Category: Musings

Charlie Kirk, RIP

Charlie Kirk’s assassination was another tragedy. I disagreed with many of the things Kirk said, but respected and admired his patient willingness to dialog with disagreeing members of his audience.  It was a behavior the country would greatly benefit from more of.  But liking or not liking Charlie Kirk should be totally irrelevant to strongly condemning his assassination.

A The Hill headline stated “A top State Department official on Thursday warned “foreigners” in the U.S. against praising the death of Charlie Kirk, the conservative influencer who was shot and killed at an event in Utah on Wednesday.”  “foreigners-warned-Charlie Kirk” I would like to unpack that statement a bit. No one should praise his death. If we are sharing with foreign visitors the behavior we would expect from them and that they should display if they want to get on well, that would be fine. But coming from our current State Department I suspect that the warning is a threat of deportation for anyone who would dare to be so rude, which would violate the fundamental free speech principles that have always been so important to our culture.

President Trump stated that the assassin was from the “radical left.”  As the assassin has not yet been apprehended, we don’t even need to wonder what information the President has that has not yet been shared with us. I very much want to know who the assassin was and what his motivation was. But that information will in no way absolve him of the evilness of his crime (we do know that it was a man/boy from FBI photographs). The President’s baseless claim is not contributing to a better atmosphere in America. It certainly did not reflect Charlie Kirk’s commitment to civil dialog.

Tolerance

Tolerance is an essential feature of a flourishing society, but it is a low bar. Jesus of Nazareth told his followers that they should “love thy neighbors as themselves.” This view is widely shared among most religions.

My Afghan friends say Islam is rooted in both love and peace. The Qur’an and Islamic teachings emphasize God’s love and compassion as central, motivating principles, with believers encouraged to love God and one another in return. The Prophet Muhammad is portrayed as a model of mercy, kindness, and tolerance, teaching forgiveness and respect for others, regardless of their beliefs. But the Quran also demands harsh punishments of transgressors, and we have seen horrible acts perpetrated in the name of Islam by radical wings of the religion (e.g. Wahabis in Saudi Arabia and the Taliban regime in Afghanistan).

Like the Qur’an, the Christian Bible also demands harsh punishments of transgressors. Radical wings of Christianity have also undertaken horrible acts. For example, the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol involved participants motivated by radical Christian nationalist beliefs, blending religious rhetoric with calls for violence and anti-democratic actions. Leaders within certain Neo-Charismatic Pentecostal movements promoted the idea of “spiritual warfare,” which helped justify extreme actions among followers.

Most Christians and Muslims ignore these demands in their holy books, which would send them to jail most anywhere in the world. My favorite presentation of the bible’s horrible demands was a scene in the TV series “West Wing”:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3CPjWd4MUXs.

My question here is how best to promote Jesus’s call to love our neighbors. We are born with the protective instinct to trust those we know and distrust “others”. But with the huge increase in wealth from trade and other interactions and cooperation, dealings with “others” increased. The siloing of religious and racial groups gave way to tolerance, and with greater exposure, tolerance gave way often to friendship. Though some of us were born with an urge to explore and meet new and different people, most are not. Their natural aversion to “others” requires social encouragement to overcome it.

Look at almost any of today’s TV series (especially British). The total mix of black, white, brown and yellow has now become the norm and feels natural. A white man’s boss is as likely to be a black woman as the other way around. This is a wonderful development in which each person is judged on their own talents and character. It is also a more interesting world. But how did we get from the culture of tribalism to our more exciting world of today?

Teaching our children the rightness of treating each person individual on the basis of their talents and character and then exposing them to those not like them was the path. As more white people encountered blacks, they became more relaxed around them. TV shows like the Bill Cosby Show were incredibly important in making normal blacks seem “normal” to whites.

Gays became more fully accepted as more and more families discovered that one of their members was gay. But the TV show Will and Grace played the incredibly important role played by the Bill Cosby Show of demystifying Gays and making the straight public more understanding and comfortable with them. Combined with Jesus’s call to love our neighbors, actual exposure to all types does the job. Companies that want a more interesting (and productive) work environment will go out of their way to hire from all races and creeds. This is an area in which real progress has been made toward a fairer, and more interesting society.

Berkeley in the 1960s

Before continuing with some of my recollections from U of Berkeley during the Free Speech Movement period, please read this penetrating article by Anatol Lieven:  “The mask of imperialism-Anatol Lieven”

In it he mentions Hans J Morgenthau, a great realist thinker of the last century. I listened to many, many speeches during my last year at Berkeley 1964-5 but very, very few that resonated with me and Morgenthau was one. The other two were Milton Friedman and Edward Teller, the so-called father of the H bomb.  

Edward Teller was a professor at Berkeley and after his speech I visited with him in his home near the campus. He explained why he had opposed dropping Atomic bombs on Japan. It was a fascinating day.

When I listened to Friedman, I vowed that I would die if I wasn’t able to study under him at the U of Chicago. I am still here so fortunately I did get my Ph.D. in economics from Chicago with Friedman as chairman of my dissertation committee. It transformed my life.

The most amusing recollection in my view was listening to Morgenthau. At the end of his fascinating speech, I was full of questions. If only, I said to myself, I could be in the room with him for an hour and ask them. A few years later as a grad student at Chicago I stepped into the elevator on my way to Friedman’s office and there, all alone, stood Hans J. Morgenthau. I couldn’t think of a single question and rode up to the 4th floor in silence.

If you would like to read more recollections of my—I must say—very interesting life, buy my autobiography.  “Life of Warren C. – From the River to the Sea-All Should by Free”

Where have all the flowers gone?

My mornings these days are spent reading email and news reports sitting in a swing on our master bedroom balcony, from which I can view Reagan National Airport and further south the skyline of Alexandria Va. Ito serves my coffee and a cut orange to me there. Life is wonderful (age adjusted). Thankfully I am no longer faced with life defining choices—forks in the road.  Luckily most of my choices worked out well. But I am happy to no longer face them.

While reading the Post, WSJ, etc. on my iPad, I listen alternatively to Opera areas and my favorite folk singers of my youth.  This morning while listening to Peter, Paul and Mary sign “Where have all the Flowers Gone,” I broking into tears and thought I would share with you why. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZgXNVA9ngx8

I believe that the hearts of most young people seek to “do good”– to prosper by or while making the world a better place, which is the essence of capitalism. There are, of course, a few bad apples, but most of us are born with good hearts and a desire to prove themselves worthy. Over too much of history young men too often proved their worthiness by going to war to defend their country, or, at the instigation of those bad apples, to expand their empire. So, the impulse to reach out and help others has often been subverted in our youth to standing up to kill them instead, dying themselves in large numbers. World War II, alone killed 70-85 million people and injured multiples of that. Where have all the flowers gone.

My tears flowed from the sadness that we have failed and still fail to nurture those good hearts into an even better world to the extent we could. The enterprise of our fellow man once liberated to pursue their dreams has lifted the wellbeing of the average person to unbelievable heights. But every young person knows that a good life consists of more than material wealth. We are again (or still?) in a period when far too many people can only think of dealing with our fellow man by beating them down in war.  What a sad misuse of our potential. Where will all the flowers go?

Anne with an E

Several weeks ago I complained that the biggest winners of this year’s Emmy awards were series I had stopped watching after a few episodes because there were virtually no characters in them to like and the real world already has enough bad apples. In response to my complaint my former IMF colleague, Marta Castello Branco, who had been a member of the IMF technical assistance missions that I led to the central banks of Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan in 1992-3, recommended that I watch “Anne with an E.”  Boy was she right.

In three seasons with ten episodes each, “Anne with an E” follows the adventures of a brilliant, well-read but socially inept orphan girl adopted at the age of 13 by a relatively old brother and sister who had never married. The drama takes place in Canada around 1800. Anne is super smart and used her expansive imagination and extensive reading of the classics to survive the cruelties of 12 years in an orphanage before her adoption. She talks faster than a speeding bullet and is rarely quiet. The series is essentially about the coming of age experiences of children in a small farming community as seen largely through Anne’s eyes.

Being a homely red head, Anne’s growing up challenges are more than most, which can be difficult enough for the average child.  The series frankly and honestly treats the racial biases toward blacks, native Indians, gays, and other minorities at the time, the ugliness of school bullies, and the ridged moral codes of the towns people. But through the ups and downs of life most members of the farming community learn and grow in their understanding of their fellow community members.  Anne plays a large role in the struggle to make the world a better place while trying to understand her own place in it. There are plenty of people to like. The show is excellently cast and performed and gripping and uplifting. I can’t recommend it highly enough. Thank you Marta.

One of our Strengths

Two sights/thoughts are sure to bring tears to my eyes. One is seeing a child loose hope for its future. Almost nothing is sadder. The other is seeing people fighting for causes they believe in to help another person or society more generally. These happy tears are a response to the goodness in people.

But not everyone shares the same view of what the right cause is. Our founding fathers had the great wisdom to know that only by confronting the arguments for opposing views could we hope to find common ground or at least to understand and respect other views even if we did not share them and thus live peacefully together. So, in the very first Amendment to our constitutions (the Bill of Rights) they established that:

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

We seem to be coming out of the sad generation over protected by “helicopter moms” who were so afraid of hearing something they might disagree with that they tried to ban such speech or demonstrations in direct violation of our Constitution. But the dangerous and pathetic Woke generation seems to be passing. The sharply different views over the tragic war in Israel and Palestine are testing our commitment to the wisdom of free speech and step by step that wisdom seems to be winning.

While the Millennials (the scardicat, afraid of their shadows generation mom kept from developing protective skins) tried to shut down and prevent encounters (speeches, demonstrations, etc.) that might offend their views (sought “safe spaces”), Gen Z seems to be reverting to the openness and search for the truth championed by our founding fathers.

There have always been some dissenters in every generation. Sadly a few people are just nasty (redneck fascist types). It’s hard for me to know how to characterize an adult like Governor DeSantis who cancels the self-governance contract with Disneyland and ordered the ban of the pro-Palestinian student group Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) from university campuses in Florida, because he doesn’t like what they are saying. “A Land of Immigrants”

We should go out of our way to hear views we might disagree with, but to be construction we should urge our “opponents” to debate politely, to be civil, and do so ourselves.  Name calling, for example calling criticism of the Israeli government “antisemitism,” does not contribute to better mutual understanding of difficult issues. Our demonstrations should always be peaceful. We have work to do on those fronts, but the urge to ban seems to be retreating. The following article about the evolving situation of opposing views on the Israeli/Hamas/Gaza wars is encouraging to me and well worth reading. https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/israel-palestine-war-facing-suspension-mit-university-students-continue-pro-palestine-advocacy

Serving Self Interest

If the goal of public policy is to maximize society’s wealth, in the broadest meaning of wealth (economic and cultural), what should that policy be? The invention and production of goods and services that enrich our lives (by providing food, shelter, safety, and entertainment) require a mix of cooperation and competition. How that mix is determined is the critical factor providing varied results in different societies. The Soviet Union represented one extreme of central determination and enforcement of the mix. The United States represents the other extreme encouraging individual determination of when and how to cooperate and when and how to compete based on each person’s self-interest.

What form of cooperation and competition maximizes society’s wealth and how should that optimal mix be determined? The exploitation of our self-interest to maximize wealth that has such extensive scope in the U.S. is guided by each person’s understanding of how their interests are best served.  Our moral code for how best to treat others and thus to be treated ourselves is a critical part of that understanding.

Alexis de Tocqueville, in his Democracy in America (1835), marveled at the extensive degree of voluntary cooperation in America. Americans joined together in church groups, civic clubs, charitable organizations, and sports clubs as part of their pursuit of their self-interests to a greater extent than in any other country in the world.

The tightest cooperative unit is the family, were trust between members is very high in dividing responsibilities while sharing its fruits, as they compete with other families for jobs and markets. Firms divide up tasks and cooperate in producing the best possible products and services with which to compete with other firms for market share (see Ronald Coase’s  The Nature of the Firm – Wikipedia). The Brooklyn Dodgers (now the Los Angeles Dodgers) cooperated within the club in order to better compete against other baseball clubs.

The wealth and success of America compared with the poverty and eventual failure of the Soviet Union reflects its better choices of the when and where and how much to cooperate vs compete. History has confirmed that those choices are best made by individuals pursuing their self-interest as they see and understand it. In Adam Smith’s foundational book: An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776) Smith argues that when individuals pursue their own self-interest in a free market, they are led by an “invisible hand” to promote the general welfare of society. However, these invisible hands operate within and through a society’s legal, institutional, and moral environment. Well defined and secure property rights are particularly important.

The dramatic increase in material wealth for the average family and decline in poverty in relatively free market, capitalist economies over the past 250 years followed thousands of years of unchanging incomes and general poverty. https://humanprogress.org/trends/

I hope that our next generation of innovators and workers understand this.

Joan Baez

“Joan Baez: I am a noise” is at the top of my list of movies to see. I fell in love with her music listening to her free Friday concerts on the steps of Sproul Hall at the U of California, Berkeley in 1964 during the Free Speech Movement protests. I became, and remain, a big fan of Joan Baez, Simon and Garfunkel, Peter, Paul and Mary and many other folk as well as Irish and Andean folk music singers.

As I am writing this I am listening, as I often do sitting here in my easy chair, to Kate Wolf, which will be following automatically by Joan, etc. Tears often form as I listen, and I don’t really understand why. I think my life has been amazingly wonderful and exciting, full of happy and sad events. Why would the music that I have always loved so much tear me up? They are neither sad nor happy tears as my mind glides over time to the past. They really are a mystery. Perhaps they are tears of gratitude for taking my mind off the world outside us today. Joan sang of love and peace.

Persuasion or Coercion

Alabama Sen. Tommy Tuberville might be right or wrong about opposing the defense Department’s policy “of providing travel expenses for service women seeking an abortion.” But President Biden is certainly right in claiming that Tuberville’s unilateral “blocking more than 300 military [nominations] with his extreme political agenda” is “jeopardize[ing] the country’s national security.”  “Biden Tuberville military clash”

The DOD must determine the policies that will attract the solders that we need in our All Volunteer Military. Those policies should be open to public debate. But Tuberville has chosen coercion to impose his views rather than persuasion to seek consensus . This is not proper in a free society governed by publicly endorsed laws. It prevents the sort of public debate that will most likely find the best balance between the opposing views of people living in the same space. And it will certainly deepen divides that will diminish rather than enhance civility. In short, it bad for the nation.

But our liberal democracy has survived for two hundred and fifty years because when the pendulum swings too far in one direction, it invariably swings back. Hopefully we are reaching the extreme of the pendulum swing of right-left antagonism. Efforts are growing to rebuild the civil dialog from which we can better live together in liberty. See for example groups like Braver Angles https://braverangels.org/   We should fight to preserve our freedom to live as we choose rather than to restrict the choices of others to live as they choose.

Hopes for the New Year

We each have our own beliefs, customs, and preferred lifestyles. But we live together in communities and nations with others who have their own beliefs, customs, and preferred lifestyles. Generally, each of us doing our own things does not interfere with others doing theirs. But sometimes it does, raising issues of the rules governing those interaction. Our personal freedom and peaceful coexistence with others depend on how wisely we define those rules. Finding and observing an optimal balance of personal freedoms with community restraints and obligations enhances the wellbeing of everyone. The U.S. has a bigger space for personal freedom than most countries and has flourished because of it.

Generally, my freedom of behavior stops where my fist meets your face. What I do with my fist otherwise should not be your concern. But some people (or countries) seem to go out of their way to find behavior by others to object to.  We had no national interest or need to attack Iraq, Syria, Kuwait, Libya, Liberia, Somalia, or Kosovo, to name a few of the countries we attacked in the last twenty years. Two men suing a baker for refusing to bake their wedding cake when another baker across the street would be happy to do it are looking for fights rather than harmony. With the same reasoning: should a website designer be required to design a website for the Ku-Klux-Klan when she disagrees with their message and activities?

Nor is it credible, nor a contribution to the rule based international order meant to keep the peace among nations with divergent political systems, to ignore the rules you expect other nations to follow. “The rule of law-China and the U.S.” The U.S. attack on Iraq violated international law as much as does Russia’s attack on Ukraine. Rather than press China to abide by international trade rules, the U.S. is ignoring them itself.  “WTO ruling-Trump tariffs violate rules” Our bullyish hypocrisy is more than embarrassing. It undermines our international standing and influence and is contrary to our national interest.

With that background, what are my most important wishes/hopes for 2023?

–Stop pushing us into WWIII. Remove the neocons from our government. “Ukraine war-how does it end?”

–End the Russian war on Ukraine. Yes we can (push Ukraine and Russia to the negotiating table) “End the war in Ukraine”

–Fix our immigration laws/policies. https://wcoats.blog/2022/09/23/a-land-of-immigrants/

–Join the Trans Pacific Partnership (now called the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership)   “Tony Judt on trade”

–End our Industrial policies. “Industrial policy sounds good but is unsound”

–End our trade protectionism  “Trade protection and corruption”

–Compete with China fairly  “Competing with China”

–Return to our principles re-Israel/Palestine “Dear Congressman Kevin McCarthy”

–Restore Congressional Leadership. Enforce the War Powers Act. Restore regular order and cross aisle cooperation to address real problems. “Our dysfunctional Congress”

–Restore fiscal sanity—balance the Federal budget via spending cuts (especially so-called defense). https://wcoats.blog/2011/04/23/thinking-about-the-public-debt/

–Restore the domestic rule of law (even on Trump): “A reflex U turn from the January 6 Committee”

–Restore the Republican Party to the principals I have always supported—get rid of Trump. “More on Trump acquittal”

–Protect our free speech but restore civility to public debate. “Sacred tension-uncanceling ourselves – Jonathan Rauch”

The above would be a good start in restoring America to the principles and scope of government that made us the Land of the Free – Home of the Brave.

Happy New Year