Emblematic of the state of this nation’s government-provided education, a public elementary school in New Jersey renamed for President Obama just last year, is now closing due to low academic achievement and declining enrollment.

In choosing to concentrate on form—renaming the school for the current President—over function—directing efforts into actually improving the education the school provided—the activist behind last year’s renaming explained:

The new name will send a subliminal message to the students. Every time they walk through the school doors, there’s going to be a certain amount of pride in where they go to school.

Similarly clichéd was the emphasis of the School Board discussions surrounding the closure—focusing not on the affected children, but on the union jobs:

It’s unfortunate the Board of Education couldn’t come together where jobs could be saved.

The failed Obama School’s 35% decline in enrollment over the past 10 years is being echoed across the nation, especially in urban areas, as, for example, in this report, “Top Students Fleeing Oakland Public Schools:”

One of every four Oakland students – including 40 percent of its highest achievers – fled the district’s public schools after finishing fifth grade in the spring, shunning the city’s middle schools in favor of private, suburban or charter schools.

The article goes on to say “Oakland officials are now looking at why families leave and how to stem the flight.” They might want to start with the California Department of Education’s statistics for their middle schools: with truancy rates averaging more than 90%, and an average of 46% of their enrollment suspended or expelled for Violence/Drugs, it’s no great mystery that those families who can “flee,” do.

Just as the President and his wife chose for their own daughters.

A review of James Ledbetter, Unwarranted Influence: Dwight D. Eisenhower and the Military-Industrial Complex. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2011.  268 pp.  $26.00.

On January 17, 1961, President Dwight D. Eisenhower gave his final presidential speech, which turned out to be his most memorable by virtue of this warning: “In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.” James Ledbetter makes this speech the fulcrum for his brief but carefully researched and smoothly written book on the military-industrial complex (MIC). He looks into Eisenhower’s past to discover how a five-star general arrived at this seemingly incongruous warning and traces how the idea of the MIC evolved after 1961 as it became grist for a variety of mills.

Ledbetter recognizes the MIC’s fuzzy meaning, but for purposes of his analysis he supposes that “we can approximately define MIC as a network of public and private forces that combine a profit motive with the planning and implementation of strategic policy” (p. 6). For virtually all scholars, it comprises the armed forces and the civilian military leadership, the relevant committees and leadership of Congress, and the private contractors who supply goods and services to the military. Many analysts also include lesser players, such as the leading universities, certain scientists and think tanks, veterans’ groups, certain labor unions, and local politicians whose jurisdictions include military bases or contractors’ facilities.

Although the MIC obviously has powerful and widespread supporters, it has always attracted critics, who indict it on several counts, including wasteful military spending, diversion of government spending from social programs, economic distortions, enlargement of military influence in American society, promotion of a culture of state secrecy, and suppression of individual liberties. Rather than extensively evaluating these criticisms, Ledbetter focuses on the changing idea of the MIC, assessing contemporary arguments about it in the light of criteria suggested in Eisenhower’s speech.

He finds antecedents in several notions advanced previously, including the merchants-of-death thesis, the war-economy thesis, the garrison-state thesis, and the technocratic-elite thesis. These theses retain some pertinence within the MIC thesis.

Ledbetter traces Eisenhower’s concern about military-economic relations back at least to 1930-31, when Ike participated in Army planning for industrial mobilization. Having studied industrial agreements, possible takeovers, and price controls, he was uneasy about such military involvement in the economy. Ledbetter concludes that the “importance of keeping a peacetime separation between business and the military would stay with him for the rest of his life” (p. 51). As president, Eisenhower continued to emphasize “the need for restrained military spending to preserve American economic liberty” (p. 61).

Soon after becoming president, Eisenhower gave his second-most-memorable speech, the “Chance for Peace” address, on April 16, 1953. Stalin had just died, and the president sought to move the United States toward a less menacing relationship with the USSR by proposing measures to promote greater cooperation and trust between the Cold War adversaries. He highlighted the great opportunity costs of ongoing large-scale military preparedness. “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed” (p. 68). Although the “Chance for Peace” initiative bore no fruit and the Cold War assumed even more menacing dimensions after 1953, Eisenhower’s concern about its costly distortion of the U.S. economy clearly prefigured the concerns he expressed in his farewell address almost eight years later.

Ledbetter’s attempts to tie down exactly who coined the term “military-industrial complex” proved unsuccessful. Eisenhower’s chief speechwriter, Malcomb Moos, has often been credited, but even though he seemed to have been happy to let people think he had come up with the term, he never bluntly claimed to have done so. Ledbetter’s examination of successive drafts of the speech revealed no unambiguous evidence of who introduced it.

In any event, the term resonated with diverse political groups in the 1960s, including New Leftists inspired by C. Wright Mills’s analysis of the power elite, critics of wasteful military spending, such as Senator William Proxmire, and various antiwar groups. Eventually, the idea of the MIC merged into references to the “warfare state” and the “national security state.”

Over the years, many congressional investigations and other studies have been undertaken of Pentagon contracting and other aspects of military-economic relations in the United States. Serious problems―cost overruns, late deliveries, official and corporate corruption, crony-capitalist bailouts, de facto industrial policy-making, and many others―have been documented again and again. Despite repeated attempts ostensibly to root out these misfeasances and malfeasances, nothing fundamental ever changes in the MIC’s operation. Even now, more than twenty years after the USSR imploded and the Cold War ended, the United States spends more than ever on the military and does so as wastefully and nonchalantly as it did before, with no serious repercussions. Despite a long-standing statutory requirement that the Defense Department be audited annually, it never has been, and cannot be, owing to the sorry state of its financial records.

Ledbetter astutely concludes that “it is difficult to see how the United States would be sufficiently motivated to eliminate the MIC, let alone replace it with something superior.  . . . [I]t is nearly impervious to democratic reform” (pp. 202-03). As he notes, the root problem is not so much the wretched performance of contractors and the self-interested actions of implicated parties in Congress and the military as it is the stupendously wide scope of U.S. geopolitical ambitions. As long as the U.S. government continues to perceive a “vital” interest in nearly every place and nearly every dispute in the wide world, any hope of realizing Eisenhower’s dream of cutting the  MIC down to size and moving toward genuine disarmament and peace is doomed to disappointment.

[Acknowledgment: This review will appear in the Journal of Cold War Studies, published by the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University.]

Americans need to snap out of it. As recently as Bill Clinton, there was at least some concern when the president of the United States began bombing a country without a congressional declaration of war or national debate. There was a lot of concern building up to Bush’s war in Iraq, but the mass destruction he unleashed has apparently made Americans totally desensitized to presidential wars.

The Obama administration has just begun the “limited” U.S. attack on Libya. Dozens are dead already, and some reports claim many are civilians. The Senate had already called for No-fly Zones in a non-binding resolution, so probably Congress would support this anyway. But that is no excuse for the complete nonchalance the American culture has adopted toward the government’s widening the list of active enemies of the U.S. Obama has now conducted military operations of a significant nature in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen and Libya. This is six countries that have been overtly bombed, if not militarily occupied, by the current president, who holds the Nobel Peace Prize. (If we count covert ops, the U.S. is certainly belligerently involved in many more countries than this.)

A lot is going on in the world, in politics, in the economy and pop culture. But when the U.S. goes to war with a country, everyone should care a little more—the American people, the media, the political left and right.

In a new article for the Gannett newspapers, “Is this any way to run a government?”, Chuck Raasch interviews Robert Higgs, Senior Fellow at the Independent Institute and author of the book, Depression, War, and Cold War. With Congress debating a possible shutdown of the federal government, Dr. Higgs discusses why:

“The government can constantly squander resources in a way that corresponds to a business taking losses every year,” said Robert Higgs, a senior fellow in political economy at the Independent Institute, a nonpartisan Oakland, Calif., research group that seeks solutions to social and economic problems.

Such a trend would drive a company out of business, Higgs said, “and yet (government) can keep going anyway because government has the power to compel people to support it. If it did not have the power to tax it could not borrow.”

As Congress approves yet another stopgap agreement to keep the government running, this time for three weeks, some economists say the uncertainty over both short- and long-term budgeting is impeding recovery from the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. The federal government has been operating on a series of continuing resolutions — legislative maneuvers to keep funding the government at current levels — since the beginning of the fiscal year October 1.

Meanwhile, neither Republicans nor Democrats have been willing to take the lead on cutting entitlement programs, raising taxes, and trimming other spending to reduce the nation’s growing debt.

Higgs has labeled this condition “regime uncertainty,” and says it has been hanging over the economy since the financial crisis of 2008.

Higgs said the country is in a great debate over the “overriding role of government in economic life,” similar to one that impeded recovery from the Great Depression. It is unlikely to be solved, he said, until bond buyers stop financing the U.S. debt, or Congress refuses to raise the nation’s $14 trillion debt limit.

“I see no possibility of a political solution,” Higgs said. “I see only credit markets restraining the government.”

The nation’s deficit this year will be roughly 9 percent of all goods and services produced by the total economy, the highest since World War II. But so far, Congress and the White House have been fighting over miniscule amounts — $4 billion in cuts in a two-week resolution passed two weeks ago and $6 billion in a three-week resolution that will expire April 8 — and kicking down the road much tougher questions about what to do about entitlements.

Higgs, the political economist, said government grows exponentially to meet crises (as it did in two world wars and the Depression), creating new lobbies, constituencies and beneficiaries that are catered to by politicians that hold the purse strings.

“No matter how sincere government officials are in their attempts to meet the crisis, they also act opportunistically,” Higgs said.

Higgs noted that former Obama chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, the mayor-elect of Chicago, told The Wall Street Journal shortly after Obama was elected in 2008: “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.

“This crisis provides the opportunity for us . . . to do things that you could not do before,” Emanuel said, referring to regulatory reform, infrastructure spending, and other Obama objectives. The “silver lining,” he said, was that “the problems are big enough they lend themselves to ideas from both parties for a solution.”

More than two years later, that bipartisan blueprint seems more elusive than ever.

I was saddened to learn of the recent death of Morris David Morris, who was my colleague in the Department of Economics at the University of Washington for thirteen of the fifteen years I spent there. Morris was my closest personal friend on the faculty at the UW, notwithstanding our differences of age, background, experience, and education. In each of these areas, he was definitely the man, and I the boy. Yet he was not one to pull rank on an ignorant and narrowly focused junior colleague, and we enjoyed wonderful times together socially, as well as illuminating times (for me) at the university.

Although Morrie’s research specialty was the economic history of India, a field to which he made seminal contributions and in which he was a recognized authority, he seemed to know about everything―European history, sociology, psychology and psychoanalysis, labor relations, you name it. His mind was constantly leaping from one area of knowledge to another and making connections that broadened one’s understanding. When he lectured, he did not write equations or carefully draw graphs on the blackboard, as other economists did, but rather terms and labels inside circles, with arrows running from one circled term to another and with wild swirls gobbling up the entire scenario, until the board ultimately depicted something like the debris left after a tornado has struck. He created all of this illustrative interconnection while lecturing in an animated, yet scholarly manner. Although his rocket-science colleagues in the economics department looked down on him―truly an inversion of a just order of intellects―the graduate students loved him, albeit they sometimes were at a loss to know what to make of his instruction.

Morrie was a good natured man, a pleasure to spend time with. He had a wealth of fascinating stories to tell about his various experiences while living in India on several different occasions and about his service in the Army during World War II, among other things. He was, for example, a member of a small Strategic Bombing Survey team that made the first Allied contact with, and extensively interviewed, the German minister of armaments and war production Albert Speer after the German surrender in 1945. John Kenneth Galbraith was also a member of this team, and so Morrie had a raft of stories about him, too.

My close friendship with Morrie was cemented early in my time at the UW. In 1968, I was approached by a group of students who were circulating an antiwar petition and wanted someone to take it around to the faculty to solicit their signatures. Being staunchly opposed to the war, I agreed to perform this task. Little did I know how my colleagues, some of whom I had yet to meet, would react to my approaching them in this capacity. Some appeared to think that I was a lunatic who had escaped from an asylum. Most regarded me as they would have regarded someone offering them a complimentary bottle of cholera germs. Morrie, however, was ever so glad to sign. In a department with thirty-six faculty members, he was the only one who signed, besides me.

Morris David Morris was a sophisticated, widely learned, highly cultured, emotionally upbeat person, and I, let us say, was none of these things. Yet we became good friends. I had the greatest respect for him, and he was willing to overlook my many deficiencies. I learned a great deal from him over the years, and his friendship was a blessing to me.

He lived to see his 90^th birthday, and so far as I was ever aware, he lived for the most part a good and happy life. He was one of the most decent human beings I have had the good fortune to know. May he rest in peace.

A brief obituary appears here, a much longer, more detailed one here.

The devastating earthquake in Japan has damaged multiple nuclear reactors, and at least one of these facilities is said to pose the potential of Chernobyl-levels of contamination. Germany is responding to this tragedy by temporarily closing down seven nuclear reactors, while France, the second-largest user of nuclear energy in the world, is reportedly planning to rely just as it has on nuclear energy.

All forms of energy production carry risks. The amount of pollution from coal, oil and even the production of windmills is not zero. Not having energy carries even greater risks, as civilization as we have come to take it for granted requires massive amounts of energy to sustain.

Pollution, once it reaches the level of damaging the person and property of third parties, is a tort. It is a violation of rights—a trespass. For over a century, the United States and other western nations have treated pollution as a regulatory matter, where some is allowed for the supposed benefit of the common good, rather that as primarily a matter of torts under civil law.

The question arises as to whether nuclear energy is appropriate or not in the context of a free and just society. This question has been tainted by the extensive degree to which the state has intervened and nearly taken over the energy sector, especially the nuclear sector, in America. The dirty history of nuclear power, from Nazi Germany’s attempts to foster civilian uses of atomic energy to the United States’s inherently immoral Manhattan Project, further complicates the issues involved.*

Yet other circumstances have dirtied the question of nuclear energy. While many free marketers argue that nuclear energy is obviously cleaner than more traditional forms, we do not want to end up bolstering the corporate state, which has in the last few decades, in the name of stopping “climate change,” attacked carbon-based forms of energy with the often forgotten side benefit of shoring up the case for nuclear power. Under the Thatcher regime in England, when anthropogenic global warming theories were first advanced, it was largely in advancement of nuclearization. This does not prove anything in itself, but it does remind us that none of the energy industry is purely clean in one especially important sense—most of this sector has been in bed with politicians for a long time.

Many people have a strong opinion on nuclear energy, either for or against. And I tend to have a strong opinion on everything political. But on nuclear energy, I must say I’m ambivalent. The way it has been maintained in Japan, in a corporatist context of General Electric working with the government, is far from ideal. It is far from ideal anywhere in America, either. I have problems with the ban on nuclear energy facilities in California, which contributed to the 1990s energy crisis, as well as governments building and helping to maintain nuclear installations against the protests of many of their subjects.

In a free market, this could be better sorted out. Would insurance companies take on the liability of covering nuclear facilities, or would they shy away? Would deed restrictions and covenants discourage nuclear plants except in remote, barely inhabited locations, or would civil society welcome such plants nearby? A free market in energy and law and torts, while not perfect, would at least help provide an idea as to the willingness of people to coexist with nuclear power and incur the risks personally and financially. Instead of the state imposing one way upon a population, the presence or lack of presence of nuclear facilities would reflect market demand and cultural norms. If the Germans don’t want nuclear power and the French do, or vice versa, this would probably be more accurately reflected in a market setting than in the political setting that has contaminated energy sectors everywhere.

But even a market would not be perfect. Few people expected an earthquake of this magnitude. Sometimes, freak accidents and natural disasters occur. I don’t trust the state to improve upon the situation.

In Japan, I sincerely suspect the state did not make conditions better than they otherwise would have been, but I am hesitant to argue that the market would have prevented anything like this from ever happening.

Nevertheless, if we are going to make a political or economics point about the question of nuclear power and the risks it carries, we can say one thing with confidence: The state monopolizes the energy sector, claims to balance the risks and benefits of its decisions, and is not liable as an institution for error. It is almost impossible to know for certain the correct answer about how much or little we should rely on nuclear energy or any other form of energy without a free market and outside the context of private property rights and privately held profits and accountability. Is nuclear power legitimate? My temptation is to say yes, with qualifications and reservations. The question is difficult to answer, but it does offer one more reason we’d be better off if we got the state completely out of the way.

* In the case of nuclear weapons, I find them intrinsically immoral as they cannot be used except in a way that kills innocent people. I particularly oppose any state having nuclear weapons, although I also oppose the use of war or state violence as a means of stopping the nuclearization of other states. The ends never justify the means. An I do hope that this does not become yet another reason to rattle the saber against Iran for its peaceful nuclear energy program and alleged but unproven attempts to create nuclear weapons.

This study by Jason Fichtner of the Mercatus Center at George Mason University offers a simple “1 Percent Solution” to balancing the federal budget.  The 1 percent solution is to cut federal spending by one percent per year, and with the current revenue stream the federal budget can be balanced in about five years.  Can this work?

I’ve done some back of the envelope calculations on this, and it looks like it comes pretty close: within a year or two anyway.  Fichtner’s back of the envelope calculations appear in a graph on page 6 of his full study.  He shows that even if we slow spending growth to increase only two percent a year the budget could be balanced by around 2020.

The 1 percent solution title is a bit of a gimmick in my view, because just a spending freeze would only put off budget balance by one year.  Could a spending freeze, or even a small reduction in spending, actually be implemented?

The simple arithmetic in the 1 percent solution is correct, but it avoids the real issue, which is controlling entitlement spending.  Fichtner says, “This paper does not provide a master plan identifying specific programmatic spending reductions in discretionary spending, such as defense and agriculture, nor in entitlement programs, such as Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. Entitlement spending on Medicare and Medicaid alone is estimated to continually increase as a share of the economy.”  Therein lies the rub.

If we assume that total federal spending declines by one percent a year, then when we add up interest on the remaining federal debt plus the Obama administration’s projections for spending on Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and national defense, those categories alone add up to the total budget in 2019.  Right now, budget items outside these categories comprise more than $1 trillion in annual expenditures.

There is no way the 1 percent solution can be implemented without cuts in planned expenditures in Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, and the 1 percent solution offers no guidance on how this can be done, as the study plainly states.  So, yes, we could balance the budget in 5-7 years if we just cut federal spending by one percent a year, but no, we can’t do this without drastic reform of our entitlement programs.

The 1 percent solution is a good device for showing that if we just got spending under control, we could stop the massive deficits that eventually will bankrupt our nation.  We don’t need more revenues, we just need to get spending under control.  But, the 1 percent solution stops short of actually being a solution, because it doesn’t explain how the growth in entitlement spending can be slowed, which would be absolutely necessary for it to be implemented.

Andrew Klaven at PJTV presents here an insightful video analysis of government-employee unions.

For further information, please see the following:

Out of Work: Unemployment and Government in Twentieth-Century America, by Richard K. Vedder and Lowell E. Gallaway

“The New, New Left: How American Politics Works Today, by Steven Malanga,” reviewed by Gary Jason (The Independent Review, Winter 2007)

“Solving America’s Public School Crisis,” with Peter Brimelow and John D. Merrifield

“Wisconsin Matters to the World,” by Alvaro Vargas Llosa

“Cities Can’t Give In To Protection Racket,” by Bruce L. Benson

“Teachers’ Unions Thwart Real Reform in U.S. Public Schools,” by Richard K. Vedder

Predictably, within days of the unmitigated disaster and massive loss of life (10,000 and counting) in Japan from the record 8.9-magnitude earthquake and tsunami, a major Keynesian economist has gone on the record in defending the “broken window fallacy” in economics by claiming that the Japanese disaster will actually boost economic growth. The economist is none other than Larry Summers (former Harvard University President and now Charles W. Eliot University Professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, former Director of Obama’s National Economic Council, former Chief Economist at the World Bank, and former Secretary of the Treasury under Clinton). In an interview on CNBC Summers actually claims that the disaster will:

. . . add complexity to Japan’s challenge of economic recovery. It may lead to some temporary increments ironically to GDP as a process of rebuilding takes place. In the wake of the earlier Kobe earthquake Japan actually gained some economic strength.

(For the record, the Kobe earthquake killed more than 6,000 people and left 300,000 homeless.)

Now in a superb article in The Daily Caller, “Tsunamis are not stimulus,” Ryan Young refutes the Keynesian nonsense from Summers:

Think about that for a second. The 8.9 magnitude earthquake was Japan’s largest in 100 years. The tsunami it spawned killed hundreds of people. Some of their bodies may never be found. Countless more people are now homeless. It tossed cars and buildings around as easily as a child tosses his Matchbox toy cars across the room. The wave was still seven feet tall when it hit Hawaii. Coastal areas were evacuated as far away as California and Oregon.

This is pure destruction. Even leaving aside the horrible human toll, destruction is bad for the economy.

Yes, construction will be a boom industry in the coming months. That’s why people like Summers can claim that the tsunami will create jobs and boost GDP. Better still, the workers will spend their wages and stimulate the rest of the economy, too. Japan will be better off for having endured a natural disaster.

If this were really the case, then the best possible way to boost Japan’s economy would be to level the entire country. Every building should be destroyed, brick by brick. The number of jobs that policy would create would dwarf any tsunami stimulus.

Then, in a few years, when the rebuilding is finished, workers can destroy their entire infrastructure again. Even more jobs will be created!

Economists call this line of thought the broken-window fallacy; if a kid hits a baseball through a window, it creates a job for the repairman. It does sound superficially appealing, which is probably why Summers fell for it. But it is clearly a fallacy. And it’s one that every economist has drilled into his or her head from day one.

Here’s why: if the tsunami had never happened, people would still have all the buildings and cars that they had in the first place. They would be able to spend their money on other, additional goods that they want.

And those new construction jobs the tsunami will create? Every last one of those workers could be making something else instead. They could be producing computers, televisions, almost anything.

People who were construction workers to begin with could be building new factories or new homes, in addition to the ones they already have. Instead, they will be working overtime just to get back what they already had. This is not stimulus, even if it does show up in GDP. It is better to build than to rebuild.

Summers, smart as he is, screwed up. Because he was reacting so quickly to a terrible tragedy as it was still happening, maybe he didn’t think before he spoke. It happens to the best of us.

The rest of us need to know that natural disasters are just that: disasters. As the Japanese mourn their dead and begin the painful rebuilding process, we should do whatever we can to bring them some comfort. Saying that the terrible wave that washed away so much will stimulate the economy offers no comfort, mainly because it isn’t true.

The “broken window” fallacy, one of the most pernicious in economics, has long been used to defend a wide assortment of government interventions, from urban renewal to “cash-for-clunkers” to “clean” energy subsidies to public works projects to war. For example, John Maynard Keynes argued in Chapter 10 of his book, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, that it may make economic sense to build completely useless pyramids in order to stimulate the economy, raise aggregate demand, and encourage full employment. Keynesian, Nobelist, and prominent New York Times liberal columnist Paul Krugman has similarly claimed that the massive munitions and other spending and public works projects of World War II ended the Great Depression (see here and here), a view that Independent Institute Senior Fellow Robert Higgs thoroughly refutes in his seminal book, Depression, War, and Cold War.

However, the “broken window fallacy” was first refuted many years earlier by the French economist Claude-Frederic Bastiat in his 1850 essay, “What Is Seen and What Is Not Seen,” which can be found in his book, Selected Essays on Political Economy. And one of the very best critiques of the fallacy is found in Austrian School economist Henry Hazlitt’s bestselling book, Economics in One Lesson.

Natural and man-made disasters are tragic enough on their own. Must mankind also continue to suffer from the government measures based of the crackpot views of Keynesians who disturbingly consider such calamities economically beneficial and refuse to learn the simple lesson of the “broken window fallacy”?

Representative Peter King, Chair of the House of Representatives Homeland Security Committee, has scheduled hearings on Islamic extremism to begin March 10.  There is no benefit to holding these hearings, which will in some ways be counterproductive.

1.  Everybody already knows the world-wide problems caused by Islamic extremism.  The hearings will not reveal anything new.  It will just make it appear that we are picking on the vast majority of Muslims who are not violent extremists.

2.  This is a public relations opportunity for Muslims, if reasonable Muslims testify they are just trying to peacefully coexist and live the American dream, like most American Christians, Jews, and atheists.  It is unfair and discriminatory to pick on a whole class of people because of the actions of a few.  This public relations opportunity is there for them even if (which I don’t believe) 90 percent of them would blow up airliners if they had the chance.

3.  In a society based on the principle of individual liberty, we treat people as individuals, not members of a group.  These principles support individuals’ responsibility for their own actions, and do not hold some responsible for the behavior of others who are members of their group.  The whole idea behind these hearings is collectivist and anti-libertarian.