Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 512

The New New Republic and the Plutocratic Left

There was an irony at the heart of Chris Hughes’ brief stewardship of the New Republic, which, the Facebook mogul announced yesterday, is now up for sale again. Hughes appeared to have two goals at the magazine: First, push the once center-left opinion journal further to the hard left, especially on issues of identity politics. (The cover story of the first issue after the mass departure of the magazine’s longtime staff was an extended denunciation of the “old” New Republic‘s coverage of racial issues). The second goal was to turn the 100-year-old magazine, once understood by its owners and writers as a kind of “public trust,” into a ruthlessly profitable corporation—or, in an editor’s now infamous words, a “vertically integrated digital media company.”

We usually don’t associate left-wing politics with this kind of corporatism and consultant-speak. And yet, this is the outlook that increasingly characterizes America’s new class of left-leaning plutocrats, who are quite left-leaning on social issues, but also deeply immersed in the world of startups, “brands,” and “disruption.”This tension between the magazine’s political outlook and its business strategy clearly wasn’t the only source of its failure—but it probably wasn’t irrelevant, either. Hughes’ emphasis on profitability was more anathema to the magazine’s old-guard liberal staff than it might have been to business-friendly journalists at the Wall Street Journal editorial page. More than anything, it was the departure from the masthead of big names like Jeffrey Rosen, Robert Reich, and Judith Shulevitz that doomed the magazine. The old-guard writers were replaced with (mostly) hip young social liberals who appeared to have fewer objections than their predecessors to Hughes’ Silicon Valley-style business model, but couldn’t control the conversation in the same way.It’s always dangerous to generalize from one event, of course, but Hughes’ destruction of the 100-year old magazine may point to challenges for left-leaning institutions down the line. The liberal billionaires of yore were enamored of the idea of “public trusts” and were therefore willing to lose money on institutions over the long run. It’s unclear whether the new class of young lefty plutocrats, whose liberalism is rooted more in identity politics than in social solidarity and class consciousness, will have the same impulses, or if they will be more determined, like Hughes was, to quickly generate profits. As Andrew Ross Sorkin pointed out, the young generation of billionaires is still finding its bearings when it comes to vanity projects.

Middle East Trend: More Bases in More Places

In a move that further complicates an already messy Middle East, Turkey is moving to finalize a long-term military base in the Persian Gulf. Olivier Decottignies and Soner Cagaptay write on the Washington Institute’s website:

In December, Ankara announced that it will establish a new military base in Qatar, putting Turkey in a small group of nations willing and able to project power in the Persian Gulf. [..] Ankara and Doha are currently in talks to sign a Status of Forces Agreement, laying the groundwork for a long-term Turkish military presence. The agreement will likely include a “casus foederis” clause stipulating that if one country is attacked, the other will come to its assistance. This would put Qatar in a special league in Ankara’s eyes. Apart from its NATO casus foederis obligation, Turkey has such arrangements with only two other partners: Northern Cyprus (which Ankara recognizes as a state) and Azerbaijan.

[…T]he Turkish base in Qatar will reportedly include army, navy, air force, and special forces components as well as trainers for the Qatari military, allowing Ankara to show off its military hardware and perhaps boost sales of its Altay tanks, Firtina self-propelled howitzers, and other arms. It will also give the Turkish military the desert training medium it currently lacks, allow Turkish naval forces to conduct counterpiracy and other operations in the Persian Gulf, Indian Ocean, and Arabian Sea, and perhaps serve as a hub for future Turkish operations overseas. More symbolically, the base will signal the Turkish navy’s return to the Indian Ocean for the first time since the 1550s, when the Ottomans unsuccessfully fought the Portuguese Empire for dominance there.

This base is not a unique development. Instead, it’s part of a regional trend:

While the United States remains by far the largest provider of security in the Gulf, major NATO allies have been stepping up their presence. The French established a multipurpose air, sea, and ground base in the UAE in 2009, while British foreign secretary Philip Hammond took part in a groundbreaking ceremony for a similar project in Bahrain last November.

Key non-Western nations are also closing in on the region. Russia has deployed forces to Syria and established itself at bases in Latakia and Tartus, while China controls commercial operations at the Pakistani port of Gwadar, not far from the mouth of the Persian Gulf.

And then there’s Tehran’s deployments in Syria, Iraq, and Yemen. As the United States continues to seek to minimize its profile in the Middle East, peace has not broken out; rather, the region has become ever more contested, with an increasing number of active players. While this time may be different, trends like this historically don’t end well.

Take the Turkish base in Qatar. As Decottignies and Cagaptay note, the Iranians will see this as an aggressive move by the Turks. In the short term, the Saudis and the Gulf States will probably welcome the assistance against what they see as an existential threat, but in the medium- to long-term, there are substantial differences between Ankara and Riyadh. This deal will give Turkey both more leverage against the Saudis and more ability to stick its nose into matters in the Gulf, creating more complications and potential sources of friction in the region in the future. Multiply this by every foreign base, alliance, and rivalry in the Middle East, and you begin to see the scale of the problem. Sometimes, as we seem set to learn the hard way, the alternative to unipolarity isn’t balance, but a multipolar rivalry that’s very hard to predict or control.

Investors Steer Clear of Thailand

Ever since a coup brought a new repressive regime to power in 2014, Thailand’s future has been clouded by political uncertainty. Now it looks like the economy is facing some tough headwinds too. Nikkei Asian Review:

Foreign investment in Thailand plunged 78% on the year for the January-November period of 2015, an unwelcome development for a government trying to charge the economy with corporate tax incentives.

The total amount listed in direct investment applications fell to 93.8 billion baht ($2.62 billion). And the number of applications tumbled 37% to 513.
Japan maintained its lead in the amount invested, but its figure sank 81% to 28.3 billion baht. Funds from China tumbled 21% to 13.3 billion baht.

Like all Asian economies, Thailand has been hit hard by the China deceleration, but the collapse of foreign investment points toward something more. Like China’s, Thailand’s export-oriented growth model isn’t delivering the results it used to, and the regulatory environment makes diversification difficult. In fact, the investment drop was exaggerated a bit because of a surge at end of 2014 as investors sought to beat a deadline on certain regulatory changes. Thailand doesn’t have the resources—intellectual, political, and economic—to transition from its older economic model to a newer one. If even China, which has many more of those resources, is having a tough time, we can expect Thailand to struggle far more and for far longer.

All of these foreign investment cuts have important geopolitical consequences as well. If Japan continues to reduce its investments, that leaves America and its allies with even less leverage in Bangkok. Which exacerbates a problem we’ve been covering here for the past year: largely because the U.S. State Department has decided to loudly chastise Thailand for human rights abuses, the U.S. has far less influence in the country than it used to—and has left a void that Beijing is trying to fill. An unstable China-dependant Thailand in which the United States has little say? That would be a very concerning development for America’s interests in Asia.

The China Bubble

As China’s stock markets sagged through the early days of 2016, there has been no shortage of follow-up stories in the MSM that try to paint the bigger picture—about how China’s slowdown is having knock-on effects around the world. Here at TAI, we have been following the commodity crash story for some time—and not just as a piece of economic news mostly interesting to financial market speculators. This is a political and a geopolitical story as well. Falling commodity prices matter to everything from the security of Putin’s power base to the ability of the oil-dependent Nigerian state to wage an effective war against Boko Haram; the fate of democracy in countries like Brazil and South Africa is complicated by the prospective fallout from the commodity crash; Venezuela may implode into chaos as a result of the oil crash, and fears for Venezuela’s future were a major consideration in Cuba’s decision to respond to the Obama Administration’s normalization overtures. In other words, significant shifts in world commodity prices can tilt the balance of power, undermine the stability of some governments, and boost the prospects of others.

But the story may be getting still bigger. We may be looking at something more serious than the unwinding of a commodity boom; we may be looking at the bursting of a bubble that could dwarf what happened in 2008. The China Bubble is bigger than the real estate bubble, and its liquidation could pose bigger risks for world politics than the subprime implosion.There’s a difference between China and the China Bubble. China is a middle-income developing country bumping up against the limits of a growth model built on massive exports of manufactured goods. There are lots of bubbles inside China, largely because both national and local governments have pursued a mix of stimulative policies even as the health of the underlying growth model deteriorated. Massive over-investment in real estate, infrastructure and manufacturing capacity, overvalued stock prices and poorly priced financial assets have created an increasingly toxic and dangerous economic situation inside China, and a rattled government is doing its best to keep the system from imploding. The government is hoping to achieve a ‘soft landing’ as China switches away from growth led by manufacturing for export to growth led by services and internal consumption. We shall see; China’s regulators and managers are skilled and have a lot of ammunition. But this is a difficult maneuver to execute and as Chinese society and the Chinese economy both become more complex, the task of running the country keeps getting harder.The China Bubble on the other hand is an international phenomenon. All over the world, the producers of commodities and manufactured goods have bought into the idea that Chinese demand is a perpetual growth machine. Producers of everything from cotton to copper to soybeans to silicon chips have assumed that double digit growth in China’s appetite for the components of its industrial machine will continue indefinitely—and they have invested to create the capacity to match this inexorably growing demand. From the jungles of Africa and the backwoods of Brazil to the rice paddies of Thailand and the Australian Outback there have been massive investments in mining, agriculture, energy production and infrastructure that assume continuing and even accelerating growth in Chinese demand.These investments, the excess capacity they represent and the stocks and bonds dependent on these investments (both inside and outside China) are what the China Bubble is about.The Chinese government may or may not succeed in stabilizing the economic situation there, at least for now, and Beijing may or may not succeed at avoiding the dreaded ‘middle income trap’ in which formerly rapidly growing developing economies hit a wall after reaching a certain level of per capita prosperity. And the inevitable deceleration of Chinese growth that comes with the transition to a less export-dependent economy may or may not result in a financial crash inside China. But whether or not China’s economic planners execute their new strategy effectively, the China Bubble is going to burst.That is to say, if China’s economic managers fail, the financial system implodes and China faces a wrenching transition and a hard landing, the massive global investments built to sustain China’s manufacturing growth will fail—dramatically, suddenly and expensively. But even if China’s economic managers succeed, and the country moves to a soft landing with growth still strong but increasingly based outside manufacturing and the export economy, the global investments predicated on China’s continuing hunger for the commodities and components it needs for a manufacturing export boom will also fail.We do not yet know whether China’s economy will fall into recession, or how exactly China will manage its mix of overbuilt manufacturing capacity, land speculation, empty apartments, local government debt and over-built infrastructure even as it attempts to move to a more market based economy. We do not and cannot know when all of China’s chickens will come home to roost—and how fast they will be running to get there.But we do know that the vast global network of mines, roads, agricultural development and financial speculation built on the assumption that the old Chinese economy would grow at eight percent forever is running on empty. The commodity price crash, a direct consequence of massive over investment in production facilities whose output cannot be sold at a price that justifies the original investment, is already here. The consequences of the crash on financial markets, tax revenues and trade flows are already being felt. From the South African rand (which plunged over the weekend by ten percent to unheard of levels) to the Brazilian real and the Australian dollar, the currencies most closely linked to the old China paradigm have already crashed.The earthquake has happened; we are now watching the tsunami surge around the world. From Germany’s high tech capital goods export sector to the copper pits of Zimbabwe, those who have invested on the basis of indefinite high growth of the old Post-Mao China economy are now waking up to the new post-post-Mao reality of sharply lower growth in demand for the key inputs of an export based manufacturing system.But we have not yet hit bottom. The new reality of a much slower growth in China’s demand for basic manufacturing inputs is still young and its impact is only now beginning to be felt. There is more to come, and the consequences have yet to manifest themselves fully. Over the next few weeks and months, the realization that the China Party has ended will spread through more industries and more markets.This is going to present a challenge for central bankers above all others; the consequences of the old bubble, in the form of ultra-low interest rates, are still with us as the world economy has looked in vain for a return to robust, unassisted growth since the 2008 crisis. The Fed had just started to raise interest rates when the latest bout of China-related instability knocked global financial markets for a loop and raised anxieties about 2016. Interesting times.

American LNG Exports Make Their Debut

This may be one of the biggest pieces of news we’ll see this week: U.S. liquified natural gas (LNG) exports are hours away from being officially off the ground as the first shipments of the chilled hydrocarbon from a Louisiana export terminal prepare to make their way to buyers abroad tomorrow.

Just a decade ago America was busy constructing multi-billion dollar facilities to import LNG, but fracking changed the game by unleashing a flood of shale gas. That had companies scrambling to secure the (massive) necessary investments to start construction on LNG export terminals to take advantage of a market that seemed to be hungering for American supplies, especially in Asia where LNG was selling for quite a premium.Last year wasn’t just a bad year for oil prices, though. Global LNG prices also dipped significantly and that Asian premium that many U.S. gas companies were banking on all but disappeared. But while the market might not be as favorable for U.S. exports as it once was, American LNG is still due to have a major impact. The FT reports:

The plunge in oil prices since the summer of 2014 has dragged down the value of LNG […]

Even so, US LNG exports are likely to have a significant impact, holding down energy costs for consumers in Europe, Latin America and Asia. They will also provide tough competition for anyone hoping to build rival LNG plants, such as the proposed projects in east Africa, the west of Canada, or Russia. By the end of the decade, the US is likely to be the world’s third-largest exporter of LNG, after Qatar and Australia.

Low prices mean that shareholders don’t have much to cheer about, but re-entry of the U.S. into energy export markets is a game-changing event. With the United States expected to become the world’s third largest LNG exporter by the end of the decade, the economics and the geopolitics of energy are clearly changing in ways that benefit the country. In just a few short years, the debate over American energy has shifted from one of scarcity to one of abundance, and for that, we have fracking to thank.

Germany Needs to Find a Golden Mean

The German political establishment still doesn’t get it. One week after the (belated) revelation of the mass sexual assault in Cologne on New Year’s Eve, Cologne Mayor Henriette Reker has given a singularly out-of-touch interview to Der Spiegel. In it, she advocates using “pictograms for refugees explaining public life in Germany about how to act in this society” to prevent sexual assault during the city’s famously lurid Fasching, or Carnival season, and defending her comments that women should keep men at “arm’s length” on the grounds that “nobody is offering any constructive suggestions.”

Angela Merkel, meanwhile, feeling the need to be seen to do something, announced a change in refugee policy that is, as she surely must know, largely window dressing: changing the rules to allow for swifter deportation of more refugees convicted of crimes. As Andrew Stuttaford points out, the European Convention on Human Rights will likely render this a dead letter. But the bigger problem is that the German public is concerned with much larger issues—mass immigration itself, and, secondarily to that, a clash of cultures—and will likely not be put off with such thin gruel for long.At the same time, German politicians and the establishment press seem to be unable to resist employing “on the one hand, on the other hand” balancing between the New Year’s Eve perpetrators and critics of German immigration policy. On Friday, we noted Ralf Jaeger’s comments that “What happens on the right-wing platforms and in chatrooms is at least as awful as the acts of those assaulting the women.” Such comments are being backed up by force of law: German police are investigating Facebook and Twitter comments, and prosecutors are bringing high-profile cases forward, involving prison time, for inappropriate speech. Meanwhile, in Cologne on Saturday, police used water cannons and pepper spray to disperse a protest by Pegida. Where, normal Germans might wonder, were those water cannons and pepper-spray-wielding officers on New Year’s Eve? And it will be worth tracking whether the number of convictions for speech responding to the Cologne NYE attacks outnumber convictions for the attacks themselves.Since the Second World War, Germany has worked admirably to expunge from its politics the warmongering, racism, and authoritarian streak that made the first half of the 20th century Not a Good Time to Be Alive in Europe. But the crises of the last few years have revealed a country that still hasn’t found a golden mean between awareness of the past and neurosis. In too many policy areas, from German defense policy to the euro crisis to, now, policing and refugee policy, German elites still fall short, “for historic reasons,” of the basic obligations of a mature democracy to protect its citizens at home, deal with threats abroad (such as the Syrian and Libyan wars), and protect its borders. Meanwhile, a populist backlash risks bringing back some of those dark tendencies that the elites are designing their policies to avoid.Now due to the scale of the refugee influx, it will have to do all of this under the gun. As Ross Douthat pointed out this weekend, family reunification laws mean that the number of newcomers could legally double or triple in short order, even if the refugee boats were stopped tomorrow. (And, as we’ve noted, they’re not stopping….) Driven by guilt and bound by refugee laws from another era, Germany’s leaders cannot seem to say no, even when the demographic weight of much of Africa and the Middle East—which obviously cannot all be accommodated in Deutschland—is pressing down on the country. Indeed, after Cologne, it’s starting to seem like Germany’s elites aren’t  even able to comprehend the scope of the crisis facing them, the measures needed to meet it, or even that there might be reasons to stop refugees that have nothing to do with racism.As Walter Russell Mead has written, a new generation of Germans is growing up that is far removed from the guilt of the Second World War or the divisions of the Cold War. (Some of their grandfathers were even too young to fight for Hitler). In time, this will likely do much to make German policy more balanced. But right now, due to the refugee crisis in particular, time is not on Germany’s side. The old heads need to figure out how to find a serviceable balance between guilt and practicality, and fast.

Was America Built By Slaves?


The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism

by Edward Baptist Basic Books, 2014, 528 pp., $35 Cotton and Race in the Making of America: The Human Costs of Economic Powerby Gene Dattel Ivan R. Dee, 2011, 432 pp., $18.95 Without Consent or Contract: The Rise and Fall of American Slavery by Robert Fogel W.W. Norton & Company, 1994, 544 pp., 18.95 (paperback)

Historians once thought that slavery had been a source of poverty. Back in the 1950s, when income levels in places like Alabama and Mississippi qualified them as second, if not third, world countries, most academics engaged in the question argued that by tying up large amounts of capital in an inefficient system, slavery had prevented the Southern economy from industrializing. Some, like U.B. Phillips and D.H. Potter, even went so far as to suggest that in 1860 slavery was about to collapse of its own weight, and the Civil War had been an unnecessary bloodbath.

Now the Old South is one of the fastest-growing parts of the country, and the old argument has shifted a full 180 degrees. After the 1989 publication of Robert Fogel’s Without Consent or Contract, historians take for granted slavery’s contribution to the prosperity of the white South and hence, statistically at least, to the country as a whole. They are now prone to ask to what extent the entire United States down to the present day owes its prosperity to 19th-century slavery. Was slavery some kind of platform upon which the modern American economy was built? That would be the politically correct question to study these days in the academy, especially if the answer can be made to come out “yes.”This is not surprising. In the present context, with the United States still struggling to build a multiracial society 150-odd years after the Emancipation Proclamation, the economic history of slavery is obviously a politically freighted issue. But it always has been to one extent or another, and American scholars and intellectuals have never ceased arguing over the question. For every Oscar Handlin who downplayed the evils of slavery, and even argued that slavery caused racism rather than the other way around, there has been a Nate Glazer who has stressed the singular evils of the American form of slavery compared to every other form known to history. Only someone unfamiliar with the literature can be surprised that, even aside from Ta-Nehisi Coates’s call for reparations payments, much of the current crop of books on the topic slides rather quickly from scholarship into advocacy.1 The three books reviewed here all were written in the main with scholarly intent, but in reading them one soon realizes how far we are from having any interpretation of the strictly economic impact of slavery that could be called settled doctrine.At a certain level there is little disagreement over the outline of events that led to the present question. In 1787, when the Constitutional Convention met in Philadelphia, there were about half-a-million slaves in what would soon become the United States. About a third of them were involved in growing rice and indigo, marginal enterprises at best that would soon all but disappear. Another 40 percent produced tobacco, which was a viable export commodity, but as the account books of George Washington testify, by the time the slave-holder paid to support those who worked as well as those who were either too young, too old, or too infirm to work, the cost advantage of slave labor relative to free labor wasn’t that great. It took a particular personality type—and not a very nice one—to get value out of slaves, but Washington wasn’t among them. Slavery had been a source of riches on the sugar plantations of the Caribbean Islands, but almost no part of the United States at the time could grow sugar. The real money awaited the arrival of cotton, which was still unforeseen as of 1787.That’s right: On the day the United States adopted its Constitution, the country grew no cotton.  Twenty years later, after the invention of the cotton gin, it still produced only a modest amount, but Sven Beckert’s “Empire of Cotton” was about to take form.2 Consumers not just in Britain and the United States but throughout the whole of Europe began replacing wool with cotton garments, and because it was now cheap to do so, they bought more clothing in general. Producers responded, the technology was easily transferable, and the number of mechanized spindles in operation increased almost daily. The limiting factor became raw material, and in the search for a source it soon became clear the American South was what today might be called the Saudi Arabia of raw cotton. The region possessed the perfect temperature and rainfall, and for the next several decades it supplied between 60 and 70 percent of the entire world’s raw cotton. Cotton farming rose in importance until, by 1850, the value of the cotton crop accounted for some 5 percent of the nation’s total, a position comparable to that of the automobile a century later.The spread of the cotton industry shaped much of the nation’s early history. Once the textile industry got rolling, in England and New England, only a short time passed before the industry needed more raw cotton than the coastal states could provide. Population moved toward new land, into areas that would become Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, and ultimately Texas. To make room, Native Americans had to be evicted. The steamboat, test-driven on the Hudson, found its real employment on the Mississippi River. Some 9,500 miles of railway had to be built to transport people and cotton. Once Andrew Jackson killed the Bank of the United States, wildcat banks sprang up to finance the enterprise, and state politicians dreamed up crazy schemes that would saddle them with debt upon which they would eventually default. And above all, there was the unending struggle over the spread of slavery. The South, anxious to fortify itself against the rising swell of abolition, pressed for slavery in every new territory, even those where cotton wouldn’t grow.As the population moved westward, it dragged 835,000 slaves behind it, most walking at least part of the way. By 1850, more than 3 million slaves worked in the American South, 60 percent of them in the cotton fields and the rest either in other crops or as craftsmen. Of every hour of useful work done in the Southern states, roughly 40 minutes was performed by a slave. Given the obvious importance of slave labor, it may come as something of a surprise to find that, as already noted, the early historians of slavery judged it to have been a burden on the South’s economy rather than its strength. Edward Baptist, in his new and widely successful The Half Has Never Been Told, has not been misled. His reading of events is right up front in his subtitle, “Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism.” Early on he asserts, “The idea that the commodification and suffering and forced labor of African Americans is what made America powerful and rich is not an idea people are necessarily happy to hear. Yet it is the truth.”This is a statement about the national economy by an historian rather than an economist, so one has to struggle a bit to find its precise meaning. It could mean that the incomes of some Americans, probably white, are greater today than they would have been had the slaves been free men and women. Individuals in both the South and the North accumulated fortunes through dealing in the slave economy. Some fraction of that wealth could have survived the Civil War and, thanks to compound interest, could today amount to a tidy sum.Tracing the origin and forward journey of that wealth could have made an interesting story, but it’s not the story Baptist wants to tell. He’s out for bigger game. His is a societal indictment according to which the entire capitalist development of 19th-century America was woven around slavery, benefitting the country’s GDP down to this day. Baptist pursues this theme not with an econometric model but with the tools of the historian, which he deploys with great vigor. His book is a prodigious work that stacks up a mountain of documentary evidence. The antebellum South comes alive beneath Baptist’s pen. Mostly it’s a tale of unending physical and mental torment, especially in the western regions, where planters bought slaves on credit and had either to succeed or face bankruptcy. The average plantation with 50 or more slaves was run by just one or two white men. Subduing males slaves wasn’t enough; they had to be emasculated, in Baptist’s reading. This is not the South of “Gone With The Wind.” Indeed, it’s not even the South of Eugene Genovese’s classic 1972 book Roll Jordan Roll. Genovese at least saw a little space within which the slave could maneuver and in many cases negotiate some elemental protections from the slave master. There’s little of that in Baptist. His players are one-dimensional characters who have one objective, money, and one means of obtaining it, physical force.There is also a certain confusion at the heart of Baptist’s argument. He doesn’t want to be bound to economic data, but for an historian is remarkably materialist. Literary flourishes aside, his argument reduces to this: Slave grown cotton yielded vast wealth, and wealth powered the nation’s growth. He’s certainly correct on the first point. The white South, and not a few individual Northerners, became wealthy on the backs of slaves, but if Baptist had taken the time to look, he’d have realized the numbers aren’t large enough to support his claim. Thanks to Fogel, we actually can calculate the amount of extra income enjoyed by Southern whites as a result of owning slaves. In the 1850s, the zenith of the cotton economy, it came to between 1 and 1.5 percent of the nation’s GDP, not a trivial sum. By this period, however, the United States was already the second-largest economy in the world and was investing every year between 13 and 15 percent of GDP in new capital. Even if the entire “slave surplus” were saved (which it wasn’t, because there were mansions to build and ball gowns to buy), it would have made a respectable contribution to growth, but it just wasn’t large enough to be the basis of an empire.There is also a more troubling point in Baptist’s argument. Individuals clearly benefitted from slavery, but not the nation as a whole. To believe as Baptist does one has to believe the Founders’ decision in Philadelphia to allow slavery was a boon and not a blunder—that they did the economy a favor by keep 10 percent of the resident population in chains. Baptist not only sells short the enslaved men and women, but he contradicts a fair body of research on the history of slave economies. The slave-run gold mines of Peru, Mexico, and the sugar islands also produced impressive fortunes in their day. Their legacy is modern Peru and Haiti. Edmund Phelps, in his recent book, Mass Flourishing argues that long-term growth requires continuous innovation; not just the big discoveries, but the steady flow of cost savings and improvements that come from an engaged workforce. Slaves, looking over their shoulder at the overseer’s whip, don’t get many innovative ideas. They were deprived of the benefits of freedom, and so the country lost the fruits of their genius. Jazz music is exactly the type of thing Phelps has in mind. African Americans always had it in their bones as they toiled in the fields, but it took freedom for it to flourish.Gene Dattel’s Cotton and Race in The Making of America makes an argument similar to The Half Has Never Been Told, but in a less evangelical tone. His enthusiasm for cotton as a source of riches is tempered by the industry’s experience in the 70 years after the Civil War. Fogel would disagree, but the postwar economy of the American South looks a great deal like the economy of every other commodity producer in history once its heyday had passed. The great wealth of the planters upon which Baptist rests his argument was largely wiped out by the stroke of Lincoln’s pen—abolition, as enacted in the United States, represented the greatest outright confiscation of property by a government in modern history. As insensitive as the statement sounds, remember that slavery was legal and that, in some fairly small number of cases, free blacks owned slaves as well.After a period of groping about, the planters and their former slaves settled into a system of sharecropping that was acceptably efficient at producing cotton, but cotton had already become a bad business. In 1900, the cotton crop was three times the crop of 1860, but its value had fallen from nearly 5 percent of GDP to 1.7 percent. Incomes were spiraling downward to the point that by 1950 Alabama had less than half the per capita income of New York. Former slaves who were now sharecroppers endured great poverty, as did their white neighbors. Cotton still proclaimed itself King, but the king nonetheless held out his hand for a government subsidy.Cotton and Race in The Making of America is largely a compilation of previously published works, but the particular strength Dattel brings to the story is his feel for cotton farming as a business. Planters knew that collectively they were into a seam of gold, but so long as they acted independently they were at the mercy of market prices. Production rose, land values increased, and slave prices remained elevated so long as the price of raw cotton was over 10 cents per pound. Planters went bankrupt when it sold for much less than 8 cents, as it did for much of the 1840s. The Southern Planters Association sought to form a sort of OPEC of cotton, which would have allowed it to extract more of the monopoly rent. Its efforts foundered, however, because planters were too numerous and too dispersed to permit centralized control over production, and they could never raise enough capital to establish a proper commodity-buying board.Where Baptist wants Northerners to feel guilty over being prosperous, Dattel wants them to feel guilty over being racist. One of his abiding themes is the conflict that arose within a North that was at once partly abolitionist and very largely racist. Northerners wanted to see blacks free but not in person. This stance, Dattel asserts without a great deal of support, is what kept African Americans trapped in sharecropping for so long after emancipation. Northern industry imported millions of immigrants from Europe but ignored proven workers to the south. His categorical example is New York Senator William Seward, who in an 1848 speech warned of “an irrepressible conflict between opposing forces, and it means the United States will sooner or later become an entirely slave-holding nation or an entirely free-labor nation.” At the same time he could say, “The North has nothing to do with the Negroes. I have no more concern for them than I have for the Hottentots. They are God’s poor—they always have been and always will be.” Seward knew his audience and was a man of his time. His mindset is what freed the Northern conscience to deal with the South and trade in slave-grown cotton.Robert Fogel’s Without Consent or Contract deserves inclusion here because, 25 years after its publication and three years after Fogel’s death, it remains the best single volume in print on the history of American slavery in all its dimensions—economic, political, and moral. It followed an earlier book, Time On The Cross, which Fogel had written with coauthor Stanley Engerman. This first book, which was similar in method to Without Consent or Contract, was severely criticized when it came out for its detached tone and lack of ostensible outrage over the institution it analyzed. Fogel, in his later book, goes to some length to remedy this deficiency without ever abandoning the high-minded perspective of a man who would soon win the Nobel Prize. Yet he doesn’t pull any punches. Why were slaves so much more productive than free workers? “… the feature that made planters prefer slave labor even when free labor was relatively abundant … is the enormous, almost unconstrained degree of force available to masters….. Centuries of tradition shielded European laborers from the force that was permitted against African and Afro-American slaves.” The heart of slavery was violence.The degree to which force was applied is almost palpable in Fogel’s calculations of output per hour worked. On small plantations, employing 15 or fewer slaves, there was no difference between slave labor and free. On large plantations, however, those employing 50 or more slaves, the slaves were 39 percent more productive per hour worked. The source of this extra output was the gang system of work that was used on large plantations but not on small ones. The gang system divided cotton cultivation into simple linear tasks each of which was assigned to a group of workers. No group could fulfill its daily quota unless the one ahead of it did so as well. One pushed the other, with the entire operation supervised by a single overseer with a bullwhip.Free white workers refused to work like this even when offered higher wages. Baptist wants to see the gang system as some kind of capitalist innovation, which in a sense it was. Economists, however, reserve the term innovation for inventions that conserve resources. The gang system didn’t reduce even by one calorie the energy required to cultivate and harvest a cotton crop. It merely allowed slave-owners to beat more work out of their chattel. At some point, even the slave-owners had to realize they were depreciating their own capital, and Fogel does point out that they did a fair amount of experimentation with the length of the work week. It settled in at about 58 hours per week, which meant slaves worked about 400 fewer hours per year than the average yeoman farmer on his own land.Without Consent or Contract, however, is not all numbers. Some of its more intriguing passages contain Fogel’s speculations on the morality of fighting a Civil War in which 600,000 men lost their lives, one for each six slaves. Fogel sees the war as a historical necessity. Slavery was certainly profitable in cotton cultivation and no less profitable than free labor in manufacturing. In his view, it was not about to disappear of its own weight. Left to itself, the South, while behind the North, would have been among the five largest economies of the world. Its presence, he maintains, would have encouraged European aristocrats and set back liberalizing trends throughout the West. It also would have had a monopoly on a raw material upon which the world was, at least for a time, vitally dependent. The inelasticity of that demand meant that an excise tax on cotton would have yielded a Confederate government enough revenue to pursue an adventurous foreign policy in Latin America, and to finance all kinds of mayhem toward the end of perpetuating slavery.One of the more attractive properties of Fogel’s work is the intellectual modesty with which he pursued his subject. Fogel was well aware that in writing on slavery he was playing with political dynamite, but he steadfastly refused to go beyond his material. The overall impression one takes away from his book is of a composite built up from the accretion of evidence on the subtopics within slavery, each of which is too narrow to carry much political weight. He may well have ended his work with a judgment of what contemporary America owes its dead slaves, but unlike too many other writers in the field, he didn’t start with one.

1Coates, “The Case for Reparations,” The Atlantic (June 2014).

2Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (Knopf 2014). See also Harold James, “Capitalism Da Capo,” The American Interest (May/June 2015).

Testing the “War of Ideas”

Part One: The Facile

I argued late last month that, after Paris, Bamako, and San Bernardino, a clutch of mainly well-intentioned observers were exaggerating the role of ideology in the Islamist threat, calling (again) for a “war of ideas,” as though the desultory post-9/11 era experience on this score had never happened. I noted, as have many others both recently and more than a dozen years ago, that any consequential “war of ideas” has to go on within Muslim-majority countries. And it is going on, with signs pointing to the eventual rejection and marginalization of salafi extremism, and the emergence of something still inchoate that is neither Islamist nor entirely traditional. Of course we could help the anti-salafis in the region more than we have been, and we could be wiser about our methods. We could also go about this foolishly and counterproductively, as we have in some cases in the past and as certain presidential contenders are urging us to repeat (and worse).Between the Western worldview and terror-prone Islamism, on the other hand, there is little intellectual or ideological conflict of significance that can be remedied by a “war of ideas.” There is a conflict, of course, and it is one between two universalisms: Western Enlightenment liberalism and Islamist supremacism. But this conflict is not the proximate source of our problem. There is rather a sociological problem in the region having mainly to do with the stresses of modernization on traditional and, in many cases, still largely tribally structured societies, and this agonizing civilizational churning happens to spatter blood beyond as well as within its borders.1 Regrettably, we in the West cannot master this problem, only manage it until those who truly own it work their way to some new and improved social equipoise.I know this argument will be unpopular in some circles, for the “war of ideas” mantra has become a kind of abstract rallying cry that supposedly complements the military/security instrumentalities Western governments must use to protect their citizens. Many people are uncomfortable or unsatisfied with an exclusively military-security response to salafi extremism and long to believe that something more philosophically elevated must be involved here. There is, no doubt, but I stand by my argument that the “war of ideas” notion, as commonly understood and promulgated, is not that something. Here I elaborate and complement that argument, in two parts.First, I want to be more specific about the non-centrality of ideological conflict between the West and Islamism. What we Western observers often identity as ideological is really theological; but then we would do that, wouldn’t we, since most Western observers do not take theology as a social force very seriously anymore. The two are not the same, and thanks to a good deal of natural blurring between the understanding of ideology and theology among Muslims—because they do not take the category of the secular very seriously—rationalist arguments on an ideological plain made directly by non-Muslims to Muslims will get us absolutely nowhere.Second, in part two, I visit the proverbial other side of the coin, for when our chatterati propose a “war of ideas” turning on the presumed centrality of jihadi ideology, they rarely leave off adjuring us here in the West to revivify and pump new energy into the liberal project that defines us both historically and prospectively. It follows that if we are warring on someone else’s ideas, we must have superior ideas in which we genuinely believe with which to win that war. Such adjuration makes for a terrific applause line, but it never comes with assembly instructions. There’s a reason for that.To argue that there is no ideological conflict of significance between Western liberalism and Islamism is not to say that Islamists have no explicit beliefs about their relations with non-Muslims, including those of the West, or that they do not draw political implications and inspiration from those beliefs. The leaders of Islamist organizations do both, and some mid-echelon followers do as well. But the rank-and-file of Islamist organizations, notably those disposed to participate in violence and terrorism, tend to be not particularly interested in the esoterica of Islamist political theology, are neither well-versed in it nor educated sufficiently to parse it, and are not mainly motivated by whatever intellectually suasive power it may have. They join for other reasons of a run-of the-mill social-psychological sort that I (and many others) have discussed before. The Arabs native to the region and those who are attracted to the caliphate from Europe, Russia, Turkey, and America do not display precisely the same social-psychological profile, and their ability to direct their intellects to salafi thinking differs as well. Still, the point stands: What we think of as a rational, intellectual process of becoming persuaded by an argument plays a minor role, if any, for most jihadi warriors and supporters.This matters, and here is why: What if there were an Osama bin Laden and an Ayman al-Zawahiri, and what if there is an Abu-Bakr al-Baghdadi and his close circle of premillenarian fanatics, but with hardly anyone willing to follow them? How much danger would these marginally charismatic hysterics pose? Not much, or at any rate far less danger than the distinctly non-existential threat they pose today. What motivates the cadres matters for practical reasons, and that motivation is usually idiosyncratic and highly emotional. It is not well described as intellectual or ideological.The cadres get a highly simplified narrative line from their elders—so simple, in fact, that a single sentence suffices to state it: The non-believers are conspiring against Islam, and it is your duty as a Muslim to uphold the superiority and ensure the victory of Islam. Put in slightly more elaborate form, as it might be pitched to a young would-be adept, it gathers up the ambient elements of the region’s deep-seated grievance culture and conspiracy-theory tendencies and says, in effect, “All the problems in our society, all the humiliations and lack of dignity and justice, are the fault of non-believers and their lackeys within our midst. If we vanquish them, we will restore the Muslim umma to its rightful place as global leaders in both faith and power. If you do not join the struggle, you dishonor your family and spite God and His Prophet.”Now, is this an ideology? It seems a bit sparse to qualify. As that term is commonly used in the West, an ideology at a minimum needs to specify: some ideal political economy; some ideal relationship between society, state, and authority; and some ideal relationship between a given society and the world outside it. There is nothing very special in these regards about current Islamist thinking. There are some innovations, yes: the very strict segregation of the sexes in public spaces; the insistence that non-Muslims cannot hold any public office; the re-merging of religious and temporal authority in the caliphate. But even these innovations do not differ much from the standard traditional Muslim understanding of these matters, and that traditional understanding is too well known to require extensive review here. Simply put, it divides the world into believers and non-believers, and proclaims the superiority of the former and the inevitable transformation of the world into a single Muslim community and state through various forms of struggle. It creates special conditions for the protection of precursors to Islam (Jews and Christians, mainly) and it bans compulsion in religion. But the precepts of Islamic supremacism and the inevitability of struggle until victory are otherwise not constrained.That said, over the centuries this traditional understanding has been authoritatively conditionalized in practical ways so as to enable Muslim polities to live normal lives, so to speak, both within and among other polities. That process began as early as the Umayyad Empire, developed appreciably in Abbasid times, and developed even more finely during some five centuries of Ottoman rule into a synthesis, or practical compromise, between a bare-bones traditional understanding and the practical adjustments required as time passed. Some of these adjustments became necessary because the unity of Islam deteriorated early on, and the original theory made no provision for either divisions among believers or the de facto separation of religion and temporal authority. Others became necessary because the power of Islam was insufficient to promulgate successful struggle at all times and places, and theories of truces with non-believers and the conditions of commercial exchange and diplomacy with non-Muslim entities had to be elaborated—and, of course, they were, in detail.It is these adjustments, those that have concerned internal order and those that have concerned relations with non-Muslims, that the al-Qaeda and Islamic State leaderships wish to jettison in order to “return” to the supposedly purer Islam of the Prophet’s time. The problem is, first, that the Prophet himself did not idealize his own time (quite the contrary), and second, that there is not nearly enough “there” there in the Quran and other early, Rushidun-era sources to construct a workable system of governance and foreign relations for contemporary times. It turns out that the accumulated accretions born of experience over the centuries remain necessary.That means that the leadership of the Islamic State, and of al-Qaeda before it and now in addition to it, already needs to authoritatively interpret scripture—in other words, it needs to do exactly what it wishes others had not done over all these centuries: adumbrate the pure and simple paradigm of Islamic thinking to cover practical necessity. The result has been a good deal of intellection and no shortage of disagreement.Now, what is the nature of this Islamist intellection or interpretation? The simple answer is that its nature is theological, not ideological. (That further begs the question of what the difference is between the two, and I will come to that in a moment.) That means, in the case of Islam, that (1) its source of authority is scripture, (2) the interpretation of scripture is bounded by certain rules concerning how it can be interpreted and by whom, and (3) that, in a law-based system like Islam, interpretations almost invariably result in specific instruction (fatwa) as to what behaviors are obligatory, permissible, and forbidden. The ideological elements here, by which I mean those pertaining to political matters, are a subset of the theological. In other words, they are lesser-included cases of law-based thinking whose center is elsewhere.Here, too, Islamists today do not differ from Muslims generally, except that their interpretations and derived law follow to an extreme what until about forty years ago was itself a minoritarian current within Islam. That current goes back to an exegete named Ibn Tamiyya, a 13th-century figure who came out of the Hanbali school of jurisprudence and who, looking forward, shaped the thinking of the 18th century Wahhabiya movement. Current Islamist thinking is even more extreme than its precursors, which is par for the premillennarian course, and it deviates from settled principle in a few cases beyond the three noted in passing above—like the protected status of Christian dhimmi. But even this is not unprecedented in Islamic history; the Fatimid caliph al-Hakim of the 11th century did the same, as did the Almohads of the 12th century.If you were to read in Arabic the interpretations and responsa of the early Hanbalis, of Ibn Tamiyya and his near-contemporary followers, of Ibn al-Wahhab, and of the current Diwan al-’Iftaa wa al-Buhuth (Fatwa Issuing and Research Department) of the Islamic State, you would see that the language, structure, and even the tone of them all are essentially unchanged over the past thousand years. The basic approach is easy to describe: a question is posed about what is obligatory, permitted, or forbidden with respect to a specific issue; a verse or maybe two in scripture is identified as the lodestone against which judgments must flow; scripture is then interpreted, usually on the basis of statements from other, post-Quranic authoritative literature as to the reasons scripture reads as it does, and, depending on which authorities are chosen, schools of thought are followed; and then the law-like dos and don’ts of behavior are laid out in conformity with the interpretations. The recent stuff is less erudite and subtle, maybe, and experts can point to some innovations here as well, but it is eminently recognizable as part of the genre.Now, if you happen to be an educated Orthodox Jew, you will notice a striking family resemblance here in the interpretive movement from Torah and Tanakh to Mishnah, to Gemorrah, to the responsa of the Gaonim (including a medieval near contemporary of Ibn Tamiyya—the Rambam), and then the gedolim down through the ages all the way to the present time. The parallel is not exact, but it is plenty close enough for, as we say, folk music and government work.If you happen to be a Christian, which involves one in an Abrahamic but not a law-based system, you would likely be unfamiliar with this sort of literature. You might be in luck, however: a shortcut is at hand. An Islamic State pamphlet about concubinage and how female war captives may and may not be treated, issued by the aforementioned Fatwa Research Department, dateline Raqqa, made its way out of the Caliphate thanks to a U.S. Special Forces raid at Abu Sayyaf this past year. There is an English translation, along with photocopies of the original Arabic pages, and reading through this translation can give you a hint, at least, of what Islamic State “ideology” looks, feels, tastes, and smells like.So what emerges from this observation? Three relevant conclusions stand forth: First, not just any semi-literate schmo can read and understand this stuff; second, interpretations will differ, and so different schools of understanding and law will emerge; and third, the extension of these differences into the political realm will create contending factions—and if those factions are free to arm themselves, they will, quite possibly, fight each other as they did in the distant past. Indeed, extremist Islamist sects are already doing so in the Levant today.Aside from disagreements among Islamist groups, it should go without saying that there are even wider differences and potential conflicts between those groups and the rest of the Sunni Muslim world. Most contemporary Muslim exegetes, who are heirs to a multi-centuries’ long jurisprudential tradition, do not agree with Islamic State researchers when it comes to concubinage and the treatment of female prisoners of war, just as very few rabbis today take literally the words of Deuteronomy, chapter 21—which is, just by the way, the original basis of the Islamic take on this subject.But more important for our purposes is the fact that Islamist “ideology” is not commensurate with any system of Western political values. Liberalism as the epitome of the Western way of thinking about politics is based on deeper philosophical currents, but it is not a mere lesser-included case. It has its own weight, its autonomy, its own discourse. The political world is a lesser-included case within Islamist (and Islamic) thinking. It is not autonomous but derivative. It does not have its own credentialed authorities and discourse, only the authorities and discourse of the clergy whose concerns far transcend politics.There are exceptions on the edge. Contemporary Islamists could turn to a few thinkers, not themselves clergymen, whose main interest has been sociology and politics rather than theology, and whose stage, as it were, is the world at large. There is Hasan al-Banna, from the 1920s, the erstwhile Egyptian founder of the Muslim Brotherhood. Sayyid Qutb is perhaps the best known such thinker of the 20th century, and his mid-century writing has no peer among Islamists for its clarity and passion. Several al-Qaeda leaders wrote Islamist tracts as well; Abu Anas al-Libi is perhaps the most noteworthy example. Osama bin Laden, who was himself no cleric and who was therefore disqualified from issuing any fatwa, made plenty of semi-substantive speeches, too, most of which exist in text form and many of which circulate on Islamist websites. But again, few rank-and-file Islamists today have ever read al-Banna or Qutb; most who come from outside of the region probably have never heard of them. As for al-Libi and bin Laden, one doubts whether Islamic State cadres, whether foreign or native to the Levant, fawn over their words either, or that most even know of them.So there is some Islamist ideology, in the sense of politically relevant innovations from tradition, but most of what drives Islamic State leaders is a rarified form of theology, or, if we prefer Mark Lilla’s term in The Stillborn God (2007), political theology. And here we come to the difference between theology and ideology.Theology is a recursive, non-falsifiable system of ideas about abstract matters. Ideology, on the other hand, as abstract as it can and often does get, is at length testable against the flow of historical reality. Take the trajectory of Communism as a case in point. Its arc of rise and fall traverses about a century, but fall it certainly did, because all of the avowed test cases of the ideology put into practice failed by their own lights. Insofar as there is such a thing as Islamist ideology, it seems to be more rapidly meeting the same fate, and for more or less the same reason.Yes, both theologies and ideologies are creedal systems and so share a certain logical syntax—something Eric Voegelin first insisted on many years ago. But an idea that was once shockingly controversial eventually became such a commonplace that many people now conflate the two in their entirely. They are, however, not the same. We Westerners tend to turn everything into the political and hence into ideology, while our universalist Islamist competitors tend to turn everything into the religious and hence into theology. In the Muslim world, let us remember, there has never arisen a stable secular space comparable to that of the West, so the conceptual preconditions for Islamists distinguishing ideology from theology barely exist. Ultimately, this is why our having a calm debate about ideological ideas with them is damned nigh impossible.The upshot of all this for practical policy purposes is that we cannot make war in the realm of ideas against Islamist ideology per se because there isn’t very much of it to fight. What there is of it is simple but implacable: Islam is superior to all other faiths, and it should by rights and God’s will be acknowledged as superior on earth. A basic implication follows: We get to dominate you, not the other way around.We cannot fight that belief with a countervailing idea and not also implicate mainstream Islam, which, of course, would just make the problem worse. And if we try to fight directly, as opposed to encouraging Muslims already mobilized for that struggle, we find that what is rational and ideological to us is heard as emotional and theological to them. In their eyes we turn from liberals into Christians, and talk about, say, democracy or gender equality willy-nilly translates into a most unwelcome invitation to apostasy. This is exactly the perverse dynamic that the Bush Administration’s “forward strategy for freedom” created, and this realization in turn helps to explain why the original, post-9/11 “war of ideas” never got very far as a government exercise (although other reasons intruded as well—like lawyers warning policymakers that the First Amendment supposedly prohibits government officials from dicking around in anything even remotely religious).Meanwhile, reform-minded Muslims who hope to dispel the precept of supremacism from Islamic thinking are hoping against hope. “A campaign to reject the dogma of Islamic supremacism would find many supporters among Muslims tired of the zealotry and self-righteousness of the Islamists,” claimed my friend Husain Haqqani in these pages not long ago. Maybe he’s right, and bless him for trying—but any attempt to displace this dogma has a very long row to hoe. You might as well ask a believing mainstream Christian to set aside the notion of the divinity of Jesus, or an Orthodox Jew to set aside the idea of “the chosen people.”In sum, there isn’t much Islamist ideology per se, and what there is cannot be displaced by argument. Whatever ideology there is constitutes, by our conceptual reckoning, a lesser-included case of a theological system whose intrinsic nature cannot be readily distinguished in method, logic, or tone from Islamic exegesis generally; and what motivates violence and terrorism in most members of extremist Islamist organizations has little to do with any of this in the first place.Now if, while that problem is being “worked” among Muslims, fanatical Islamists come looking to kill us in our own part of the world, the proper first response is not to argue with them over ideas but to kill them first. That in itself won’t solve the larger, longer-term problem of course, but it will have to do for the moment.

1Just to be clear, “tribal” is not a normative term but is descriptive of a kind of social structure that comes directly from cultural anthropology. Similarly, “traditional” and “tribally structured” are not synonyms. A culture can be traditional without being tribal, and the rapid urbanization that has occurred in the Middle East in the past two or three generations, and that has sharply attenuated the significance of tribal social structures in many cases, can cause societies to become more traditional, in the sense of neo-fundamentalist. I briefly discussed this concept here.

Why Can’t California Cut Prison Costs?

One big selling point for the criminal justice movement that has gained momentum in states across the country is that it would save money, freeing up resources for more productive endeavors like infrastructure and education. In California, however, it hasn’t worked that way. Reuters reports:

In 2012, under court order to reduce prison overcrowding, California announced an ambitious criminal justice reform plan that promised not only to meet the court mandate but also to improve criminal sentencing and “save billions of dollars.”

. . . But the promise of savings – a chief goal of prison reform nationwide – has not been realized. Instead, costs have risen.. . . The biggest driver of higher costs . . . has been personnel. The state budgets for about the same number of positions as it did five years ago, when the state system housed nearly 30,000 more inmates.

Why hasn’t such a dramatic reduction in the prison population led to a reduction in prison personnel? The answer is complicated, but from the story, part of the responsibility appears to lie with prison guards’ unions, which pushed the state to adopt a staffing model that would force the department to keep hiring.

This is another example, as if one was needed, of how public sector unions and their (bipartisan) political allies can work together in what is essentially a conspiracy against the public. It goes like this: Politicians pat themselves on the back for “reforming” the prison system, unions get even more job security and political power, and taxpayers—who were promised that prison reform would cut costs—end up facing a triple hit: higher taxes, reduced quality public services, and (potentially) higher crime.At Via Meadia, we think the American criminal justice system is both too expensive and often too punitive, and we are open to cautious efforts to reform it, even if they risk a modest increase in the crime rate, which is currently at historic lows. But prison reform without cost savings—or, as in this case, with cost increases—is not nearly as good a bargain. Many voters are likely to share this view. If California’s prison cutbacks fail to reduce costs, other states are less likely to follow. It’s in the interest of reformers, then, to pair sentencing reductions with real concessions from the prison guard unions.In states like California, winning such concessions will be difficult, given how entrenched the California Correctional Peace Officers Association is, in both parties. But the Supreme Court may be about to make the task much easier.

American B–52 Flies over South Korea

The United States flew a B-52 bomber over South Korea, in a gesture meant to underline Washington’s displeasure with Pyongyang’s detonation mid-last week of what North Korea claims was a hydrogen bomb. Reuters:

The massive B-52, based in Guam and capable of carrying nuclear weapons, could be seen in a low flight over Osan Air Base at around noon (0300 GMT). It was flanked by two fighter planes, a U.S. F-16 and a South Korean F-15, before returning to Guam, the U.S. military said in a statement.

Osan is south of Seoul and 77 km (48 miles) from the Demilitarised Zone that separates the two Koreas. The flight was “in response to recent provocative action by North Korea”, the U.S. military said.

Meanwhile, South Korean media reported that Washington was considering sending an aircraft carrier off the peninsula next month to participate in a training exercise with Seoul, and that the U.S. might also separately  F-22s, B-2s, and nuclear submarines to the region. “The United States and South Korea are continuously and closely having discussions on additional deployment of strategic assets,” a spokesman for the South Korean government said, declining to confirm or deny any details.

We’re encouraged by these reports of Washington-Seoul collaboration, and we hope that they will be accompanied, in addition, by strong U.S. diplomatic efforts to help South Korea and Japan strengthen their ties as a way to check China’s ambitions. To a significant extent, that’s already been happening; as we said last week, the nuclear test’s biggest loser is Beijing, which looks either malicious or incompetent in the wake of its client state’s decision.More of this kind of U.S. leadership, please.