Soviet kids say the darnedest things, art historian Igor Golomstock discovered when he led field trips through Moscow’s Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts in the late 1950s. The schoolchildren indicated that they couldn’t distinguish between the propaganda paintings of Nazi Germany on display and the works of Socialist Realism that had flourished (if that is the right word) under Stalin’s decree.

In a freer society, such occasions might have inspired a lesson about the forms and functions of government propaganda or a lively debate about the merits of enacting the separation of art and state. Until Golomstock emigrated or his country liberalized, however, public discussions of topics like these would need to wait.

But a question continued to nag Golomstock: Why the remarkably similar aesthetic expressed in the propaganda images of the Nazis and in those of the Soviets, despite the regimes’ ideological hostility toward each other?

Finally, in 1990, he published his answer in Totalitarian Art: In the Soviet Union, the Third Reich, Fascist Italy, and the People’s Republic of China. The book has just been re-issued and updated to include material on propaganda in Kim Jong Il’s North Korea and in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.

Writing in the May/June issue of Foreign Affairs, Kanan Makiya, professor of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies at Brandeis University, has kind words for the new edition:

By cataloging and reproducing hundreds of images, some never before published, of paintings, posters, and sculptures and juxtaposing Soviet, German, Italian, and Chinese works to one another, Golomstock has fleshed out that original intuition [viz., his inkling that Nazi and Soviet propaganda share more than superficial similarities]. His exploration of these works, and his unearthing of the multitude of stories surrounding their origin, production, and fate, is invaluable. Totalitarian Art is an indispensable work of reference on the art produced under four regimes that, between them, are responsible for the deaths of tens of millions of people.

Makiya’s review essay (“What Is Totalitarian Art?”) goes beyond a mere evaluation of Golomstock’s book. An authority on art under Saddam Hussein, Makiya also offers his own insights about government propaganda and well-reasoned disagreements with some of Golomstock’s analysis. Highly recommended.

“Fight of the Century: Keynes vs. Hayek Round Two” is the superb and very timely sequel to the phenomenally successful and insightful, rap video pitting the views of macroeconomist John Maynard Keynes against those of Austrian School economist Friedrich A. Hayek, “Fear the Boom and Bust.” The original has attracted to date more than two million viewings on YouTube, and Round Two now addresses the bailouts and “stimulus” measures by the federal government concerning the current “Great Recession.” No doubt this new video deserves to generate an even greater viewership. As the video is described:

According to the National Bureau of Economic Research, the Great Recession ended almost two years ago, in the summer of 2009. Yet we’re all uneasy. Job growth has been disappointing. The recovery seems fragile. Where should we head from here? Is that question even meaningful? Can the government steer the economy or have past attempts helped create the mess we’re still in?

In “Fight of the Century”, Keynes and Hayek weigh in on these central questions. Do we need more government spending or less? What’s the evidence that government spending promotes prosperity in troubled times? Can war or natural disasters paradoxically be good for an economy in a slump? Should more spending come from the top down or from the bottom up? What are the ultimate sources of prosperity?

Keynes and Hayek never agreed on the answers to these questions and they still don’t. Let’s listen to the greats. See Keynes and Hayek throwing down in “Fight of the Century”!

HT: Donald Boudreaux

The newest round of WikiLeaks revelations unearths troubling facts about the U.S. prison facility at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Operating for more than nine years now, the prison camp was originally said to be holding “the worst of the worst”—terrorists of the same moral plane and dangerousness as those who committed the attacks of 9/11. The vast majority of the 775 who have been housed there have since been released. 172 remain.

One revelation from the leaks confirms the suspicion long held by many that very few of these people were in fact “the worst of the worst.” The Telegraph reports:

Only about 220 of the people detained are assessed by the Americans to be dangerous international terrorists. A further 380 people are lower-level foot-soldiers, either members of the Taliban or extremists who travelled to Afghanistan whose presence at the military facility is questionable.

At least a further 150 people are innocent Afghans or Pakistanis, including farmers, chefs and drivers who were rounded up or even sold to US forces and transferred across the world. In the top-secret documents, senior US commanders conclude that in dozens of cases there is “no reason recorded for transfer”.

Such totally innocent people include Naqibullah, a fourteen-year-old captured and likely gang raped by warlords, and held at Guantánamo without anything approaching a good reason for a full year. Another revelation confirms the understanding long held by civil libertarians that the standards of evidence at Guantánamo were beyond shoddy. McClatchy reports:

The allegations and observations of just eight detainees were used to help build cases against some 255 men at Guantanamo—roughly a third of all who passed through the prison. Yet the testimony of some of the eight was later questioned by Guantanamo analysts themselves, and the others were subjected to interrogation tactics that defense attorneys say amounted to torture and compromised the veracity of their information.

Said Mohammed Alam Shah, a 24-year-old Afghan who had lost a leg as a teenager, told interrogators at the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, that he had been conscripted by the Taliban as a driver before being detained in 2001. He had been caught, he said, as he tried to “rescue his younger brother from the Taliban.”

Military analysts believed him. Mr. Shah, who had been outfitted with a prosthetic leg by prison doctors, was “cooperative” and “has not expressed thoughts of violence or made threats toward the U.S. or its allies,” according to a sympathetic 2003 assessment. Its conclusion: “Detainee does not pose a future threat to the U.S. or U.S. interests.

So in 2004 Mr. Shah was sent back to Afghanistan—where he promptly revealed himself to be Abdullah Mehsud, a Pakistan-born militant, and began plotting mayhem. He recorded jihadist videos, organized a Taliban force to fight American troops, planned an attack on Pakistan’s interior minister that killed 31 people, oversaw the kidnapping of two Chinese engineers, and finally detonated a suicide bomb in 2007 as the Pakistani Army closed in. His martyrdom was hailed in an audio message by none other than Osama bin Laden.

Then there is the question of prisoner abuse. Whereas many Americans have outrageously argued that detainees at Guantánamo have been coddled, the horrific treatment of prisoners has long been difficult to dispute. Reports of the standard protocol of discipline at Guantánamo—the “Extreme Reaction Force”—whereby detainees are savagely beaten for the lightest of transgressions, should have alone put to rest any reasonable doubts that the prison camp conducts what would easily qualify as torture. Now a new study bolsters the claims by inmates that they were tortured and the abuse was ignored by Guantánamo doctors.

Of course, we are told that the “enhanced interrogation techniques” were necessary for “intelligence.” Yet for years our leaders have told us U.S. foreign policy has acted on the assumption that Osama bin Laden fled Afghanistan into Pakistan. The leaked Guantánamo files indicate that he in fact escaped northeast deep into Afghanistan. At this point, he could probably be anywhere.

What’s the reaction of the Obama administration, which had promised in January 2009 to close the prison camp down by January 2010? The administration, in channeling the rhetoric of its predecessor, has essentially warned that transparency and disclosure are helping the terrorists.

The Economist takes the prize:

The most curious thing about Mr Krugman’s quasi-religious squeamishness about the “commercial transaction” is that it is normally the economist’s lot to explain to the superstitious public the humanitarian benefits of bringing human life ever more within the cash nexus. Yet Mr Krugman has chosen to reinforce rather than fight taboos against trade as if he were a benighted, harrumphing scold, or a sociologist.

I like to poke fun at sociologists, but would never stoop so low as to link them to Paul Krugman.

Big numbers can be hard to visualize.  What’s the difference between a million and a trillion?  They both sound like big numbers, but a trillion is 1,000,000 times bigger than a million.

The terrible earthquake and tsunami in Japan last month helps visualize some big numbers.  Surely you’ve seen image after image of the terrible destruction the Japanese have suffered.  Recent estimates place the damage suffered in Japan as high as $309 billion.  Those images give some indication of how massive destruction of that magnitude is.

Meanwhile, the 2011 federal budget deficit in the United States is about $1.5 trillion, or about five times as large as the damages from those natural disasters in Japan.  The Japanese have some major work ahead to pay for the damages those natural disasters inflicted on them.  Meanwhile, future taxpayers in the United States will be looking at paying for about five times that much due to the federal government’s borrowing this year alone.

The US economy is about 2.8 times as large as the Japanese economy, so one might argue those numbers are not directly comparable.  If the US economy were the size of Japan’s economy, the budget deficit would be only $536 billion, or 1.7 times as large as the damage done by those natural disasters in Japan.

Japan will have to pay to rebuild, but the cost imposed on future US taxpayers from just one year’s budget deficit is still substantially larger than the rebuilding cost in Japan.  That should help us to visualize the cost the federal government is imposing on the nation through fiscal irresponsibility.

From a financial standpoint, many of the losses suffered in Japan were covered by insurance, while the entire cost of the US budget deficit will be borne by future taxpayers.  But the point of the comparison is to try to make those big budget deficit numbers more understandable.  Every year, the US government is inflicting a cost on future taxpayers greater than a huge natural disaster.

The way those deficits are looking right now, some observers have said that if we don’t get the budget under control, we’re going to be like Greece.  Let’s think about that a bit further.  Greece got a bailout from the EU, mostly thanks to Germany, but in return gave up some fiscal autonomy.  Greece is now more under the control of other countries, and less of an independent nation.  When we run into the same problems, Germany won’t be able to bail us out.  Who will?  China?

Am I thinking too far ahead to imagine what kinds of concessions we will be making to China to rescue us from our fiscal irresponsibility?

First posted last Easter, here again are my contemplations on the meaning of Easter:

This week is the most holy for Christians, as we commemorate Jesus’ trials, scourging, crucifixion, and triumph three days later over the Roman Empire’s most fearsome weapon: death.

Christians and non-Christians alike can take many worthy lessons from these events. As occupying forces, the Romans were terrified of violent insurgents, especially during the Passover season when Jerusalem was full to overflowing. Key Jewish authorities operating as Roman collaborators, meanwhile, were eager to frame a charge against the devoutly Jewish Jesus, before his revolutionary teaching inflamed the people so much that they caused a riot. So they brought him before the local Roman ruler, Pontius Pilate, on false charges. Determining there was no real case against him, but wishing to keep the peace at all costs, Pilot eventually acceded to the crowd’s insistence and convicted Jesus on hearsay.

So then Pilate took Jesus and scourged him.

According to the Cambridge Bible Commentary on the New English Bible:

Scourging was the Roman method of examining an alien or a slave—not a punishment, but a means of finding out the truth or extracting a confession.

In other words, torture as an enhanced interrogation technique. Christians might then well question support of a government purporting to represent us that utilizes the very methodologies of those who killed our Savior. And all of us ought to question the use of a method proven for thousands of years now to be neither efficacious nor a winning strategy.

At his crucifixion, Jesus reinforced perhaps the most important lesson of His teachings, when he famously said:

Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.

For the full impact of this statement, we need to fast-forward to Stephen, the first Christian martyr following Jesus’ ascension.

Stephen had delivered a blistering speech in his own trial—also on trumped-up charges—attacking the Jewish leadership that had sold out to the Romans. Angered, they stoned him. Just before he died, Stephen cried out:

Lord, do not hold this sin against them.

As the famed New Testament scholar and Chair in New Testament and Early Christianity at the University of St. Andrews, N.T. “Tom” Wright notes, in Acts for Everyone: Part One, this was incredibly remarkable:

There had been many ‘martyrs’ during the last few centuries of Jewish history before the time of Jesus. . . . One after another (the most striking account is in 2 Maccabees 7) they not only bear witness to their own faith, particularly in the resurrection they believe they will enjoy on the last day; they also threaten their torturer with dire punishments to come. ‘Do not think,’ says one, ‘that God has forsaken our people. Keep on, and see how his mighty power will torture you and your descendants!’ That is utterly typical of many Jewish stories of people being tortured and killed for their belief and way of life.

And the extraordinary thing is that, even though the earliest Christians were all first-century Jews to whom that kind of response would have been normal and expected, none of them, going to their death, say anything like that at all. Stephen had just laid a pretty ferocious charge against the Jewish leaders in his speech. But when it comes to his own death, he shouts out a prayer at the top of his voice, as rocks are flying at him and his body is being smashed and crushed, asking God not to hold this sin against them. . . . It is the up-ending of a great and noble tradition. If we knew nothing about Christianity except the fact that its martyrs called down blessings and forgiveness, rather than cursing and judgement, on their torturers and executioners, we would have a central, though no doubt puzzling, insight into the whole business.

There is of course only one explanation. They really had learned something from Jesus, who made loving one’s enemies a central, non-negotiable part of his teaching (not, as so often in would-be ‘Christian’ society, something one might think about from time to time but not try very hard to put into practice).

So there we have it: a direct order to love our enemies. And there are many remarkable modern examples of Christians doing so: Desmond Tutu’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission following the fall of Apartheid; the ministry of survivors of Cambodia’s Killing Fields to the very Khmer Rouge soldiers who tortured them and killed their families; and more.

As the beneficiaries of the greatest blessings in the history of mankind, are we not most especially charged with following this “non-negotiable” order?

In the 2009 “Nation’s Report Card” of students’ achievement, by state, produced by the U.S. Department of Education Institute of Education Sciences, Californian students ranked 49th in reading—ahead only of Hawaii and the District of Columbia—and above only Mississippi in science.

One would think that those kind of statistics would focus all attention on reversing the tragedy of processing students through schools that leave them incapable of dealing with the world they will inherit.

One would be wrong.

Instead, last week, the California State Senate passed a bill specifying:

Gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transgender people would be added to the lengthy list of social and ethnic groups that public schools must include in social studies lessons….

This new legislation clearly helps fill the gaping holes in earlier mandates:

California law already requires schools to cover the contributions to the state and nation of women, African Americans, Mexican Americans, entrepreneurs, Asian Americans, European Americans, American Indians and labor.

Sorry, guys, but a child who cannot read, and knows little math and science, is not going to get a lot out of such “social studies,” and is certainly never going to make history.

Does anyone really still believe that politicians will ever produce an education system that serves our children?

Let’s just eliminate the taxes and debt that go to government education altogether, and release those resources to be available for producing education far more effectively and creatively. Teachers and/or parents could privatize their schools (see our Can Teachers Own their Own Schools?), and the market and private associations could and would otherwise create myriad alternatives (such as these examples of how the world’s poorest people are educating themselves)—just as phone companies freed from the Ma Bell monopoly have put a cell phone with functionality unimaginable 20 years ago into the hands of every 13 year old in the country.

As Adam Smith knew, freed from a public school monopoly, people “would soon find better teachers for themselves than any the state could find for them.”

I’m pausing from completing a faculty survey to offer a couple of quick thoughts on the following directive. I’m to register the degree to which I agree with the statement “Private funding sources often prevent researchers from being completely objective in the conduct of their work.” My options are “Agree Strongly, Agree Somewhat, Disagree Somewhat, and Disagree Strongly.” Three points:

1. My answer was “disagree strongly.” I’m pretty sure that money matters less in scholarship than it does in politics. Here’s Will Wilkinson discussing Tyler Cowen and Kevin Drum on the “money and politics” link. Obligatory disclosure: I supervise student programs funded by a grant from the Koch Foundation, and some of my professional travels have been paid for in part or in whole by the Koch Foundation and/or organizations they support. As I’ve written before, if I were looking to sell out, I would follow Arnold Kling’s advice and work for the government.
2. Speaking of which, there wasn’t a question about whether public funding corrupts scholarship.
3. The key word in the statement is “often.” My rule of thumb is that something happens “often” if it happens more than half the time. The percentage of privately-funded research projects that have been corrupt have is certainly not zero, but it’s almost certainly far less than 50%. I will be interested in seeing what fraction of my colleagues and compatriots answer this with some form of agreement based on the fact that it has happened before. Just because it is possible and just because it has happened before does not mean that it is probable.

My sense is that “economic impact studies” funded by industry lobbying groups aren’t worth the paper on which they are printed or the server space on which they are stored, and no doubt, some of these are corrupt. When compared to the body of scholarship that is funded by private money, however, I’m pretty sure corruption is relatively rare. As I wrote a few months ago, I think there’s a great project for an interested student somewhere.

Virtually all long-haul trucking companies use GPS-based tracking systems to record the locations and activities of their drivers. Guess what? These firms support a proposed federal rule requiring independent owner-operators to install the expensive (up to $2,000) devices in their trucks. The rationale? Public safety, of course.

Surprisingly, the NPR story gets it right:

And some big companies are now actively promoting electronic logging, with five major companies coming together to form a group called the Alliance for Driver Safety and Security. It’s lobbying Congress to pass a law requiring electronic logging, to make sure the proposed DOT rule goes through.

“These companies wanted some action, and wanted it now, and wanted to push for legislation,” says Bill Vickery, spokesman for the alliance. “The best way to get action in Washington is to push for legislation.”

“We don’t want to be defined by the worst in our industry,” says Don Osterberg, senior vice president of safety for Schneider National, one of the companies in that alliance. “We just think we need to elevate the expectations and the performance of all motor carriers.”

But Spencer, from the independent owner-operator drivers’ group, dismisses that argument. “When they talk about leveling the playing field, what they are really saying is we need to get behind efforts that will increase costs of our competitors,” Spencer says. “We don’t find that to be an especially noble effort.”

At least in part. In the run-up to the Iraq war, many protesters brandished signs declaring, “No War for Oil!” The response from those pushing for the war was typically that this was a childish and silly admonition. And of course, the precise economic reasoning involved in much of this dissent was indeed faulty: Often leftists assume that the U.S. wages war for the strength of the overall economy, which in fact suffers in war, as opposed to narrow interests, which indeed prosper in war.

Yet it turns out all those young people shouting in the streets were probably more correct than those respectable voices in the mainstream press pushing for war. In the case of the UK, anyway, newly exposed memos demonstrate that oil was one of the major motivations behind the government’s support of the invasion, reports The Independent. In particular:

Over 1,000 documents were obtained under Freedom of Information over five years by the oil campaigner Greg Muttitt. They reveal that at least five meetings were held between civil servants, ministers and BP and Shell in late 2002.

The 20-year contracts signed in the wake of the invasion were the largest in the history of the oil industry. They covered half of Iraq’s reserves – 60 billion barrels of oil, bought up by companies such as BP and CNPC (China National Petroleum Company), whose joint consortium alone stands to make £403m ($658m) profit per year from the Rumaila field in southern Iraq.

As with practically all other modern wars, the motivation given is rarely the same as the main motives of those behind the scenes. Economic interests in particular have long weighed heavily on the West’s foreign adventures, and certainly the United States is no exception. If not for the desire of favored businesses to capture markets, harm competitors, seize resources, and other such economic goals that are often so much easier accomplished when the costs are socialized rather borne internally, it is difficult to imagine the last century of war transpiring nearly the way that it did. There were other motivations behind the Iraq war — some of them simply misguided, but many of them nefarious — and yet the thirst to control oil appears to have been a clear leading factor behind the support for the Iraq war coming from Britain, America’s greatest ally in this conflict.