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It’s Hard To Be An Isolationist
Susan Quinn’s post about the Little League World Series is an example of a point I’ve occasionally made here on Ricochet: It’s hard for loss of freedom in another country not to diminish our own freedom. I doubt that a single person on Ricochet has agreed with me, partly because it isn’t self-explanatory. But here’s an example.
In the comments of Susan’s post I posted a link to Matt Antonelli’s take on the game, in which he started out by saying it’s a game of Chinese Taipei against Florida. When I first heard that and heard “Taipei,” I immediately translated it: “Oh, yeah. Taiwan!”
China puts a lot of pressure on the West to not refer to Taiwan as a separate country, even though we know it is. But China makes it hard for others to do business with China without adopting some of their restrictions on speech. Since 1979 our athletic organizations have been placating China by not saying “Taiwan.”
Some hardline isolationists among us might say the solution to that is simple. We should have no relations with China in sports or anything else. But that means having no trade with China or with countries that do business with China, once all of those other countries adopt China’s hardline policy on not saying “Taiwan.” Some isolationists might say that’s the way it should be. But our country has always had trade relations with other countries. We fought a war to become independent in good part because we wanted no British restrictions on our foreign trade. America became great and mighty by having trade relations with other countries. We can’t become great again in any sense of the word by becoming isolated.
When other countries become less free, there are always accommodations we have to make to cooperate with their lack of freedom. Those acts of cooperation may not be all that onerous, but they tend to become habit-forming. We may not object too strongly the first time, because it’s “not the hill to die on.” Soon we don’t even think about how we moderate our language and become a little less free when others become less free.
It may not just be restrictions on speech. We may also cooperate in sending asylum-seekers back to the lands of the unfree. There will be those among us who say, “Well, when in other countries we have to obey their laws.” Sometimes we end up obeying their laws even in our own country, and doing it all too easily.
Sometimes we just have to be practical. It can’t always be helped. Should we go to war over it? It’s hard to imagine how that could be justified. But a real insult to our own freedom is when we pretend that the loss of freedom elsewhere does not diminish our own.
In this case of the Little League World Series, the ESPN announcers didn’t always follow the rules. A couple of the announcers said the forbidden word, “Taiwan,” as explained in this article: China Probably Wants A Word With ESPN/Disney After Little League World Series. One of them may have done it intentionally.
ESPN does a lot of business with China. Wanna place any bets on whether it happens again?
Published in Foreign Policy
The world is full of people who put their own self-interest above all else. The people you want to rule us do not exist. Even the most incorruptible person in American history, George Washington, was corruptible and used government power against his principles in order to serve the personal interests his wife was nagging him to look after.
If you’ve got a corrupt country like Russia in which everyone has learned to be corrupt all the time, paying bribes and protection money, etc., then you’re right, good laws and institutions probably aren’t going to help. But the good people who always put their duty to their country and neighbors above self-interest simply don’t exist.
I recently read (listened to) Gordon S. Wood’s biography of Benjamin Franklin, The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin, in which he pointed out that in the 1750s and 1760s, the idea was still current that the best government was obtained by putting the good people in charge and letting them rule. Franklin was for much of his life working to become one of those people who were deemed good, so he could get a lucrative government job from the British government. (He did for a time have the job of postmaster for America, at which he served well.) These people believed that there were good people should rule, and everyone else who should not.
It took Franklin a long time to get over that idea and become American in his thinking. It was a near thing, and he almost become a Brit rather than coming back to America. Nowadays nobody believes the world is divided into good people and bad people, and that the solution to bad government is to throw out the bad people and install good people. Nobody, that is, except the extreme left (aka the left) and kedavis.
People need material incentives and constraints in order to do good in government. That’s why our Constitution puts limits on what they can do, and why it gave us a system whereby corruptible people use their greed and ignoble motives to keep other people from having full rein to exercise their greed and ignoble motives, and helps them do the right thing once in a while through fear of being found out and punished. However, this is what is largely lacking in our system of rule by the administrative state. Firing a few people at the top is not going to drain the swamp. The administrative state lacks the same type of controls and constraints that were originally set up to keep our government in check, which is why it stands as as monolithic whole against the people when they want to extract information about incompetence and wrongdoing by the Secret Service that led to its failure to properly protect Donald Trump. You’re not going to fix that by putting good people in charge.
Since our Constitution is the best set of written and agreed upon rules ever used as the basis for governing, our voters should be taught and learn how to live under its terms which include procedures for changing it.
Those in government who violate those rules and /or properly legislated and enforced resulting statutes should be removed from governing.
If we follow these established procedures there is little need to concern ourselves with whether a particular person in government is good or bad because they won’t be there very long if they act corruptly.
As long as you can have people who care more about that, than continuing to feather their own nest while allowing the other bad people to continue feathering theirs.
But you and Reticulator seem to be insisting such people don’t even exist, and never have.
Perhaps the problem is simply that the options for graft in the modern world could never have even been imagined by Washington, Franklin, etc.
It’s two things.
The state-controlled media is a nightmare. Nobody in the Federalist papers foresaw this.
I haven’t found the quote yet, but the constitution is only intended for people that fear God and going to hell. Otherwise, you would just kill people and take their stuff, like we do with inflation and everything that springs from it.
The people who do the crimes may be self-professed Believers, but maybe don’t think what they’re doing is all THAT wrong, or something. They might tell themselves nobody is being hurt, really. Not directly, or whatever.
But the main problem I see is that nobody has yet explained what motivates someone who might not be so “good,” to keep an eye out for other people not being good and doing something about THEM, rather than focusing on their own graft and everyone else doing the same. Especially in this modern world, they can easily graft a lot more than they can earn legitimately at their government job. Maybe just a few grand for airline tickets to Europe for a little vacation, something again that Washington and Franklin could never have DREAMED of, nor could have been offered to them by someone wanting to buy them.
It would be far worse without religion. The problem is, the media, and academia never give the government a colonoscopy. All bad run Keynesianism all the time; all kinds of bad things flow from this, including the government runs out of money.
The government is too centralized, and it produces too many non-public goods. The Founders never intended this. It starts with the Fed creating too many colored pieces of paper all of the time.
Nobody wants to give up inflation or the excessive non-public goods this country has. Very few want to give up the centralized power that creates so much grief. It will end the hard way.
Oh, I believe good and bad people do exist.
One thing all humans pretty much strive for is economic well-being, sometimes thought of as prosperity. That depends on wealth, sometimes thought of as money.
One major difference between good and bad, in the minds of many, is how available wealth is distributed. In politically-oriented economic terms we arrived at a division of opinion about dealing with the options related to wealth distribution and the processes that affect that.
My theory is that big concentrated central government leads to big concentrated monopoly or oligopoly business practices that do not serve the people and forestall their ability to attain personal prosperity in the economic environment.
Small, more localized, government yields the reverse of the big concentrated government, a competitive economic market where common people can better themselves economically.
An America made great again is that place.
Then you don’t think enough good people are interested in being involved in government, or what? For sure, at minimum there seem to be insufficient motivations for good people to remain good, and to help deal with the bad people; versus just going along to get along, and perhaps even becoming bad themselves. Presumably nobody actually dies from embezzlement etc, but if you go out of your way to get rid of the bad people, most likely all that happens is you continue getting your salary.
Present-day America might simply be too large for that to work.
Yes.
People don’t fear God, and hell enough.
If we had deflation constantly as God intended us to live, we wouldn’t have this problem. Every single minute they are taking power from you and giving it to the government and the one percent. It’s stupid.
Trade and automation are great, because they lower costs, otherwise known as deflation. Then the Fed tries to wipe it out.
LOL what do you propose?
The Ludwig von Mises Institute Is Right About Everything™
A break-up could be coming regardless.
We pay more in interest than we do to the Pentagon.
We have docked 17 perfectly good navy ships because they can’t get enough people to work on them.
How do you avoid Medicare death panels?
The way they measure inflation is absurd.
The stock market is at a record level, and a very high PE for some reason. I’m sure the Fed doesn’t care. lol
60% of the country has their back against the wall because of inflation.
How does this not end up with massive inflation?
Carry on.
Okay well that’s fine, but of course it doesn’t solve the problem. Maybe if there were incentives for good people to “rat out” the bad people, via rewards etc. Sufficient incentives that it would be better to get rich that way, rather than the corrupt way.
But at this point, even getting such laws passed could be effectively impossible. And then afterward you still have the problem of enforcement. If the bad people get richer by not enforcing the laws than by enforcing them, they will continue to not enforce them.
I suspect good behavior at this point requires stronger incentives.
They have whistleblower laws and whistleblower attorneys. Like I said, it’s about fearing God, and too much centralized stupid government.
We
are
doomed.
Yes, and all those honest judges and stuff out there. Convicting Trump and what-not.
Stop it, you’re making my ribs hurt from laughing!
There may well be a “reset” coming, hopefully not the kind the bigwigs wish for.
The Ludwig von Mises Institute Is Right About Everything™
I told you, it comes down to fearing God and hell. You can laugh all you want, but you don’t have any solutions.
True, but when you refer to whistle-blower laws etc, it’s just piling more likely-bad people on top of the existing bad people.
“The Spirit of Liberty” Speech by Judge Learned Hand, 1944
https://www.thefire.org/research-learn/spirit-liberty-speech-judge-learned-hand-1944
I’m telling you they have tried covering it. What do you recommend?
Really? You think there are too many bad people in the whistleblower system?
It doesn’t take ALL of them being bad. And you can have as many whistleblowers as you like, but if the prosecutors won’t take the cases, or if the judges mess things up, it goes nowhere. Haven’t you heard how many of whistleblowers already get treated?
Arguably, Gen. Flynn was a whistleblower. In a way, so is Trump.
And the Boeing whistleblowers. You know, the dead ones?
Would YOU want to be a whistleblower, in the current environment?
We don’t have enough people that fear God, and hell.
The whistleblower process is between Congress and whistleblower lawyers.
I am well aware of how bad the justice system is. God help anybody that can’t afford good attorneys.
Yes, but you can’t be any more protected than with the system we have right now. It’s disgusting because people are disgusting.
You can say that, but they didn’t use the process.
People don’t fear God and hell enough. What do you recommend?
I would follow the process and maybe I would do it or maybe I wouldn’t.
Government Is How We Steal From Each Other™
THE FEDERAL PROSECUTOR
BY ROBERT H JACKSON
https://www.roberthjackson.org/speech-and-writing/the-federal-prosecutor/
It’s a problem for the whistleblower process too. Companies and government agencies can collude to bring criminal charges against whistleblowers, both to intimidate them and to attack their credibility as whistleblowers. Congress doesn’t start that, and either can’t stop it or is unwilling to do what is necessary to stop it.
Which is what my point has been from the start. Good laws are useless – perhaps even counter-productive – without good people behind them.
What do you recommend?
We have resolved everything.
You don’t seem to be one of those who believes that it’s somehow possible to craft laws that will force bad people to be good, or at least to somehow make it more attractive to be good than bad. I don’t think that works, except for a situation where the bad people are greatly outnumbered by the good. If bad people are a small – perhaps necessarily a tiny – minority of all workers etc involved, then it might work. But once there’s even a significant minority of bad people, it falls apart. At that point, just passing more laws etc, won’t change it. Because no law is self-enforcing. (As one of my self-created aphorisms puts it, “no great hand comes down from the sky and forces people to do the right thing.”)
I get the feeling those people might be the first to quote “our Constitution is meant for a moral and religious people” etc, but don’t fully grasp the implications.
Too many people like or excuse government force. Some economists think that 80% of the government is non-public goods. Inflation is not good. Inflation is bad. 90% of the population has no idea that things could be better if they thought this way.
Not a chance.
Really? What kind of graft could have been offered to Washington and Franklin? Not even indoor plumbing.