Category Archives: BAB’s A List

Updated: Israel and Hamas: Who Is To blame? By Tibor Machan

BAB's A List, Israel, Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, Terrorism

Hamas has embroiled Israel in a vortex of terror and counterterror. BAB A-Lister Tibor Machan has a way of clarifying complicated matters. In the following column, Tibor untangles the jerry-built justifications for Hamas terrorism.

The sequel to “Israel and Hamas: Who is to blame?” follows hereunder. Scroll down to read “Terrorism: Inexcusable,” also by Tibor Machan.

Israel and Hamas: Who is to blame?
By TIBOR R. MACHAN

When one is bombarded with information about events on which the history is ancient and so complex that hardly anyone commenting makes sense of them, it is tough to judge. That’s how it is with me and the current upheaval between Israel and Hamas.

The news reports at the beginning said Israel took military action after hundreds of missiles were being launched at it from Gaza. So to rid the Gaza Strip of the missile launchers, Israel began to target various areas from which the missiles were being launched, presumably centers where Hamas had most of its personnel and equipment located.

Further reports, especially on CNN International, observed that Israel’s response to the initiation of aggression by Hamas was disproportionate to what Hamas did to Israel. Still, as with most fights, this one had to start with someone throwing the first punch, as it were, and that seems to have been Hamas this last time. (Last time, Hamas supposedly kidnapped some Israeli soldiers, another situation that was bizarre from the start.)

The Israelis claim that all they want is for the missile launching to stop, and Hamas spokesmen on CNN say they will only stop if Israel stops its aggression. But this is confused since Hamas clearly started the launching of missiles out of the Gaza Strip and isn’t disputing this. So how could Israel be the aggressor? To aggress is to begin a fight, not to respond to one being initiated.

As I was watching report after report on CNN, while attending a conference — and getting no sleep — in Mexico, I noticed that the reporters of this news network kept repeating the claim, made by Hamas leaders and others who support Hamas and oppose Israel, that Israel is targeting innocent civilians. Yet it is nearly impossible to tell who is a civilian in the Gaza conflict, judging by the footage showing various groups of young people and adults shooting whatever weapons they have at hand and throwing rocks in the direction of the border between Israel and the strip.

Unfortunately, the reports fail to include any discussion of how one is to tell the difference between Hamas civilians and Hamas militia. I have never seen any footage showing Hamas soldiers, if they exist; Israel, however, does distinguish between its civilians and its army by way of their garb.

After about five days of the hostilities, CNN’s reporters had some Gaza government official on the air and posed some pointed questions about who is the victim and who the aggressor. It was immediately clear that the official wanted at all cost to dodge the issue of who had started the current hostilities. When the CNN reporter asked about Israel officials’ claim about the missiles that had been launched at Israel and to which Israel was supposedly responding, the spokesman was so obviously evasive that I couldn’t believe it. Who sent this person to speak for Hamas? He replied to the CNN reporter by saying “I have always been known as an opponent of violence.” So what? Why is that an answer to “Israelis say they are responding to your aggression, so what is your answer to them?”

When one is bombarded with selective, nearly haphazard information about events around the globe, events that are one’s only source of understanding of who is doing what to whom and how it is all justified, there is not much one can do but listen very carefully and determine who is making logical mistakes — who is equivocating, who is being evasive and vague, who is being clear and answers relevant questions directly, without obfuscation.

By that criterion I have to say that my provisional assessment of what is reported from the Middle East leaves me with the impression that Israel is less responsible for the recent mess than Hamas. That’s as well as I can do with the immediate information at hand. Maybe more detail, more history will lead me to alter what I think about the matter, but for now I am pretty sure that Hamas is the bad guy here, while Israel, as so often in history, is the victim.

As my mother, who lives in Europe and went through the mid-century disasters there, said to me a while ago, “Why don’t they leave the Israelis to live in peace?” Frankly, I am mystified myself. And it is also puzzling why so many Western academics seem to get on board with the anti-Israel stance. No, I don’t call it anti-Semitism because I don’t know the motivation behind their position. I do know that they nearly always favor Israel’s enemies and consider America’s official pro-Israel stance something wrongheaded, based not on considerations of justice but on the so-called influence of the Jewish Lobby.

I don’t care about any lobby. I am only concerned that when fights break out, those who start them be identified, and that their reasons and motives be objectively evaluated. That is the only way I personally can make some bit of sense of these kinds of situations of which I receive such spotty information. That is, unless I become a specialist, and for that I would need to return to school and get a graduate degree in Middle Eastern studies.

Part II: Terrorism: Inexcusable
By TIBOR R. MACHAN

In discussing the Arab-Israeli conflict one often comes across disturbing defenses of anti-Israeli policies by such organizations as Hamas and Hezbollah. One such line of defense I have encountered, for which even some of my colleagues in philosophy have shown sympathy, is that given the desperate situation of Arabs, say in the Gaza strip, one must accept their resort of terrorism, including, of course, the indiscriminate murder of people, many of them children and thus indisputably innocent of anything that might plausible justify killing them. And often this line of defense is put in terms of what Israel has done to Arab citizens in Gaza, placed them into desperate situations by cutting off the flow of supplies, starving them, etc.

Without going into whether the claims against Israel are true or accurate, or who is ultimately responsible for the conditions in Gaza–it is crucial to realize that even if those claims were all true, they would fail to justify terrorism, the murder of innocent people for political purposes and the like.

Say I am starving and say I believe that this has been caused by various adults around my neighborhood. Would my situation justify my recklessly lobbing bombs around the homes in this neighborhood, never mind who is being killed by my actions? Am I justified in my state of desperation to inflict violence on those who have had nothing to do with what I am experiencing? No, not at all. All one might say is that I have completely lost control over myself and am now simply flailing about madly, caring nothing about the consequences; about whether my conduct is remotely just. And in that case I need to be pacified!

It is one thing to show some understanding of the dastardly conduct of certain people in dire straits. It is something else entirely to claim that this conduct is just or justified. And over the last decades it is difficult to deny that on the whole, apart from the early terrorist actions of certain Israelis, the overwhelming majority of indiscriminate, often suicidal, killings have been done by anti-Israeli partisans.

For some reason that escapes me, quite a few people who would ordinarily be appalled at deeds of cruelty toward the innocent seem to find what these anti-Israeli parties are doing acceptable. I cannot see how the fact that Israeli policies are imperfect, disputable, sometimes over the top, serves in the slightest to justify these anti-Israeli policies.

Again, I confess that a full grasp of what is happening between Arabs and Israelis escapes me. But I seriously doubt that anyone has that grasp, given how it is tied up with a very long history, many religious convictions based on faith, and, most of all, collectivist or tribal thinking. Some of the arguments that are propounded by many who contribute to the debate, especially on the anti-Israeli side, seem also, to be linked to manufactured historical events and religious claims that are wholly unprovable.

At times simply abstaining from forming any conclusions about these matters is acceptable. But that is near impossible to do in a democracy where one is called upon to approve or disapprove policies of one’s government vis-à-vis foreign governments. Even if the entire situation in, for example, the Middle East is basically irrational and beyond hope of sorting out fully, one is simply left with a need to take a stand so as to be able to assess with some measure of competence what one’s government is doing (even in circumstances that are tainted with confusion and a history of mistakes).

I am certainly only in the process of coming to grips with the issues, not by any stretch of the imagination at the point of having formed a fixed, stable position on them all. But just as Socrates, who confessed not to know very much at all, continued to search, along with all of his pupils, for what is true, perhaps some attentive, if incomplete, reflections on the Arab-Israeli situation can help advance not only one’s own understanding, but that of others too.

Tibor Machan holds the R.C. Hoiles Chair in Business Ethics & Free Enterprise at Chapman University’s Argyros School of B & E and is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution (Stanford). He advises Freedom Communications. His most recent book is The Morality of Business, A Profession for Human Wealth-Care (Springer, 2007). E-mail him at TMachan@link.freedom.com.

Patriot Goes Up Against Treason Lobbyist

BAB's A List, Crime, Ethics, Ilana Mercer, IMMIGRATION, Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, libertarianism

Patriot Peter Brimelow, founder of VDARE.COM, debated Treason Lobbyist Jacob Hornberger on immigration.

I await footage of the debate, but I expect “Bumper Hornberger” was intellectually disemboweled.

He ought to be used to it, although the bitch-slap he received from Robert Bidinotto occurred some time ago, so “Bumper” may need a reminder. See “Shame on Bumper Hornberger,” reproduced hereunder.

I have no wish to revisit the manner in which he (and his ever-righteous ifeminist handmaiden, or hyena, rather) swarmed me. I’ll say only this: Hornberger and his backers seldom fail to bend over backwards to avoid imputing evil intent to bad elements or evil characters (as Bidinotto elaborates hereunder). Yet me Bumper and his gang accused of malicious intent in the absence of any. In other words, they implied I was a liar; impugning my person rather than my positions.

Again, notwithstanding the intellectual differences we hold on the issues; what makes these people–who’re forever posing as paragons of justice–so despicable is that they convicted me of malicious intent when there was none.

In the universe of these twisted individuals, some are more equal than others.

In any event, in “Shame on Bumper Hornberger,” Robert Bidinotto explains why “Bumper Hornberger” is a lousy exegete, not fit to defend truth. This is why I am quite confident Peter Brimelow, a class act, will have tossed and gored Hornberger “real good.”

The BIDINOTTO BLOG
Shame on Bumper Hornberger
posted 08/26/03

Bumper who?

Okay, apologies. This impromptu post refers to a matter more arcane than you’ll normally find here, and I beg your patience for a brief setup.

A feisty columnist for WorldNetDaily.com, Ilana Mercer, recently took on some fellow libertarians for their one-sided view of Middle East politics: the view that Israel is the root of all evil, and that the poor, downtrodden Palestinians are merely responding defensively and justly against the Zionist oppressor.

Ilana (she’s a friend, so I’ll call her that) has a perfectly good point. There’s a curious moral asymmetry among some self-styled lovers of Liberty and Justice, who rage against Israel for targeting the likes of Hamas terrorists in self-defense, yet who simultaneously exude boundless sympathy toward those who encourage their kids to strap on explosives and blow themselves up, along with scores of innocent noncombatants in buses, restaurants, and nightclubs. For most Americans, this is an easy moral call; but then again, most Americans aren’t libertarian anarchists.

Anyway, it so happens that one of Ilana’s targets was a writer and editor, Sheldon Richman. Not one to mince words, she wrote: “I understand that libertarians like Sheldon Richman (and the Holocaust-denying Institute for Historical Review) believe, mistakenly, that all ‘the land’ belongs to the Arabs.”

Mr. Richman, who is of Jewish descent, took great offense. He claimed that with this sentence Ilana had implied that he, too, was among those who denied the reality of the Holocaust. One notes, though, that in her sentence, Ilana had fastidiously segregated Mr. Richman from the Holocaust Deniers by means of a parenthetical barricade. I don’t think that any fair reading of the sentence (that is, a reading by someone not personally involved in the counterpunching) would construe it to mean that Mr. Richman was similar to the I. H. R. in denying the Holocaust–only in their shared beliefs about Arab claims to Israeli land.

Now Ilana Mercer is perfectly capable of defending herself, and she has. But a bit of piling on against her has begun, with one Jacob “Bumper” Hornberger–head of something called the Future of Freedom Foundation–now hyperventilating against the lady and her online publisher, WorldNetDaily.

Mr. Hornberger believes that Mr. Richman was grievously wounded by Ilana’s parenthetical bludgeon, and has publicly damned WorldNetDaily (“Shame on WorldNetDaily” is his screed’s title) for daring to defend their columnist, rather than muzzling or disowning her. Along the way, he accuses Ilana of a “false and despicable insinuation” and of a “smear”; and he further claims that she “knowingly, deliberately, and intentionally chose not to pursue the truth…”

I would have stayed out of this particular little spat except for two things.

First, I don’t much like it when men gang up on a lady–especially a lady whom I know to be honorable.

Second, it so happens that I’ve had a bit of first-hand experience with Mr. Hornberger concerning the matters that he says so concern him: false and despicable insinuations, smears, and deliberate misrepresentations of the truth.

This seems an opportune moment to revisit that episode.

The July 1990 issue of his Freedom Daily column, “The Forgotten Importance of Civil Liberties,” found Mr. Hornberger striking his favorite pose–that of a self-righteous moralizer–this time to attack me for what he described as “a tremendous intellectual assault on civil liberties.” My offense, he proclaimed to his readership (such as it is), was my three-part series, “Crime and Consequences,” which appeared during 1989 in The Freeman magazine.

While I am gratified that, to Mr. Hornberger, my series was both “tremendous” and “intellectual,” I certainly didn’t recognize any of my views in his characterization of them. According to him, here is what I said:

“Concerned with ever-increasing crime rates in America, Mr. Bidinotto argued that the solution, at least in part, turned on the curtailment of the safeguards enunciated in the Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, and Eighth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution. Mr. Bidinotto suggested that if Americans just loosened some of the strictures in the Bill of Rights which enabled so many criminals to go free, the crime problem could be significantly alleviated. Not spared from Mr. Bidinotto’s attack were civil liberties lawyers as well as such rights as trial by jury, right to bail, right to counsel, protection from unreasonable searches and seizures, and protection from self-incrimination.”

Now had I written any of those things, I would have been first in line to condemn myself, sparing Mr. Hornberger the strain of further moral posturing. But the reader will first note a curious fact: nowhere in his bill of indictment does one find a single word in quotation marks. [A technique “Bumper” and his ifeminist friend further perfected on me.]

That isn’t surprising, since not a single claim is true.

What Mr. Hornberger declared to be attacks on the Bill of Rights were nothing more than my unapologetic assault on the Warren Court’s infamous misinterpretations and manipulations of the Bill of Rights: their shameless departures from a “strict constructionist” approach to constitutional interpretation, and their wholesale invention of a category of criminal “rights” never envisioned, intended, nor codified by the Framers.

For example, I criticized Supreme Court decisions such as Miranda v. Arizona (1966) and Mapp v. Ohio (1961) for manufacturing evidentiary “exclusionary rules” that one finds nowhere in the Constitution or Bill of Rights. Yet Mr. Hornberger equated my criticism of this constitutional vandalism with criticism of the Constitution itself. Perhaps this is understandable. Mr. Hornberger is an attorney, and having gone through a modern law school, he may no longer be capable of grasping subtle distinctions–such as the difference between James Madison and Earl Warren.

To take another example, what exactly did I say that he declared to be an “attack” on the “right to bail”? Only this: “Career criminals–and anyone with a history of escapes or failures to show in court–should never get bail consideration.” That is hardly a radical assault on a “right”: in fact, it’s the essence of the 1984 federal Bail Reform Act, which grants judges the authority to deny bail to defendants who pose a danger to individuals or the community. My position is totally consistent with the wording of the Eighth Amendment, which says that “Excessive bail shall not be required”–leaving it to judges to determine whether defendants are trustworthy to appear in court, whether bail ought to be granted, and in what amount. I said nothing inconsistent with this established principle, leaving me to wonder if Mr. Hornberger believes that the Constitution guarantees bail to every defendant, no matter what his character or trustworthiness.

I could go on, but the interested reader can decide the matter for himself. The three-part series is available online: Part I, Part II, and Part III. [Links defunct.]

Afterwards, the reader may also decide for himself if the accusations Mr. Hornberger slings at Ilana Mercer more appropriately describe the accusations he made against me: “false and despicable insinuation” and “smear” by someone who “knowingly, deliberately, and intentionally chose not to pursue the truth…”

If Mr. Richman needs a defender concerned with the truth, it should be someone other than Bumper Hornberger.

Update II: Marx Was Partly Right By Tibor Machan

BAB's A List, Individualism Vs. Collectivism, Private Property, Socialism

Update I (June 29): I’m please to bring you a piece by BAB A-Lister, Tibor Machan. Tibor holds the R. C. Hoiles Chair in Business Ethics and Free Enterprise at Chapman University and is research fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford, CA. He is editorial advisor for Freedom Communications, Inc., which includes the errant Orange County Register. Well, at least our Tibor still features on the editorial page. Tibor has also recommended my column, for which I am grateful (www.Tibormachan.com).
Update II: Tibor is on hand to answer your questions. Make the most of the opportunity.

MARX WAS PARTLY RIGHT
By Tibor Machan

Most literate people know that first on the list in Karl Marx & Frederick Engels’ Communist Manifesto of what needed changing to achieve socialism is the abolition of the right to private property. This follows, of course, from the very idea of socialism, which sees humanity or society as an organic body, akin to a termite colony. Individuals no longer exist in such a system, so privacy and private property must go, too.

Marx also made a prediction that in modern democracies there wouldn’t be a need for violent revolutions because the citizenry will get rid of the legal protection of private property through the electoral process. Too many people will get fed up with the volatility of freedom, including the free market place, and gradually achieve socialism by voting in politicians who will eliminate the obstacle of legally protected private property rights to central planning.

Marx thought that central planning would serve society well but he based this idea on his confidence that human nature will change. Instead of people wanting to achieve various goals of their own, they will in time come to aim only for the public good. He believed that once matured, “the human essence is the true collectivity of man.” The new man, then, will not be like you and me or anyone today.

This is an important element of socialism and central planning because only if it is true will the theory of public choice, which completely undermines confidence in central planning, be avoided. Public choice theory addresses human being as they are now, not as they would turn out to be in Marx’s vision of a socialist society. If Marx is wrong and human nature will not change, then public choice theory shows that central planners will make a mess of things, not help out at all. Central planners, being ordinary humans, will aim at fulfilling their own agendas, not some vague public purpose.

A unified, one-size-fits-all public purpose makes sense within the context of the Marxian idea of the new man, one who cares nothing for himself or herself, only for the whole society. This is like people in a team or orchestra who are not focused on their own private agendas but that of the group. It works fine in small organizations which human beings join voluntarily because they do in fact promise to fulfill their own goals, only with the aid of other people. But in Karl Marx’s picture no need for voluntary joining exists. People will be born as socialists, by their very nature.

Because the Marxian idea is myth—history is not driving us toward socialism and the new man—the socialism aimed for by Marx and his followers has to be brought about coercively, by brute force–see Stalin or Hugo Chavez, as examples. This is even so when people elect politicians whom they entrust with public service because those people, of course, haven’t a clue how to achieve some mythical comprehensive public good. So even when elected by majorities, as Max thought they would be in democracies, promoters of socialism will be thoroughly stymied by their own unavoidable ignorance of what really benefits us. We are not all the same; indeed humanity as it actually is consists of a huge variety of individuals with an equally huge variety of different ways of attaining their best interests. No central planners can achieve this, ever.

But Marx did have it right that in their impatience and frustration with the free market, people will attempt the impossible. (Marx, of course, didn’t think socialism was impossible.) Consider, for example, environmental issues. Many are panicked about how well protected private property rights leave much of the environment uncared for–e. g., rain forests, the polar bear, etc., etc. So they then wish to entrust the care to politicians and planners. They envision some kind of supreme plan that will bring about a healthy ecosystem. But no one really knows what that is and planners are just as prone to mismanage it all as individuals, only the scope of their mismanagement is far greater, so the damage they do is huge. (In fact most of the current environmental mess is due to government central planners who built ridiculously huge projects using government’s power to violate private property rights, as in the case of the TVA and the many humongous dams around the globe.)

Impatience is what produces all this. It is true that with a regime of legally protected private property rights no grand scheme is in the offing. Yet that impossible dream motivates too many people, however futile it is from the start. The only real prospect is the piecemeal, strict private property approach and that is what encourages—though it does not guarantee—the responsible use of the environment.

Just as the perfect is the enemy of the good, so the myth of guaranteed environmental health is the enemy of a reasonably healthy one. Too bad, but Marx did have a point about people’s impatience. Yet certainly it isn’t going to lead to any socialist utopia.

Updated: The Politically Incorrect Guide to Capitalism

BAB's A List, Capitalism, Energy

Economist Robert Murphy, Ph.D., a delightful capitalist PIG, has joined Barely A Blog’s A-List with this debut essay. He’s selling something, of course.

The Politically Incorrect Guide to Capitalism
By Robert P. Murphy

When my book, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Capitalism (Regnery, 2007), first came out last year, Ilana graciously invited me to plug it here on her blog. As is obvious, I rudely dragged my feet in getting this promotional article to her—but hey, at least the publisher sent her a free copy of the book. You, dear reader, will get no such treatment—unless you tell me you have a popular blog and might favorably review my book. (What do you expect from a capitalist pig?)

As its title suggests, the The Politically Incorrect Guide to Capitalism tackles the popular myths of the alleged evils of an “unregulated” market economy. I show that on issues ranging from labor unions to anti-discrimination laws to financial speculators, the conventional wisdom about the supposed necessity of government oversight is exactly backwards. The market in theory should be able to handle all of these potential problems, and then I also show how in history the market really has performed up to snuff.

People have “learned” that white people on the whole benefited from the existence of slavery, that the free market caused the Great Depression, that the New Deal got us out of it, that the War on Poverty reduced poverty, and that Ronald Reagan’s tax cuts led to huge deficits. But as I show in my book, these historical “facts” are obviously wrong.

On some issues, I merely summarize defenses of the market economy that other popular economists (such as Walter Williams and Thomas Sowell) have given. On other issues, I offer the wisdom of the Austrian School of economics, providing insights from Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek.

And then on a third set of issues, I broke new ground, to the best of my knowledge. For example, in one chapter I explain the benefit of derivatives markets and financial speculation in a depth that I haven’t seen used elsewhere. The true fan of the free market will probably gain the most from reading these sections.

A basic understanding of derivatives markets, such as the market for oil futures, is crucial to guide citizens through the upcoming months. Right now politicians are promising to regulate or even ban institutional funds from investing in oil futures. To understand the ramifications of such meddling, you must first understand the role that futures contracts play in allowing producers and consumers to plan more confidently because they are inoculated against oil price movements. For example, a car manufacturer might produce more vehicles if it can hedge its exposure to gas prices through purchasing oil futures (which go up in value when oil prices rise).

What is particularly ironic about this case is that, if the punitive politicians get their way, then the average Joe has been deprived of one of his most basic defenses against skyrocketing gasoline prices. Yes, Joe Sixpack is getting killed at the pump, but at least his retirement has (say) a 2% allocation in a Commodity Index. If that type of position is soon rendered illegal, then Joe Sixpack will have to start trading in the oil futures markets himself if he wants to offset the harm of rising oil prices. Oh wait, I forgot—since he would want to do such trading electronically, he might have this option thwarted too once the regulators close the “Enron loophole.” Gee thanks, guys.

The problems don’t stop there. If large potential buyers are chased from the market, then it becomes less liquid. This is exactly what all the financial analysts have said regarding the credit crisis: nobody knew how to value a counterparty’s balance sheet because its mortgage-backed securities didn’t have any price. Because the market for such “toxic” derivatives had completely dried up, everyone was stuck with their contracts. They couldn’t alter their holdings at a convenient price. What had once been very liquid like an ounce of iron was suddenly illiquid, like an expensive piece of art.

Yet if everyone can see the downside of a shallow market in mortgage-backed securities, why in the world would we want to force such a fate on the oil futures market? If certain rich people think oil prices are going up, they will find somewhere in the world people who will field such wagers. The price of oil will still move in response to speculators. But the benefits of futures markets will be reduced, because the market will be shallow. Producers and consumers of oil would be much more willing to rely on oil futures contracts if they knew they could unload them on a dime without suffering a huge price cut. Without large institutional funds to “pick up the slack,” day-to-day fluctuations in the oil market will lead to wilder price swings.

The operation of futures markets is just one of the topics I cover in The Politically Incorrect Guide to Capitalism. There are plenty more issues, including the space program and seatbelt regulations, where I restore the free market’s good name. Once you buy a copy for yourself, you will then arrange for copies to be mailed to your six closest friends who either love or despise the free market.

Robert P. Murphy has a Ph.D. in economics from New York University and is an economist with the Institute for Energy Research. IER has recently released a study exonerating speculators from the charge that they have caused massive hikes in oil prices.

Updated (June 27): We have been fortunate to have the Doctor on Call. Many thanks to Bob for taking the time to reply to readers. Now go do the right thing; buy Bob’s book.