficit. The reality, however, will be more spending and more taxes with zero reform of financially unsustainable entitlement programs.

Read more here.

Illegal Immigration: Elite Illiberality by Victor Davis Hanson.

The divide over immigration reform is not primarily a Left/Right or Democratic/Republican divide; instead, it cuts, and sharply so, across class lines. Elites blur the distinction between legal and illegal immigration to ensure that the opponents of the latter appear to be against the former. They talk grandly of making legal immigration meritocratic, but fall silent when asked to what degree. They talk darkly of racist subtexts in the arguments of their opponents, but skip over the overt ethnic chauvinism of proponents of amnesty; they decry conservative paranoia over a new demography, but never liberal euphoria over just such a planned reset. They talk deprecatingly of rubes who do not understand the new global realties, but never of their own parochialism ensconced in New York or Washington or San Francisco. They talk of reactionaries who do not fathom the ins and outs of the debate; never of their own willful ignorance of the realities on the ground in East L.A. or southwest Fresno.

More at NRO.

Freedom: The Unfolding Revolution by Jonah Goldberg.

“Why are there no libertarian countries?”

In a much-discussed essay for Salon, Michael Lind asks: “If libertarians are correct in claiming that they understand how best to organize a modern society, how is it that not a single country in the world in the early twenty-first century is organized along libertarian lines?”

Such is the philosophical poverty of liberalism today that this stands as a profound question.

Definitions vary, but broadly speaking, libertarianism is the idea that people should be as free as possible from state coercion so long as they don’t harm anyone. The job of the state is limited to fighting crime, providing for the common defense, and protecting the rights and contracts of citizens. The individual is sovereign; he is the captain of himself.

It’s true, no ideal libertarian state has ever existed outside a table for one. And no such state will ever exist. But here’s an important caveat: No ideal state of any other kind will be created either. America’s great, but it ain’t perfect. Sweden’s social democracy is all right, but if it were perfect, I suspect fewer cars would be on fire over there.

Ideals are called ideals for a reason: They’re ideals. They’re goals, aspirations, abstract straight rules we use as measuring sticks against the crooked timber of humanity.In the old Soviet Union, Mao’s China, Pol Pot’s Cambodia, and today’s North Korea, they tried to move toward the ideal Communist system. Combined, they killed about 100 million of their own people. That’s a hefty moral distinction right there: When freedom-lovers move society toward their ideal, mistakes may be made, but people tend to flourish. When the hard Left is given free rein, millions are murdered and enslaved. Which ideal would you like to move toward?

Read more.

Obama’s Real NSA Antagonist Is Glenn Greenwald by Carl M. Cannon.

Like Obama, Greenwald is a lawyer whose area of interest is the U.S. Constitution. Formerly a practicing attorney in New York, Greenwald gave up litigation for the world of blogging and journalism so he could advocate his views on civil liberties to a wider audience. In this quest, he has been wildly successful.

He started a blog, “Unclaimed Territory,” and moved from there to Salon, a liberal online publication. For the past year, he has written for The Guardian, which has grown over the years from a mid-size British newspaper based in Manchester to a worldwide brand with a huge online presence in the United States.

The paper’s sensibilities tend to be left-wing, but Glenn Greenwald is not an easy man to classify. On some issues — antipathy to Israel, staunch support for gay marriage, a pronounced hostility toward George W. Bush — he seems an archetypal figure of the left.

Yet his crusades certainly seem based on principle, not partisanship. His support for gay marriage, for instance, was formed by his own experience seeking equal treatment for himself and his gay partner, a policy Greenwald was publicly pursuing long before most Democratic Party officials would go near it.

Likewise, and in contrast to so many members of Congress from both major political parties, Greenwald’s outrage at what he views as intrusions into Americans’ civil liberties does not depend on the party of the person in the Oval Office.

More.

Recycling: Can It Be Wrong, When It Feels So Right? by Michael C. Munger.

There are two general kinds of arguments in favor of recycling. The first is that “this stuff is too valuable to throw away!” In almost all cases, this argument is false, and when it is correct recycling will be voluntary; very little state action is necessary. The second is that recycling is cheaper than landfilling the waste. This argument may well be correct, but it is difficult to judge because officials need keep landfill prices artificially low to discourage illegal dumping and burning. Empirically, recycling is almost always substantially more expensive than disposing in the landfill.

Since we can’t use the price system, authorities resort to moralistic claims, trying to persuade people that recycling is just something that good citizens do. But if recycling is a moral imperative, and the goal is zero waste, not optimal waste, the result can be a net waste of the very resources that recycling was implemented to conserve. In what follows, I will illustrate the problems with each of the two central fallacies of mandatory and pure-market recycling, and then will turn to the problem of moral imperatives.

More here.