Angelo M. Codevilla, professor emeritus of international relations at Boston University, has written an extraordinary essay for the July/August issue of The American Spectator. It’s called “America’s Ruling Class – And the Perils of Revolution,” but it deals much more extensively with the anatomy and functioning of the class system in the United States today than with the prospect of revolution.

Codevilla cuts immediately to the core: the United States today is divided into (a) a ruling class, which dominates the government at every level, the schools and universities, the mainstream media, Hollywood, and a great deal else, and (b) all of the rest of us, a heterogeneous agglomeration that Codevilla dubs the country class. The ruling class holds the lion’s share of the institutional power, but the country class encompasses perhaps two-thirds of the people.

Members of the two classes do not like one another. In particular, the ruling class views the rest of the population as composed of ignoramuses who are vicious, violent, racist, religious, irrational, unscientific, backward, generally ill-behaved, and incapable of living well without constant, detailed direction by our betters; and it views itself as perfectly qualified and entitled to pound us into better shape by the generous application of laws, taxes, subsidies, regulations, and unceasing declarations of its dedication to bringing the country—and indeed the entire world—out of its present darkness and into the light of the Brave New World it is busily engineering.

This class divide has little to do with rich versus poor or Democrat versus Republican. At its core, it has to do with the division between, on the one hand, those whose attitudes are attuned to the views endorsed by the ruling class (especially “political correctness”) and whose fortunes are linked directly or indirectly with government programs and, on the other hand, those whose outlooks and interests derive from and focus on private affairs, especially the traditional family, religion, and genuine private enterprise. Above all, as Codevilla makes plain, “for our ruling class, identity always trumps.” These people know they are superior in every way, and they are not shy about letting us know that they are. Arrogance might as well be their middle name.

The ruling class, not surprisingly, is also the statist party:

[O]ur ruling class’s standard approach to any and all matters, its solution to any and all problems, is to increase the power of the government – meaning of those who run it, meaning themselves, to profit those who pay with political support for privileged jobs, contracts, etc.

Despite the rulers’ chronic complaints about people’s exercising “discrimination” of one kind or another, they have no intention of treating everybody equally. Hence, “[l]aws and regulations nowadays are longer than ever because length is needed to specify how people will be treated unequally.”  As the recent health-care and financial-reform statutes illustrate perfectly, however, much of the inequality is achieved not directly, but by the statutes’ delegation of authority to countless regulatory and administrative bodies, which will use their ample discretion to do the desired dirty work.

Codevilla’s description of the ruling class and its modus operandi is longer and more detailed than his account of the country class, which is probably inevitable in view of the latter’s extreme heterogeneity. And the force of his argument wanes a bit toward the end of the essay, when he muses about how a country party might turn the tide against the domination and contempt it presently suffers at the hands of its officious rulers. Nevertheless, I heartily recommend this magnificent essay, which is one of the most intelligent, forthright discussions of America’s current socio-political condition I have ever read. If we serfs are ever to escape the grip of our overbearing, self-appointed nobility, the first requirements will be to recognize correctly our current condition, to denounce openly its injustice and idiocy, and to deride every claim of legitimacy or entitlement our rulers have the temerity to make or presume.

Bill McCollum, Florida’s current attorney general and candidate for governor, recently announced his support for legislation to eliminate teacher tenure and design a pay system for teachers that rewards them for their students’ performance.  One of the criticisms McCollum has had on this proposal is that it is an idea promoted by former Florida Governor Jeb Bush.  In this, and in other policies, critics are complaining that Jeb Bush is still pulling the strings in Tallahassee (the state’s capitol).  Despite the fact that he’s been out of office for nearly four years, and isn’t running for office now, Florida Republicans are still Jeb Bush’s puppets.

I don’t have anything to say about whether this accusation is true, nor about McCollum’s teacher tenure proposal.  What gets me about this accusation, though, is that elected officials are all the time saying citizens need to get involved with their governments.  They need to attend commission meetings, they need to be informed voters, they need to let government officials know their views.  Yet when someone like Jeb Bush does that — someone people will actually listen to — he’s criticized for it.

I am somewhat informed on what my governments are doing, and I have, on a few occasions, actually gone to city commission meetings, asked to be on the agenda, and expressed what’s on my mind.  My experience has been that the commission gives me three minutes to speak, strictly timed, and even during my three minutes acts completely disinterested in what I have to say.  My impression is that they are thinking, “This guy is wasting three minutes of my life, and when he and others like him finish talking, we’ll just go ahead and do what we were going to do anyway, public opinion be damned.”

Public officials “want” you to be involved in the policy-making process… as long as your involvement has absolutely no influence on the outcome.  But if you’re somebody who might actually have some influence, like Jeb Bush does in Florida, you’ll be criticized because your involvement might actually make a difference.

Government officials want to make it appear that they are listening to their constituents, but there is a difference between allowing someone the opportunity to speak, and listening to that person.  If the speaker is someone people will actually listen to, government officials will tolerate the speaker only when that speaker supports their agendas.

Facing a budgetary shortfall of between $56 billion to $86 billion over the next two years, a recent article in the Wall Street Journal by Tamara Audi (“Cities Rent Police, Janitors to Save Cash”) documents efforts by municipalities across the nation to stanch red ink by outsourcing the “public” services they no longer can afford to supply.

It’s about time.

Until very recently, city, county and state governments nationwide have taken advantage of every growth in tax revenues, even if temporary, permanently to expand the size and scope of the activities taxpayers are called upon to finance: convention centers; sports venues, including football stadiums, basketball arenas and golf courses; trash collection; janitorial services; grounds-keeping; parks and recreational facilities; fairgrounds; and vehicle maintenance, along with many other goods and services that the private sector could provide much more cost-effectively.

During the mid 1990s, I was appointed by Governor Kirk Fordice to a taskforce commissioned by the then-State Auditor of Mississippi, since sentenced to Club Fed as a result of his later involvement in king-of-torts Richard “Dickie” Scruggs’s ill-conceived attempt to bribe a state judge for the purpose of buying a favorable ruling on a fee-splitting dispute with his co-counsel. (I have no involvement in that criminal activity.)

The task force produced a well-reasoned report summarizing numerous budget-saving privatization initiatives open to the State of Mississippi. Among other such opportunities, we identified a publicly owned and operated gasoline station (which the operators of state-owned vehicles rarely took advantage of) located in the capital city; a state-run school for hearing- and sight-impaired children; grounds-keeping and janitorial services at public institutions of higher learning; food service operations at state prisons and county jails; and Mississippi’s Veterans Memorial Coliseum, used mainly as the site of Jackson State University’s home football games, but otherwise idle and, thus, unable to cover its operating expenses let alone its capital costs. Few of those recommendations subsequently were adopted.

Nowadays, however, constrained in their borrowing capacities and lacking the power to print money, sub-national governments nationwide finally have hit the wall.

Afghanistan may or may not be President Obama’s war, but the ongoing recession certainly is. Faced with the expiration of the Bush tax cuts, the enactment of the current administration’s healthcare and financial market reform initiatives, along with its FDR-like anti-business rhetoric, the U.S. economy is in a protracted slump to which no end is in sight.

It is no wonder that privately owned businesses are reluctant to invest in new plant and equipment or to hire some of the 9.5% of the civilian workforce that currently is unemployed. The private sector has shed inessential personnel and is in the process focusing on their core competencies. So should the public sector.

In that regard, the so-called Great Recession may in the end turn out to be a boon for hard-pressed taxpayers rather than a bust.

The Washington Post published yesterday the first of three large reports by Dana Priest and William M. Arkin on the dimensions of the gigantic U.S. apparatus of “intelligence” activities being undertaken to combat terrorist acts against the United States, such as the 9/11 attacks. To say that this activity amounts to mobilizing every police officer in the country to stop street fights in Camden only begins to suggest its almost unbelievable disproportion to the alleged threat.

Among Priest and Arkin’s findings from a two-year study are the following:

The top-secret world the government created in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has become so large, so unwieldy and so secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work.

[We] discovered what amounts to an alternative geography of the United States, a Top Secret America hidden from public view and lacking in thorough oversight. After nine years of unprecedented spending and growth, the result is that the system put in place to keep the United States safe is so massive that its effectiveness is impossible to determine.

Some 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the United States.

An estimated 854,000 people, nearly 1.5 times as many people as live in Washington, D.C., hold top-secret security clearances.

In Washington and the surrounding area, 33 building complexes for top-secret intelligence work are under construction or have been built since September 2001. Together they occupy the equivalent of almost three Pentagons or 22 U.S. Capitol buildings—about 17 million square feet of space.

Many security and intelligence agencies do the same work, creating redundancy and waste. For example, 51 federal organizations and military commands, operating in 15 U.S. cities, track the flow of money to and from terrorist networks.

Analysts who make sense of documents and conversations obtained by foreign and domestic spying share their judgment by publishing 50,000 intelligence reports each year—a volume so large that many are routinely ignored.

According to retired admiral Dennis C. Blair, formerly the director of national intelligence, after 9/11 “the attitude was, if it’s worth doing, it’s probably worth overdoing.”  I submit that this explanation does not cut to the heart of the matter. As it stands, it suggests a sort of mindless desire to pile mountains of money, technology, and personnel on top of an already enormous mountain of money, technology, and personnel for no reason other than the vague notion that more must be better. In my view, national politics does not work in that way.

As Priest and Arkin report, “The U.S. intelligence budget is vast, publicly announced last year as $75 billion, 2 ½ times the size it was on Sept. 10, 2001. But the figure doesn’t include many military activities or domestic counterterrorism programs.” Virtually everyone the reporters consulted told them in effect that “the Bush administration and Congress gave agencies more money than they were capable of responsibly spending.” To be sure, they received more than they could spend responsibly, but not more than they were eager to spend irresponsibly. After all, it’s not as if they were spending their own money.

Why would these hundreds of organizations and contracting companies be willing to take gigantic amounts of the taxpayers’ money when everyone agrees that the money cannot be spent sensibly and that the system already in place cannot function effectively or efficiently to attain its ostensible purpose? The question answers itself. It’s loot for the taking, and there has been no shortage of takers. Indeed, these stationary bandits continue to demand more money each year.

And for what? The announced goal is to identify terrorists and eliminate them or prevent them from carrying out their nefarious acts. This is simultaneously a small task and an impossible one. It is small because the number of persons seeking to carry out a terrorist act of substantial consequence against the United States and in a position to do so cannot be more than a handful. If the number were greater, we would have seen many more attacks or attempted attacks during the past decade—after all, the number of possible targets is virtually unlimited, and the attackers might cause some form of damage in countless ways. The most plausible reason why so few attacks or attempted attacks have occurred is that very few persons have been trying to carry them out. (I refer to genuine attempts, not to the phony-baloney schemes planted in the minds of simpletons by government undercover agents and then trumpeted to the heavens when the FBI “captures” the unfortunate victims of the government’s entrapment.)

So, the true dimension of the terrorism problem that forms the excuse for these hundreds of programs of official predation against the taxpayers is small—not even in the same class with, say, reducing automobile-accident or household-accident deaths by 20 percent. Yet, at the same time, the antiterrorism task is impossible because terrorism is a simple act available in some form to practically any determined adult with access to Americans and their property at home or abroad. It is simply not possible to stop all acts of terrorism if potential terrorists have been given a sufficient grievance to motivate their wreaking some form of havoc against Americans. However, it is silly to make the prevention of all terrorist acts the goal. What can’t be done won’t be done, regardless of how many people and how much money one devotes to doing it. We can, though, endure some losses from terrorism in the same way that we routinely endure some losses from accidents, diseases, and ordinary crime.

The sheer idiocy of paying legions of twenty-something grads of Harvard and Yale—youngsters who cannot speak Arabic, Farsi, Pashtun, or any of the other languages of the areas they purport to be analyzing and know practically nothing of the history, customs, folkways, and traditions of these places—indicates that no one seriously expects the promised payoff in intelligence to emerge from the effort. The whole business is akin to sending a blind person to find a needle inside a maze buried somewhere in a hillside. That the massive effort is utterly uncoordinated and scarcely able to communicate one part’s “findings” to another only strengthens the conclusion that the goal is not stopping terrorism, but getting the taxpayers’ money and putting it into privileged pockets. Even if the expected damage from acts of terrorism against the United States were $10 billion per year, which seems much too high a guess, it makes no sense to spend more than $75 billion every year to prevent it—and it certainly makes no sense to spend any money only pretending to prevent it.

What we see here is not really an “intelligence” or counterterrorism operation at all. It’s a rip-off, plain and simple, fed by irrational fear and continually stoked by the government plunderers who are exercising the power and raking in the booty to “fight terrorism.”

The Lighthouse is the weekly email newsletter of the Independent Institute, which I’ve written since at least late 1999. It features summaries of topical commentaries and analysis by our research fellows and announces new Independent Institute books and journals, upcoming events, and academic programs.

Its contents should interest all readers of The Beacon. To receive a free subscription (which is usually distributed on Mondays, around 6PM Pacific Time), please enter your email address on this page.

This week’s Lighthouse (available online here) touches on Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan and the Second Amendment (Stephen Halbrook); debunks the notion that the U.S. government’s creditors represent a credible, major financial risk (Robert Higgs); lampoons the recently busted Russian spy ring (Alvaro Vargas Llosa); and probes the suicide bombings of World Cup soccer viewers in Uganda by Somali terrorists (Ivan Eland).

For your convenience, links to individual articles from this issue are provided below.

1. Would Kagan Defend Second Amendment Rights?
2. Do Foreign Investors Threaten U.S. Financial Stability?
3. Russia’s Pathetic Spies
4. Uganda Suicide Bombings Highlight Risk of Blowback

Happy reading!

Few individuals in recent years have had such a profound impact on scholarship, public debate and public policy as has Independent Institute Research Fellow Stephen P. Halbrook. The leading constitutional legal scholar and attorney on the Second Amendment, who has won three cases before the U.S. Supreme Court, Dr. Halbrook has authored numerous seminal books that have revolutionized legal understanding, including the following:

The Founders’ Second Amendment: Origins of the Right to Bear Arms

Securing Civil Rights: Freedmen, the Fourteenth Amendment, and the Right to Bear Arms

That Every Man Be Armed: The Evolution of a Constitutional Right

The results of this work have now been shown to have been crucial in a recent number of landmark legal decisions pertaining to the Second Amendment:

McDonald v. Chicago, U.S. Supreme Court

District of Columbia v. Heller, U.S. Supreme Court

State of Washington v. Christopher William Sieyes, Supreme Court of the State of Washington

Dr. Halbrook has also testifed in the confirmation hearings for Eric Holder, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan, all of whom he has clearly and correctly critiqued for their confusion of and opposition to sound adherence to the intent and wording of the U.S. Constitution:

“On the Nomination of Eric H. Holder, Jr., for Attorney General of the United States”

“On the Nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to Be an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States”

“Confirmation Hearings for the Appointment of Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court of the United States of America”

This real product is available at BSRemoval.com. You can order the Obama Bumper Sticker Removal Kit (also known as the BS Removal Kit) to send to friends, family, and all those still deluded. Here is the firm’s product description:

You were drawn in by the promise of hope and change—so much so that you decided to broadcast it on your car’s bumper. Back then, you were proud to be seen in your Obama-mobile. Lately, however, you’ve gone from hopeful to woeful, and now you’re stuck with a bumper sticker that you just wish would go away. You got change, but not one that you can believe in.

Like the bad tattoo that you got in college, your Obama bumper sticker is an embarrassment that seemed like a good idea at the time. Fortunately, now you can finally do something about it.

A new book has rocketed to the the top of my already too-long reading list: Neoconservatism: An Obituary for an Idea. It is already winning praise from across the political spectrum ranging from Richard Epstein, the distinguished professor of law at the University of Chicago to Thom Hartmann, an Air America Radio Network host.

The author C. Bradley Thompson, the Executive Director of the Clemson Institute for the Study of Capitalism, has come forward not only to be the academic grave digger of the movement but expose its history beginning with neoconservativism’s godfather, Leo Strauss. As someone who once often moved in Straussian circles, he can write with rare authority. I only hope that his “obituary” is not premature.

Dr. Christina Romer of the president’s Council of Economic Advisers claims that three dollar’s worth of personal income was generated by every federal dollar disbursed under 2009’s “American Recovery and Investment Act”. Mr. Obama has been using that “result” to convince naysayers that a second stimulus package is needed to lower an unemployment rate that has been hovering around nine percent since he moved into the White House.

A government-spending “multiplier” of three is beyond comprehension. As a matter of fact, recent work by Robert Barro suggests that during the Second World War, a $1 increase in government expenditures added less than $1 to U.S. GDP.

The basis for that conclusion answers the question: what are the principal sources of the public sector’s ready money? Washington has just three ways available to it for financing spending programs: taxing, borrowing or resorting to the Treasury’s printing press, all of which suck scarce resources from the private sector. Because wealth thereby is transferred from private to public use, expansions in the number of jobs “created” in “green” industries and other politically favored sectors of the economy must be less than the number of jobs destroyed in the private businesses that are forced to finance governmental economic “stimulus” packages but receive nothing in return.

Given that the national unemployment rate barely budged after the enactment last year of the president’s initiative aimed at financing “shovel-ready” state and local governmental projects, how, exactly, is a second federal stimulus bill supposed to jump-start an obviously stagnant national economy?

Dr. Romer was not very long ago a widely respected student of economic history. Now, as Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz before her, she seems to have caught “Potomac Fever” and to have succumbed to the flawed Keynesian idea that deficit public spending can “create” jobs.

A sounder explanation for economic sluggishness includes the pending expiration of the Bush tax cuts, along with the uncertainties created by passage of the Obama administration’s health care and financial reform bills. A market-based economy is extraordinarily resilient, but cannot forever bear anti-business rhetoric and overweening governmental intrusion into affairs best left to the private sector.

Recent media reports such as the Huffington Post‘s “‘Climategate’ Investigation VINDICATES Scientists, Finds Research Reliable“ claim that an “independent” Climategate inquiry “vindicated” the parties involved. But was the inquiry in fact independent, and how much of an inquiry was actually made?

As Patrick Michaels points out, the investigations were not exactly as “independent” as they have been labeled:

Last week “The Independent Climate Change E-mails Review,” commissioned and paid for by the University of East Anglia, exonerated the University of East Anglia.

Further:

One of the [investigative] panel’s four members, Prof. Geoffrey Boulton, was on the faculty of East Anglia’s School of Environmental Sciences for 18 years. At the beginning of his tenure, the Climatic Research Unit (CRU)—the source of the Climategate emails—was established in Mr. Boulton’s school at East Anglia. Last December, Mr. Boulton signed a petition declaring that the scientists who established the global climate records at East Anglia “adhere to the highest levels of professional integrity.”

Michaels also points out that the institutions performing two earlier investigations—the University of East Anglia itself, and Penn State University into its employee Michael Mann—stood to lose millions of dollars in federal funding for global warming research had any wrong-doing been found.

The BBC’s Environment Analyst Roger Harrabin also reports questions about the independence of the investigations, which you can hear here.

But, motivations aside, just how rigorous was this “independent” investigation that has now “vindicated” the scientists involved?

As background for those who might have forgotten who the players are, last November, an unknown party known only as “FOI” (Freedom of Information) posted to a website thousands of emails and other documents among key scientists, all champions of anthropogenic global warming and involved in the UN panel creating its Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Report. The key players involved were Phil Jones, director of the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (CRU), Keith Briffa, a climatologist at CRU and IPCC author, and Michael Mann (of “Hockey Stick” infamy) at Penn State University. Phil Jones stepped aside as director at CRU pending the investigation’s findings, and is now set to return, though with a slightly different title.

The most serious evidence the hacked emails had revealed was of Keith Briffa colluding with a colleague of Mann’s to change the published IPCC assessment of the Hockey Stick dispute from that which had been sent to external reviewers to one that favored Mann and his colleagues, creators of the Hockey Stick—rather a direct contradiction of the fabled “peer review” process. These were the email exchanges about the IPCC report (AR4) that Phil Jones exhorted all to delete (see #2, below).

Other of the more damning emails involved are also outlined below.

As extremely well documented in Steve McIntyre’s Climate Audit blog, the investigation, headed up by Sir Muir Russell, only interviewed representatives of the CRU itself—hardly a balanced investigation—and Russell himself did not even attend the interviews of Jones, Briffa and other key players (“Muir Russell Skipped Jones Interviews“).

Further, although the panel had been directly tasked to:

Examine the hacked e-mail exchanges, other relevant e-mail exchanges and any other information held at CRU to determine whether there is any evidence of the manipulation or suppression of data which is at odds with acceptable scientific practice and may therefore call into question any of the research outcomes.

The investigative panel did not review the vast majority of the emails. (“The Botched Examination of the Back-Up Server“)

It thus appears that this latest investigation hardly warrants the name, and the charges remain largely unanswered:

1) Hide data requested by outsiders.
Phil Jones to Mike Mann:

The two MMs [probably Ross McKitrick and Steve McIntyre] have been after the CRU station data for years. If they ever hear there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the UK, I think I’ll delete the file rather than send to anyone.

Phil Jones to Gavin Schmidt (Climatologist at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies):

All our FOI [Freedom of Information] officers have been in discussions and are now using the same exceptions not to respond—advice they got from the Information Commissioner. …

The FOI line we’re all using is this. IPCC is exempt from any countries FOI—the skeptics have been told this.

2) Delete emails and lie about their back conversations on rewriting the IPCC report.
Phil Jones to Mike Mann:

Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith [Briffa] re AR4 [the IPCC report]? Keith will do likewise. He’s not in at the moment – minor family crisis. Can you also email Gene [Wahl, an employee of the U.S. Department of Commerce] and get him to do the same? I don’t have his new email address. We will be getting Caspar [Amman, of the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research] to do likewise Cheers, Phil.

And:

Keith should say that he didn’t get anything extra that wasn’t in the IPCC comments.

Although the Russell panel’s finding reports “evidence that emails might have been deleted in order to make them unavailable should a subsequent request be made for them [under Freedom of information law],” Fred Pearce of the Guardian points out:

Yet, extraordinarily, it emerged during questioning that Russell and his team never asked Jones or his colleagues whether they had actually done this.

3) Manipulate (or “enhance”) data to support findings such as the “Hockey Stick” graph made famous in Al Gore’s movie, among other outlets. Phil Jones, explaining that switching over from the use of “proxy data”—tree-ring samples—used to derive temperatures for earlier periods, to “real temperatures” for the more recent years, “hides” the decline in temperatures that the tree-ring data shows in more recent years—and, voilá, produces the continually upward-rising (“hockey stick”) temperature graph:

I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline. …

Despite its other gaps, the Russell investigation did agree that use of this “trick” was improper, and:

was misleading in not describing that one of the series was truncated post 1960 for the figure, and in not being clear on the fact that proxy and instrumental data were spliced together.

4) Bring down a leading climate journal in response to its publishing a peer-reviewed article skeptical of anthropogenic global warming.
Michael Mann:

Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal. We would also need to consider what we tell or request of our more reasonable colleagues who currently sit on the editorial board.

Phil Jones:

I will be emailing the journal to tell them I’m having nothing more to do with it until they rid themselves of this troublesome editor.