On immigration and Big Government, I was wrong. Unfortunately.

The other day I suggested that conservatives who really want to beef up enforcement against illegal immigration would have to live with a bigger and more expensive federal bureaucracy. I've been proven wrong by this morning's New York Times story about private companies that basically do the work of immigration enforcement for countries around the world.

The really infuriating parts of the story will be familiar to anyone who has critiqued the privatizing of prisons in the United States: The illegal immigrants who are placed in the care of these private companies are often treated like cattle—with the problem being that ranchers generally want their herd to survive. The Times documents a number of cases where immigrants died or were badly injured while in the custody of the private companies. When that happens, companies are punished by ... losing contracts. The problem: Contracts are plentiful, and companies find it easy to replace the lost income. The profit motive works only to attract big companies to profit—not to ensure that they do the job correctly. We should ask ourselves about whether society benefits when the people carrying out the work of the taxpayers are more accountable to their shareholders.

Also disturbing, to me at least, is the way the story illustrates a bizarre disconnect. While workers are largely confined to their countries of origin—or face life-threatening detention—the companies that imprison them can span the globe. The Times: "G4S delivers cash to banks on most continents, runs airport security in 80 countries and has 1,500 employees in immigration enforcement in Britain, the Netherlands and the United States, where its services include escorting illegal border-crossers back to Mexico for the Department of Homeland Security." 

Not to sound all Marxist about it, but: There are no borders for Big Business. Only for people. That should trouble lovers of individual liberty—if not the corporate shills who masquerade as such.

Happiest in the dirt.

Taken at Fitler Square

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.

Rod Dreher on American exceptionalism

Rod Dreher » Is Obama ashamed of America?: "American exceptionalism is so deep within our national psyche, and has been since the beginning, that it will never be eliminated. James Kurth was correct to say that the realist tradition in American foreign policy “is not only rarely in America, it is un-American.” (N.B., Kurth, a conservative, is by no means saying that’s a good thing; read his brilliant essay/speech on the role a secularized Protestantism has played in shaping American foreign policy.) If we believe that we, as Americans, have been especially blessed, and have a special responsibility among the nations to be a light, then I agree. But that too often expresses itself not as humility — as holding ourselves to a higher standard, and striving to live by it — but rather as arrogance: believing that we are a kind of chosen people, and that that status gives us the right and even the obligation to impose ourselves on the rest of the world, and to think of ourselves as doing them a favor.
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Commentary's continuing lack of self-awareness

Max Boot hasn't done me the favor of sounding like Paul Krugman for a couple of days, but lucky for me his Commentary colleague Ted Bromund is stepping up to the plate:

The Economist reports two researchers from Columbia and Cornell have been studying the personalities of individuals who, in surveys, express a willingness to personally kill one human in the hope of saving more. Their conclusion is there is “a strong link between utilitarian answers to moral dilemmas . . . and personalities that were psychopathic.” TheEconomist’s conclusion, in its usual slightly tongue-in-cheek style, is utilitarianism is a “plausible framework” for producing legislation, and the best legislators are therefore psychopathic misanthropes.

 This would seem to be an indictment of governance generally—there's always a weighing of costs and benefits in decision-making, or there should be—but for Bromund it's an indictment of progressive governance. He writes: "But the problem with applying utilitarianism to legislation ... is someone has to decide which ends serve the greater good, just as the Ivy League experiments require someone to decide who lives and who dies, and just as top-down legislation in the progressive tradition requires wisdom that no single person possesses."

But to me, this psychopathic framework reminds me strongly of the decision to start a pre-emptive war. Like, say, accusing a country of possessing weapons of mass destruction and then invading or bombing that country to prevent the—entirely hypothetical—use of those weapons. In that case, a country's leaders are willing to see hundreds or thousands of people die so that many more people might be spared a horrible death. At least, I think that's the logic.

Is that psychopathic? By the standards advanced here, I'd say it is. And yet Bromund's colleagues at Commentary can reliably be counted on to cheerlead any proposed U.S. military intervention, anywhere, for nearly any reason. Our debacle in Iraq has suggested that Bromund is correct: Our leaders aren't really wise enough to balance decisions of life and death very well. Yet his magazine would almost always give our government carte blanche to make those decisions in the military arena. EPA regulations are pretty small potatoes compared to that.

John Hinderaker: Democrats would like to commit genocide

John Hinderaker at Power Line: "How many Democrats are National Socialists at heart? Quite a few, I suspect, and every now and then the Democrats’ totalitarian urges break through to the surface. Thus, we have the Governor of North Carolina, Bev Perdue, suggesting that we “ought to suspend, perhaps, elections for Congress for two years.” The press assures us that she was just kidding. I would modestly submit that suspending elections is not something an elected executive should kid about."

Sure. Because one Democratic governor said something unwise—granted—off-the-cuff, I think that merits painting the American left as a bunch of genocidal tyrants in waiting. We'll leave alone, for the moment, Hinderaker's revisionist take that Nazism was a left-wing phenomenon. (The brown shirts beating up Communists was apparently left-wing intramural sport. Right.) The truth is you can't summon up Nazism without summoning up 6 million slaughtered Jews. Ever. Hinderaker surely knows that. Which makes his casual Nazi analogy cynical and despicable. 

Before Solyndra before they were against it

Solyndra isn’t the best poster child for what’s wrong with President Obama - The Washington Post: "What McConnell neglected to mention is that Solyndra was cleared to participate in this loan-guarantee program by President George W. Bush’s administration. He also did not mention that the legislation creating the loan-guarantee program, approved by the Republican-controlled Congress in 2005, received yes votes from — wait for it — DeMint, Hatch and McConnell.

This doesn’t mean that Bush is to blame for Solyndra or that the Obama administration should be absolved. Obama, whose administration gave the company the loan guarantee, deserves the black eye that Republicans have given him over the half a billion dollars squandered on the company. But the Republican paternity of the program that birthed Solyndra suggests some skepticism is in order when many of those same Republicans use Solyndra as an example of all that is wrong with Obama’s governance."

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