Jonah Goldberg: Capitalism loves you, baby

Jonah Goldberg this morning delights in his own prescience in writing this 2008 column about how the children of capitalism are spoiled and ungrateful:

In large measure our wealth isn’t the product of capitalism, it is capitalism.

And yet we hate it. Leaving religion out of it, no idea has given more to humanity. The average working-class person today is richer, in real terms, than the average prince or potentate of 300 years ago. His food is better, his life longer, his health better, his menu of entertainments vastly more diverse, his toilette infinitely more civilized. And yet we constantly hear how cruel capitalism is while this collectivism or that is more loving because, unlike capitalism, collectivism is about the group, not the individual.

These complaints grow loudest at times like this: when the loom of capitalism momentarily stutters in spinning its gold. Suddenly, the people ask: What have you done for me lately? Politicians croon about how we need to give in to Causes Larger than Ourselves and peck about like hungry chickens for a New Way to replace dying capitalism.

Although I agree with Goldberg, generally, that market capitalism has generally been the best force for raising the living standards of the maximum number of people. But I think it's terribly weird that he would advance the idea—as he seems to here—that capitalism is an end unto itself. It's not: It's a means to an end; an imperfect means—and one can acknowledge that and still be a capitalist!—but likely the least-worst means.

Goldberg today places the column in the context of the Occupy Wall Street protests, and it's here that you start to see that he creates a bit of a straw man in dealing with critics of the free markets. While it's true that there are Marxists, socialists, and anarchists among the protesters, the movement has broad support beyond the fringe not because it opposes capitalism, but because it's asking an important question: Why has capitalism stopped working for us, the broad mass of Americans?

The answer the protesters have come up with is this: The wealthiest Americans and wealthiest American institutions have bent government to their will, so that while the rest of us are left to live with "austerity" and "creative destruction," the banks and banker bonuses are protected from their catastrophic mistakes with taxpayer dollars. The alternative? Letting them lay waste to the economy if they fail, making things even worse for the rest of us. As conservative commentators like Nicole Gelinas and Timothy Carney have noted, that's not free-market capitalism, properly understood—and, in fact, serves to undermine the discipline that markets usually impose when the possibility of failure is real. Corporatism is tearing at the foundations of capitalism, in other words.

It is not "spoiled" to point out when capitalism is coming unmoored from its foundations, or when it is failing to deliver the maximum good to the best number of people. (It's also not irrational to compare one's lot with one's contemporaries, instead of being grateful that conditions are better than they were 300 years ago.) The Occupy Wall Street folks are far from perfect, but they're giving voice to an important critique of the status quo that even serious advocates of the free market can agree upon.

Jonah Goldberg, and my good faith on the death penalty

TreeHugger social media editor Chris Tackett—a friend from my Lawrence days—managed to bring my post about Jonah Goldberg and the death penalty to the attention of Goldberg himself. Goldberg tweeted a response:

And he's almost right! If you can reform death penalty jurisprudence so poor and black defendants get a good shake, or to solve any of the other huge problems that exist, it would be much more difficult to oppose the death penalty on fairness and justice grounds. The problem is: I don't think such reforms are likely—I wonder, really, if they're possible. It would take, among other things, a decision by legislatures to spend a lot more money on defense lawyers for poor defendants in capital cases—an act that would be politically tough in good times, never mind when states are tightening their belts. Abolition seems the best way to go to me.

Then again—addressing Goldberg's good faith question*—let me make myself plain: I'd still oppose the death penalty on moral grounds even if it were pristinely administered. But it's not pristinely administered, and short of abolition I would take reform. Right now, we're getting neither.

*An entirely reasonable question from one standpoint: I insulted Goldberg on Twitter recently. It was (I hope) uncharacteristically unkind and ungenerous of me. I have apologized, but to the extent I'm on his radar at all, I wouldn't blame him for holding a grudge.

Jonah Goldberg is certain about the death penalty

Jonah Goldberg doesn't think that the potential execution of innocent people is any reason to halt the death penalty, because, well, stuff happens:

If anything, I’m even more opposed to police accidentally shooting bystanders or shop clerks mistaken for robbers. Well we know that happens. And yet, I’m still in favor of cops carrying guns. I’m against — absolutely against — all sorts of accidental deaths that are the direct result of government messing something up. I’m against Air Traffic Controller errors that lead to deaths, but I’m still in favor of flying and air traffic controllers. It is a scandal, given how much we spend on the death penalty and all the endless appeals, for any mistake to go as far as it has. But why is it that the death penalty is the only government function that must be abolished after a single error?

The examples Goldberg cites are situations where split-second judgments are called for—and sometimes go awry. But the death penalty, of course, takes years and even decades to carry out. We've made a considered judgement to do it badly.

If you're poor and accused of capital murder, you're screwed. If you're black and accused of capital murder, you're screwed. If your lawyer falls asleep during the trial, you're screwed. And if evidence later emerges that you might well be innocent, well ... you may well be screwed.

This isn't a split-second judgment. This is a system riddled with structural problems guaranteed to produce unjust and unfair outcomes. It's a system that lawmakers have tried, over the years, to stack the deck in favor of those unjust and unfair outcomes.

Put it this way: If this was the EPA rulemaking process we were talking about here, Goldberg would be screaming bloody murder. Or, to borrow Goldberg's analogy: If police training seemed designed to produce the shootings of innocent bystanders on a regular basis, and if Congress had acted to make it easier to shoot innocent bystanders efficiently, we'd be alarmed. We'd be talking about changing that system, certainly.

It's not a single error that's the problem—though that error, if ever conclusively proven, will likely become a focal point of the death penalty debate. It's that the whole system is rickety. We shouldn't trust it with our lives.

The ACLU and Jonah Goldberg's Assassination Straw Man

Jonah Goldberg's debating partner.

Toward the end of an otherwise-modest column on the government's plan to assassinate an American citizen affiliated with Al Qaeda, Jonah Goldberg stacks the deck:

Some civil libertarians seem to think we can never, ever kill an American citizen without a trial by jury (and perhaps not even then). That would have been silly during the days of conventional warfare. Now it's plain crazy.

Perhaps "some" civil libertarians believe that, but it's not the position of the ACLU, which has brought the lawsuit challenging the government's plan. In its complaint (PDF) asking for an injunction, the organization acknowledges there are times when due process will be skipped:

Outside of armed conflict, both the Constitution and international law
prohibit targeted killing except as a last resort to protect against concrete, specific, and
imminent threats of death or serious physical injury. The summary use of force is lawful
in these narrow circumstances only because the imminence of the threat makes judicial
process infeasible.

In other words, you can kill your enemy on the battlefield, when he's also trying to kill you. Not even the ACLU is against that.

That's not what the government is doing. It is reserving to itself the right to kill an American citizen who -- for all we know -- might be sitting peacefully in a kitchen somewhere in Yemen, presumably able to be captured if he's spotted. And that's where, at the very least, the government wanders into gray area. The ACLU, noting that the "right to life" is fundamental for U.S. citizens under the Constitution, wants that area to be a little less gray.

The government’s refusal to disclose the standard by which it determines
to target U.S. citizens for death independently violates the Constitution: U.S. citizens
have a right to know what conduct may subject them to execution at the hands of their
own government. Due process requires, at a minimum, that citizens be put on notice of
what may cause them to be put to death by the state.

The weird thing is, that's not so different from Goldberg's own conclusion. "So, let's have Congress and the president come up with some clear, public rules," he writes. "Better to start the debate over an easy case than a hard one." Sure. So why knock people who share your position? Can there never be a cease-fire in the war against liberals?