In his latest column for the New York Times, “Our Lefty Military,” the iconic “liberal” commentator Nicholas D. Kristof has now come clean on the reality of his own collectivist views that military means and organization embody the “liberal ethos” (“progressivism”), an admission that liberals rarely face up to. While numerous liberal and conservative pundits have long mistakenly supported military Keynesianism (see here and here) as necessary for national defense and economic prosperity, Kristof has now taken this view far further to claim that the military provides the all-inclusive socialist model for all of society.

Interestingly enough, the recognition that militarism is socialism is consistent with that found in the Independent Institute’s new edition of the classic book by the renowned historian Arthur Ekirch, Jr., The Civilian and the Military. But in direct contrast to Kristof, Ekirch opposes militarism, showing why such command-and-control government is exactly contrary to liberty, prosperity, human decency, peace, and the rule of law. As a result, we can only be grateful to Kristof for drawing this very clear line in the sand for others between the good of liberty and the evil of tyranny, with him supporting the latter.

According to Kristof:

The business sector is dazzlingly productive, but it also periodically blows up our financial system. Yet if we seek another model, one that emphasizes universal health care and educational opportunity, one that seeks to curb income inequality, we don’t have to turn to Sweden. Rather, look to the United States military.

You see, when our armed forces are not firing missiles, they live by an astonishingly liberal ethos — and it works. The military helped lead the way in racial desegregation, and even today it does more to provide equal opportunity to working-class families — especially to blacks — than just about any social program. It has been an escalator of social mobility in American society because it invests in soldiers and gives them skills and opportunities.

Really? Independent Institute Senior Fellow Robert Higgs has documented in his book Depression, War, and Cold War and other works that it is government intervention into financial markets that “periodically blows up our financial system.” And, such interventions include the exact Federal Reserve and New Deal-type policies that Kristof and other “liberals” support.

And as Research Fellow Jonathan Bean reveals in his Institute book, Race and Liberty in America, desegregation not only began in the private sector decades before federal courts and laws intervened, but it was government regulations (e.g., Jim Crow laws, labor regulations, etc.), including that mandated by the military, that institutionalized racism on a huge scale and made desegregation so difficult.

Kristof approvingly quotes General Wesley Clark, who ran for the 2004 Democratic Party nomination for president, on the nature of military organization:

It’s the purest application of socialism there is . . . It’s a really fair system, and a lot of thought has been put into it, and people respond to it really well.

Clark commanded Operation Allied Force in the unconstitutional Kosovo War during his term as the Supreme Allied Commander Europe of NATO from 1997 to 2000. In his retirement, Clark became an early and avid supporter of the war in Afghanistan and while initially a critic of the war in Iraq, he went on to support expanded U.S. military forces there because he believed the U.S. invasion and occupation was “undermanned.” As a “progressive” Clark has further indicated that he likes the Democratic Party because it stands for “internationalism”, “ordinary men and women”, and “fair play.” Hence, both Kristof and Clark believe that achieving the “liberal ethos” requires socialism, and militarism is the ideal form to do so.

Kristof goes on:

The military is innately hierarchical, yet it nurtures a camaraderie in part because the military looks after its employees. This is a rare enclave of single-payer universal health care, and it continues with a veterans’ health care system that has much lower costs than the American system as a whole.

Perhaps the most impressive achievement of the American military isn’t its aircraft carriers, stunning as they are. Rather, it’s the military day care system for working parents.

While one of America’s greatest failings is underinvestment in early childhood education (which seems to be one of the best ways to break cycles of poverty from replicating), the military manages to provide superb child care. The cost depends on family income and starts at $44 per week.

“I absolutely think it’s a model,” said Linda K. Smith, executive director of the National Association of Child Care Resource and Referral Agencies, which advocates for better child care in America. Ms. Smith, who used to oversee the military day care system before she retired from the Defense Department, said that the military sees child care as a strategic necessity to maintain military readiness and to retain highly trained officers.

The German-Prussian “Iron Chancellor” Otto E. L. von Bismarck could not have said it better in his establishing the German welfare state (Sozialstaat) in order to pursue imperial wars in the 1880s.

Call it socialism or whatever you like. It is the same to me.

In his article, Kristof unmasks his own deeply held admiration for the Total State, exalting the military in every respect not just as a “compassionate” and “egalitarian” welfare state, but as the socialist model to organize the entirety of American society:

So as the United States armed forces try to pull Iraqi and Afghan societies into the 21st century, maybe they could do the same for America’s.

Hoo-ah!

Or as the fascist Italian Prime Minister Benito Mussolini stated:

All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.
—Speech to Chamber of Deputies (9 December 1928)

Fascism conceives of the State as an absolute, in comparison with which all individuals or groups are relative, only to be conceived in their relation to the State.
—”The Doctrine of Fascism” (1932)

So let me get this straight. Obama is not in his actions in Libya violating the War Powers Resolution, passed in 1973, because Libya doesn’t count as a war? You can’t make this stuff up. It goes without saying that if Bush had done something so brazen, Obama and many of his other left-liberal critics would have likely — and correctly — called him out on it.

Arguably, even Bush did not do anything quite so bold regarding presidential warmaking. Now, under the Constitution, I believe that the Iraq war was also unconstitutional, for Congress never formally declared the war. But the federal legislature did, at least, empower Bush through a resolution to wage war on his own terms. This was a despicable forfeiture of constitutional authority, and many have compellingly argued that Gulf War II was no less unconstitutional, despite Congress’s passage of the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution of 2002. Yet Obama has been even more explicit in his rejection of procedural niceties than Bush, for, after having argued that the administration’s conduct of the Libya war was legal under the sixty-day grace period afforded to the president under the War Powers Resolution, the administration switched gears and argued that operations in Libya were not bound by the 1973 Act at all. The last president to demonstrate such temerity was Clinton, in regard to Kosovo. But this is perhaps even worse, as Clinton didn’t play the American people for quite the fools as Obama is doing.

A bipartisan group of Congressmembers have sued in federal court, asserting that Obama has overstepped his bounds in Libya. House Speaker Boehner has called on Obama to explain himself. Obama’s war in Libya is so outrageous and so devoid of justification that even the hawkish Republicans, who typically criticize Democrats for being too soft on foreign policy, are sounding like doves—at the last GOP presidential debate, not a single one of the candidates vying for the Republican nomination supported the Libya war.

Obama has now violated statutory as well as constitutional limits on his war power, all to bring about regime change in a country when he denied three months ago that this was the end goal of his intervention. But he would have us believe that this is not a war. It is just bombing and killing and using the military in support of a NATO operation to liberate a foreign country from a foreign dictator.

Americans were upset when Clinton tried to redefine the word “is,” but even his verbal gymnastics in the Lewinsky scandal had a tittle of plausibility to them compared to what we are hearing from the current administration. More important, they did not involve matters of life and death.

As Congress and the American people are finally waking up to Mr. Nobel Peace Prize’s illegal presidential war in Libya, a nation that never posed a threat to the United States—and as the Bush-Obama wars in Afghanistan and Iraq continue to fatigue the nation and, in many cases, bore a complacent media—we find ourselves witnessing yet another war that seems to have just crept up out of the blue. Obama has been bombing Yemen for some time now, but it appears that the belligerence will be kicked up a notch, that the relationship status of the U.S. toward that country will be upgraded from “hostile and it’s complicated” to “I think we’re in all out war now.” The New York Times reports:

Central Intelligence Agency is building a secret air base in the Middle East to serve as a launching pad for strikes in Yemen using armed drones, an American official said Tuesday.

The construction of the base is a sign that the Obama administration is planning an extended war in Yemen against an affiliate of Al Qaeda that has repeatedly tried to carry out terrorist plots against the United States

Some wonder how this happened all of a sudden. Well, much of it has to do with fulfilling Obama’s goal of assassinating U.S. citizen Anwar Awlaki —an aspiration he has taken on without anything resembling due process, judicial oversight, or congressional approval. Awlaki is allegedly associated with al-Qaeda (as are some of the key rebels the U.S. has sided with in Libya), but most conspicuously, the American government has charged that this cleric has delivered sermons harshly critical of U.S. foreign policy, sermons attended by some of the 9/11 terrorists and the Fort Hood killer. Did his words incite violence? Even if so, such speeches are only considered criminal under U.S. legal traditions in very, very narrow circumstances, at which point the U.S. government, to follow its own constitutional limits, would have to observe minimal Bill of Rights protections before doing anything to him, rather than just summarily executing him. According to the Yemeni government, 130 have been killed in U.S. drone attacks in the last month, some of them civilians—collateral damage in yet another illicit U.S. military/CIA operation.

But, many will respond, people in Yemen started it! Wasn’t Yemen implicated in the (foiled) shoebomber plot of Christmas 2009? In fact, history didn’t begin then, either. Eight days before that terror plot fizzled, the U.S. bombed Yemen, using cluster bombs (those weapons that are so evil when Gaddafi uses them but which the U.S. government has long embraced in its wars), killing dozens of civilians, including 21 children. At the time, this was falsely reported as a bombing conducted by Yemeni security forces, as the Yemeni and American governments agreed to deceive their populations about who was behind them. A month later Obama lied, saying he had no intention of sending U.S. troops there, when some were already there.

There is, despite all these details, a more important moral principle at play, one that is always ignored. While there may be monstrous people in Yemen plotting deeds of evil against innocent people, this cannot possibly justify the type of lawless and directionless war that has become so common in American diplomacy and certainly since 9/11. Have bad organizations in the world planned acts of immorality against innocent Americans to manipulate their government? Surely. But so too have U.S. officials planned acts of immorality against innocents abroad so as to manipulate foreign governments. The sanctions on the Iraqi people throughout the 1990s, which U.S. politicians deliberately engineered with the express purpose of killing many thousands of Iraqi civilians so as to undermine their state, serve as one stark example. It was partly in response to this deliberate killing of innocent Iraqis that al-Qaeda launched its terrorist attacks against Americans, particularly on 9/11. If Osama bin Laden was wrong to kill innocent Americans in response to the deaths of innocent Iraqis—and surely he was—the U.S. is no less wrong to commit acts that will predictably kill innocent foreigners by the dozens, hundreds, thousands or even hundreds of thousands. The evils of a government or terrorist group can never justify killing innocents who happen to inhabit the same country. The principal argument against all these American wars is moral: It is simply mass murder for the government to bomb children, for whatever purpose. The U.S. government is a terrorist state, and so long Americans ignore this reality, our freedom will be but a dream.

It’s always a treat to announce the publication of a new issue of our acclaimed quarterly journal, The Independent Review.

If nothing else, it gives me an excuse to write up essay-type questions based on the new issue’s contents—and thereby bring to mind (to my mind, at least) those recurring Saturday Night Live skits, “Coffee Talk with Linda Richman,” in which Mike Meyers’s character, when overcome with emotion (“I’m a little verklempt”), would say to her television audience something like, “The Holy Roman Empire was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire. Discuss.”

Here, now, are some probing, pedantic questions based on our Summer 2011 issue:

• In what ways do Mario Vargas Llosa’s greatest political novels reflect the author’s disenchantment with ideology and fanaticism, and his intellectual migration away from the political left? Read Julio H. Cole’s article (pdf). (Incidentally, Sr. Vargas Llosa will be an honoree at the Independent Institute’s 25th Anniversary Gala for Liberty on November 15, in San Francisco, Calif.)

• How does the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010 promote the shifting of risk from large “systemically important” financial firms to smaller, less-regulated ones? Read Roy C. Smith’s article (pdf).

• How can thinking about religious liberty in terms of property rights and rational economic behavior help protect private rights and public order while avoiding religious discrimination? Read the opening paragraphs of James A. Montanye’s article.

• What is the paradox of habeas corpus, and why is the “Great Writ of Liberty” badly in need of a justifying principle? Read Anthony Gregory’s article (pdf).

• How did Jane Addams’s views about her charitable works exemplify the Social Gospel movement’s attempt to synthesize Christianity and Progressivism? Read the opening paragraph of Brandon Harnish’s article.

• How can the study of foreign affairs be illuminated by the insight that the international balance of power is a type of spontaneous order? Read the opening paragraphs of Edwin van de Haar’s article.

• Where do Nouriel Roubini and Stephen Mihm go astray in their mostly sound and informative book, Crisis Economics? Read George Selgin’s review essay (pdf).

• How strong is the evidence for the claim that for centuries the inhabitants of upland Southeast Asia organized their lives and cultures in ways designed to avoid predation by the state? Read Thomas J. Thompson’s book review.

• What were the greatest successes and failures of U.S. conservatives who sought to restrain the federal leviathan? Read Anthony Gregory’s book review.

• In what way did the political culture of Dakota Territory in the 1880s reflect civic republicanism and religious diversity, rather than the social conflict proclaimed by the academic expositors of “new western history”? Read Gregory L. Schneider’s book review.

• How does cultural evolution—especially the natural selection of ideas—contribute to the division of labor, specialization, and comparative advantage and thereby foster prosperity? Read James A. Montanye’s book review.

• What’s wrong with the standard criticisms of the Supreme Court’s decision in Lochner v. New York (1905) and their attacks on the liberty of contract? Read William J. Watkins Jr.’s book review.

• Why have U.S. presidents led the American people into a host of wars that had nothing to do with protecting the nation from an existential threat? Read Robert Higgs’s “Etceteras…” article (pdf). (Dr. Higgs will also be honored at the Independent Institute’s 25th Anniversary Gala for Liberty on November 15, in San Francisco, Calif.)

Subscribe to The Independent Review. (New subscribers can sign up for 1 year and receive 2 additional issues for free!) And recommend it to your library. To receive summaries of future issues of The Independent Review by email, go here.

And as Linda Richman would say . . . discuss amongst yourselves.

Once in a great, great while, one or both houses of Congress do the right thing. Even more rarely is something good passed with strong bipartisan support. Majorities in both parties in the House of Representatives have voted to defund the illegal Libya war. It will be interesting to see what comes of this.

Florida’s new Governor Rick Scott promised to cut government and make Florida more business-friendly when he campaigned.  In addition to overseeing a reduction in state spending, which I wrote about here, he also dialed back the state’s land use planning by cutting state oversight, and abolishing the agency that was the overseer.  The bill to do this was signed last week.

Florida was a pioneer in state-wide land use planning when the state passed its Growth Management Act in 1985.  Only Oregon had that level of state-wide land use planning before Florida’s 1985 Act.  The Act required all local governments to draw up local comprehensive plans that met specific requirements.  Florida’s strict land use laws made it difficult for businesses to site new facilities in the state, sending some businesses interested in Florida locations to other states.

One of the key provisions in Florida’s Growth Management Act was its concurrency doctrine, which required various types of infrastructure — but mostly, roads — to be available concurrent with any new development.  If roads in the vicinity of a proposed development were already congested, either additional capacity had to be added, or the development would not be approved.  The concurrency requirement was a substantial impediment to further development in urban areas.

Florida’s Department of Community Affairs was the agency that oversaw the state’s growth management efforts.  It reviewed all local comprehensive plans to determine if they were in compliance with Florida law, and it rejected a lot of them.  Eventually, local governments learned how the Department of Community Affairs interpreted and enforced the Act, so essentially, the state was dictating all land use decisions, with local governments doing the work of drawing up the details.

Legislation pushed by Governor Scott and passed this legislative session (1) made concurrency optional for local governments, and (2) abolished the Department of Community Affairs.  Essentially, land use planning will now be done by local governments, and local governments will be free to use their discretion to determine how strict they want to be on developers.

This is still a good distance away from abolishing land use planning.  It’s now up to local governments, though, and not mandated by the state.  It will make Florida more business-friendly, at least in some jurisdictions.

Housing America, a book I co-edited with Ben Powell, takes a critical look at government intervention in land use.  Land use planning has been becoming increasingly prevalent over the past two decades.  But now, Florida has taken a step back from comprehensive land use planning.

Critics of the market, from Marx and Karl Polanyi to Alasdair MacIntyre, John Gray, Robert Putnam, and some contemporary sociologists, decry the anonymity of commercial relations. Strong, local, community ties, they complain, are being displaced by long-distance, ad hoc, impersonal, weak ties. “Increasingly,” writes anthropologist Stephen Gudeman, “we commoditize things, leisure, body parts, reproductive capacities, DNA, and social relationships. As people flock to cities, sell their hardwood trees, change clothing styles, and watch television, community . . . shrinks.” (Thanks to Virgil Storr for this and many other good references.)

One response is to invoke Mises’s idea that social cooperation under the division of labor is actually the foundation of community. “The fundamental facts that brought about cooperation, society, and civilization . . . are the facts that work performed under the division of labor is more productive than isolated work and that man’s reason is capable of recognizing this truth” (Human Action, p. 144). Writers like Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams argue, for example, that the growth of the market stymies racism and other forms of prejudice.

Last week’s Economist had an interesting piece on supermarkets that brought these arguments to light:

The nostalgics don’t even have their history right. A big research project at the universities of Surrey and Exeter is currently studying shopping in post-war England. For one thing, high streets were not as quaint as politicians think. As far back as 1939, chain stores and co-operative (ie, mutual) retail societies already controlled about half of the grocery market. It was middle class matrons, the sort who dressed up to go shopping, who missed the deference shown by traditional grocers. Supermarkets were often welcomed by younger and working-class women. A retired secretary interviewed by the project recalled, as a young bride, asking the butcher for a tiny amount of mince. “Oh, having a dinner party, madam?” he sneered. A woman who bought anything expensive or unusual risked disapproving gossip, spread by shop assistants. The project found press advertisements promoting the anonymity of supermarkets, as well as their convenience.

Some of you will remember a scene from Woody Allen’s Bananas, which also illustrates this point nicely.

[Cross-posted at Organizations and Markets]

In a recent article, the Wall Street Journal quotes Mark Zuckerberg, the kid from Harvard who heads the CEO of a company-not-yet-public. (Goldman-Sachs VIP insiders only, please). What disturbed me about the article is not that another company is breaking into the so-called China market after the Google row over censorship. I’m more disturbed by the mealy-mouth rationalization of Zuckerberg, who seems to have breathed in the multicultural fumes of higher education.

Zuckerberg stated:

“I don’t want Facebook to be an American company [God forbid!],” he said. “I don’t want it to be this company that just spreads American values all across the world. …For example, we have this [culturally constructed American] notion of free speech that we really love and support at Facebook, and that’s one of the main things that we’re trying to push with openness. But different countries have their different standards around that. …My view on this is that you want to be really culturally sensitive….”

This is the moral and cultural nihilism that bristles at “American values” and must be “culturally sensitive” and protect the “right not to be offended” lest you face a “hostile environment” charge—or worse. My students spew this because it starts K-12 and many of my colleagues are fond of the “free speech for me but not for thee” quote (Stanley Fish). And, of course, we must “understand The Other” (non-Americans). Or, as Zuckerberg put it: “understand the way that people actually think.”

Now, there is nothing wrong with “understanding the way the people actually think” but there is something wrong when you privilege these “other ways of thinking” at the expense of what you profess to “really love and support at Facebook” (that odd notion of openness and American values).

God help Mr. Zuckerberg, et al., as Iran goes ahead with its foolish autarkic plans to build a new operating system to impose the Islamic ethical code on all computer users in Iran. If or when Zuckerberg sells his out in Iran (and China), he will move one step closer to losing his soul and costing the lives of Others in foreign lands who had hoped that U.S. companies and Americans (of all types) might stand with them as they embrace dissident “American values” (as if they were peculiar to America).

“What good is it for a man to gain the whole world, yet forfeit his soul?”
—Mark 8:36

Sometimes I swear we are living in a dystopian novel whose author is courteous enough to provide us mere extras in his story with plenty of comedic relief to make the days tolerable. The USA Today headline reads: “Obama, Biden again target government waste.” Yes. That’s in fact what it says. The administration that has given us a $3.7 trillion budget is so concerned about wasting money, you see, that its Vice President is heading up a “Campaign to Cut Waste.” The White House brags of having trimmed $33 billion of waste in the last year. That amounts to less than 1% of the budget—a budget that is, in nominal dollar terms, approximately double what it was a decade ago. Back in 2001 I remember thinking about how small our government was, and how if only we doubled its size, and were careful to cut back about a percent of that sum that happens to be “waste,” we’d be in great shape. Oh wait a second. That’s not what I thought at all.

Yet all this talk of waste misses the point. Perhaps there are better uses of our tax dollars than “waste,” but I must say, I prefer so-called waste to most of what the government spends money on. Government is destructive. Most of what it does is harmful. Being an agency of violence and the threat of violence, the institution of government runs counter to economic progress as a general principle. Even worse, its coercive grip strangles the freedom out of people as a matter of course, and, far more often than Americans seem accustomed to recognizing, it kills people.

If only the regulatory state’s budget were a matter of “waste.” If the federal government did not spend billions to hire and empower regulators who each spend hours a day sending out edicts to business, telling employers who to hire and not to hire, commanding state governments and industry on the parameters of infrastructure and architecture, imposing rules on pharmaceutical companies concerning which drugs they can produce and sell, strong-arming commercial enterprises into the advertising guidelines chosen by politicians, telling banks what interest rates ought to be, instructing telecommunications businesses on the rules of speech and the distribution of information, threatening farmers and corporations with invasive environmental regulations, imposing speech codes on workplaces, dictating what furniture and employment standards companies can utilize, forcing national standards on food manufactures, controlling the business practices of bars and restaurants, deciding which immigrants were free to enter the county to work and which ones were not, setting tariff rates for international trade, determining which education policies passed federal muster, overriding the decisions of doctors, medical professionals and patients, imposing billions of hours of ridiculous paperwork onto the private sector, spying on our communications, diverting resources from economical purposes to counterproductive ones, threatening peaceful entrepreneurs with fines and imprisonment for their consensual business activities, and otherwise obstructing the economic growth made possible by the free market, we would be so much better off it should make any thinking person angry to contemplate it. Indeed, if the government simply took the same tax dollars it spends on regulation, used it to buy up as many products as that money could buy, and dumped all those products into the ocean, the economy would rebound almost instantly and we would likely witness the greatest genuine boom in American productivity in three generations, as the money being wasted would be so much healthier for growth than the money being spent as it is now—on destroying wealth on an atrocious scale through the crippling burden of regulations. The pharmaceutical regulations alone, once unenforced, would translate into thousands of lives saved, as the FDA notoriously kills Americans in large quantities by depriving them of life-saving drugs. This would be a great and moral end in itself, but it would also be a boon for the economy.

Or what if the warfare state money were simply wasted? Pentagon waste has got to be the best thing coming from that department. When Obama decided to stop spending so much on Cold War weaponry that would never be used and divert the funds to 21st century killing machines to deploy against insurgents in Pakistan and other such places, many cheered but I did not. For a weapon that gathers dust is the best kind the military buys. One could correctly argue that the thousands of nuclear weapons, by their mere existence, pose an existential threat to humanity and should be eliminated, but the point stands that so long as they have the potential to be used, better that they not be. Nevertheless, the U.S. military establishment, at nearly a trillion dollars a year when all is carefully accounted for, makes us less safe, hinders our freedom, and, most important, actively and energetically pesters, harasses, oppresses, tortures and murders foreigners in numerous countries. Millions have been slaughtered, directly and by stealth means, by the U.S. warfare state, only in the last couple decades. If Obama wants to cut down the budget by more than $33 billion a year, he should look first to this monstrosity, probably the greatest threat to world peace currently existing, and slash away. But short of that, he should convert the entire military machine to one of “waste” as opposed to engagement and activity. A trillion dollars spent yearly on waste, or to pay personnel to sit around and play blackjack all day, would be far better for American freedom, American wealth, and global affairs, than allowing the status quo of murderous war to continue.

Then there is the U.S. police state. If only its budget was wasted! Instead, billions are spent tracking down, trying, and locking people into cages. Many of these people—about half at the federal level—are nothing but offenders with no victim. Drug offenders, tax offenders, gun offenders and other violators of laws that don’t belong in a free society. If this money were spent on building huge modern art projects and launching them into the sun, society would prosper significantly relative to where it is thanks to how the money is actually spent. Surely, building prisons and not filling them with peaceful people is infinitely morally preferable to building prisons and housing harmless souls inside their cages. These cages, which have in many cases become torture chambers and rape rooms, are the great domestic atrocity of our time, so putting an end to them is a moral mandate in itself, even putting aside the billions that could be saved by ridding of them. And with each innocent man caged, we lose the chance of that person being out there in the private sector actually producing wealth, which we desperately need in this time of recession. And this doesn’t even account for how much federal criminal justice programs, by their very nature, foment social conflict, subsidize gang warfare through drug and gun prohibitions, and generally make us less safe, less free and less wealthy.

Then there is all the welfare—corporate and individual—which distorts the economy and poisons the social fabric. In the long term this, too, is more destructive than mere government waste, as the opportunity cost of businesses catering to politicians rather than customers is unspeakably immense, and the encouragement of people to rely on the federal government rather than on each other for support is a rot at the core of the culture’s character and the key method by which the empire and police state maintain the trust and love of the oppressed masses.

I do not want to understate the evil of government waste. A billion dollars stolen from taxpayers and sent down the drain is an injustice and a moral disgrace of national importance. But government is an organ of plunder, economic dislocation, mass imprisonment, social destruction, persecution and mass murder. Given that it steals our money—certainly a great evil in itself—we’re generally much better off the larger portion of its budget goes purely to waste.

Those hoping Obama would have been even slightly less belligerent than the last president must be truly disappointed now. I know I am.

First, we learn the Libya war, where airstrikes have again intensified, is costing more than previously estimated. Not really much of a surprise. But the earlier Pentagon projection of $40 million a month was off by at least $20 million. As the conflict rages, with the threat posed against civilians by the regime continuing without much apparent change, despite the bombings, it is hard to see where the endgame is supposed to be. Meanwhile, the rebels circumstantially on the side of the U.S. government and NATO are being implicated in their own attacks on civilians. No surprise there, either. When is the last time the U.S. allied with a foreign force that wasn’t brutal against innocent people? I’m not sure of the answer, if there is one. And now NATO is threatening these “freedom fighters” with violence should they not relent in their atrocities. Ah. A civil war where there are no good guys—how very unpredictable—except of course for the U.S. government, whose bombs only kill in the quest for peace and justice, and whose death count must be measures against the goal of making the world safe for democracy.

Then there is the covert war in Yemen, where the Obama administration has increased U.S. involvement considerably. A couple dozen in Pakistan were reportedly slaughtered in drone attacks just today. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates is meanwhile calling for a more permanent presence in Afghanistan than most Americans were likely bargaining for.

Well, this is the price for ridding the world of evil. Unless, of course, that evil is happening under the auspices of a U.S.-friendly regime—such as the state of Bahrain, which continues to be in the good graces of Washington despite its brutal crackdowns against dissidents and medical workers, its torture, its abuse of women and girls, and its destruction of dozens of Shiite mosques. Saddam Hussein was also brutal against the Shiites, we’ll recall, but he was different—by the time the U.S. waged war to topple his regime, he was no longer a friend of the U.S. government.