Let That Be Your Last Battlefield

In the original Star Trek series there was an episode “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield.” In this episode the Enterprise was transporting two warring alien humanoids who are black on half their body and white on the other half of their body. One of the aliens is Bele, a police commissioner from the planet Cheron, who is chasing the political refuge, Lokai, from the same planet. Bele considers himself superior to Lokai because Bele is white on the left side of his body while Lokai is white on the right side. Their mutual hatred over superficial differences had been going on for 50,000 years and continues throughout the episode. In the final scene, Captain Kirk leaves them to return to their now destroyed home planet presumably to continue to go at it.

The episode was originally broadcast in 1969 and, of course, was a not too subtle, but effective, allegory about race relations in the United States.

Last week we considered Georgia’s invasion of South Ossetia and our imprudent involvement in the area. Georgia is a country smaller than South Carolina, and South Ossetia is a region smaller than Rhode Island. Despite the relatively small area that they share on this earth, Georgians and Ossetians have different languages and they view each other through the eyes of simmering ancient hatreds. To a foreigner they are more similar than not; but to the Georgians and Ossetians their “differences”, like those of Bele and Lokai, are very real. The harsh reality is that they would rather suffer than give up their hatreds.

Why, in such a geographically small area, can human beings not live in harmony? There is a simple answer—not united by common principles that make peace and harmony possible, Georgians and Ossetians see each other as different, as less than fully human. Collectively they hate each other, and they have reaped what they have sown.

A few years ago a Kurdish graduate student shared this story with me after he had just received a phone call from his family. In his home village a neighbor had called the police on another family because that family had a chicken running loose in the street. When the patriarch of that family came home that day, he was incensed that his family’s honor had been insulted by the police visiting his home. He got his gun and shot to death the members of the family that had called the police. The student explained to me that a blood feud had now begun that would continue for many generations.

Without common principles, the hatred and superstition that lurks in every ego rises to the top. And those who rise to the top of almost every tribal society maintain their power by feeding and exploiting that hatred.

Their choice to hate can be undone at anytime, says A Course in Miracles:

What would you see? The choice is given you. But learn and do not let your mind forget this law of seeing: You will look upon that which you feel within. If hatred finds a place within your heart, you will perceive a fearful world, held cruelly in death’s sharp-pointed, bony fingers. If you feel the Love of God within you, you will look out on a world of mercy and of love.

But the choice to see love instead of hate must be supported by the institutions of the society we live in. Those institutions begin with respect and support for property rights. And those institutions only thrive if we want others to enjoy the same rights—to not be encroached against—as we would wish for ourselves. In countries that are organized around allegiance to a tribe rather than around abstract principles, the idea that another tribe should enjoy equal rights is a laughable proposition.

With most of the mainstream media continuing to press the point that a resurgent Russia is threatening world peace, the opportunity is passing us by to learn important lessons. There are those Americans who would bring to the United States mindless, cruel, and needless suffering like we see in the Caucasus.

Who are those Americans? They include the bulk of politicians who owe allegiance to no principles other than increasing their own power and the power of the government. They include those educators who fail to understand and teach the principles that promote peace and prosperity. And it includes those Americans who prefer to watch mindless television each evening rather than to seek to understand the principles that protect their liberty.

We are told by politicians, pundits, and educators that our founding principles, which begin with our rights, are out-of-date. What an absurd notion. The rights guaranteed to the American people are anchored in the idea that all power begins with the people, and that the people transfer limited and defined powers to government to protect their inalienable rights. Rather than being out-of-date, these are transcendent ideas of which many are completely ignorant or never accepted in the first place.

Today a student can graduate from many public schools and never learn the differences between societies organized around the supremacy of the tribe and societies organized around the principles that promote prosperity and liberty. Public schools have almost stopped teaching the founding principles of America. In place of that, students are taught multiculturalism and the idea that is impossible to say which system is best.

Of course this is nonsense. We can say which system works best. When the tribe comes first, hatred and ancient superstitions are able to rear their ugly heads and cause poverty and suffering for millions.

Today, almost no politician of either party bears allegiance to the transcendent founding principles of America. Instead their allegiance is to expanding the reach of government into new and seemingly unlimited areas.

Without an understanding of our founding principles, campaigns for public office become popularity contests based on looks, personality, and who can promise the most. In such a cheap popularity contest, individuals making vague promises, who can articulate no principles, who have accomplished nothing in life, but who can speak well into a teleprompter, can rise to the top.

Perhaps because of his high-pitched voice and perhaps because he spoke with a lisp, Thomas Jefferson despised giving speeches. His State of the Union addresses were sent to be read rather than spoken before Congress. One of the great men in all of political history would have no chance of being elected to office today.

For millions of immigrants, the United States has been their last battlefield. They came from countries where their tribe, clan, or ethnicity was more important than their basic rights as human beings. They treasured the principles that made this country great because these principles have allowed more groups to unite in peace, harmony, and prosperity than have ever gathered anywhere on the planet. This rich legacy is being squandered away.

We could be only generations away from descending into tribalism; it can happen here if we continue to lose touch with our founding principles. For the ignorant among us, a vacation in Georgia or South Ossetia would be a worthwhile experience.

Bipartisan Madness

Until this past week or so, many Americans did not know that there was a country of Georgia. Although I don’t applaud geographical ignorance, in this case, the lack of knowledge may have been understandable. Georgia lies in an area of the world that Richard Maybury has aptly named Chaostan—an area not known for peace, prosperity, or for sharing western values.

Maybury has observed, “there are only three possible political conditions, liberty, tyranny, or chaos.” Chaostan, the region of the world, located mostly in Central Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa, has mostly experienced chaos. Maybury writes, “Since the beginning of history this area has been inhabited by hundreds of nations, tribes and ethnic groups that have hated and fought each other constantly. Russia alone contains some 250 of these groups, and they know nothing of the legal principles that make an advanced, peaceful civilization possible.”

We are told the story repeatedly on the nightly news that Georgia, a peaceful democratic country, was invaded for no reason by Russia. McCain was way over the top when he exclaimed, “Today, we are all Georgians.” Obama dispatched supposed foreign policy expert Senator Joe Biden to Georgia who pronounced, “(Georgia) has become a question of whether and how the West will stand up for the rights of free people throughout the region.” Bush and Secretary of State Rice have both made frequent menacing statements directed at Russia.

But wait! No doubt, Russia’s Putin is not exactly the poster boy for a kindly and peaceful world statesman, but neither is Georgia’s Saakashvili. In 2004, Saakashvili won the Georgian presidential election with 96% of the vote cast. To me, that sounds more like the percentage a winner gets in a totalitarian state and not in a democratic society. And Russia’s military action came only after Saakashvili recklessly invaded the breakaway region of South Ossetia. South Ossetia is inhabited mostly by ethnic Russians and has been autonomous since about 1991.

Why would we want to pick a pony in this race? Since the fall of the Soviet Union we have enjoyed peaceful and if not warm, certainly cordial relations with Russia. The absence of a cold war with Russia is a good thing not to be dismissed lightly. Why would we spoil our relationship with Russia to back Saakashvilli’s wild adventure?

A new cold war with Russia will further increase economic strains. Our country is already near economic ruin in part because of needless foreign wars. Chalmers Johnson, a former naval officer, observes this about our current military expenditures:

It is virtually impossible to overstate the profligacy of what our government spends on the military. The Department of Defense’s planned expenditures for the fiscal year 2008 are larger than all other nations’ military budgets combined. The supplementary budget to pay for the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, not part of the official defense budget, is itself larger than the combined military budgets of Russia and China. Defense-related spending for fiscal 2008 will exceed $1 trillion for the first time in history. The US has become the largest single seller of arms and munitions to other nations on Earth. Leaving out President Bush’s two on-going wars, defense spending has doubled since the mid-1990s. The defense budget for fiscal 2008 is the largest since the second world war.

Once again, it is wise to consider the timeless advice of George Washington is his 1796 Farewell Address:

Observe good faith and justice towards all nations; cultivate peace and harmony with all.

Harmony, liberal intercourse with all nations, are recommended by policy, humanity, and interest.

…Nothing is more essential, than that permanent, inveterate antipathies against particular Nations, and passionate attachments for others, should be excluded; and that, in place of them, just and amicable feelings towards all should be cultivated.

The great rule of conduct for us in regard to foreign nations is in extending our commercial relations, to have with them as little political connection as possible.

There are widespread but silly beliefs about military spending and war. Contrary to what many believe, war does not foster prosperity. Maybury succinctly explains:

The answer is that an absolute, unavoidable prerequisite for genuine, lasting prosperity is peace — because war is the most expensive thing humans do. The US cannot have peace and prosperity as long as Washington meddles in other countries, supports foreign dictators, and keeps its troops and bases in foreign lands. These things provoke war.

Besides being bad for peace, our ill-advised bipartisan support of Saakashvili is one more step on our continuous slide into economic misery.

Feedlot Beef and Ethanol Battle Over Corn

Yesterday in The Wall Street Journal, Governor Rick Perry of Texas complained that due to higher prices for corn, ethanol was destroying the livestock industry in Texas. Governor Perry’s complaints about ethanol driving up the price of corn and thus the price of livestock feed are indeed true, but is the livestock industry the innocent victim that Perry is portraying?

The single most subsidized crop in the United States is corn. From 1995-2006, corn subsidies in United States totaled a staggering $56.2 billion. Almost every bushel of corn produced in the United States is subsidized, and those subsidies have driven the growth of feedlot beef and other feedlot livestock. The livestock industry has no more right to these subsidies than do ethanol producers.

For all but the rich, eating meat at most meals did not become common until the 1950s. Before then, meat was simply too expensive to be an everyday item on the household menu. Although rising incomes played a role in the expanded role for meat in the American diet, the main factor was cheap corn and the introduction of feedlot livestock.

With its cakey loam topsoil still nearly two feet deep, Iowa has some of the richest farm land in the world. However, in the past century, nearly half of that original topsoil has been washed away. Our rich agricultural heritage is being squandered to grow corn whose chief uses are animal feed and ethanol.

Government subsidies for corn encourage its expanded production via hybrid seeds and monoagriculture. The latter means farms grow a single crop year after year without regard to the diversity needed to maintain the topsoil. The declining fertility of the soil is simply replaced with synthetic nitrogen. The same synthetic nitrogen that goes into the fertilizer that grows the corn poisons the water table with excess nitrates. As the runoff from Iowa farms flows down the Mississippi and into the Gulf of Mexico, the marine ecosystem is harmed.

The cow, a ruminant animal, has evolved over the years to thrive on grasses. Indeed cows can thrive on even low quality forage from semi-arid lands such as the Dakotas. Of course the “problem” is that a grass fed cow takes much longer to reach maturity for slaughter. That problem is “solved” by feeding cattle cheap starches, such as corn; but cattle are unsuited to eat corn. Michael Pollan writes:

Perhaps the most serious thing that can go wrong with a ruminant on corn is feedlot bloat. The rumen is always producing copious amounts of gas, which is normally expelled by belching during rumination. But when the diet contains too much starch and too little roughage, rumination all but stops, and a layer of foamy slime that can trap gas forms in the rumen. The rumen inflates like a balloon, pressing against the animal’s lungs. Unless action is promptly taken to relieve the pressure (usually by forcing a hose down the animal’s esophagus), the cow suffocates.

A corn diet can also give a cow acidosis. Unlike that in our own highly acidic stomachs, the normal pH of a rumen is neutral. Corn makes it unnaturally acidic, however, causing a kind of bovine heartburn, which in some cases can kill the animal but usually just makes it sick. Acidotic animals go off their feed, pant and salivate excessively, paw at their bellies and eat dirt. The condition can lead to diarrhea, ulcers, bloat, liver disease and a general weakening of the immune system that leaves the animal vulnerable to everything from pneumonia to feedlot polio.

The solution for feedlot owners is, as Pollan explains, feeding cattle the antibiotics Rumensin and Tylosin. Corn fed beef, or feedlot beef, could also be called pharmaceutical beef because almost all feedlot cattle are fed antibiotics which end up in the human food chain. Despite that, up to 70% of the slaughtered feedlot cows have abscessed livers.

Pollan writes that: “A feedlot is very much like a premodern city… teeming filthy and stinking, with open sewers, unpaved roads, and choking air rendered visible by dust.” As a result of the filth and the corn diet, acid-resistant E. coli, which are toxic to humans, thrive in feedlots. As importantly, the unnatural diet of corn results in unnatural beef that is marbled with fat; health consequences result for human beings who eat the fatty beef. But no matter, as we weaken our bodies, we simply demand more subsidized health care.

To Governor Perry and the livestock industry he shills for, as well as to the ethanol industry, I say this—a plague on both your houses. Without subsidies, ethanol and the feedlot beef industry would shrink. Your greed is part of what is destroying America’s finances, its morality, its environment, and its health.

Note: Much of the information about corn and livestock is based on Michael Pollan’s outstanding book: The Omnivore’s Dilemma. I highly recommend his book. A warning though—his book may give you more knowledge than you care to have. As Pollan writes, “Eating industrial beef takes an almost heroic act of not knowing or, now, forgetting.”

Fatal Ignorance

This past weekend, heavy rains resulted in a power outage at our home. We went to bed early, as millions did before there was electricity, and then were awakened by a knock at the door at 10:30—a town policeman advised us to evacuate because the only road to our home was washing out from swollen brooks. There was some chance, he added, that the road would collapse on us if we attempted to leave. Fortunately, our home was not in danger of being flooded, and so we opted to stay put but move our car to a neighbor’s lot on a road out of danger. I did so successfully, and then I walked back to our home through the cascading water and stones swept by the brook onto the road.

Having lived in or near major cities for most of my life, and now living in a rural area, I am very conscious of the differences in the two. Living in a rural area, I am more conscious than I am in the city of just how interdependent we all are. The cycles and vagaries of nature are more palpable; and unlike a city where you may know just a few of the neighbors on your block, you get to know on more than just a “say hello” level, your neighbors, the mailman, the farmer who grows your food, your painter, and your shopkeepers. Unlike what many naively believe, shutting the door on the rest of the world is less of an option in a rural area than it is in the city. In a rural area, it is hard to maintain the fiction—as some city dwellers do—that we are independent captains of our own lives.

I often try to generalize from my experiences and see what lessons I can learn—sometimes it is a familiar one, an old lesson looked at through fresh eyes. Nothing like going without to help one appreciate the familiar; I began to reflect on electricity. Electricity is an invention that has transformed the world; yet before it was available to the public, the idea of an electric current powering machines and lighting homes was not conceivable to almost all individuals.

You may be familiar with the recent surveys that show that high school seniors lack basic knowledge of history, that they have no knowledge of the principles of American government, and that they have no knowledge of geography.

As importantly, many are ignorant of how “anything happens” in the course of a market process. What do I mean? Well, take electricity. If you asked most how or by whom electricity was discovered, they would probably search their minds for familiar names and guess that Ben Franklin or Thomas Edison discovered electricity. They would have little knowledge or appreciation for the fact that research into electricity began thousands of years ago, and it took the efforts of many individuals in multiple societies across epochs to finally bring electricity into our homes as a usable tool.

In the 1957, the BBC presented a mock documentary on the Swiss spaghetti harvest which “explained” how a mild winter had resulted in a bumper spaghetti crop. The documentary fooled millions who had little idea of how the food they eat was grown, harvested, manufactured, and then transported and sold in stores.

This ignorance of history, economics, and our natural worlds is destructive to the maintenance of a free society. Why? If many can believe that a single individual can invent electricity, it is not much of a leap to believe that if government gets to harness more resources, it can improve our lives faster than the market process can. After all, if one man can invent electricity, think of how quickly the government can solve the problem of high energy prices. Indeed, polls show that most support the government spending billions to do just that.

Whenever a problem or a need arises, “someone should do something about it” is the rallying cry of the ignorant. The ignorant believe in the silly fairy tale that some politician can wave a “magic wand” and make something, like a new form of energy, happen. When that politician fails at what never can be done, the ignorant turn to the next political hopeful while maintaining their own ignorance. And there is, of course, an endless supply of politicians who are ready and willing to exploit their ignorance.

Nobel laureate Friedrich Hayek’s great insight was that socialism could never work because it could never solve the knowledge problem—that is, it could never obtain but a fraction of the information necessary to build a modern economy. The corollary of his initial insight is that a free-market economy uses far more information and thus solves problems far faster than a socialist economy ever could. The idea that socialists could conquer the knowledge problem and wave the “magic wand” to shape the world according to their “superior” knowledge was what Hayek called the “fatal conceit”—fatal because it results in poverty, starvation, and war.

There has been more material progress in the past century than in all of recorded history up to that time. The ignorant have no idea that this progress is due to the efforts of free-men and women and not to the directions of politicians.

Many among the ignorant believe in a relatively static world, and so it is natural for them to believe that government can fine tune what is fixed. They have only the vaguest idea that others in the past lived far differently than we do now and that those who will come after us will live far differently than we do—if the blessings of liberty continue to be enjoyed. Their fatal ignorance of how progress happens is crippling the American experiment in liberty.