Reflections  

ANWR Nonsense — With the current war jitters, gasoline prices have spiked above $2 a gallon in some places. This has led our friends in the Department of the Interior to do a public-relations push for oil drilling in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge so that we can "reduce our dependence on foreign oil."

I hate to break it to our fearless leaders, but the price we pay for fuel is based on world market prices. The most optimistic projections are that ANWR will add less than 1.5 percent to world oil production over the next 50 years. If ANWR were in production today, the $1.99 you paid for gasoline this morning might have been $1.96 instead. Big deal.

Why is it safer to drain America first? If we are really concerned about oil dependence, let's keep ANWR in reserve. Then, when the Saudis, Venezuelans, Canadians, or whoever threaten to cut off our oil supply, we can just thumb our noses and say, "We can get oil from Alaska anytime we want." — Randal O'Toole

Out-taxing the communists — A new bill in Communist Cuba allows private-farm co-ops to distribute 70% of their profits, reducing the state's take to 30%, which happens to be below the tax rate in capitalist America, whose income tax has become dangerously "progressive," i.e. re-distributive. The top 5% of taxpayers now pay over half of all income taxes paid, whereas the top half of taxpayers pay 96% of taxes.

In addition to the unfairness and economic consequences of such a system, there are important public policy concerns. Where half the population pays no tax, many people have no stake in cutting taxes or government spending, and the politics of envy take root. To be in that top 5% of taxpayers, by the way, which includes both individual and joint returns, one need earn $120,846, hardly extravagantly rich — Adrian Day

Thieves' paradise — An Arab student living in England exclaimed, "September 11th was a great day. Osama Bin Laden is a great man and all Americans deserve to die." His neighbor, an Englishman, replied, "I hate Arabs and Muslims." A unpleasant exchange, but one without fisticuffs, just words.

One of the men was hauled into court under the newly minted Anti-Terrorism Act. Which man? The Englishman, of course. He narrowly escaped jail time only because of his "remorse." (He was sentenced to community service and fined.)

Meanwhile, a homeowner who shot a burglar while defending his family has been put in jail. The career criminal who burgled him has been convicted more than 30 times for burglary and other violent crimes. He has been given government aid to sue the homeowner. The homeowner, a farmer living in a rural area whose home had been broken into several times in the past, has been denied parole because he is deemed a danger to future burglars.

The chief justice has directed judges not to imprison first or even second-offense burglars. One judge took this to extremes, freeing a professional burglar with 51 previous convictions, saying he hoped the man would give up drugs and develop his talent for writing poetry. British police solve only 12 percent of burglaries, usually offering victims only a free session of "distress counseling" and not even attempting to solve the crime — unless, of course, the homeowner attempted to resist the burglary, in which case the homeowner is arrested.

Only 30 percent of police time is spent on crime; the rest is devoted to paperwork, community work, teaching anti-racism, and so forth. Johnson suggests the fundamental problem is a lack of moral right and wrong, wherein crime is viewed simply as a social problem. But the police do have time for the really important crimes. Well-known country writer Robin Page was arrested and detained in a police cell after telling a countryside rally that rural dwellers should have the same rights as blacks, Muslims, and gays. Similar sentiments expressed by Prince Charles, though causing some stir, did not lead to his arrest. — Adrian Day

Pyongyang's nuclear calling card — To understand what's going on in North Korea, which seems on the surface to be antagonizing the United States in a reckless and opportunistic fashion, it might be helpful to step back a bit and consider the recent history of the Korean peninsula. South Korea has grown into an economic powerhouse, while North Korea is still an isolated basket case that can get attention mainly by rattling its large and possibly nuclear but overall rather creaky saber.

In early February, the North Koreans announced that they were reactivating their nuclear facilities, which have been shut down since 1994 (although the regime has admitted it has carried on a secret program to make nuclear weapons). Then, the North Koreans blustered that, if the United States launched an attack on Pyongyang's nuclear facilities, it would trigger a "total war."

Since the South Korean capital, Seoul, is only 30 miles from the demilitarized zone and could be reached with artillery and, since North Korea in 1998 tested a missile that arched over Japan, both countries hope it's bluster and would prefer to defuse the situation. The United States is involved because we have 37,000 troops in South Korea and President Bush named North Korea as part of the "Axis of Evil." Also, the U.S. exposed North Korea's secret nuclear program last October without a game plan to deal with the consequences.

"What's really going on is the North's leaders are trying to come in from the cold without sparking a rebellion in which they lose their heads," Chalmers Johnson told me on the phone. He's a University of California emeritus professor of political science and Asia specialist whose recent book, "Blowback," predicted many of the consequences of U.S. involvement in so many overseas squabbles. "North Korea fears the U.S. will come after them after it deals with Iraq, and wants, in its bizarre and clumsy fashion, to get U.S. attention and reach an accommodation," he said.

The U.S. has no good options, so it's time for a dramatic move. We should quietly tell South Korea it can say that if North Korea behaves, the South will get U.S. troops — which function as a tripwire rather than effective defense anyway — off the peninsula. Then we can leave the problem of easing North Korea into the modern world to its neighbors. — Alan W. Bock

Enlightened cynicism — I was leafing through my old copy of Bartlett's "Familiar Quotations," looking for something else and there it was: the La Rochefoucauld page.

I hadn't seen La Rochefoucauld in quite a while. It was good to meet him again. He hadn't changed a bit. He was still the haughty Francois, Duc de La Rochefoucauld (1613–80), author of the "Maxims," several hundred expressions of the cynical wisdom of the Enlightenment. He was still the author from whom good people shudder and turn away.

That's unfortunate for them. If they studied La Rochefoucauld, they might learn something about what naked goodness is up against, and arm themselves accordingly.

It's not a bad world that La Rochefoucauld describes. His idea that every "virtue" is associated with some "vice" can work both ways. Even hypocrisy has a relationship to something good: "Hypocrisy is the homage that vice pays to virtue."

On the other hand: "The gratitude of most men is merely a secret desire to receive greater benefits."

Perhaps you don't like to hear that. But he has worse things to say: "True love is like ghosts, which everybody talks about and few have seen."

Would you be better off if you didn't consider that possibility? Perhaps you'd feel better. I know that I would. I also know that my sensitivities are wounded when I hear La Rochefoucauld say that "to succeed in the world, we do everything we can to appear successful." I would rather think that to succeed you just do a good job. It would be more pleasant, after all, to cherish the simple faith of the character in Conrad's "Secret Agent," who "set before him a goal of power and prestige to be attained without the medium of arts, graces, tact, wealth — by sheer weight of merit alone." Before people act on such a faith, however, they should at least be warned that their tactics may not work. That's what La Rochefoucauld does. He provides the warning.

While I'm praising him, I'll sound my own warning. He's not always right. I don't believe that "the understanding is always the dupe of the heart." There is such a thing as objectivity, and there are ways of arriving at it. I must admit, however, that the understanding usually has about as much chance with the heart as a ball of string when the cat gets it.

Some of the other maxims are doubtful or contradictory. It may be true that "we need greater virtues to sustain good fortune than bad." I suspect that it is. If you want moral instruction, you know instinctively that you're more likely to find it in people's deathbed scenes than in the amorous episodes of their 19th year. But it may also be true that "neither the sun nor death can be looked at steadily."

Then there are differences in interpretation. Maxims have to be interpreted in the light of one's own experience, and my experience sometimes differs significantly from that of La Rochefoucauld. When he says, "What men call friendship is only a reciprocal conciliation of interests, an exchange of good offices," and when he goes on to call it "a form of barter from which self-love always expects to gain something," I think he's right, but not in the way he thinks he is. He's thinking about people who abandon their friends when they no longer expect to gain any concrete rewards from them; I'm thinking about friends who stick by each other because they always expect to gain something of spiritual importance to themselves.

Yet his basic principle is right: there is an economy in friendship, just as there is an economy in everything else. I don't mind being told that my friends like me because I have something to offer them. That's a worthwhile addition to my own "self-love."

I also don't mind being told about certain personal characteristics that, my author insists, I share with everyone else. It may not be pleasant to learn some of these things, but if I'm going to navigate the shallows that lie within me, I need to know where they are. After a few sharp nudges from La Rochefoucauld, I'm prepared to admit that "we," meaning "I," "rarely find that people have good sense unless they agree with us," that "usually we praise only to be praised," and that "we would rather speak ill of ourselves than not talk about ourselves at all." The proof of that last saying is before you.

Of course, the strength of a maxim is the pleasure we get from the way it's put. That's what makes us willing to confront any critical message it delivers. If someone tells me, "You don't care how much I suffer! You don't feel bad about me at all!", I will tell him, in all seeming sincerity, that he's wrong. Of course I care. I care very much. Don't you accuse me of not caring. I care about your problems just as much as you do — you miserable piece of slime. But when La Rochefoucauld tells me, in his droll way, "We all have strength enough to endure the misfortunes of others," I immediately succumb. "You're right!" I admit. "I have no empathy at all."

La Rochefoucauld is not especially fond of adverting to political issues, but when he does, he usually has something important to say. Libertarians often think of the Enlightenment, which was the cradle of our political conceptions, as a time of high idealism. Thomas Jefferson. Thomas Paine. The storming of the Bastille. But one reason why liberty was able to be born into the world was that people like La Rochefoucauld had shown that liberty was not simply a matter of high ideals. People had always cherished high ideals. Liberty could only be enjoyed when they came to terms with the fact that high ideals, in themselves, were as much the problem as the solution. Ideals had always been used as an excuse for destroying liberty. Only when ideals, as such, were distrusted could the necessary checks and balances be devised. As La Rochefoucauld advises, don't trust to the love of justice: "The love of justice is simply, in the majority of men, the fear of suffering injustice." When you understand that, you can start thinking, as the fathers of our constitution thought, about ways of turning the fear of suffering injustice into a basis of limited government and the system of equal justice it is capable of maintaining.

The cynical wisdom of the Enlightenment is not to be found only in La Rochefoucauld. You can find it in Adams, Hume, Chesterfield, Johnson, Smith; you can find it in the most brilliant commentary on the American form of government, Madison's tenth Federalist paper; and you can find it in the 20th-century libertarians who are most mindful of the Enlightenment — Garrett, Hayek, Paterson. If liberty finally got its start, it was because people like La Rochefoucauld prepared the way for it. If it is still alive, it is because other people understood how that way was prepared. Live in the world, these people say; but live with both eyes open. — Stephen Cox

© Copyright 2008, Liberty Foundation

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