On gay marriage: Civil liberties are not a zero-sum game

I respect Rod Dreher's work on most things, even though I disagree with much of it, because he's thoughtful and eloquent and tries to think outside his own biases. Except when it comes to matters of sexuality: Then turns a bit shrill. So it is today, when he posts the story of a U.K. "housing manager" who received a demotion for criticizing gay marriage—on his own time. Says Dreher: "Move along, nothing to see here. It didn’t really happen, and if it did, this man, History’s Greatest Monster, must have deserved it for his thoughtcrime."

This is part of the argument made by Dreher—and anti-marriage conservatives more generally—that allowing gay marriage will necessarily entail a restriction on the rights of Christians to hate gay marriage. There's just one problem with the evidence they marshal in support of the argument: It's almost always from Europe, and Europe has a very different tradition with regards to civil liberties than the United States.

For example: I’m from Kansas, home to the notorious Fred Phelps family—the folks who display a kind of homophobia far beyond what’s on display in Dreher's example. And a number of family members have been employed over the years as state or county civil servants—despite the fact that the family is held in very low esteem by the community at large. The state doesn't have the right to boot them for privately held opinions—even those that are publicly expressed—that don't interfere with the performance of their duties. What's more, we're the same country where the ACLU defends the rights of racists to march in public.

This isn't to say Dreher's nightmare scenario can't happen here: We must always be vigilant in defense of our rights. But it's much, much, much less likely to happen—and it's unlikeliness makes Dreher's concerns seem desperate instead of considered. The great thing about the First Amendment is that it protects people with wildly differing—even diametrically opposed—outlooks on life. In the United States, at least, civil liberties aren't a zero-sum game. In my ideal future, homophobic old housing managers will be able to keep their opinions and their jobs in the same society in which gays, lesbians, and transgender people are free to exercise their rights to marry each other. The day can't come too soon.

Mitt Romney, public health, and illegal immigrants

Kevin Drum takes stock of the "controversy" surrounding RomneyCare and the fact that illegal immigrants can get some medical care on the tab of Massachusetts taxpayers:

Somebody in a rival campaign presumably thinks this is a useful campaign issue because the slavering masses of the tea party base won't be appeased until illegal immigrants are literally writhing in the streets while doctors walk by and pointedly ignore them. Allowing them access to even last-ditch health services is unacceptable, even if the pointy-heads insist that we're saving money in the long run because it keeps them out of emergency rooms.

At the risk of sounding collectivist, one of the reasons we have public health efforts is because health is so often collective. That illegal immigrant writhing in the street—and this imagery might be unfortunate—might have a communicable disease, and refusing to offer care to that person might end up communicating that disease to you. Giving them a free dose of penicillin might stop the infection in its tracks ... unless, of course, we decide that the immigrant shouldn't get that dose because, goshdarnit, America!

We provide public health services to the public—including illegal immigrants—not just out of some misguided bleeding-heart do-gooderism, but because it also protects the rest of us from epidemic and death. Think of it this way, immigration hawks: It's like building an electrified border fence around your physical well-being.

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.

Bag O' Books: 'Moonlight Mile' by Dennis Lehane

Three thoughts about the novel 'Moonlight Mile' by Dennis Lehane:

• This is Lehane's most recent novel, but the first I've ever read. I'm not so ignorant of culture, though, that I don't know that his books have been adapted into acclaimed movies like "Mystic River" and "Gone Baby Gone," or that Lehane himself was a writer on "The Wire." Since I haven't read those earlier works, all I can say is that I can see how Lehane ended up so loved by Hollywood. His writing is cinematic—lean, funnier than I expected, full of violence. Plenty of internal monologues by the narrator—longtime Lehane hero Patrick Kinzie—that, in your head, you can easily hear as voiceover narration by Robert Downey Jr. It's easy, breezy fun.

• That said, this novel got me thinking about the distinction between genre fiction and literary fiction. "Moonlight Mile" seems a fairly straightforward pulp noir novel to me, yet Lehane seems to have crossed into the seemingly higher-brow literary fiction arena. (The distinction is artificial, but I wonder the same thing about music sometimes. Why is some music considered "pop" and ready for the Top 40 audience and other music, of great listenability, directed more to indie audiences? Sometimes it's quantifiable and sometimes it's not.) As best I can tell, Lehane gets the the more-coveted "literary fiction" label, at least to some extent, because lots of smart people like reading his stuff. Maybe genre distinctions are more about the audience and reader self-identification than about what a writer actually produces.

• Final thought: Lehane lards this novel with so many contemporary references— the band Pela, the TV show "Arrested Development," jokes about P. Diddy—that it's impossible to place this novel in any year besides, roughly, 2010. On one hand, Kinzie's constant name-checking helps us figure out who he is: He's not just a Chandleresque tough guy—he's an aging Gen X hipster with great taste in popular culture. But at times it almost seems to overwhelm the crime story (which has ... plausibility problems) and turn it into an episode of "Community." "Moonlight Mile" is a fun read, but it's also—despite the violence—light as a feather.

Drop out of school, become a billionaire

Michael Ellsberg argues in the New York Times that we should emphasize entrepreneurship over education:

I TYPED these words on a computer designed by Apple, co-founded by the college dropout Steve Jobs. The program I used to write it was created by Microsoft, started by the college dropouts Bill Gates and Paul Allen.

And as soon as it is published, I will share it with my friends via Twitter, co-founded by the college dropouts Jack Dorsey and Evan Williams and Biz Stone, and Facebook — invented, among others, by the college dropouts Mark Zuckerberg and Dustin Moskovitz, and nurtured by the degreeless Sean Parker.

American academia is good at producing writers, literary critics and historians. It is also good at producing professionals with degrees. But we don’t have a shortage of lawyers and professors. America has a shortage of job creators. And the people who create jobs aren’t traditional professionals, but start-up entrepreneurs.

College isn't for everybody, sure, but this line of attack rings false to me. The men—all men—mentioned here didn't have traditional educations, to be sure, but their knowledge base was heavily augmented in non-traditional ways not necessarily available to most Americans. Steve Jobs continued auditing classes at Reed College after he dropped out, and he learned the fundamentals of electronics in his father's workshop. Bill Gates went to an "exclusive prep school" in high school, and obtained free computer time at a time when computers weren't ubiquitous. Same for Paul Allen. Stone went to one of the most academically challenging high schools in Massachusetts, while Zuckerberg went to Philips Exeter Academy on his way to Harvard.

Point being: All these men received educations that gave them a pretty good knowledge foundation for their future work. All of these men were born to comfortably middle class families, often with parents personally deepening their child's knowledge base. And because of those middle class families, each of the men had a comfortable safety net to fall back into if their entrepreneurship failed. It's easier to start a business if you understand the world a bit, and if the failure of that startup won't ruin you for life.

Ellsberg is right to argue for alternatives to the higher education machine. And as a proud liberal arts grad, I'll even agree that maybe we could use a few less liberal arts degree holders. But his "college dropout" meme ignores that nearly all the men he names arrived at college having already had extraordinary educations. Would we know of any of them without those educations? Education is the foundation of entrepreneurship, not a substitution.

The problem of humanitarian interventions

Something I've been wrestling with since I posted my opposition to the Uganda intervention is whether I could ever support an American military intervention on purely humanitarian grounds. I came of political age around the time of the Rwandan genocide, and I can say that it truly troubled my conscience at the time—and angered me greatly that the West stood by and watched while an entire region descended into hell. If my framework for supporting a military intervention wouldn't allow the United States to get involved, then two possibilities exist: The United States should never intervene on humanitarian grounds, or the framework doesn't work.

Spencer Ackerman today gets at the trouble inherent with humanitarian interventions conducted under a doctrine known as "Responsibility To Protect" on his blog today:

The uncomfortable truth is that a belief in human rights is a disruptive force in global affairs. It scrambles ideological boundaries and takes people down intellectual roads they did not anticipate travelling. It's why the Responsibility To Protect is a force for -- let's strip it of euphemism -- war. Not because, say, Ken Roth or Samantha Power are warmongers; that's absurd. But because the world, and America, has yet to come to terms with the obligations that human rights place on nations, particularly hegemonic ones.

To support the R2P seems like a recipe for endless war; to oppose it, a recipe for endless injustice and impunity. The responsible work of intellectuals and policymakers is to bridle it, to make it commensurate with American capabilities and American interests; to shape a world in which America is not the only nation burdened with enforcing it; and not to avoid the circumstances in which it conflicts with American capabilities and American interests.

Which is to say, once again, that there's no perfect framework for deciding to support or oppose an American military intervention. My framework is very much biased against military adventures of most sorts, which makes it also biased against humanitarian interventions. My problem: I still think the United States and the world should've done something a generation ago in Rwanda. Picking and choosing which holocausts to send troops to halt is tricky business. But it's also necessary.* The difference between Rwanda and Uganda may be mostly that the Rwandan genocide burned hotter, faster, and with much greater immediate loss of life. Is that enough of a distinction? It feels like it to me, but your mileage may vary.

* Necessary, presuming the United States retains its ability to project power virtually anywhere in the world. That's not a given, and if America retreats closer to home, then a lot of this calculation makes no difference. You can't go where you can't go.

The 'regulatory uncertainty' canard

Ben and I discuss whether regulatory uncertainty is holding back the U.S. economy in this week's column. My take:

Let's be honest: "Regulatory uncertainty" is a euphemism for "regulations." Businesses -- and their mostly Republican allies -- don't want them.

We have regulations for a reason. The Dodd-Frank law passed because the financial industry proved it couldn't police itself and nearly destroyed the American economy. Richard Nixon created OSHA at a time when 14,000 employees were dying in the workplace every year; that number dropped 60 percent over the next 30 years. Left to their own devices, businesses often cut corners, resulting in financial and even physical harm to the rest of us.

Overregulation can stifle the economy. The Obama administration recognizes this -- and in August announced a reform effort to reduce regulatory burdens on business by $10 billion a year, mostly by streamlining required health, labor and tax paperwork. Obama even alienated environmentalist supporters this fall by delaying new EPA ozone standards to save jobs.

The problem isn't regulatory uncertainty. The Economic Policy Institute in September reported that weekly hours for still-employed workers are still down from their last high in August 2007.

If businesses wanted to produce more widgets --but wanted to avoid the federal paperwork that goes with hiring more widget-making workers -- they'd increase the number of hours their existing employees are working. They aren't. That suggests that the problem is demand: Americans aren't buying stuff.

Why? They're digging themselves out of debt -- often in the form of mortgages that are now worth more than the houses those mortgages bought. Until that issue is adequately addressed, or until those mortgages are finally paid off over the next 30 years, America will continue to have a problem with demand.

"Regulatory uncertainty" offers a handy political club to use against Obama, though. The GOP, it seems, would rather win the presidential campaign with stale untruths rather than address our real problems.