The American Dream

Mitt Romney made some remarks recently that illustrate a problem I have with the right wing interpretation of the celebrated American Dream. Romney stood on Papa John’s founder John Schnatter’s lawn and explained a distinction he sees between the way Republicans and Democrats view success. Romney pointed to the mansion behind him and remarked, “Democrats see this and don’t think anyone should live like this. Republicans think- everyone should live like this!” This is in the same vein as Marco Rubio’s quote that, “we are not a nation of haves and have-nots. We are a nation of haves and soon-to-haves.” These quotes do more than just preview the tactics the GOP will use this fall to defend an economic platform that critics say favors the rich.  Far more interesting is what these remarks reveal about the way many of today’s conservatives view the pursuit of happiness in our country.

The implication of Romney and Rubio's statements is that wealth is there for the taking in America and critics should join the chase instead of trying to reform the system. It’s true that the barriers to success are historically low in 21^st century America, a credit to our political and economic system. But Romney and company are out of touch with a key point, and they may suffer politically for it.  And that is that not everyone wants to be a rich business owner in the first place. Some people “just” want to teach our children, put out our fires, fight our wars, or rush us to the hospital when we get sick. And most of those people earn less than $50,000 a year. Could they save or borrow the capital to start a business from the ground up? Perhaps. And Romney thinks that’s exactly what they should do. Because it’s just what he would do- you know, if he hadn’t already inherited the silver spoon and the prep school upbringing. But as a society do we really want our teachers and nurses to view their careers as a stop-gap until their start-up takes off? Do we want them rushing out the door at 4 o’clock to get to work on their side venture? Or do we want them to focus on their students and patients? 

The subtext of the conservative message- that if you haven’t “made it” it’s because you haven't had the guts, savvy and work ethic to stake your claim- is not lost on most middle class people. Nor is it appreciated. Just because a person doesn't view life as a big game of monopoly doesn't mean they aren't ambitious or industrious. They may simply choose to direct their energy towards goals other than making money. The guy who lives in the $150k house isn’t necessarily less smart and hard-working than the guy in the $1.5M house. He may just be a paramedic instead of a lobbyist. 

The War on Drugs

Let me count the ways I loathe it....

As a society we elect a government in order to keep our streets paved and get our mail delivered, not to tell us what we can and cannot put into our bodies. As such I object to the prohibition of marijuana and other drugs on the standard libertarian “stay out of my business” grounds. But you don’t have to be an anarcho-capitalist to see the fundamental folly of prohibition, and the practical considerations are more compelling than any philosophical argument. 

First, if government officials want to spend our resources butting into our privacy, they at least need to get some bang for our buck. While we can’t even begin to estimate the resources being plowed into the fruitless enterprise of stopping people from consuming drugs, it’s easy to see that the impact has been negligible; the positive impact that is. What the war on drugs has done is inconvenienced importers and caused a spike in prices, driving money out of the domestic economy and pouring it into the pockets of the dealers. It’s also packed our prison system with non-violent drug offenders (over half of all inmates fall into this category). Since our $50 billion prison system is quietly becoming privatized, rich people are profiting from all these people doing time. More time means more money, which in turn means lobbyist jackals will descend on Washington to advocate for any legislation that throws and keeps people behind bars at $35k a year. Bravo. The war on drugs is flunking its cost-benefit analysis.

No matter what you think about drug use or drug users, if you can’t stop it, legalize it. Why? First, because then you could tax it.  Taxes on tobacco and alcohol yield tens of billions annually in local, state and federal revenues. Second, because then you could regulate it. Pharmaceutical companies can be held accountable for distributing dangerous drugs because the industry is by law transparent. Johnson & Johnson settled a Texas lawsuit out of court this year for $185 million. They had been accused of illegal marketing practices pertaining to an anti-psychotic drug that may not have been as safe as J & J said it was. But what happens when street dealers distribute heroin laced with fentanyl and people get killed, as they did in Pittsburgh and other cities in 2006? Nothing but funerals. Because black market drug dealers don’t register with the SEC and FDA. A corporate whistle-blower can produce research and accounting documents but a snitch on the streets can only offer a nickname and a burner cell number.  Pharmaceutical executives also don’t accidentally shoot children in a botched drive by. So there's that too.

The entire exercise would be somewhat excusable if we hadn’t experimented with the prohibition of alcohol less than a century ago and gotten a lucrative black market for our trouble, enriching a gangster class who put its money in a safe instead of paying taxes and investing in the stock market. The lesson we should have gleaned is that strict drug and alcohol laws are a lot like strict gun laws- the people we’re worried about will get them anyway. It’s the tax-paying, law-abiding old lady with glaucoma who goes without.

What is harder to quantify than potential tax revenues or the costs of enforcement are the innumerable negative consequences, financial and otherwise, felt by society due to the countless people contending with addiction. These are often the same people who place an additional financial burden on this country through our social programs. Drug addicts often struggle to hold a job and frequently develop health problems related to their use. Hello food stamps and hello Medicare. It’s well established that going to prison simply makes the cycle permanent. If we’re going to spend $35k on incarceration, why not direct that towards the kind of true rehabilitation that can get at least a portion of these people off the social safety nets and back into the work force? We have to be practical.

In summary, the American taxpayer spends huge sums on law enforcement and the incarceration of non-violent offenders, while at the same time missing the boat on tax revenues and ceding dominion over the marketplace to the dealers.  Those who choose to consume (they pay taxes too) cannot be protected from shady suppliers and have minimal options should they seek treatment.

I know that for many people it just feels like weed and other drugs should be illegal. And it feels like legalization would intensify what is already a gigantic problem. But that’s just the point- drug use has become a gigantic problem in spite of this massive assault by the federal government and its agencies. It isn’t working. If you can get past the stigma, the correct path for the government here is clear. Step one: legalize and levy a tax on recreational drugs. Step two: insert itself into production and distribution; ensure the (relative) safety of the supply and generate additional revenues. Step three: use those revenues to treat addiction and the mental health issues that so often contribute to elicit drug use in the first place.   

To Drill Baby Drill, or not to Drill Baby Drill

The off-shore drilling debate became incredibly polarized and over-simplified by both sides during the last presidential election. (I know, what else is new.) Two things are clear. Oil spills and oil prices both suck. Otherwise, neither the pros nor the cons of an expanded domestic drilling program have ever been adequately quantified. In 2009 the democrats did their self-satisfied environmental protector routine while republicans were in take-no-prisoners drill mode.

On one hand it’s standard liberal operating procedure to champion a noble cause with zero regard for the tradeoffs. The downside of refusing to drill domestically was largely and predictably ignored by anyone on the left. But the flip side of that charge sticks for republicans too- what do we really stand to gain if we take the oil companies off their leash?

Who can forget the chants of “drill baby drill” emanating from their convention in ‘09; all those supporters drunk and delirious with petrol-lust? But how much did prices drop when drilling commenced in the Gulf of Mexico? Did every American get a fuel-perks card good for dollar gasoline? The only people who benefit when a new area opens up for drilling are those who own the leases. That oil hits the open market like all the rest; it doesn’t get routed to American pumps at a discount. Prices in general might drop a penny per supply and demand, but that doesn't justify the mess unless you were a BP stockholder. How can we change that? And if we do, how much will that change things, given that we have fewer reserves in this country than Qatar or Kazakhstan? There may be answers to these questions. If there are, we want hear them. So conservatives need to expand the message this time. If they want to risk a giant disaster in another region, we need to hear more than a rabble of blithering idiots screaming “drill baby drill” and “we’re sending money to people who hate us!” 

Take the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve, for instance. What quantities of proven, probable and possible reserves are present? How much time and resources are required for primary, secondary and tertiary extraction? Who will be given the drilling rights? What mechanism is in place to ensure that the American people will genuinely benefit? And how much impact at the pump can any of this ultimately have if we have less oil than the backwards country they made fun of in Borat? Keep asking these kinds of questions and it begs another- has this issue been all style and no substance all along?

I don’t excuse democrats from these types of demands, but the larger burden of proof falls to republicans in this case because their position is the one that risks further environmental catastrophe. And, in the political arena, because they are the ones seeking to win back the White House. They cannot simply rely on slogans and quick-hitter talking points again, not just on this issue but with regard to the assault on Obama in general. They can do it, and through primary season they to a large degree have. But it won’t be good enough to get general election votes from those who think critically.


EDIT (to clarify my personal thoughts):


I am all for more drilling in theory. But like a lot of issues I feel that voters on both sides of this particular fence are too busy root-root-rooting for the home team to hold the politicians accountable. Since there are major left wing staples like alternative energy and the environment that, on the surface, don't mesh  with *anything* relating to drilling, you can forget about those guys. So we're left with independents and mainstream republicans. And since independents are ignored until the general election, it falls on the party faithful to demand from its leaders answers to the questions I posed above. Yet it largely remains an echo chamber. This is my beef.

The Afghan Question

The absence of a clear finish line continues to complicate any discussion of what to do about Afghanistan. Our justification for going in initially was based on a widely accepted tenet of international relations. If a government is unable to prevent its territory from being used as a base for attacking another country, that country is justified in going in to address the threat. Well address the threat we did, in typical badass American fashion. I watched it on TV and loved it. But since victory was never defined and an exit strategy was never articulated, we need to make several determinations before settling on the best course of action.

There is no question that we have managed some successes in the traditional military sense of driving back enemy forces and assuming control of contested territory.  And few would argue that those gains won’t be lost without American boots on the ground. But this isn’t a traditional military campaign. In WWII the allies drove the Germans out of France and forced their surrender by penetrating Germany itself. In the American Civil War Lincoln knew that by destroying Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia he would cripple the South’s ability to wage war and defend its bid for independence. Both cases resulted in the unconditional surrender of America’s enemy. But there will be no total victory in Afghanistan. In the absence of a clear end-game we need to answer the question- are the tactical gains we've made worth defending, and if so at what cost?

While I generally agree with following the advice of the commanders in the field over the whims of politicians, I limit that to after the decision has been made that there is a job to be done and the army is the right tool for that job. Because just like a carpenter is apt to see a solution to a dilapidated house involving hammers and nails, a general is apt to see a solution to a country in flux involving troops. Especially in the case of Afghanistan, where so much effort and so many lives have been invested in the victories we’ve won, our generals could be forgiven for having a hard time accepting that those victories may be pyrrhic.

Unfortunately that’s just what they are. While our initial retaliation to 9-11 was just and effective, the nation-building campaign that followed is doomed. The institution of democracy has been favorable for mankind but it doesn’t make a good export- particularly to the third world. Assistance from abroad can aid the process (France’s role in the American Revolution and NATO’s role in the Libyan conflict are instructive) but the revolution must be internal in origin if the new democracy is to sustain itself. It makes sense in the same way that a man who earns a fortune is more likely to retain it than a man who inherits one. Totalitarianism in the Arab world has concerned the west for decades. But it took the uprisings in Tunisia in late 2010 to inaugurate the chain reaction of civil disobedience that has toppled regimes in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen and Libya, and triggered significant fundamental changes in several other countries. These populations are earning their democracies. The Afghans have earned nothing. The west has tried valiantly to hand it to them, but until they earn it themselves they will never keep it.

This hasn’t come as a surprise to anyone with a discerning eye on history and current events. Historians, philosophers and political scientists have long explored the link between the development of democracy and factors such as wealth, education and the accessibility of information. In the case of the Arab Spring experts have also been quick to note the contributions of social media to the spread of the movement. Take a close look at Tunisia, where the first uprisings began. 33% of the population has access to the internet and 85% have a cell phone. One in six even has a Facebook page- not as shocking when you consider that the median age is now 24. 57% of Tunisians enter the workforce with a college degree, though high unemployment persists and is blamed largely on the government. The people of Tunisia are young, educated and socially connected. And they’re pissed off. They were ready to rock. Now turn to Afghanistan. Afghanistan has one tenth the per capita GDP of Tunisia ($900), and one tenth the internet access (3.4%). They were not ready to rock.

Unfortunately no amount of territory seized by our armed forces and their allies can change that right now. Regardless of our intentions, nation-building is a fruitless enterprise if the domestic ingredients aren't in place and the populous isn’t ripe for revolt.  The good news is that unlike the days of Voltaire and Paine, the messages of the modern heroes of democracy can spread across the Arab world quickly. But for America, as much as I hate to say it given the friends of mine who have served over there, the right move is to withdraw from Afghanistan, and quickly. Our focus should be on the safety of our troops and the local population, and only secondarily on the strategic interests of the Afghan security forces. The Afghans will have democracy when they are ready to take it.