New article

I've got a new article at Strike the Root. Hope you like it. Meanwhile, over at my other blog, I've got some stuff on the late Gordon R. Dickson.

An exercise in futility

Sheldon Richman has been talking, here and here, about the income tax protest movement. If you don't know what that is, give him a quick look before reading further. In brief, they believe that federal income taxes are not constitutional and seek to demonstrate this in court.

I'm not all that interested in the merits of the tax protesters' claims, though Richman seems to do a good job of refuting them. What baffles me about the tax protesters is their strange optimism about the honesty of the government: that is, their apparent belief that if they prove that federal income taxation is unconstitutional, the federal courts will actually give a damn.

These are the same courts that have decided that growing food on your own land for your own consumption constitutes "interstate commerce," that McCain-Feingold did not violate the First Amendment, and that seizing land from one private party to give to another private party is constitutionally protected "public use." Do they really seem like they're that interested in massively decreasing state power over constitutional niceties? Even if everything the tax protesters say about the law is true, the idea that the federal government would give up hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue every year for the sake of the Constitution is absurd. They don't care about the law nearly that much.

Cognitive dissonance? What's that?

In an excellent post at Unqualified Offerings, Jim Henley points out something I hadn't really thought of: the crime for which Saddam Hussein was officially executed, the Dujail reprisal massacre, is pretty much the sort of thing a lot of hawks are suggesting we do when they complain about our inadequate ferocity in Iraq. As Henley bluntly puts it:

Every time you read a complaint about “politically correct rules of engagement” you are reading someone who would applaud a Dujail-level slaughter if only we were to perpetrate it.

A harsh assessment, but it rings true with several conversations I've had, sadly.

This brings to mind a similar quirk of many hawks, who are generally the people most likely to advocate the use of torture on suspected terrorists. Quite often, their publicly stated position seems to be, "Hussein was a monster who had to be destroyed because he engaged in things like torture. By the way, let's start torturing people!"

To be fair, I'm pretty sure none of the neocons have advocated going to Hussein-level extremes like rape rooms or acid baths. Still, it makes me wonder: Are they oblivious to the fact that they're calling for us to do the sorts of things they damn Hussein for? Or are they just hoping everyone else will be?

New stuff

Apologies for the dearth of new posts lately; now that I've got my new laptop and the holidays are coming to a close, that situation should improve. Meanwhile, I hope you'll check out my new article at lewrockwell.com.

I'm also happy to say that work on my other blog has proceeded at a good pace, with reviews of Larry Niven, Poul Anderson (who is of particular libertarian interest), and some thoughts on science fiction at the movies. If that sounds interesting, please have a look.

Maintaining the public trust

I have no particularly strong animus against Gerald Ford, and I hadn’t intended to comment on his death one way or the other. But I ran into something that deserves comment.

I just finished reading this morning’s Chicago Tribune’s editorial pages. Most of the letters to the editor and the lead editorial were about the late Gerald Ford. The tone was universally worshipful- he was benevolent, he was wise, he was a compromising moderate who united people. In particular, his decision to pardon Nixon was praised as a great act of statesmanship, a way to restore American trust in government by avoiding the spectacle of a former president being put on trial. That jumped out at me. It is interesting that these people, who consider faith in government and the presidency a good thing, implicitly recognize and acknowledge the fact that to maintain the people’s all-important trust in government it is necessary to distract them from criminal acts committed by their leaders. Letting Nixon go to trial for his crimes like some commoner would have encouraged the public to think about the fact that the state’s highest official had broken the state’s own laws, and we can’t have that!

I doubt they think of it in precisely those terms- few people are that Machiavellian. But it remains the underlying principle of their argument.