Conspiracy or Incompetence

In response to some of the material I circulated on Perry v Schwarzenegger, one of my friends stated that he was wondering if the bringing of this case were not a ruse designed to elicit a negative result from the Supreme Court, which potentially devastating consequences for gay rights. My reaction to that kind of thinking is that conspiracies of that sort are far less likely than a well-intentioned, if ill-fated, miscalculation. Margaret Talbot wrote an essay for the January 18 issue of The New Yorker in which she took up that theme.

A lot of people wonder if it is not premature to bring a gay marriage case to the Supreme Court. The Court is more conservative than it has been in many years. It is also loaded with Roman Catholics, who are reputedly more conservative on social issues than Protestants or Jews. For those who haven't been keeping track, Chief Justice Roberts and Associate Justices Alito, Kennedy, Scalia, Sotomayor, and Thomas are all Roman Catholics. The possibility that the Court would rule against the plaintiffs in Perry v Schwarzenegger, with lasting effect, is both real and worrisome.

On the other hand, it could be fifty years before we have a Supreme Court more liberal than the one we have now. Maybe now is the best time for a roll of the dice.

There is also a point to be made about gay rights, as opposed to an individual's right to marry. I'm certainly no advocate of collective rights, group rights, communal rights. Communities have no rights because they have no real existence. Only individuals can have rights. So no one should have a claim to some right because he is gay; and by the same token, no one should be deprived of any right to which he has a claim solely because he is gay.

I think this is the tack that Boies and Olson are taking in Perry v Schwarzenegger, the line that everyone has a right to marry. That the right to marry is not conditioned upon an intention to reproduce. That the right to marry is not conditioned upon adherence to some particular code of conduct. That the right to marry is not conditioned upon the approval of some religious group. Rather, the government should recognize the formation of unions between individuals, because individuals have the right to form such associations as they wish for any lawful purpose.

Current Reading at Knight's Castle

I've made some more changes to my Current Reading list on this blog, and I hope that some of you find the additions of sufficient interest to read and comment upon them.

I removed the books that I finished in the first half of December, making room for new stuff. So far in January I've only finished one book: The Malice of Unnatural Death by Michael Jecks. If you like medieval mysteries, Jecks is in your line. He is, however, not as good as either Ellis Peters (Edith Pargeter), the late doyenne of that sub-genre, or Bernard Knight, to whose Crowner John mysteries Jecks's work bears a considerable resemblance.

I started reading two new novels on Friday. Henning Mankell's Faceless Killers was a Christmas gift to my wife a couple of years ago, and I'm finally getting around to it. So far, this Swedish murder tale is looking pretty good. A friend gave me Sean Williams's Cenotaxis for Christmas 2009. Williams says that "cenotaxis" means "empty order," but my Roadside Geology books seem to indicate that "ceno-" means "recent," as in the Cenozoic era. I haven't gotten far enough into Cenotaxis to arrive at any judgments, but Williams is supposed to be cutting-edge.

Let me know what you're reading, too. I would welcome comments, recommendations, and reviews.

Don't Bank On Bankers!

Am I trying to start a financial panic by undermining confidence in the geniuses who run our big financial institutions? Well, no, they already did that. In the Paul Krugman article I posted earlier today, Jamie Dimon, the head of JPMorgan Chase, was quoted as telling the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission that a crash "happens every five to seven years. We shouldn't be surprised." Isn't that nice? Reminds me of the guys who say that anthropogenic global warming isn't possible because God created the world with the temperature He wanted, and we're not capable of undoing His work.

So, the follow-up to Krugman's piece in The New York Times is this David Gross essay from Slate.com. Gross's key statement is this:

"Rule No. 1: The banks have no idea what kind of regulation is good for them.
"Rule No. 2: If you ever think the banks have a point, remember Rule No. 1."

There's an old saying. "If you believe the doctors, no one is healthy. If you believe the police, no one is honest. If you believe the soldiers, no one is safe." (There's a nice double-edged quality to that line.) So, if you believe the bankers, no one is solvent.

Bankers and Economists - Who Is More Dismal?

David Gross says mean things about economists, but he also points out that the bankers and financiers have their faults. Their many, many faults. Now, Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman weighs in with the opinion that, after their testimony the other day to the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, we should ignore anything the bankers say about their industry. They are clueless.

Are they really clueless, or are they trying to conceal their foreknowledge? I think it's probably some of both; they suppressed their uneasiness about some of their own actions by always hitting the positive note. That left them in a position where the crash had to come as a surprise. Which is the harder question:

1) Why didn't you know a crisis was coming?

or

2) If you knew a crisis was coming, why didn't you do something about it?

We Need to See Beyond Al-Qaeda

David Ignatius is always good on the Middle East; he's obviously a man who spends time thinking about the issues there. He is quite right to say that military and intelligence operations against Al-Qaeda are not enough. No matter how many insurgents we shoot and training camps we blow up, there are always more. The Middle East seems to generate more violent malcontents as it there were a factory somewhere producing them.

But I don't think Ignatius quite gets how unimportant the Arab-Israeli issue is in most of the Middle East. It's important, all right, but most Yemenis have concerns closer to home than Gaza or Hebron. Yemen has a lousy government which has never really integrated North Yemen and South Yemen into a coherent administration. Yemen is poor, very poor, in a region of oil-rich countries. Yemen's educational system may be worse than others in the Arab countries. So there is a continual flow of the undereducated, the overeducated but unemployed, the poorly educated and rootless, and those educated in all the wrong things by madrassahs and imams.

So, in addition to George Mitchell and Hillary Clinton spending some time working the Middle East, and beyond the arm-twisting President Obama needs to administer to Bibi Netanyahu and Abu Mazen, we need to be undertaking a broader effort to improve education, governance, civil society, and economic conditions in the countries of the Arab Middle East.

For a really good starting place for a discussion of these issues, try Kenneth Pollack's A Path Out of the Desert: A Grand Strategy for America in the Middle East. I read it last year, and now I have my own copy ($18.00 in trade paperback from Random House). In particular, read Part Two: The Problems of the Modern Middle East.) It consist of two powerful chapters on what is wrong in the Middle East. These are the problems that underly the issues we in the U.S. have been trying to deal with. In Pollack's view, we need to dig deeper, stay longer, and take a broader view. Sounds like work, doesn't it?

Another Subsidy

I, personally, think we ought to abolish all subsidies. Farm subsidies, business subsidies, housing subsidies, even student loan subsidies. The basic effect of a subsidy is to encourage people to stay in a business that cannot support that number of participants. Subsidies distort the market by steering resources to business that ought to be allowed to die. Here's an article on a subsidy that most of us had probably forgotten about. I don't think that anything about this particular case would lead one to doubt the general principle that subsidies are bad.

An Excess of Bile

Why, one might ask, is Victor Davis Hanson driven to sarcasm, the lowest form of humor, in this attack on President Obama and his policies? One of the things that I like about Hanson, and there aren't many, is that he usually expresses himself clearly. But this article is almost incoherent with Hanson's rage at all things left of Fresno. Why?

A great deal of the right's rage at Mr. Obama, the Democratic Congress, and everything on the left side of the aisle is driven by their fear that they may be shown to have been wrong. Hanson accuses President Obama and the Democrats of arrorgance and of hubris. Yet this is exactly what Hanson himself has been demonstrating for year. The right was so sure that their mantra of low taxes, small government, deregulation, and business domination of the economy would lead to a paradise on earth. Instead, the level-headed businessmen, always brought up in invidious comparisons to government employees and bureaucrats, screwed the pooch. The small businessmen, to whom Hanson attributes the means of economic recovery, let their greed get the better of their sense and sold mortgages to people who couldn't make the payments.

The entire worldview of the right, which is, in its way, a Jeffersonian view, has been shaken. But they can't give it up, and they do so want the next national catastrophe to be the fault of the left, so that people will forgive the right for the Great Depression. So they are actually hoping that the Obama administration will fail. They are hoping for more economic disaster, more foreclosures, more unemployment, more businesses going under. The fact that many of their fellow Americans would suffer greatly is a small price to pay for proving themselves right.