Is America Rational? Ten Reasons It Might Be — by Polydamas
A recent July 24, 2012 blog post in the online New Yorker Magazine, titled “Is America Crazy? Ten Reasons It Might Be” (http://nyr.kr/Pfaoyo) made a number of interesting observations about America. Its author, one John Cassidy, an expatriate native of England who has lived in the United States for 30 years and has been an Anerican citizen for five years, considered ten strong convictions that are shared by many Americans (or, at least, a small but vocal minority) which politicians defy at their peril. These beliefs are, according to Cassidy:
1. Gun laws and gun deaths are unconnected.
2. Private enterprise is good; public enterprise is bad.
3. God created America and gave it a special purpose.
4. Our health-care system is the best there is.
5. The Founding Fathers were saintly figures who established liberty and democracy for everyone.
6. America is the greatest country in the world.
7. Tax rates are too high.
8. America is a peace-loving nation: the reason it gets involved in so many wars is that foreigners keep attacking us.
9. Cheap energy, gasoline especially, is our birthright.
10. Everybody else wishes they were American.
Mr. Cassidy submits that these contentions are not amenable to reason, but are within the province of “irrationality, flakiness, nonsense, nuttiness, absurdity, craziness. . . .” Let us, therefore, examine his argument and see if these ten positions have convincing reason and evidence to support them or are ten articles of faith akin to the fanciful beliefs in extraterrestrial life, the Loch Ness monster, vampires and werewolves, and even the Easter Bunny.
1. Gun laws and gun deaths are unconnected.
Gun laws and gun deaths are obviously connected. One cannot have a gun death without a gun. Also, by definition, gun laws pertain to guns. What Mr. Cassidy means is whether or not there is a causal relationship between gun laws and gun deaths. Mr. Cassidy apparently contends that the vocal minority of Americans wrongly believes that there should be fewer or laxer gun laws. He evidently thinks that there is an inverse relationship between the number and strictness of gun laws and the number of gun deaths, meaning the fewer and the more lenient the laws, the greater the number of gun deaths, and, conversely, the greater number and strictness of gun laws, the fewer the number of gun deaths.
The hidden assumption in Mr. Cassidy’s contention is that laws in general are effective and that people actually obey laws. This assumption appears incorrect at least insofar as the laws against murder because murder has been prohibited and has been punishable by death at least since 2100 B.C. by the Sumerian Code of king Ur-Nammu of Mesopotamia. Evidently, this 4,100-year-old law and its more recent incarnations have been woefully ineffective throughout history at stopping all murderers. However, in reality, the vast majority of people will not commit murder because of the religious and moral prohibitions against it and not because of any of the sovereign’s laws on the books, whereas there is some small percentage of people that will commit murder despite all of the same prohibitions.
Now, let us examine some facts and whether Mr. Cassidy’s notion that more and stricter gun laws have the expected result of decreasing gun deaths. According to the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence, “California holds the top spot with the nation’s strongest gun laws that help combat the illegal gun market, prevent the sale of guns without background checks and reduce risks to children”. (http://bit.ly/NZZ48t). However, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Uniform Crime Reports for 2010 (http://1.usa.gov/qc26ec), California led the nation with 1,811 murders of which 1,257 were with firearms, which also led the nation. Incidentally, California had 250 murders using knives, 201 with other weapons, and 103 bare handed. The Brady Center rated New York as the No. 4 state for most strict gun laws. According to the FBI, New York was the state with the third most murders (860), the third most firearm murders (517), the third most knife murders (173), the second most other weapons (148), and sixth with bare hands (22). Pennsylvania was rated by the Brady Center as the state with the 10th most stringent gun laws. The FBI’s numbers show Pennsylvania fourth in murders (646), fourth in firearm murders (457), fourth in knife murders (67), fourth in other weapons (94), and tied for fourth with bare hands (28). In 1976, Washington, D.C. enacted the nation’s toughest gun laws that completely banned the possession of firearms. However, this outright ban has not stopped gun fatalities and, throughout the ensuing 36 years, Washington, D.C. continued to be both the political and the murder capital of the United States.
On the other hand, remember when scores of states in the mid to late 1990s liberalized the requirements for citizens to obtain concealed carry permits from the former granting of permits at the absolute discretion of public officials and upon the required demonstration of a specific need to have a concealed weapon to a “shall issue” system which removed the discretion of public officials, but also excluded felons and the insane? Gun control advocates imagined the direst consequences and wailed that blood would be flowing in the streets of these states. They practically predicted that, on every street, there would shootouts reminiscent of Tombstone, Arizona’s OK Corral and the blood feud between the Clantons and the McCoys. Not only did blood not flow in the streets of these states, crime rates, in general, and murder rates, in particular, declined significantly. Based upon the evidence, more stringent gun laws do not correlate with lesser gun deaths. The converse appears to be true; the easier legal availability of firearms and the arming of people who would otherwise be easy prey appears to have a deterrent effect against criminal predators. Prof. John Lott’s “More Guns, Less Crime” is replete with even more statistics and fine analysis.
A far better determinant of murders appears to be population density. Urban, metropolitan areas with a larger number of people per square mile seems to account for more crime, in general, and a higher incidence of murder using firearms and other means. Perhaps, in the larger metropolitan cities, the higher population density causes greater friction among people which translates into a higher homicide rate and into a higher gun homicide rate. It may also be that crime, in general, and murder, in particular, correlate with the greater economic activity in the larger cities because the human predators rationally opt to hunt where their human prey congregate.
In the language of economics, a topic on which Mr. Cassidy has written extensively and is, presumably, conversant, stricter gun laws only restrict the overall supply of firearms in the general population. Except in times of national emergencies, these laws do not appear to affect the demand for guns among the law-abiding because those who wish to have firearms for lawful purposes get them, and those who do not wish to do so do not. The demand for guns to be used in illegal activities and in murder is minimal or nonexistent in the law-abiding population, whether or not there are more or fewer laws. The law-abiding cannot be deterred from committing murder by the enactment of yet another, stricter law than they already are by their already existing moral code. In economic parlance, demand here is not elastic and there is no additional marginal utility for the passage of stricter laws upon the law-abiding. Correspondingly, hardened criminals who are already predisposed to commit murders to further their goals will not be deterred by the passage of yet another restrictive law. To the hardened criminals, demand is not elastic either and restricting the supply of firearms has little discernible effect because criminals regard firearms as necessities to their criminal activities. They will obtain firearms illegally for use in crime and murder regardless of the scarcity or the price of the firearms. Either way, the criminals will always have guns.
Based on the above, it is apparent that the desire by Mr. Cassidy and other gun confiscationists to eliminate or greatly restrict the supply of all guns arises out of the bizarre misconception that every person in America is just one emotional meltdown away from turning into a raving mass murderer, and, therefore, a reduction in the overall supply of firearms will save lives. This is not borne out by the facts. What Mr. Cassidy and his fellow gun confiscationists propose is as absurd as Congress hypothetically passing a law that all children born must live apart from their mothers for the first three years of these children’s lives because Susan Smith, Andrea Yates, and Casey Anthony suffered from post partum depression and killed their own children. In reality, the overwhelming majority of mothers simply will not commit infanticide, regardless of what laws may be on the books. Restricting all mothers from having access to their children would be monstrously unjust for the acts of a few, deranged mothers. Conversely, such a hypothetical law would not stop the small percentage of determined, mentally ill mothers from finding ways to harm their children in defiance of any laws.
Gun confiscationists love to make the argument by asking the loaded question “What if stricter gun laws saved even a single life?” The hypothetical saving of the life of a single human being cannot be the yardstick for laws. Is it possible that a law that separated young children from their mothers could have saved at least one and possibly more of the children of Susan Smith, Andrea Yates, and Casey Anthony? Yes, it is possible. Would such a law be just to the overwhelming majority of mothers and their children who would be deprived of one another during the first three years of the children’s lives? Absolutely not.
On a related note, Mr. Cassidy is precisely the well-educated European sophisticate of the type discussed in a previous July 22, 2012 post on The Cassandra Times, titled “The Unfortunate Cost of Liberty”. These sophisticates are unable to intellectually and emotionally accept the existence of firearms in the hands of the American citizenry as the Founding Fathers’ ultimate insurance policy against a tyrannical government. Over the past four centuries, Europeans have been fed a steady, traditional diet of Thomas Hobbes’ “Leviathan”, wherein it was argued that the citizenry must simply accept abuses and impositions by their sovereign. This was seen by Europeans as the inevitable price of living in an orderly society and avoiding the “continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” that is inherent in Hobbes’ conception of the state of nature without a strong government. Hence, to Europeans, order and cleanliness are next to godliness, and they yearn for government-imposed order and its efficient wielding of power to achieve such order.
In contrast, the Founding Fathers were more indebted to the philosophy of John Locke’s “Two Treatises of Government” in which the people’s rights to life, liberty, and property were not an indulgence by the king, but individual, natural rights. The Founding Fathers believed, as John Locke did, that the people have a natural right to revolt against any tyrannical government that oppressed the natural rights of its people and to replace it with one that respected such rights. They were willing to sacrifice the European ideal of efficient government power even at the price of some chaos. Hence, one can see that the notion of our Founding Fathers that the people must always have firearms as a systemic insurance policy against a dictatorship even at the expense of occasional small-scale anarchy is absolutely unthinkable to class-regimented Europeans like Mr. Cassidy and similarly-inclined Americans.
On their surface, the objections of European sophisticates to private firearms in the hands of the American people inevitably revolve around firearm deaths due to crime. Yet, at their root, they stem from the European knee jerk adherence to the philosophy of utilitarianism, which advocates the principle of the greatest good for the greatest number of people. These are the same utilitarians who believe that the happiness of 51 percent of the people outweighs the natural rights to life, liberty, and property of the remaining 49 percent. According to these European utilitarians, present firearm deaths from crime outweigh the people’s future ability to resist government tyranny. Ever elevating the happiness and needs of the many over the lives and rights of the few, these utilitarians have always been entirely willing to embrace any form of dictatorship that satisfied this equation. This utilitarian calculus of the happiness of the many trumping the natural rights of the few was absolutely unacceptable to the Founding Fathers. This is precisely the utilitarian philosophy that facilitated and excused the genocide of 262 million citizens by their own governments in the 20th century alone, according to Professor R.J. Rummel, under the banners of communism, national socialism, and religious and ethnic cleaning. (http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills). After all, the practice of throwing Christians and other religious minorities into the Roman Coliseum to be devoured by lions for the amusement of the crowds also made perfect utilitarian sense 20 centuries ago.
2. Private enterprise is good; public enterprise is bad.
Mr. Cassidy engages in sly sophistry here. There is no such thing as “public enterprise”. Government enterprise is contradiction in terms, a laughable oxymoron.
A private business produces goods and services through the voluntary work and investment of capital by its individual producers. The private business enterprise freely trades its goods and services with willing consumers. The business strives to work efficiently so that the amounts it charges for its goods and services exceed the costs of production, and the result is profit. The profit is then reinvested in the business and a percentage redounds to its owners.
In stark contrast, a government has a legal monopoly on the use of violent force within its geographical boundaries and can force people to do its bidding with disobedience being punished by death, imprisonment, and confiscation of property. The government has no concern whether or not people actually want or use its government services. The government does not produce goods and services to trade with willing customers for profit, which is a measure of efficiency. There is no trade, only coercion. To get more money for its operations, the government need not work more efficiently and satisfy its customers’ needs. All the government needs to do is to seize money from its citizens by means of coercive taxation and to print more legal tender currency.
Naturally, private enterprise is good. Businesses that produce what their customers want and at the prices that the customers are freely willing to pay for these goods and services are prosperous businesses. Customers are free to choose which businesses they wish to deal with, based upon their own free will and economic and non-economic considerations. Competition for the loyalty of customers by many private companies spurs a constant drive for improvement by the businesses that benefits consumers. A business that operates poorly does not have the government’s luxury of taxing its customers or of printing more currency to fund its operations. That failing business eventually goes out of business.
The fundamental advantage of private enterprise over the so-called “public enterprise” is the freedom of choice of the customers to transact or not to transact and with whom to transact. To the private enterprise, the customers are always right and are treated as royalty. To the so-called “public enterprise”, the customers are a captive audience that must acquiesce to officious government bureaucrats and self-entitled clerks, stand in long lines like at the Department of Motor Vehicles, and be treated as impertinent serfs.
3. God created America and gave it a special purpose.
As far as the religious origin of America, this country was founded by religious refugees from European persecution. While it does have a strong moral foundation of Judeo-Christianity, the United States is a place where every religion, from the Amish to the followers of Zoroaster, can freely practice its faith and can peacefully coexist with every other religion.
Setting aside for a moment the religious origin of the country, the United States, indeed, has a special purpose. It is the first nation in the world that was explicitly founded on the principles of the natural rights of its citizens. American citizens do not live at the sufferance of a monarch or of their political leaders. Each American’s individual natural rights are ends in themselves, not the losing end of an equation that has a greater number of people on the other side, with the utilitarian notion of the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people serving as the standard which decides which of them is to prevail. The United States does not adhere to the utilitarian calculus that would convict and lynch an innocent person to placate a raging mob. America’s special purpose is the protection of the natural rights of each individual.
4. Our health-care system is the best there is.
See No. 2 above as applied to hospitals and doctors.
In a private enterprise system, doctors, nurses, and health care providers are free individuals who trade freely and without compulsion with other free individuals who happen to be consumers of health care services. The providers are free to exchange their specialized skills and knowledge in return for the consumers’ payment. This is because the parties to the exchange are neither the serfs nor the slaves of the other parties. The doctors are free to charge whatever prices they believe their skills and knowledge warrant, subject to other doctors’ ability to do the same. Consumers have the right to shop around and to choose their doctors on a variety of factors, including price. If a doctor charges more than other doctors for an equivalent quality of service, consumers have the freedom to obtain services from other doctors. The overpriced doctor then has the choice to either lower the price he or she charges to compete in the marketplace or go out of business.
In stark contrast, in a so-called “public enterprise” system, otherwise known as a socialist system, that operates on the utilitarian principles of the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people, the happiness or the satisfaction of the needs of ten consumers of health care services outweighs the happiness or needs of one doctor. If the government is a democratic socialism, the government panders to the votes of the ten consumers by bribing them with goodies, otherwise known as entitlements, such as “free universal health care”. The government then goes to the doctor and orders him or her in no uncertain terms that it decreed that he or she must work 80 hours per week at a below market rate of $10 per hour and to satisfy the needs of the consumers.
Under a socialist system, there are no longer any consumers because there is no fair exchange between producers and consumers of goods and services. The consumers are now “claim holders” who have legal claims to the labors and lives of the doctors. The doctors are now “claim providers” who have a legal obligation to contribute their lives and labors to the “claim holders”. The “claim holders” are happy because their health needs have been satisfied by the doctors through the legal coercion of the government, but the lives and labor of the poor doctors have become means to other government ends, a collection of human assets that belong to the government like serfs on their feudal lord’s land or slaves on their master’s plantation. In a socialist dictatorship, the doctors are ordered to perform in exactly the same way, but without the $10 per hour compensation, on pain of confiscation of assets, imprisonment, torture, and death for the doctors and their families.
If doctors have advance knowledge that their governments plan to nationalize (i.e., expropriate by law) their lives, skills, and knowledge for the benefit of “claim holders”, the doctors flee the so-called “public enterprise” system of their country for a “private enterprise” system. Those disgruntled doctors that remain enslaved behind and shackled to their operating rooms must then deal with ever-longer lines of “claim holders” who are there to take advantage of the free or government-subsidized resource. It is an economic truism that anything that can be gotten for free or whose price is subsidized by the government, there will be an even greater demand for it. In a free enterprise system, consumers will think many times before going to visit doctors’ offices for treating hang nails and other trivial conditions if they must pay for such treatments out of their own pockets. Under socialism, “claim holders” think nothing of bringing all of their trivial ailments to the attention of doctors if the services are free or massively subsidized. Hence, socialist health care systems always suffer from chronically exhausted doctors treating long lines of “claim holders” with ever growing lists of real and imaginary ailments.
At some point, the long lines of “claim holders” simply overwhelm the capabilities and resources of the poor doctors and of the health care providers. The government then proceeds to ration the health services if only to avoid the complete collapse of its doctor serfs. Again, operating on the utilitarian principle of the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people, the needs of ten “claim holders” with comparatively less serious ailments must take precedence over the one “claim holder” with the more serious ailment. The ten “claim holders” are served by doctors, but the one “claim holder” is placed on a waiting list and is, ultimately, abandoned to be served by the Grim Reaper. If the one “claim holder” with the serious ailment happens to live in Canada and has loving relatives who would rather not see their loved one die that ten strangers may be served, that “claim holder” ends up flying to the United States and obtains life-saving treatment here.
The American health care system is not a true a “free enterprise” system because it must contend with government-mandated insurance requirements and reimbursements, Medicare, Medicaid, and free and subsidized federal and state health care systems for the needy. It will become even less so under the socialistic Obama health care entitlement system. Yet, even in its current hybrid state, the American system is far superior to all of the “free universal health care” systems of other countries because doctors here have not yet been completely enslaved by the government to serve timorous “claim holders”. In the United States, consumers and doctors still have freedom of choice although this sphere of freedom appears to be shrinking rapidly.
5. The Founding Fathers were saintly figures who established liberty and democracy for everyone.
The Founding Fathers were not saints. Like all other human beings, they were imperfect. At the same time, one could scarcely imagine a more educated and informed group of non-aristocratic people for their times. They also had practical life experiences. As detailed in the National Archives’ online presentation of “Charters of Freedom: A New World is At Hand”, (http://1.usa.gov/b76hy8), about half of the Founding Fathers had graduated with university degrees and a few of them had advanced university degrees. Many were educated in their youth by private tutors or attended academies. 29 of the 55 participants in the Constitutional Convention of 1787 had served in the Continental military. 35 of them were lawyers or received legal training. Two became United States Presidents, five served on the Cabinet, 19 became United States Senators, 13 became members of the House of Representatives, five of them went on to serve as Justices of the United States Supreme Court, four of them became federal judges, and seven became ambassadors or diplomats. 13 were businessmen, merchants, or shippers. Six were real estate developers, 11 were investors in securities, three were medical doctors, 12 owned plantations, nine were public officials, three were retired, two were scientists, two were teachers, and one was an ordained minister but a good number of the others had studied theology yet were never ordained.
As it is recounted in Max Farrand’s “The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787”, vol. 1 (1911), on June 25, 1787, the delegates were very thoughtful, knowledgeable about world history and government, and even prescient in their discussions of the form of government they wished to establish. For example, one of the Founders, Charles Pinkney spoke eloquently about not emulating the aristocratic institutions of Europe and, instead, creating a new form of government:
There is more equality of rank and fortune in America than in any other country under the sun; and this is likely to continue as long as the unappropriated western lands remain unsettled. They are equal in rights, nor is extreme of poverty to be seen in any part of the union. If we are thus singularly situated, both as to fortune and rights, it evidently follows, that we cannot draw any useful lessons from the examples of any of the European states or kingdoms; much less can Great Britain afford us any striking institution, which can be adapted to our own situation — unless we indeed intend to establish an hereditary executive, or one for life. Great Britain drew its first rude institutions from the forests of Germany, and with it that of its nobility. These having originally in their hands the property of the state, the crown of Great Britain was obliged to yield to the claims of power which those large possessions enabled them to assert. . . . .We surely differ from the whole. Our situation is unexampled, and it is in our power, on different grounds, to secure civil and religious liberty; and when we secure these we secure every thing that is necessary to establish happiness. We cannot pretend to rival the European nations in their grandeur or power; nor is the situation of any two nations so exactly alike as that the one can adopt the regulations or government of the other.
The following day, James Madison spoke eloquently about the need to create an enduring government that would protect the people from the selfsame government’s abuse of its powers:
“In order to judge of the form to be given to this institution, it will be proper to take a view of the ends to be served by it. These were first to protect the people against their rulers. Secondly to protect the people against the transient impressions into which they themselves might be led. A people deliberating in a temperate moment, and with the experience of other nations before them, on the plan of government most likely to secure their happiness, would first be aware, that those charged with the public happiness, might betray their trust.”
Madison then proposed to weaken the powers of the government by a checks and balances system:
An obvious precaution against this danger would be to divide the trust between different bodies of men, who might watch and check each other. In this they would be governed by the same prudence which has prevailed in organizing the subordinate departments of government where all business liable to abuses is made to pass through separate hands, the one being a check on the other.
Madison explicitly sought a permanent system capable of protecting the people against future erosions of their liberties, but which also recognized the fallibility of human nature:
In framing a system which we wish to last for ages, we should not lose sight of the changes which ages will produce. . . . How is the danger in all cases of interested coalitions to oppress the minority to be guarded against? . . . . it was more than probable we were now digesting a plan which in its operation would decide forever the fate of republican government we ought not only to provide every guard to liberty that its preservation could require, but be equally careful to supply the defects which our own experience had particularly pointed out.
Although, by modern standards, the Constitution did not establish liberty and democracy for everyone, most notably women and slaves, the Founding Fathers produced a marvel for the ages. In no other time in history did revolutionaries, who became the founding ruling class of a country, resist, against their own self interest, the temptation to seize for themselves the reins of absolute power. No other group of revolutionaries was so mindful of historical abuses by previous governments and of its own fallibility. No, the Founding Fathers were not, individually or collectively, saints. Yet, what they created together was unparalleled.
6. America is the greatest country in the world.
Absolutely. See both above and below.
7. Tax rates are too high.
Definitely true. Taxes are always, by definition, too high. Since taxes are coercive and involuntary in nature, i.e, not voluntary contributions to one’s fellow human beings according to the dictates of one’s conscience or fees for the exchange of goods and services, then, on principle, even a single dollar is too high of a tax. Of course, any voluntary contribution is not a coercive tax and all individuals are free to contribute of their own free will any amount of money they wish to others, including the government.
The above theoretical libertarian principle aside, some level of taxation appears to be inevitable. On one hand, since time immemorial, monarchs and governments have sought to obtain the maximal amount of taxes from their taxpayers in a manner bearing a striking resemblance to the appetite of a symbiotic parasite for extracting the maximal sustenance from its host. On the other hand, there is no legal obligation whatsoever under American law which is imposed upon American taxpayers to pay any more than the absolute legal minimum. In the old case of Helvering v. Gregory, 69 F.2d 809 (1934), Judge Learned Hand stated “a transaction, otherwise within an exception of the tax law, does not lose its immunity, because it is actuated by a desire to avoid or, if one chooses, to evade, taxation. Any one may so arrange his affairs that his taxes shall be as low as possible; he is not bound to choose that pattern which will best pay the Treasury; there is not even a patriotic duty to increase one’s taxes.” After the Internal Revenue Service lost in the Helvering v. Gregory case, it appealed the decision to the United States Supreme Court, which emphatically stated “The legal right of a taxpayer to decrease the amount of what otherwise would be his taxes or altogether avoid them, by means which the law permits, cannot be doubted.” Gregory v. Helvering, 293 Up.S. 465 (1935).
Practically-speaking, on the same moral and practical principle, that parents should not give their wasteful and spendthrift children more spending money when they have not demonstrated responsibility and frugality, there is no reason whatsoever that a government should be permitted to spend beyond its means. A reasonable person does not give more alcohol to the alcoholic, more drugs to the drug addict, and more spending money to the gambler, and, thereby, enable their irresponsible behavior. Government is no exception.
8. America is a peace-loving nation: the reason it gets involved in so many wars is that foreigners keep attacking us.
This is true. America is, indeed, a peace-loving nation. Foreigners do persist in attacking American interests. Mr. Cassidy’s post appears to imply that the opposite is true, that America is a bully nation that becomes involved in wars because it instigates them. Let us, then, consider a most instructive lesson from history.
On the western side of the Mediterranean, the navies of the Muslim Barbary States of Morocco, Algiers, Tunisia, and Tripoli had long preyed on merchant ships since the 16th century. According to Ohio State University Professor Robert Davis who wrote the book “Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters: White Slavery in the Mediterranean, the Barbary Coast, and Italy, 1500-1800”, these Muslim states enslaved between a million and 1.25 million Caucasian Europeans and, later, Americans between 1530 and 1780, an average of 8,500 per year. (http://bit.ly/cFiPJg). “Enslavement was a very real possibility for anyone who traveled in the Mediterranean, or who lived along the shores in places like Italy, France, Spain and Portugal, and even as far north as England and Iceland,” Prof. Davis noted.
In November of 2005, historian Michael B. Oren delivered a fascinating lecture at Columbia University whose topic concerned the lesson learned by the young American Republic in the late 18th century in dealing with the Barbary Coast states of North Africa.(http://bit.ly/hvoKZx). During this time period, the United States was not a naval or military threat to other countries. The new nation had just signed a peace treaty with Great Britain in Paris on September 3, 1783 that ended the Revolutionary War. The United States navy was nonexistent and, literally, did not have even a single warship. Although not a naval military power, American merchant ships sailed throughout the world, and trade with the Mediterranean accounted for 20 percent of American exports in the late 1770s.
According to Prof. Oren, “In a single six-month period between 1783 and 1784, the Barbary states sacked three American vessels. The crewmen were paraded down the streets of Fez and Algiers, pelted with rotten vegetables and offal, and thrown before the emperor or the pasha who reportedly told them, ‘I’ll make you eat stones, Christian dogs,’ and then sold them to the highest bidders.” Diplomats from European countries such as Spain and France advised the United States to pay the ransom or tribute demanded by the Barbary Coast states for the safety of American merchant ships. The young republic did not have a navy and did not want to pay for building up a navy. John Adams believed that America would be better served to pay off the pirates than to resist them and said that it was preferable to pay “one Gift of two hundred Thousand Pounds” than to risk “a Million [in trade] annually.”
In 1785, the United States Ambassador to France Thomas Jefferson and John Adams traveled to London to negotiate with a treaty with one of the Barbary Coast states, Tripoli to stop its predatory behavior. Tripoli’s envoy, Abd-Alrahaman, greedily demanded $1 million per year for safe passage and Jefferson reported back to Congress Abd-Alrahman’s message:
“It was written in their Koran, that all nations which had not acknowledged the Prophet were sinners, whom it was the right and duty of the faithful to plunder and enslave; and that every mussulman [Muslim] who was slain in this warfare was sure to go to paradise. He said, also, that the man who was the first to board a vessel had one slave over and above his share, and that when they sprang to the deck of an enemy’s ship, every sailor held a dagger in each hand and a third in his mouth; which usually struck such terror into the foe that they cried out for quarter at once.”
John Adams concluded that the United States “ought not to fight them at all unless we determine to fight them forever. This though, I fear, is too rugged for our people to bear.” The United States proceeded to pay ever increasing ransoms. Morocco agreed to forgo plundering American ships for “only” $20,000 per year. In 1787, Algiers alone plundered 11 American ships, enslaved 121 American sailors, and demanded $1 million. By 1793, the tribute demanded by Algiers rose to $2 million while Tunis and Tripoli sought to extract similar tributes from the destitute United States.
Like a young child victimized repeatedly by the neighborhood bully and forced to pay an ever-growing share of his lunch money, according to Prof. Oren, “by 1800, the United States was paying out 20% of all its federal revenues to North Africa.” The blackmail had risen to such a level that Americans were shamed by their government’s acquiescence and impotence that they pressured the government to establish the United States Navy. Twenty years later, in 1815, after a number of naval victories and with Algiers in the target of his squadron’s cannons, American Commodore Stephen Decatur, Jr. dictated a new treaty to Algiers that eliminated the annual tributes and guaranteed free passage to American merchant vessels. Decatur proceeded to Tunis and Tripoli and, with his display of strength and determination, obtained similar treaties with them.
For as long as America is prosperous or perceived to be a weakling or a paper tiger, it will be attacked by those who want what it has and would prey on its weakness. For 33 of its first years, the young nation turned the other cheek and appeased the Barbary States with tribute which only whet the latter’s appetites for even more blackmail. Humble and meek nations that shy from confrontation with predators soon disappear from the pages of history. History shows us that the price of liberty is blood and that those who stand willing and ready to protect their liberties will retain them.
9. Cheap energy, gasoline especially, is our birthright.
America’s birthright is liberty. This also means the economic liberty of willing buyers and sellers to come to a voluntary agreement as to the price that they will exchange their goods and services.
Like most Europeans, Mr. Cassidy appears to be of the opinion that Americans do not pay enough for their energy or, at least, in comparison to Europeans. He must think that it is absolutely scandalous that Americans pay “only” $3.50 per gallon of gasoline (side note: gasoline cost $1.87 per gallon when President Barack Obama took office), which encourages them to drive their supposedly wasteful, gas-guzzling sports utility vehicles. Instead, he probably thinks that the government should heavily tax gasoline and make it an even more expensive commodity in order to provide a strong disincentive to Americans who own wasteful private vehicles and to push them to use mass public transportation.
First, mass public transportation is most efficient in the largest metropolitan cities which are also limited in their geographical spread. In New York City, where Mr. Cassidy lives, public transportation makes sense. In the 49 square miles of San Francisco, mass transit makes sense. In contrast, mass transit in metropolitan areas and their suburbs which are more spread out is a monumental disaster that cannot support itself economically and must rely on confiscatory taxes. In other words, it cannot succeed as a business enterprise which must make a profit to remain in operation and does not have the luxury the government enjoys to extract taxes and/or to print more currency.
Second, as pointed out by our Cassandra Times colleague Odysseus in his superb essay “Dispersion: Smaller is Better and More Resilient”, efficiency is not the sole determinant of solutions to social problems. Just because one solution may be more efficient than other alternatives does not mean that it must be selected over them. Odysseus capably demonstrated the benefits of dispersion as a decentralized and even redundant solution that is far more resilient to economic fluctuations as well as to terrorism and intentional sabotage. In a system that has many competing transportation alternatives, a strike by bus drivers will not bring a country or a city to its knees. Substitute solutions such as driving one’s car, car pooling with others, using taxi service, and other alternative modes of transportation allow people to enjoy maximum economic freedom of choice. The existing decentralization of American transportation prevents any one element from becoming so indispensable that it makes a natural target for terror, crime or incompetence.
Third, the same philosophy of decentralization militates against an over-dependence on unstable Middle East oil supplies. The more self-sufficient the United States can become, whether through nuclear power, coal and natural gas, wind power turbines, solar power, shale oil, fracking, horizontal drilling, drilling in Alaska, developing off-shore drilling platforms, and every other possible energy source, the more the United States can insulate itself from crises in the rest of the world and, especially, the Middle East. Also, by purchasing oil from many suppliers, the United States can reduce its reliance on any one supplier’s ability to deliver. As an added benefit, such independence will serve to reduce the inordinate power born of the incredible petrodollar wealth that is amassed and wielded by the despotic kleptocracies of the Middle East, which are the cousins two centuries removed of the Barbary Coast pirates.
At this juncture, it should be remembered that, whether western civilization chooses to accept it or not, the reality is that, unlike Christianity which outgrew its crusades several centuries ago, Islam is an aggressive and militant religion. Islamic wealth and power are put to use on every continent to advance the religiously-commanded Jihad and to conquer the entire world. Whether this is done militarily, economically or peacefully, all Muslims are commanded by Muhammad to bring all under the green banner of Islam, to extirpate pagan religions, and harass the followers of every other religion into converting to Islam.
Paying any more for gasoline is as bad an idea as giving more money to the government.
10. Everybody else wishes they were American.
True. See No. 1 through 9 above.
Every person and every country are free to voluntarily adopt the Founding Fathers’ governing principles of individual liberty, both in the personal sphere and in the economic sphere, as expressed in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution of the United States, and in the Amendments to the Constitution. Although liberty is an end in and of itself, material and economic prosperity also redound to the people and the nations that adopt these principles. They are also encouraged to study and implement the works of Milton Friedman, Ludwig von Mises, Henry Hazlitt, F.A. Hayek, Ayn Rand, Murray Rothbard, and other libertarian scholars.
As you, the readers of The Cassandra Times, can discern, Mr. Cassidy is wrong, America is very rational, and all of the above ten reasons are susceptible to proof, and are not in any way the “irrationality, flakiness, nonsense, nuttiness, absurdity, craziness. . . .” that Mr. Cassidy claims.
