Fake Nous

Evidence that it Doesn’t Work

I looked at this question briefly in The Problem of Political Authority. The evidence I found from political science suggested that terrorism is rarely effective – i.e., terrorist groups hardly ever attain their stated political goals. In many cases, their goals are set back because of their attacks. This is especially true when they target civilians (cases of successful terrorism tend to be attacks on military targets).

The reason is basically that terrorist attacks, especially on civilians, increase public support for hardline, hawkish politicians, who tend to do the opposite of whatever the terrorists wanted. E.g., the 9/11/2001 attack resulted in two decades of hawkish politicians in America, in which nearly everyone in both parties agreed on a highly aggressive stance in the Middle East. It caused America to invade two countries and topple their governments, killing hundreds of thousands of (mostly Muslim) civilians, in addition to bombing many more people in multiple countries in the Middle East. So, even though the attack succeeded in causing harm to Americans, it was a spectacular failure from the standpoint of benefiting Islam or people in Muslim countries.

Wtf Are They Thinking?

I think if you’re planning to kill people, you’re obligated to think hard about it first, and to try very hard to verify that your plan will actually produce the (putatively) good consequences that you anticipate.

The stuff I said above about 9/11 was not hard to anticipate. It was completely obvious that the U.S. government was not going to swiftly withdraw from the Middle East and that it would instead go to war in the Middle East. Any idiot could also tell that this war or collection of wars would be extremely destructive to the people in the Middle East.

The general empirical facts about terrorist success are no secret either. Anyone who was thinking about doing some terrorism could do some investigation — “Hm, I wonder how often this works?” — and they would find out that it rarely works and often backfires.

So, one can only conclude that terrorists don’t make serious efforts to verify that their killings will advance, rather than hinder, their stated goals.

That’s odd. Why would you go kill a bunch of people, and even sacrifice your own life, when you have approximately no evidence for thinking that it will help your cause, and it may instead harm the cause?

I am not sure. But this makes me suspect that terrorists’ actual motives are not what they often say. E.g., Islamic terrorists don’t care about advancing Islam, or helping Muslim people, or even reducing foreign intervention in Muslim countries. None of that. They don’t want to help the ingroup. They just want to hurt the outgroup. In other words, their motive is hate.

A lot of human behavior is like that.

Wait, Maybe it Worked

As I say, I thought that 9/11 was an excellent example of how a “successful” terrorist attack (as in, the operation was carried out according to plan) can be a complete failure from the standpoint of advancing the motivating cause. I thought that in 2012, when I wrote that book.

More recently, it occurred to me that the 9/11 attack might have worked, to a certain extent. The U.S. didn’t get out of the Middle East, no, and things have gotten worse for Muslims in the Middle East. But Islam has made cultural inroads in the West. Bizarrely enough, I think Islam is more popular in the West, much better respected in certain (non-Muslim) circles, than it was before that attack. I would not have predicted this at all.

More specifically, Islam has become popular among left-wing people. (Of course, not among right-wingers.) Muslims are now one of their favored identity groups – along with women, blacks, Latinos, etc.

I think this is due to 9/11, because as I recall, before 9/11, Islam was not on the radar screen of mainstream U.S. society. People did not talk about it. 9/11 evoked some “Islamophobia” (as people say), which in turn evoked a counter-reaction from the left, turning a fair number of them pro-Islam.

As a case in point, see Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Muslim apostate who escaped from severe and very tangible oppression in Somalia and has gone on to speak out boldly and insistently, and at great risk to her own physical safety, against the oppression of women in the Islamic world.

Hirsi Ali spoke at CU-Boulder on Monday evening. She spoke of how her home country was riven with tribal conflict, and of her concern that America and the West are descending into tribalism and abandoning the values that made us peaceful and prosperous.

You might assume that Hirsi Ali would be a hero for feminists and social justice crusaders across the world. Instead, many progressives are more interested in attacking her as an “Islamophobe” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayaan_Hirsi_Ali#Criticism) – in effect siding with the oppressors against an oppressed woman of color.

Wtf Are We Thinking?

This is on its face odd, because Islam is not exactly a progressive belief system. The Islamic world is, let us say, not full of liberal feminists and LGBTQ activists. (What if progressives were protesting against people who criticize Trump, calling them “Trumpophobes”?) So what’s going on?

One possibility: appeasement. Left-wing individuals seem to like the idea of appeasement more than right-wingers. Maybe terrorism has worked on the progressives in exactly the way the terrorists intended: left-wing Westerners have been frightened into deferring to Islam.

That is the charitable read. Here is another possibility. Remember how I said above that the motives of terrorists are not what they say? That they don’t care about benefiting their own side, but only about harming their enemies?

The same may be true of a significant portion of Western progressives: they don’t mainly want to help their favored groups; they mainly want to harm their disfavored groups. They don’t, for example, aim to help the poor, or women, or blacks, but simply to harm the rich, men, and whites. Of particular import here: they don’t want to help other countries; they want to hurt America.

That would explain how progressives could be on the same side as Islamic extremists – how they could, for example, side with Muslim traditionalists against Hirsi Ali. If progressives just wanted to help oppressed minorities, they would join people like Hirsi Ali in calling for an Islamic reformation. But if they mainly wanted to hurt America, then they would probably side with the Islamic extremists.

Hostility to One’s Own

Obviously, the above would apply only to some leftists. Many others would in fact side with (e.g.) Hirsi Ali, just as one would expect a feminist or advocate for social justice to do.

You may still think that I have given an excessively uncharitable interpretation, even of just a significant number of progressives. If you’re tempted to say that, then you probably haven’t read enough academic political discourse. So let me help you out.

The following is an excerpt from an essay by Ward Churchill, formerly a Professor of Ethnic Studies at my own university (before he was fired for plagiarism). Churchill wrote this the day after the 9/11 attack, discussing the terrorists who destroyed the World Trade Center (https://cryptome.org/ward-churchill.htm):

They did not license themselves to “target innocent civilians.”
[…]
Let’s get a grip here, shall we? True enough, they [the people in the World Trade Center] were civilians of a sort. But innocent? Gimme a break. They formed a technocratic corps at the very heart of America’s global financial empire – the “mighty engine of profit” to which the military dimension of U.S. policy has always been enslaved – and they did so both willingly and knowingly. […] To the extent that any of them were unaware of the costs and consequences to others of what they were involved in – and in many cases excelling at – it was because of their absolute refusal to see. More likely, it was because they were too busy braying, incessantly and self-importantly, into their cell phones, arranging power lunches and stock transactions, each of which translated, conveniently out of sight, mind and smelling distance, into the starved and rotting flesh of infants. If there was a better, more effective, or in fact any other way of visiting some penalty befitting their participation upon the little Eichmanns inhabiting the sterile sanctuary of the twin towers, I’d really be interested in hearing about it.

Caveat: This is anecdotal. But, reading the above passage, I get a really strong sense that (a) the author hates America and a large portion of Americans, (b) the author is happy about the 9/11 attack, (c) the author puts himself on the same side as the terrorists.

Granted, that is an extreme case (which is why it caused a great controversy when people noticed the article). But it is not unusual in the academic world to read texts with a strong anti-American (and anti-white, anti-male, anti-wealthy, etc.) emotional tone. My subjective impression is that my fellow academics do not merely criticize America (or men, white people, etc.) in the hope of improving these things. Many have a deep-seated emotional hostility that they just need to let out.

I’m not going to talk now about whether such hostility is justified. My point right now is that this could explain how terrorism might succeed: violent attacks on a society could further one’s cause, if a sufficient number of influential people within that society are actually extremely hostile to their own society. Those people might then gain sympathy for the terrorists and their cause.

I think it would be a very rare circumstance that this would work — it is very unusual that a significant portion of influential people are that hostile to their own society. But, strange as it seems, I think that has happened to us.

They’re Not on Your Side

I guess I have one more point to make, on the off chance that this isn’t completely obvious to everyone reading this. If you’re a progressive, and you think Islamic terrorists are on your side, then you’re an even bigger fool than the people who read Donald Trump’s tweets and believe them. The Islamists – the ones who blow up buildings and issue fatwahs – would not hesitate for one second to kill you, if they somehow had the power in your society. They would have no problem with murdering people for being gay, either, or for being atheists, or for criticizing a theocratic government, or for being victims of rape.

So I think we in the West need to put a leash on our self-hatred long enough to realize that not everyone who attacks us does so in the name of justice.

I’ve seen several people commenting on the recent assassination of the Iranian general Qassem Suleimani (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Baghdad_International_Airport_airstrike). From what I can see, it appears that everyone is against it (but maybe that’s just liberals and libertarians). I’m not quite sure why, though. This is a good time for some comments on assassination.

Is Assassination Just?

Assume you have someone who is going to cause a lot of unjust harm to others. In the present case, I assume that U.S. intelligence is basically correct that Suleimani was a murderer and terrorist, and he was going to murder more people in the future if someone didn’t stop him. I don’t know the details about this, but this doesn’t seem to be disputed. (I do not assume that any attack was imminent, as there seems to be no evidence of this.)

Suppose further that the only way to stop this person is to kill him, or to kill some other people, like several of the people who work for him. That also seems plausible in this case.

In that case, should you assassinate the evildoer?

I don’t see why not. If Suleimani wasn’t a morally legitimate target, I don’t know who would be. The person who is ordering other people to commit evil deeds is surely at least as responsible as the people who directly carry them out. So the top military official is at least as legitimate a target as rank-and-file soldiers in the military. And it’s obviously better to kill him than to kill multiple other people.

According to the NYT, killing Suleimani was the “most extreme” option that Pentagon officials offered to Trump, to respond to Iranian aggression. (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/04/us/politics/trump-suleimani.html) Apparently, though, the more “moderate” and more conventional options would have involved killing many people, but only lower-ranking soldiers or militia members, instead of a general.

By what deranged moral metric is it better to kill multiple lower-ranking people than the guy at the top who is ordering people to commit evil deeds?

Why Are People Shocked?

When U.S. forces were hunting Osama bin Laden, no one seemed to have any trouble understanding why it made sense to go particularly after him, as the leader of al Qaeda, rather than merely pursuing his footsoldiers. Of course you would want to take out the guy at the top, or someone close to the top. And when Seal Team Six assassinated bin Laden, no one seemed to have any problem with that. As a matter of fact, I recall people celebrating.

So why are commentators so shocked by the “extreme” action of assassinating Suleimani? One possibility is that people are shocked because it’s an action by Trump. Anything that Trump does, we’re primed to see as crazy.

Another possibility is that the action seems extreme and shocking because . . . Trump attacked a high government official. Usually, you just attack soldiers. In the bin Laden case, bin Laden was the leader of a non-governmental terrorist group. So of course you can assassinate someone like that. And of course you can kill multiple completely innocent civilians in the course of targeting members of private terrorist groups. But killing a government official? Dear God, is nothing sacred? Has Mr. Trump no limits?!

Is It Prudent?

Perhaps that’s uncharitable. Perhaps the main worry is that assassinating foreign government officials is likely to start a war. (If that’s your worry now, then when the war fails to materialize, then presumably you will admit that the assassination was a good move. Right?)

The theory, I suppose, is that assassinating officials is more “provocative” than killing ordinary soldiers or civilians (as we traditionally do) — it’s more provocative to the people who run the foreign government, because those people don’t give a crap about footsoldiers and civilians.

Well, that’s one theory. Here’s another theory, one that relies on premises that my libertarian friends seem to accept in other contexts. Assassinating a high-ranking government official makes it less likely that we will go to war with the foreign country, as compared to merely attacking their troops.

Why? Because the government officials who make the decisions about whether to go to war don’t give a crap about soldiers and civilians. If attacking the U.S. means that the U.S. kills more Iranian soldiers or civilians, then, plausibly, the Iranian government will continue to attack the U.S. They might just be fine with sacrificing multiple such “unimportant” lives, year after year, for the sake of their ideology and their hatred of the U.S.

Assassinating a top government official changes the calculus. It lets the Iranian government know that you’re not just going to target the civilians and soldiers that they don’t care about. You’re going to target them, the people making the decisions. Then they have to think hard about how much they really care about their ideology and their hatred. Do they care enough to sacrifice their own lives?

This is one reason why there is so much war in the history of the state: because the people who make the decisions about going to war almost never have to bear the costs. It’s a lot easier to see the merits of sending other people into a war than it is to see the merits of starting a war in which you yourself are likely to die.

From that point of view, Iran’s decision to essentially back down (only launching missiles that killed no one) (https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jan/08/irans-assault-on-us-bases-in-iraq-might-satisfy-both-sides), is utterly unsurprising. The Ayatollah is not stupid. He knows what will happen in a war with the U.S. The Iranian government, obviously, would be defeated. Very likely, the U.S. would topple the government and kill the leader, since that’s what happened the last time we went to war in the region. (This might in turn cause ISIS or other terrorist groups to gain more followers, but not before Khamenei himself was dead.)

In fact, Trump just might order Khamenei to be assassinated even without a war. This realization is more likely to curtail Iranian aggression than any amount of economic sanctions or attacks on Iranian soldiers.

Is It Legal?

Having said all that, there is a distinct, purely descriptive, legal question: was the assassination (and other, similar assassinations) legal?

To that, the answer is “obviously not”. There is a little crime called “murder” that you’re considered guilty of when you deliberately kill people. You’re also legally considered to be guilty of it when you successfully direct someone else to kill someone. So, on the face of it, Donald Trump is guilty of murder. That’s not partisan rhetoric, by the way. That’s just an objective, descriptive fact.

Now, there are exceptions, where you can kill someone and not be legally considered a murderer. One exception is for killing in war. But the U.S. is not at war with Iran (thus far!), so that would be a tough case to make.

Another exception is for self-defense or defense of innocent third parties. This is what the Trump administration would like to claim. But, in American law, in order to employ the “defensive killing” defense, you have to argue that the person you killed posed an imminent threat to life or limb. It’s not enough to say that the person was eventually going to kill you or some innocent third party. You have to argue that the person was just about to do it, right when you killed him. (If they were merely going to do it at some further future time, you’re supposed to call the police, run away, or something like that.)

That, obviously, is why Trump administration officials keep insisting that Suleimani was planning an “imminent” attack, at the time U.S. forces killed him. Because if it wasn’t imminent, then, according to our own law, we murdered him. We sure don’t want to say we’re murderers; therefore, it must have been imminent . . . but we can’t provide any information whatsoever about this attack that we’re talking about. We don’t know where it would have been, or when, and we can’t tell you a single thing about the evidence we have for this, but . . . believe us.

Obviously, they’re lying. If you don’t know that, then I would like to sell you the Brooklyn Bridge seven times, because that’s how absurdly gullible you are.

The Obama administration, by the way, ran into the same issue. They also liked to assassinate people with drones, but they didn’t want to call themselves murderers. (Bush also used some drone strikes, but nowhere near as many.) So the Obama Justice Department wrote up a memo explaining that the people they were targeting were all posing “imminent” threats. They seem to have vastly expanded the meaning of “imminent”. In the ordinary context (i.e., if you’re not a government official), an imminent attack pretty much has to be just about to occur — surely within hours, if not seconds. But in the new sense introduced to justify government killings, an “imminent” attack might be coming within a few years.

So the last three Presidents were probably murderers, legally speaking. Of course, you might think that these were mostly good murders. Be that as it may, the Suleimani murder really doesn’t seem to have been a particularly bad or shocking one, among the murders that our leaders have been carrying out over the past couple of decades.

1. An Alleged Problem

Sometimes, we hear lamentations about political “gridlock” — the alleged problem wherein politicians are unable to agree on what should be done, and so “nothing gets done”, i.e., no (or relatively few) new laws are passed.

More generally, we have two major parties in the U.S., and — despite periodic complaints to the contrary when one side loses an important race — they are about evenly matched, and have been for decades. Neither party is able to fully implement their agenda, since there is always the other party there to oppose them. As I write this, the Democrats control the House of Representatives, while the Republicans control the Senate. Since any legislation must pass both houses, and the two parties disagree on many things, it is difficult to get any laws passed.

Many on both sides decry this situation, wishing that their side could finally gain undisputed control so they could just implement their agenda and save the country at last. They just disagree on which side ought to have total power.

Libertarians, on the other hand, often praise gridlock — we don’t want the politicians to be “getting stuff done”, because most of what they would do is bad.

Now I want to make an argument in praise of the political stalemate we’ve been enjoying, but I don’t want to appeal to specifically libertarian premises. I want to say that if you’re a reasonable person, of whatever party, you should hope that the stalemate continues.

2. Moderation

The first point is that the political stalemate — more accurately, the balance of power — exerts a moderating influence on government. The most extreme ideas that might be devised by our leaders are politically infeasible, because they will be rejected by the other party.

The only proposals that can get through the government are ones that can get at least some support from both sides. Some moderate Republicans/Democrats have to be persuaded to vote for it. On average, these proposals will tend to be those that are relatively less stupid and destructive. The most stupid and destructive policies are most likely to occasion dissent from the “other side” (the party other than the one that proposed the policy).

Many have noticed that our politics has become more polarized in recent years. This has some bad effects, but at least one good one: maybe there will be fewer bad policies passed.

Now, you might think this a surprising argument to come from an avowed political extremist. My own policy ideas are probably more extreme than those of anyone currently in Congress (in most cases, much, much more extreme), and thus my ideas could not get passed. So that’s a bad thing.

True. But, while I think most of the ultimately correct ideas are extreme, I do not think that most of the extreme ideas are correct. I am not in favor of extremism merely as such; in fact, most extreme ideas are terrible. Even though the status quo is badly flawed, most extreme policy proposals that I hear are much worse than the status quo. Therefore, on average, I expect that if more extreme ideas (of the sort that politicians are likely to come up with) get passed, things will get worse.

Of course, you might disagree with this if you are a committed partisan of either the left or the right. Maybe you think that extreme left-wing ideas tend to be good. Obviously, I can’t examine all extreme left(/right)-wing ideas right here, since I’m not going to type in a 2000-page book. All I can do is give a general sort of prima facie, meta-consideration.

In the U.S. at present, things are going relatively well. Not compared to the ideal utopia, of course, but compared to other actual societies, from other times and places on the Earth. In fact, things are going incredibly well by that standard; almost all societies have had things vastly, horribly worse. You could say we are way above the mean of the “goodness” distribution.

In general, most large perturbations of a chaotic system should be expected to push it towards whatever is the most common state for that kind of system. Human societies are complicated, chaotic and their behavior is difficult to predict. You could think of extreme policy changes as big perturbations of a chaotic system. We should expect such changes, on average, to have the effect of making our society more similar to the average human society. Which is terrible.

Of course, if you have some specific (extreme) policy proposal, and you think you have very powerful arguments demonstrating the advantages of that particular policy, then the above very abstract consideration wouldn’t and shouldn’t change your mind about that proposal. But I think it gives prima facie evidence that in general, making it easier to pass extreme policies (especially if you do not have a great deal of confidence in the judgment and character of typical political leaders, which you should not!) is a bad thing.

3. Corruption

Here is the other thing, which I think is the main point. As Lord Acton says, power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. If the American political stalemate were to end with one party assuming unambiguous control of the government, then the U.S. would become a one-party democracy. What’s another word for a one-party democracy? “Dictatorship”.

You might think that your side’s politicians are nice now. (Though chances are, you don’t think that. You probably just think that they are relatively less corrupt and destructive than the other side.) But once they gain unchecked power, it’s a different story. There are almost no cases in history when a group had unchecked power, and they decided to use it mainly for good, and not to benefit themselves at the expense of others.

An interesting case is the communists. If you meet communists today (which you can sometimes find on university campuses), they seem like such nice people, who are just deeply concerned about justice, the plight of the downtrodden, and so on. They do not at all seem like power-mad potential killers. But in actual history, in all cases where communists gained actual political power, they fairly destroyed their societies. They suppressed dissent, oppressed the people, and often murdered millions.

The more morally committed a ruling elite is, the more oppressive they are likely to be. The communists were so oppressive because they wanted to remake society according to their ideals, whereas the kings and queens of old mainly just wanted to live in luxury. That’s why societal dominance by an ideologically defined group is especially dangerous.

4. How Have We Been So Lucky?

When I think about this, it seems to me that America has been very lucky to have such a long-running stalemate. Our political system, with its winner-take-all elections, seems to be designed to favor only two parties. Parliamentary systems such as the U.K.’s are much more favorable to multiple parties, which would seem to make it harder for any one party to gain dominance.

It’s a striking thing that Democrats and Republicans are so evenly divided in the U.S. Most elections turn on a few percentage points of the vote. The overwhelming majority of voters vote along party lines, but it just happens that a little less than half of voters identify with the Dems and a little less than half with the Reps; then there are a few percent of swing voters.

You could easily imagine shifts in the population so that more people start identifying with, say, the Democrats. With a shift of just a few percent of the population, the Dems would sweep the elections, and then we’re on to a one-party democracy.

What is maintaining this equilibrium?

Perhaps the explanation (related to the median voter theorem) is that politicians of both parties deliberately adjust their positions to be just to one side of the middle of the political spectrum (where the “middle” is defined in terms of the preferences of the median voter). Why would they do this? Well, suppose one politician in a race takes a position far to the right of center. Then his opponent should take a position distinctly, but not too far, to the left of the first politician. The second politician will then presumably get the votes of a large majority of voters (everyone who is clearly to the left of the first politician in their preferences).

Obviously, there are some complications (if your position is too moderate, then your party’s extreme members may not show up at the polls, etc.). But this general sort of dynamic could explain the long-lasting equilibrium in which Dems and Reps are about evenly matched.

One problem with this story — and this is more than a minor adjustment — is that there’s a fair amount of evidence that voters don’t really vote on the basis of policy preferences. They vote more on the basis of “identity”. They just personally prefer to identify with either Democrats or Republicans. Maybe their parents always voted Republican, or their ethnic group generally votes Republican, and so they “identify as” Republicans. (See Achen and Bartels’ Democracy for Realists.)

That being the case, if the balance between Reps and Dems starts to shift in the voting population, it is not so straightforward for a politician to simply “adjust his position” in a way that will still get him close to half of the votes. If demographic changes start to happen that would produce a decisive majority who prefer to identify with the Democratic tribe, it’s not clear that the Republicans could do anything about this — it’s not clear that there’s anything they could change about themselves that would move them back toward the median voter’s preference. This would make it surprising that the balance has been maintained for so long.

I can think of two possibilities. Either Achen and Bartels are wrong, and policy preferences are a significant part of voting decisions, or, even though voters’ preferences are not mainly based on policy ideas, there are still some adjustable attributes of each party that voter preferences are based on. As the population changes, the Republicans/Democrats can perhaps adjust aspects of their image that appeal to voters’ non-cognitive, emotive preferences, so as to place their party close to the median voter’s preferences.

5. Conclusion: How Progress Works

An implication of my view is that major political progress is not to be hoped for from defeating one’s political opponents (whether those be the Republicans, or the Democrats, or both). If voter choices are based on policy preferences, then long-run progress must come from shifting the median voter.

If (as Achen and Bartels argue) policy preferences are largely epiphenomenal for average voters, then I think progress would have to come from shifting the median policy opinion among the elites.

I’ve been watching some of the impeachment news. It looks like opinions are extremely divided on partisan lines: ~80% of Democrats think the President should be impeached, while ~80% of Republicans think he shouldn’t. (https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/impeachment-polls/) Politicians are even more partisan: not one Republican voted in support of an impeachment inquiry.

Who is being unreasonable here? The Republicans are. Here, I’m going to discuss the defenses of the President that I have seen. I don’t know if the politicians and Fox contributors who say these things believe them, but in case someone does, here is what is wrong with them:

Trump Defenses

1. Trump was duly elected. The Democrats are trying to overturn the election results.
   • Comment: This complaint would make sense if the impeachment was taken up right after the election, before Trump did anything. But it does not make sense if, after Trump was elected, he went on to abuse his powers in specific ways, and that is what prompted the impeachment inquiry. That is exactly what impeachment is for. Presumably it is not the case that no elected official should ever be impeached; yet any such case would “overturn an election result”.
2. The Democrats have been wanting to impeach Trump from the beginning.
   • Some were, some were not. Notably, Pelosi was against impeachment until the Ukraine information came out, and no impeachment inquiry started until then. So the Democrats did not in fact consider the President to be sufficiently impeachable until this story happened.
   • The fact that some wanted to impeach for bad reasons, before the Ukraine story came out, does not show that the Ukraine deal isn’t impeachable. This complaint is irrelevant.
3. We should wait for the 2020 election.
   • No, we shouldn’t. This amounts to saying that there should be no cost for Trump’s actions. He was already going to face an election in 2020, which he might have lost even if he hadn’t committed this abuse, so having to face an election in 2020 imposes no clear cost for the abuse of power. (Maybe he’ll lose some votes because of it, but no one will ever be sure of that.)
   • It is in fact Congress’ job, under the Constitution, to assess whether the President committed high crimes. This is pretty much the only legal mechanism for enforcing the law against the President. If Congress declines to impeach, they are in effect saying that the President did nothing very wrong. That will be noted, both by voters and by future Presidents.
4. Impeachment is divisive.
   • True. But voting against it on purely party lines, and making up rationalizations like this, does not reduce the divisiveness. It’s not as though if everyone in Congress votes in support of Trump, then the country will suddenly join together and sing Kumbaya. In general, “Let’s end these divisions by everyone coming over to my side” is not a persuasive proposal.
   • What would actually reduce the divisiveness would be if some people were to vote based on the facts of the case and general principles, rather than based on party affiliation.
   • Pretty much any impeachment would be divisive. It does not follow that we shouldn’t have such a process. A President should not be allowed to commit abuses with impunity just because he has some supporters.
5. The Bidens were corrupt.
   • Hunter Biden’s taking that job at Burisma was inappropriate and a conflict of interests. And if he or his dad were in office, then maybe we’d be talking about his impeachment. But he’s not, so we’re not. Trump is the one in office now, and we’re talking about him. So this complaint is irrelevant.
6. What about Hilary Clinton’s email?!
   • Irrelevant.
7. The whistleblower is untrustworthy, possibly a Democrat, a never-Trumper, or a Deep State operative.
   • Everything said by the whistleblower has been independently corroborated, so, again, this is irrelevant.
8. Trump said there was no quid pro quo.
   • This does not show there was no quid pro quo. It more likely just indicates that Trump knew that what he was doing was wrong. People who know that they are committing a crime very often deny that they are doing so.
   • There is plenty of independent evidence (other than Trump’s explicitly saying it) that there was a quid pro quo.
   • If you shoot someone while saying, “This is not a murder,” that won’t insulate you from murder charges.
9. A lot of the testimony is second-hand.
   • Trump’s efforts to prevent first-hand testimony from being given (ordering his people not to testify) suggests that he thinks the first-hand testimony would worsen his case. So the first-hand information is probably even more damning.
   • We now have more first-hand testimony (David Holmes, Gordon Sondland) about Trump’s scheme. The only more direct evidence would be Trump himself testifying, but I don’t think that’s reasonable to expect.
   • Trump already released a call transcript in which he tries pressuring Zelensky, and Mick Mulvaney already admitted that Trump was doing it.
   • Hearsay is bad when it is unreliable, but you can hardly complain about hearsay when you have already admitted to the main substance of what the hearsay supports, nor when you yourself are trying to stop the firsthand information from being used.
10. Trump was just trying to fight crime, which is good.
    • If you think that Trump was just concerned about upholding the law, and it is just a coincidence that the only alleged crimes he knew of happened to involve (i) a conspiracy theory about someone helping his political opponent in the 2016 election, and (ii) alleged corruption by his leading political rival for the 2020 election, I have some bridges to sell you.
    • The President does not have the legal authority to, for his own reasons, withhold military aid that Congress has appropriated. He could not legally do this, even if he had a good reason for it.
    • He did not have a good reason. We heard testimony that, according to Trump ally Gordon Sondland, Trump did not care about Ukraine and only cared about “big stuff” that benefits himself. By the way, if you didn’t know that Trump was like this, then I would like to talk to you, again, about some very nice bridges that I can get you a great deal on.
    • Trump was in fact putting the security of a U.S. ally in jeopardy, to the benefit of an American enemy, Russia.
11. We do this all the time (says Mick Mulvaney).
    • I don’t think so. No doubt, the U.S. frequently attaches conditions to the receipt of foreign aid. What does not happen all the time is that the President decides to refuse to implement the policy legally established by Congress, as part of a ploy for harming his political opponents. Nor do Presidents commonly side with a U.S. enemy that is invading a U.S. ally.
    • I know that this is not a routine thing, because of the reactions of career officials in the U.S. government — state department officials and intelligence officials who have worked in the government for many years, and have worked for other Presidents from both parties, found the incident disturbing, inappropriate, and “crazy”. That’s why Trump had to replace the ambassador to Ukraine with a yes-man; that’s why there was this whistleblower report, etc.
12. Zelensky said he wasn’t being pressured.
    • Trump was sitting right next to Zelensky. A reporter asked Zelensky if he felt pressured by Trump to investigate Biden. Zelensky says, hesitantly: “I think you read everything. So, I think you read text. I’m sorry, but I don’t want to be involved to democratic open, uh, elections, elections of USA. No, you heard that we had, uh, I think good, uh, phone call. It was normal, we spoke about many things, and I, so . . . I think, and you read it, that nobody pushed me.” Trump interjects, “In other words, no pressure.” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SSMmZLud3I4) Frankly, this really did not come across like a person feeling no pressure. He looked about as comfortable as Lando in this clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OXyH1XkQo44 (“Perhaps you feel you are being treated unfairly?”)
    • Trump was withholding $400 million in military aid, while Zelensky’s country was under Russian invasion. That seems like pressure to me.
13. It was wrong but does not rise to the level of impeachment; impeachment is very serious.
    • No, giving someone the powers of the Presidency is very serious. We don’t need incredibly high standards for impeaching a President. We need very high standards of conduct for the President. The correct thinking is not that we can’t afford to mistakenly remove a President; the correct judgment is that we can’t afford to have a criminal President. The President losing his job isn’t a terrible thing; entrusting vast power to a corrupt leader is the terrible thing.
    • If he’s not impeached, there is no cost for his violating the law, abusing his powers, etc. If there is no cost, he will of course continue doing it. And so will other Presidents. This case is going to establish the precedent — either that Presidents can be held accountable, or that they are unaccountable as long as their party holds one house of Congress. Next time there is a Democrat in office, don’t be surprised if they violate the law and abuse their powers in order to harm Republican rivals and hold on to power.
    • Again, what Trump did was selling out a U.S. ally, in favor of a U.S. enemy. (Much as he just did with the Kurds.) This might not be impeachable if it were done legally. But if he violates a Congressional mandate to do this, while also using the powers of the government to harm a political rival, I should think that is very serious. And I really don’t think Republicans would have trouble seeing this, if the President in office were a Democrat. If Obama had refused to implement a law passed by Congress, so that he could somehow harm Mitt Romney in 2012, and if in the process he was betraying a U.S. ally that was then being invaded by the Russians, I think Republicans would have voted for impeachment in a New York second.
14. There has been no due process.
    • An impeachment by Congress is not subject to the legal process requirements of a courtroom trial. That’s partly because it’s just a procedure to fire someone from his job, not a procedure to send someone to jail. In fact, Trump is getting much more process than you normally get when you’re being fired.
    • It’s also partly because, again, we can’t afford to have a corrupt leader in office.
    • Congress, again, is carrying out its Constitutionally prescribed function, exactly as it is legally supposed to do, and with the normal process.
15. Zelensky never started the Biden investigation, yet he did get the military aid. Therefore, there really was no quid pro quo.
    • What this shows is that Trump’s attempted blackmail/bribery/extortion did not succeed (because it was exposed by the whistleblower). Attempts, however, are typically punishable.
    • If Trump had succeeded, we would probably never have known about his crime. Zelensky would have made the announcement, Trump would have released the aid, and no one would have said anything. Surely the rule can’t be that we don’t punish you in the case where we actually find out about your crime.
16. We hate the Democrats.
    • Okay, that’s a good point. I have no answer to that.

The way it looks now is that the lesson we will be teaching, for all future politicians, is that a President can do whatever he likes, legal or illegal, as long as his party controls one house of Congress. 30 years from now, we’re not going to be happy that we established that principle. 30 years from now, it’s still going to be Republicans and Democrats vying for power, probably still about evenly matched. Only both will be quicker to abuse their powers for corrupt purposes. We’re selling out the future for ephemeral and doubtful political gains.

The only realistic way this doesn’t happen is if public opinion turns strongly against Trump, at which point Republican senators will switch sides as well.

Addendum

More on the confusion that it’s all about whether Biden should be investigated:

No, the question is not whether Biden is bad. Maybe Biden should be investigated, but:

a. In the American system, the President does not order up investigations of individuals. That’s not how it works. We have law enforcement people who are responsible for starting and running investigations.

b. Having politicians directing investigations of their political opponents is an obvious conflict of interests. I didn’t think that had to be explicitly pointed out, but apparently Trump Derangement Syndrome is now preventing people from seeing the most obvious, standard principles of justice, when applied to Trump.

c. In the context, Trump was obviously pressuring the Ukrainians to say something bad about Biden, whether it was true or not. If you’re sitting in Zelensky’s chair, and you’re not a complete moron, it’s going to be obvious to you that that’s what Trump wants. That’s part of the conflict of interests problem.

d. Anyway, why was Trump insisting on a public announcement? That is not generally how law enforcement works – they don’t publicly announce that they’re investigating someone at the start. The answer is, again, completely obvious: Trump’s purpose was obviously to cause political harm to Joe Biden, his leading rival for the next election, not to get justice.

e. Apart from the problem of potential injustice to the individual, the practice of having the current rulers use the power of the state to suppress their political opponents is a threat to the democratic system generally. This is the sort of thing that happens in dictatorships, not in free countries, the sort of thing that turns a country into a dictatorship. If you like this practice, imagine how you’re going to feel when a Democrat takes office, and suddenly Republicans are all getting their tax returns audited by the IRS. See if then you feel like saying, “Well, the President is just doing his job, enforcing the law.”

f. Even leaving aside all of the above, the President still cannot legally violate a policy passed by Congress. If Congress has appropriated funds to some purpose, the President does not have the legal, Constitutional authority to stop the funds from going through.

None of these are difficult points to see, if one isn’t suffering from TDS. Republicans would have no trouble grasping these points if we were talking about a Democratic politician. And my evidence for this:

g. No one in government who isn’t a partisan politician performing for a public audience, thought that Trump’s behavior was okay. Multiple career officials, who had served Presidents from both parties, were shocked. Trump had to remove the ambassador to Ukraine. Then he had to conduct his Ukraine/Biden deal in secret, and with a special group led by his personal lawyer, instead of the normal diplomats. Why do you think that was? His own people, as soon as they saw his infamous phone call with Zelensky, quickly edited out parts of the transcript and then hid it. Why was that? Trump himself tried to insist that he didn’t do it (“no quid pro quo”; “no pressure”). Why was all of that the case, if Trump was just doing his job perfectly normally?

Jesus F. Christ, come on. Every damned person in the government, including Trump allies, including Trump himself, obviously knew that this was not kosher. And yet they’ve still got the Republican base convinced that it’s all perfectly fine.

Here is a fascinating podcast: https://www.econtalk.org/keith-smith-on-free-market-health-care/

It’s an interview with Dr. Keith Smith, who runs the Surgery Center of Oklahoma. It’s a for-profit business that provides surgery of various kinds. They don’t take insurance, and their prices are all posted online. Their prices are also radically lower than the prices at regular, “not-for-profit” hospitals.

Near the beginning, Smith describes quoting a price for a surgery to a patient over the phone. He quotes her a price of $1,900. The patient says, “That’s interesting, because the non-profit hospital I talked to before you quoted me a price of $19,000.”

Later in the podcast, he describes some of the scams that go on in the industry. When hospitals claim that they were underpaid (the patient didn’t pay the full cost of treatment), they get money from the government. That sounds reasonable, right? They should be compensated for their good work.

This has caused hospitals to jack up prices to absurd levels, so they can regularly claim they were paid only a tiny fraction of the costs, so they can get more money from the government.

The hospitals make agreements with insurance companies whereby the insurance company only pays a fraction of the absurdly inflated price. This is all cool with the insurance companies too, because it enables them to claim that they negotiated unbelievable discounts (like an 80% or 90% discount) for their customers. It also makes it cost-prohibitive for a patient to get medical care without insurance, which is also fine with the insurance companies.

America’s health care system is obviously f—‘ed up. Even politicians recognize it. Almost everyone I hear talking about health care (a) knows that our system is terrible, and (b) has some radical proposal that would make things much worse and would ignore all the main problems. I’m getting kind of tired of this situation, and I’m worried that when I get old and need more health care, I will have to leave the country in order to avoid being bankrupted. Of course, no one with power will listen to me, and the problem will probably continue worsening for decades, especially if politicians pass more “reforms”. But I’m going to say what I think anyway.

1. The Problem

What’s wrong with American health care? Is it

1. Its quality
2. Its quantity
3. Its cost
4. Its distribution?

There are some quality issues (like people dying from medical errors), but overall America has high quality health care. The main problem is obviously (3). Costs are absurdly high, which in turn prevents many people from getting health care, so that affects (2) and (4) as well. Anecdotally, you can literally buy some drugs from Canada for less than a tenth the price you would pay in the U.S. If you take your cat to the vet, the cat can get health care for a fraction of the price you would pay for similar care for yourself. So we know that health care does not inherently have to cost this much. Now some statistics:

We spend over a sixth of the entire GDP on health care (18%), over $10,000 per person per year, much more than other developed nations. Costs have been skyrocketing for the past few decades, as shown in these graphs:

If this goes on, we’re all going to go bankrupt from medical costs.

We’re outspending the rest of the world, including other developed nations, but we’re not getting better health outcomes than other developed nations. This is a graph of deaths amenable to prevention by health care, per 100,000 population, in several developed countries:

Notice how the U.S. is doing worst (the red bars).

(Sources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_care_in_the_United_States, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/262881094)

Let’s keep this in mind. The main problem isn’t that we don’t have enough insurance, or that the costs are being borne by the wrong people, or any dumb thing like that. The main problem is the total costs are too high. If we can address that, all other problems are going to get easier. If we don’t address that, then nothing else can really be fixed. No matter how you shuffle around the costs or modify the method of paying, it really cannot produce a satisfactory outcome if you don’t do something to drastically reduce the total.

2. Why Is Health Care So Damned Expensive?

There are many factors. Here are a few big ones.

a. Insurance.

Note: the problem here is not that the greedy insurance companies are making excessive profits. Profit margins in health insurance are not out of line with profit margins for companies in the U.S. economy generally. Rather, the problem is:

1. Any time you add a middle man, you’re increasing costs. The middlemen have to be paid. If we all bought food using “food insurance”, then food costs would probably double.
2. Insurance companies want to make sure that they don’t overpay or pay for unnecessary procedures. So they require paperwork to be filled out to convince them of this. There then have to be experts on all the complicated rules about what the insurance company pays for, how much, etc. This greatly increases costs.
3. Because a third party is paying, patients ignore the prices. Because patients ignore the prices, providers jack up the prices. Since it’s being paid by a big, faceless corporation, no one feels bad about this.

This is part of why veterinary care is much cheaper than human care. It’s also why elective procedures (e.g., cosmetic surgery) are cheaper than “necessary” procedures — because insurance won’t pay for the former.

b. Shadow Prices.

If you go to a doctor or hospital, they never tell you the price of anything before you take it. You just have to take the medical care, whatever it is, and then wait to get a bill in the mail. For this reason, there is no question of going to a lower-cost provider, even if you wanted to.

c. Supply Restrictions.

Basic economics: the Law of Supply and Demand: for a given level of demand, if you restrict the supply of a good, the price goes up. Also, if you add very costly hurdles that suppliers have to jump over, you increase the prices.

In this case, to be allowed to practice medicine in the U.S., you have to:

1. Get an undergraduate degree (~4 years),
2. Go to medical school (~4 years),
3. Do an internship (1 year, possibly included in the following requirement), and
4. Do a medical residency (~3-7 years).

All of this is extremely costly in both time and money. Therefore, prices of medical care have to go up, a lot, in order to make it worthwhile for people to enter the field. Health care providers have to be compensated for the enormous up-front costs, else there wouldn’t be any providers.

There also is a limited number of residencies available in various specialties, making it impossible to increase the supply of providers to meet demand. Residency Review Committees, staffed by doctors in a given specialty, have control over how many residencies are offered, and they use this power to restrict the supply and raise prices. (Source: Sean Nicholson, https://www.nber.org/papers/w9649.pdf.)

d. Because We Care.

Why is it so easy to get health care for your cat, and why can he get excellent care for a fraction of what it would cost to care for you? Because he’s just a cat.

Because he’s “just a cat”, people don’t freak out as much about giving him care. They don’t do as many unnecessary tests and procedures. If something goes wrong, you probably won’t sue the vet. If you do sue, you probably won’t be awarded millions of dollars. Therefore, the vet doesn’t have to practice defensive medicine, and doesn’t have to buy malpractice insurance. And because he’s just a cat, there is less regulation governing his care.

When your cat is terminally ill and in pain, the vet will offer euthanasia. When the same situation befalls you, in most states, your doctor will not be permitted to offer the same mercy. This may result in spending much more money on care in the last few months or weeks of life.

3. Bad Ideas that Ignore or Worsen the Problem

Here are some examples of the incredibly bad ideas people come up with to “reform” the system. I think these are products of ideology rather than serious reflection or even awareness of the basic problem:

a. Make everyone buy health insurance. (per Obamacare)

This ignores the main problem. The main problem was never a shortage of insurance policies. The main problem is the total cost. Buying insurance spreads the costs over the insurance pool, which of course might be worth doing, but it does nothing to reduce the total, which is the main thing we need.

In fact, insurance is one of the main reasons why health care costs are so high in the first place, so we should expect this idea to increase the total cost of health care. And indeed, health care costs have continued, utterly unsurprisingly, to rise since the ACA (Obamacare) was adopted (https://ldi.upenn.edu/brief/effects-aca-health-care-cost-containment).

(Note: I know there is more to the ACA than the individual mandate.)

b. Have the government subsidize health care.

On an individual level, this might seem like a solution: if you are facing high health care costs, your problem is solved by having the government pay for (part of) your health care. But this can’t be the solution for society if society as a whole is facing excessive health care costs. This just redistributes the cost; it doesn’t reduce the cost borne by society overall.

In fact, basic economics tells us that if a product is subsidized, then (a) more people will try to buy it, and (b) the prices will rise. So this idea increases total costs.

If the supply is fixed (per section 2c above), the result will be that suppliers raise their prices so that the same number of people receive the good as before. We just spend more money for the same amount of the good.

c. Have the government pay for all health care. (“Single payer”)

Another proposal to shuffle around who pays the cost or how it is paid. In fairness, there is an economic theory whereby a single payer can reduce prices. It’s just the reverse of a monopoly: if you have a monopoly (single seller), you can raise the prices above what would be the competitive market level. If you have a monopsony (single buyer), you can lower the prices below the competitive market level. Both, by the way, result in a lower total quantity of the good being consumed, and lower economic efficiency (monopoly benefits the seller but harms the buyers by more; monopsony benefits the buyer but harms the sellers by more).

However, this theoretical possibility does not mean that things would in fact work out that way, in the United States as it actually is, with the federal government as the single payer. The U.S. government, as it happens, is extremely subject to influence from rent-seeking special interest groups, and is not extremely good at reducing costs or balancing its budget. Another factor is that, when the government is paying for something, many Americans have a tendency to spend as much as they can. Thus, the following are all possible results of a single-payer American system:

1. Prices might be reduced, maybe by a lot, due to the state’s bargaining power.
2. The number of health care providers might decrease because of (1). (When prices go down, fewer people want to enter the industry.) There would then be less health care available.
3. There may be more rent-seeking lobbying from the medical industry, with unpredictable results. This could increase health care costs, as providers use political influence to get the government to cover things that private insurers would not have covered, or even to get the government to pay above market rates for procedures.
4. Health care providers might start to recommend more, and more expensive forms of, medical care, and patients might agree, since the government is paying.
5. The federal debt would of course explode, even more than it already has. Because there’s no way we’re going to raise taxes by trillions of dollars per year to pay for it.

. . .

Before proposing a reform, we should think about this: what is going wrong in the health care industry, as compared with normal industries?

In most industries, prices decrease relative to wages over time. Subjectively and anecdotally speaking, the products of most industries seem really affordable yet high-quality. (E.g., for $350, you can buy a machine that can literally perform a billion calculations a second, can store millions of pages of information, connects you effortlessly to a world-wide network so you can share your fake-nous thoughts, and other amazing things.) What is different in the health care industry, compared to the industries that are going well?

I’ve answered that in section 2. The answer is not “the industries where things are going well are run by the government” or “they have a single payer for all of their products” or “everyone has insurance”.

Notice how all of the reforms discussed in this section completely ignore all the points I raised about health care costs in section 2. It’s as if those were completely unknown or incomprehensible points. But they’re not; they’re totally obvious with a basic understanding of economics and basic facts about the American health care system.

4. Non-Stupid Ideas that at Least Acknowledge the Problem

What would a minimally smart person say who was trying to think about the problem, rather than trying to score points with know-nothing ideologues? You can doubtless find more developed and better answers than this, but the following is a start:

(a)

We should eliminate shadow prices. My proposed law: For any medical care accepted by a patient, the price of that care must be made available in advance, or else the patient is not legally obligated to pay. In the case of emergency care, for which there may not be time to discuss pricing information when the particular patient shows up, the information should still be published in a publicly available location.

(A legal rationale: you can’t claim that someone has implicitly agreed to pay some price, if there was no way for them to know what the price was. If patients have not agreed to pay the price, then they should not have to pay it.)

(b)

There should be less reliance on insurance. Insurance should only pay for large, unanticipated expenses, not routine medical care.

Also, insurance should be purchased by the individual, not the individual’s employer. (Take the money that employers are already spending on health insurance: they can just give that money to the employees, then employees can buy insurance themselves.) Then insurance plans could be expected to become better tailored to individuals’ desires. You also wouldn’t lose your insurance if you changed jobs.

(I don’t know exactly how these outcomes would be brought about.)

(c)

Remove the goddamned rent-seeking supply restrictions.

Supply restrictions, unfortunately, are among the most popular anti-libertarian laws. People love being fleeced by industries. Whenever you propose relaxing restrictions on the supply of some good, consumers immediately and indignantly start to repeat the rationalizations originally invented by the industry to serve the industry’s financial interests.

FYI, putting huge hurdles in the way of people providing a good does not generally result in higher quality. Many economic studies have been done of licensing requirements. To quote one review of the evidence, “most research does not find that licensing improves quality or public health and safety.” That’s not some libertarian propaganda piece; that’s a quotation from an Obama administration report on professional licensing laws (https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/sites/default/files/docs/licensing_report_final_nonembargo.pdf). Everyone who looks at it agrees, however, that these sorts of barriers definitely do increase prices.

The industries where things are going well — products are affordable, well-adapted to consumer needs, and there is frequent innovation — are not industries with large barriers to entry. They’re the opposite, areas where new entry is easy and frequent. And they do not have terrible quality. If anything, quality tends to be higher in the industries with lower barriers, because they are more competitive. Competition drives up quality. (The tech industry has little regulation and low barriers to entry; that’s why it has frequent innovation, high quality, and decreasing prices.)

(d)

We should reduce legal liability in medicine. Doctors should not fear multi-million-dollar lawsuits for honest mistakes.

. . .

None of suggestions (a)-(c) are even on the public radar screen. No political leader comes close to entertaining any of them. I assume the reason is either (1) that our leaders want prices to keep going up, because they’re in the pocket of the industry, or (2) that no leader (and hardly any citizens either) has given serious, informed, and non-ideological thought to the American health care problem — nor bothered to consult anyone who has.

As long as this continues to be the case, we’re just going to keep pouring more and more of our economy into this industry, without getting any more benefits in return.

Think of the epistemic environment as an intellectual commons. To get a deeper understanding of the world, it helps to have a wide range of ideas to consider, especially when arguments are given to support them. This helps us justify our beliefs, which tends to be good for everyone.

But some people are motivated to pollute the commons with false beliefs that aim to please an audience or promote a political outcome. Examples include dishonest political advertisements and biased journalism intended to provoke outrage. Each of us internalizes the benefit of adding a bit of epistemic pollution, but all of us share the costs. Journalists and activists know that motivated reasoning pervades politics, and that if they repeat dubious accusations or false beliefs that titillate their audience, the beliefs are more likely to stick, and the articles they write are more likely to be shared. Mike Huemer summarizes some of the reasons for this in a previous post.

Dishonest journalism is nothing new, and to some extent it just reflects what consumers of news want to hear. The benefits of making bombastic claims go to the writer of a story, and to those who get a dopamine hit from consuming it and feeling outraged. But the costs accrue to all of us in the epistemic commons, who find it harder to figure out what to believe.

When our indignation is activated, we feel like our lives gain meaning. Don Quixote is a comical character who symbolizes the rush we get from fighting injustice, whether real or imagined.

The social isolation of large, liberal societies tends to make this worse. Many people find meaning in political movements in the same way true believers find direction from religious institutions. As religious belief wanes in free and prosperous societies, religious wars give way to political battles. Journalists and academics assume the position of a secular clergy who take it upon themselves to burn the heretics who challenge sacred dogmas. Those of us who attempt to bend or break the Overton Window of acceptable belief are crucified by the Cathedral. Our ideas are attacked as wicked rather than engaged with. Journalists cash in on indignant mobs. They also create them.

There are many ways of writing click bait journalism, and many sources of “evidence” to appeal to. Some organizations specialize in producing biased data that journalists can go to when they want to assassinate a political opponent. For example, some journalists use the SPLC’s “hate map” to discredit political opponents who they don’t know how to argue against. Everyone who’s studied the issue knows the SPLC is a rapacious and morally bankrupt organization that manipulates data to generate outrage and increase their donations.

The thing is, it works. The SPLC smears people like former Muslims Aayan Hirsi Ali and Maajid Nawaz as “Islamophobic” for criticizing female genital mutilation, and for exalting the virtues of Western societies.

There are many other examples online. A website called RationalWiki is an especially egregious offender, and it is – predictably enough – promoted by Google’s search algorithm. It provides an outlet for zealots to create hit pieces against people and publishers whose ideas they disagree with. Because it mimics the template of Wikipedia, which is considered somewhat credible by casual readers, journalists and activists sometimes use it as a source.

Click-bait journalism benefits those who create and consume it. But in the long run it harms all of us. When we’re confronted with hit pieces aimed at indulging our desire to be outraged, readers should refuse to click and targets should refuse to apologize. The only way to clean up the intellectual commons is to shame the mobs and protect their targets.

Today (Oct. 19, 2019), I’m participating in the Open Borders Conference at the New School in New York — https://freemigrationproject.org. In keeping with that, here is a post about why illegal immigration is cool. There’s no reason to respect immigration laws.

1. Ethical Questions About Illegal Migration

• Many people — at least politicians during campaigns — appear to express some indignation and condemnation at people who have “violated our laws!!” by immigrating illegally. Are such attitudes appropriate?
• Sometimes it is suggested that these illegal migrants should be punished for their presumed misdeed. Would that be just?
• If you have the chance to migrate and thereby improve your overall welfare, but doing so would be illegal, do you have a reason to refrain out of respect for the laws of your desired destination country?

I suggest that the answer to all of these is “no”. Potential illegal migrants have no moral reason to respect immigration laws.

2. Things I Am Not Assuming

I am skeptical about political authority. I think that no state is legitimate, no one has political obligations, and no one has political authority. That stance would make it easy to answer the above questions. Since there is no obligation to obey the law in general (merely because it’s the law), there is also no obligation to obey immigration laws.

Unfortunately, not everyone has read my book on The Problem of Political Authority. Worse, even some who have read it don’t agree with it. So let’s suppose we bracket that. I mention the issue of authority only to make clear that I am not assuming any controversial stance on that.

I also am not assuming anything controversial about the justification of immigration laws.

In other words, my claim is that even if the state has authority, and even if the immigration laws are entirely justified, there is still no moral reason at all for potential immigrants to respect the immigration laws.

How can that be? Briefly, (1) even if the state has authority, that authority only extends to its own citizens; and (2) even if there are good reasons for the state to adopt immigration restrictions, those reasons are not reasons that the migrants themselves have. (You might have a reason to try to prevent me from doing something, even while I have no reason not to do it.)

3. Accounts of Authority

Basically, all extant accounts of authority imply that the state’s authority would not extend to potential illegal immigrants. I don’t agree with any of these theories, but let’s pretend that we think one of them is correct.

a. The Social Contract Theory

On this account, the state’s authority derives from a contract with its citizens. We have to obey the government’s laws, because we somehow (“implicitly”?) agreed to do so, in exchange for the state’s protection.

On that view, this authority would not extend to would-be immigrants. People living in other countries are not parties to this state’s social contract, even if the social contract exists. So they would not be obligated to obey this state’s laws.

You might think: “Okay, they’re not now obligated by our laws. But once they migrate into ‘the government’s territory’, or perhaps when they start benefiting from some government services, they will become so obligated (even if they are not citizens). At that point, they will acquire an obligation to deport themselves, in order to stop violating the law.”

Here is the problem. A contract involves some sort of exchange of value. When you sign a rental agreement, you agree to exchange some amount of money for a space to live in. When you sign an employment contract, you agree to exchange labor for money.

In general, it cannot be a condition on a contract that one party give up the very good that they are entering into the contract to receive. For instance, in a rental agreement, there couldn’t be a clause that says the tenant can’t use the apartment in any way. In an employment contract, the employee could not be required to never cash his paychecks.

Now, the central point of the social contract is for individuals to secure the benefits of peaceful cooperation in a given society. That is what the individual is supposed to be entering into the contract for. Therefore, the individual cannot be required, under that contract, to renounce living in that very society. So there could not be a social-contract-based obligation to deport oneself.

b. Fair Play

The Fair Play account says that, when there is a cooperative scheme that produces benefits for all (including you), you generally ought to do your fair share in supporting it; you should not free ride on the efforts of others. Thus, you should obey the law, because general obedience to the law in society is required for there to be peaceful and orderly social cooperation. If you decide to break the law while others are obeying it, then you’re seeking to free ride on the sacrifices of others.

But it is a condition on having a fairness-based obligation that one actually receive a fair share of the benefits of the cooperative scheme in question. If the scheme produces benefits for others but excludes you, then you are not obligated to support it (at least, not by fairness considerations).

Thus, there is a similar constraint here as in the case of the social contract: it cannot be part of doing your “fair share” in supporting a cooperative scheme that you exclude yourself from the benefits of that very cooperative scheme.

Example: say you’re on a lifeboat with several other people. The boat is taking on water and needs to be bailed. You should do your fair share by bailing out the boat. On the other hand, if someone suggests that you should do your fair share by jumping overboard to lighten the load on the boat, that’s ridiculous. You don’t have to do that.

In the case of our alleged political obligations, fair play might require one to obey almost all other laws. But it could not require one to obey a law whereby one would be entirely excluded from the society, for then one would receive none of the benefits of the social cooperation that one was contributing to. Hence, fair play cannot support an obligation to obey immigration restrictions.

c. Democracy

Some say that the state’s authority is based on the will of the majority. Provided that the state is democratic, it has been authorized by the people to make the laws that it makes. For some reason, we have to obey the will of the people, so we have to obey those laws.

This theory obviously implies that non-democratic governments lack authority. Slightly less obviously, I think it also implies that those who are excluded by the state from the democratic process are also outside the state’s authority. Defenses of democracy tend to emphasize the good of equality, which democracy is said to realize (see Christiano), or the good of well-conducted public deliberation (see Habermas, Cohen).

But the immigration laws are made without any participation from the main group that is affected by those laws — the potential immigrants. They are given no vote, and no say in the making of those laws. So even if you think the democratic process confers authority on its outcomes in general, the potential immigrants in particular have no moral reason to respect these laws.

d. Freedom of Association

People in general have a right to freedom of association, which includes a right not to associate with others whom we do not wish to associate with. Perhaps this can be used to explain why the state has the right to make immigration restrictions — perhaps this is an exercise of a right to freedom of (non-)association on the part of the nation’s existing citizens.

Two problems: first, the right to avoid unwanted associations generally applies to substantial relationships, not extremely vague and tenuous “associations”. For instance, if I don’t like you, I can refuse to have you as an employee, friend, or spouse. I cannot, however, refuse to allow you to live in the same neighborhood as me — that is much too weak of an “association” for me to claim rights over. I have a right against your moving into my house, but not against your moving into my neighborhood.

Second, the right to freedom of association includes a right to veto one’s own associations with others, but does not include a right to veto other people’s associations. E.g., if I don’t like you, I can, again, refuse to hire, befriend, or marry you. But I cannot demand that third parties not hire, befriend, or marry you.

Now, immigration restrictions, to be justified by freedom of association, would require rights over extremely tenuous, vague associations — such as a right not to merely be in the same vast geographical region as a certain other person — or rights over other people’s associations — such as a right to demand that employers who want to hire a person not hire that person simply because you yourself don’t want them to.

In my view, individuals have a right not to associate with immigrants or would-be immigrants, if they so choose. That is, one could refuse to hire, befriend, marry, etc., an immigrant. But one cannot justly demand that an immigrant not live anywhere in the same country as oneself (on someone else’s property), nor can one justly demand that someone else not hire an immigrant (using their own money).

4. Reasons for Restriction

a. Jobs

Why should the state restrict migration? Some say that the state should do this in order to protect employment opportunities for low-skill native workers.

This might count as a reason for the state to restrict, provided that the state is justifiably partial toward low-skill native workers. But notice that this reason would not apply to the immigrants themselves — the immigrants themselves have no reason to be partial to native workers. The immigrants rationally prefer themselves to be hired, just as native workers prefer themselves to be hired. If it’s not wrong for a native worker to take a job that an immigrant could hold, then it’s not wrong for an immigrant worker to take a job that a native could hold.

So, even if this is a good reason for the state to restrict, it isn’t a good reason not to illegally migrate.

b. Fiscal Burdens

Some say that immigration imposes fiscal burdens on the government because immigrants consume social services and pay lower-than-average taxes (due to being poor).

This might be a reason for the state to restrict, again assuming the state is justifiably partial to native citizens. But again, there is no reason for the immigrants themselves to be partial to native citizens. If it’s permissible for native citizens to consume social services and impose fiscal burdens on the state, then this should also be permissible for immigrants.

Now, some would say that it is impermissible to take handouts from the government. In that case, both natives and immigrants should refrain from doing it. But they still don’t have to completely exile themselves from the society.

c. Political Change

Some say that we should restrict migration to prevent immigrants from changing the political culture of our society, e.g., by voting for authoritarian policies and leaders.

Again, assume that this is a good reason for the state to restrict. It still wouldn’t be a good reason for the immigrants themselves not to illegally migrate. Of course, the immigrants, like all of us, should support freedom and not authoritarianism. If you have been voting for authoritarian candidates, what you should do is either start voting for good candidates or stop voting.

Many native-born voters support authoritarian values. No one thinks that they’re obligated to exile themselves. Similarly, there’s no reason why immigrants who support authoritarian values would be obligated to exclude themselves from the society. In both cases, they should change their values to support freedom; or, failing that, not participate in the political process.

Of course, illegal immigrants can’t vote anyway, so they don’t have to worry about directly supporting bad policies. Perhaps they should also be careful not to speak in favor of bad policies either.

Conclusion

Conclusion: even if the state has good reasons to restrict immigration and even if the state has authority (both of which points I doubt), there would still be no moral reason for the migrants themselves not to migrate illegally.

I discussed this all at greater length in my chapter contributed to this book: www.amazon.com/Open-Borders-Movement-Geographies-Transformation/dp/0820354260/