Juan Cole, the great historian and the author of the “to go to” blog on the contemporary Middle East, Informed Comment, will speak tonight at the University of Alabama on the timely topic of “Liberty, Power, and Dictatorship: U.S. Foreign Policy in the Middle East.”

His speech, which is the most recent installment of the Liberty and Power Lectures at UA, is open to the public and will be in 205 Smith Hall.

If you need more information, call me at 205-454-6759.

On April 16, 1953, shortly after the death of Joseph Stalin, the U.S. government made a peace initiative outlined in a speech now recognized as one of the two most significant and memorable speeches of Dwight D. Eisenhower’s presidency. Historians continue to debate whether this initiative was a sincere effort to end the Cold War or a propaganda stroke best seen as an element in the conduct of that great conflict. In any event, the president’s “Chance for Peace” speech contained a clear recognition of the prospects the world faced in 1953 and of the costs associated with even the best outcome possible, if a general peace were not achieved.

The worst to be feared and the best to be expected can be simply stated.

The worst is atomic war.

The best would be this: a life of perpetual fear and tension; a burden of arms draining the wealth and the labor of all peoples; a wasting of strength that defies the American system or the Soviet system or any system to achieve true abundance and happiness for the peoples of this earth.

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.

This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals.

It is some 50 miles of concrete highway. We pay for a single fighter with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.

This, I repeat, is the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking.

This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.

This Thursday, the District of Columbia Circuit Court of Appeals will hear oral arguments in a case brought by the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) against the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) use of body scanners. The case asserts “that the federal agency’s controversial program violates the Administrative Procedures Act, the Privacy Act, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, the Video Voyeurism Prevention Act, and the Fourth Amendment.”

Depressingly, almost no one expects the case to succeed, in part because, as an ACLU spokesman explained, fourth amendment ruling precedents are almost all bad. And, indeed, the 1973 9th Circuit Court ruling in U.S. vs. Davis, said that “airport screenings are considered to be administrative searches” which are allowed so long as they are “no more intrusive or intensive than necessary, in light of current technology, to detect weapons or explosives, confined in good faith to that purpose, and passengers may avoid the search by electing not to fly.”

Emboldened by its success at completely disregarding all protests against body scanners (a/k/a “porn scanners“) so far, the DHS’s Transportation Security Administration (TSA) is now taking its show on the road—literally. TSA recently set up an invasive search at a Savannnah, GA train station, that included near-strip searches of a group of passengers who had just gotten off a train, but who were nevertheless ordered to go into the train station to be searched. TSA claimed that the passengers were searched because they had voluntarily entered the “secure area” of the train station, which they had not had to do (the baggage claim area was on the platform). Unfortunately for TSA, the group included a group of firefighters and policemen—whom it’s harder for TSA to call liers—who reported that the TSA agents had ordered them to go into the station.

We should be encouraged by the Rasmussen poll finding that 2/3 of Americans oppose intervention in the Arab nations. However imperfect a reading, it reflects in the national culture a lingering strain of America First sentiment—that disposition against U.S. intervention in foreign squabbles that are not Americans’ business, or at least not our government’s business.

This reluctance to commit seems paradoxical in light of America’s nearly thousand overseas military bases, its footprint in virtually every corner of the populated world, its two wars and expanding crusade against terrorism. The history of U.S. wars is equally difficult to square with a supposed national aversion to intervention: Has any other state gone to war with as many different countries as has the United States in the last century? And surely, the sheer size of the U.S. defense establishment, rivaling those of the rest of the world combined, belies any attempt to call Americans particularly antimilitaristic.

Yet there is a tradition of American antimilitarism, one that has been forgotten but one we could hope could be reclaimed. Arthur A. Ekirch, Jr., has the classic definite history on it, The Civilian and the Military. The Independent Institute has just released a reprinting of this important work, complete with a new foreword by the great historian Ralph Raico.

Ekirch traces the legacy of antimilitarism from the origins of the United States all the way to the early 1950s. Along the way we come across plenty of gems:

Derek Leebaert is an interesting and unusual man who combines active involvement in the world of business and government with an intellectual bent and a wide-ranging mind. He describes himself as a management consultant, currently a partner in the Swiss management consulting firm MAP AG. The holder of a D.Phil. degree from Oxford University, he spent seven years as a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard’s Center for Science and International Affairs, where he became the founding editor of the journal International Security. Since 1996, he has taught foreign affairs at Georgetown University while continuing his consulting activities.

Of Leebaert’s books, several deal with information technology and several with foreign and defense policies and events. In 2002, his book The Fifty-Year Wound: How America’s Cold War Victory Shapes Our World (Boston: Little, Brown) was published. This 700-page tome is, if not the best comprehensive history of the Cold War, certainly one of the better ones. Packed with carefully documented information, it is critical of U.S. policies and actions in many respects, yet it remains well within the bounds of respectable scholarship in establishment circles, as does everything Leebaert writes. He is not a radical.

His most recent book, Magic and Mayhem: The Delusions of American Foreign Policy from Korea to Afghanistan (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2010), is a less meaty, but even more critical book. By saying that it is less meaty, I do not intend to suggest that it lacks a great deal of factual evidence or careful documentation, but that it jumps about more, relying more on anecdotes and portraits of key actors, and less on a sustained analytical narrative. Nevertheless, it is a worthwhile book, especially for those who retain their faith that U.S. foreign and defense policymakers actually want to serve the general public interest better, if only they knew how to do so―a view I do not share.

The effectiveness of business leaders is measured by the bottom line: whether their actions increase company profits.  Lots of people would like to hold management positions, all the way up to corporate CEO, and the way commercial leaders are selected is by their records at enhancing their companies’ bottom lines.

I would stop short of saying the purpose of a business is to earn a profit.  For example, the Ford Motor Company was created for the purpose of making automobiles, and Microsoft was created for the purpose of making computer software.  But the measure of their success in making automobiles and software is the profit those companies earn.

Commercial leaders are chosen based on their ability to produce profit for their companies.  People who enhance the bottom line are promoted into higher leadership positions.  The metric used to select commercial leaders is the same metric that measures their effectiveness.

The effectiveness of political leaders is their ability to implement policies that enhance the general welfare.  This is a difficult metric to evaluate, because different people will have different ideas, and there is not a common denominator like dollars in which it can be measured.  I am going to gloss over this detail, however (and, it may be a major detail!), to note that the political campaigning skills it takes to be elected are not the same skills it takes to design and implement welfare-enhancing policies.

Despite the astonishing flood of more than a trillion dollars in new commercial-bank reserves that the Fed created in late 2008 and early 2009, when it undertook to rescue the big banks and other institutions from the consequences of their boom-time mistakes, Ben Bernanke has insisted that the Fed can and will contain this inflationary potential, and he has emphasized that inflation remains under control, indeed, that potential deflation presents the greater danger. He rests his case on the evidence of standard macroeconomic indexes.

Standard measures of the money stock, for example, have not increased greatly. The year-to-year change (ending in January 2011) in M2 was only 4.3 percent; the two-year change, only 6.4 percent. For MZM (money zero maturity), the corresponding rates of change were 2.6 percent and 4.4 percent, respectively. Thus, it would appear that by historical standards money has grown quite moderately in the past two years.

Bernanke and his supporting cast of monetary economists can also point to corroborating evidence that by historical standards the rate of inflation has been modest. The year-to-year change (ending in January 2011) in the all-items consumer price index (CPI) was only 1.7 percent; the two-year change, only 4.3 percent. The implicit price deflator for GDP, the broadest of all price indexes, reveals even less inflation. This index, which is computed on a quarterly basis, shows a one-year change of only 1.4 percent for the year ending in the fourth quarter of 2010, and a corresponding two-year change of only 1.8 percent.

[Cross-posted in The Lighthouse, 3/1/11]

Politics makes strange bedfellows — including alliances of idealists and opportunists who lobby for the same regulations, but for vastly different reasons. The classic example is that of bootleggers and Baptists, both of whom supported local laws to stop the sale of alcohol on Sundays, but scholars have found similarities with other coalitions, including lobbies that promoted NAFTA, tobacco restrictions, and the Clean Air Act.

Typically, “unholy alliances” are formed by an outsider — a political entrepreneur who is alert to political opportunities and plays matchmaker to moralists and profiteers — argue Randy Simmons, Ryan Yonk, and Diana Thomas (all of Utah State University) in the Winter 2011 issue of The Independent Review.

Here’s one maxim the authors discuss that predatory political entrepreneurs embrace: Support noble-sounding goals that can’t possibly be achieved, then position yourself to collect a payoff. Here’s one example: In 1998, Shell Oil, Mobil Oil, and other groups that had opposed the Kyoto Protocol began to support it. Why? An amendment to the Clean Air Act would have compensated them for voluntarily reducing their carbon emissions early on. Mobil alone stood to gain $300 million in relief.

See “Bootleggers, Baptists, and Political Entrepreneurs,” by Randy Simmons, Ryan Yonk, and Diana Thomas (The Independent Review, Winter 2011)

Subscribe to The Independent Review. Special Internet Offer: Sign up online for a paid subscription of $28.95 and receive the next six issues for the price of four. A savings of 33% compared to the newsstand price. Available to new subscribers only, not renewals.

Last Friday an Illinois court resurrected a previously overturned $10.1 billion tobacco verdict, sending the case back to Madison County, Ill., for a possible retrial. According to Yahoo! News carrying the AP story:

In 2003, now-retired Madison County Circuit Judge Nicholas Byron found that Philip Morris misled customers about “light” and “low tar” cigarettes and broke state law by marketing them as safer, ending a trial that both sides at the time said was the nation’s first over a lawsuit accusing a tobacco company of consumer fraud.

What is not mentioned in the news article is the curious way by which Judge Byron’s court decided to distribute the damages. Since identifying class members was effectively impossible, the court invoked a legal doctrine known as “cy pres comme possible,” roughly meaning “as near as possible.” Under this doctrine, the remaining $5.3 billion—after setting aside 30% for the state coffers and 25% for plaintiff attorneys—should be distributed as close as possible (that is, cy pres) to the interests of the class. Naturally, “close” in these scenarios is a judgment call.

As legal scholar Charles Keckler writes in “Cy Pres and its Predators,” one of 12 chapters in my Independent Institute book, The Pursuit of Justice:

When an area of the law involves enormous judicial discretion over an ever-increasing amount of money, the conditions are created for remarkable—and sometimes unseemly—attempts by attorneys to influence that discretion.

Attempts indeed. After soliciting the opinions of attorneys on both sides, Judge Byron pre-announced how the remaining $5.3 billion would be distributed: 91 percent to the state’s legal profession—including the Illinois Bar Foundation, the state’s 11 law schools, legal aid, and the state judiciary—and nine percent to domestic violence programs and the American Cancer Society.

The Illinois case is not alone. In the chapter, Mr Keckler reports that a number of recent cy pres distributions have followed the same path to “law-related entities such as law schools, pro bono advocacy organizations, and the like.”

The Illinois Supreme Court overturned the case in 2005, but a 2008 ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court has breathed new life into the plaintiffs’ cause. And so the rumors of cy pres‘s death may have been grossly exaggerated.

If you’re curious, cy pres derives from law on charitable trusts, as this succinct treatment explains. For the video inclined, here is a critique of cy pres by Northwestern law professor Martin Redish.

Two closing thoughts:

1. In California, the legislature mandates cy pres on unclaimed class action funds and also requires the funds (net of Sacramento’s share) go to child advocacy programs and legal aid (statute here). Unsurprisingly, the same statute exempts cy pres when the defendant is a public entity or public employee. In short, California’s state courts cannot opt out of cy pres and must distribute funds to the legislature’s favored groups instead of their own.

2. Many tobacco cases are based on the harms imposed by second-hand smoke, or “externalities” in the language of traditional welfare economics . But the externality argument has been almost entirely refuted, as Fred Singer recounts in his recent Independent Institute column. To the extent that the externality is there, it’s known to be small. According to MIT economist Jon Gruber:

The only call for intervention in the [traditional economic] model is related to the externalities that smokers impose on others. … But such externalities are in fact fairly small by most measures. … As a result, the traditional economic model would suggest that the “optimal” tax on cigarettes may be below even its 1995 level.

In a recent piece in The Chronicle of Philanthropy, Ralph Nader bemoans President Obama’s failure to use his position and standing to advance the non-profit sector:

Yet, though he rhetorically urges more volunteerism, as all presidents do, in his travels around the country, he stops most often at factories and campaign fund-raising events patronized by the wealthy rather than at the regional Salvation Army and other organizations devising solutions to the problems facing America’s most vulnerable people.

President Obama’s disregard for the charitable sector goes beyond such on-the-ground snubs, and far exceeds that of his predecessors. He declined to continue the presidential tradition of meeting, for example, with the National Commander of the Salvation Army, who as head of the fifth largest social services provider in the U.S. could also have arguably been described as the most important black American in the non-profit sector, and has politicized his Office of Faith-Based Initiatives (which should be abolished) in using it to recruit ministers as propagandists for Obamacare.

Just for the record, I disagree with Mr. Nader’s contention that Pres. Obama should be lending support for private charities (see, for example, my post here). I’m just puzzled that Mr. Nader should be surprised. For, as Arthur Brooks showed in his excellent research published in Who Really Cares, “those who support the idea that government should redistribute income are among the least likely to dig into their own wallets to help others.”