Jon Stewart has apologized for calling Harry Truman a war criminal during an interview with Clifford May. For Bill Whittle’s criticism of Stewart’s original statement, which helped to lead to Stewart’s capitulation, see the link at Jane Shaw’s post here

Well…was Harry Truman a war criminal? In my view, it is not even a close call. He was. If just war theory means anything it is that the intentional mass slaughter of civilians cannot be justified. Had Hitler dropped an atomic bomb on London in 1941, prosecutors at a subsequent war crimes trial would have dismissed out of hand any defense (even if it was partially true) that one goal was to “shorten the war and save lives from an invasion.” They would have called it mass murder, pure and simple.

As Mark Brady points out, the entire basis of Whittle’s argument falls apart once we abandon the premise of unconditional surrender (as first proclaimed by FDR). Truman rebuffed all proposals to let the Japanese keep the emperor in exchange for a surrender. A side benefit, of course, of such a conditional surrender would have been to avoid a bloody American invasion. Ironically, once Truman had dropped the bomb, he shifted course and agreed to this condition anyway. One of the best discussions of this issue is Thomas Fleming’s magisterial book, The New Dealers War.

Fires don’t discriminate but fire departments do. While the flames of a house fire may not discriminate on the basis of skin color, New Haven, Connecticut’s fire department is making sure that those who risk their lives are dark or light-skinned in the “right” proportion, regardless of merit.

After throwing out professional exam results because whites and Hispanics scored higher than blacks, those candidates denied promotion took their case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which is currently considering their case (Ricci v. DeStefano). While this case centers on officers, the incentive to rank-and-file firefighters is diminished, unless they have black skin; and, even then, they need not try as hard as their white or Hispanic counterparts because New Haven clearly values race over other factors.

This case highlights all that is wrong with “affirmative action as we know it”: Employers practice defensive racial preferences, not because they believe it serves the public good, but because it will protect them from lawsuits (or so they think). Government employers are much more likely to discriminate based on race—a point I drove home in a forthcoming book (Race and Liberty in America: The Essential Reader). Businesses, however, come to accept quotas as the “cost of doing business” in America.

Unfortunately, This case is playing out much like the Croson case. In that case, the city of Richmond gave such heavy and sweeping preference to all minorities—even Eskimos!—that Justice O’Connor wrote the opinion setting down the rules of “strict scrutiny”: In a word, race distinctions were suspect and held to the strictest scrutiny. Moreover, race may not be a BFOQ (Bona Fide Occupational Qualification), as it seems to be in the New Haven case. Think of a like scenario: If a town decided to scrap professional exams to favor WHITE firefighters, what would the courts do? If the same town spent tax dollars to defend this discrimination, how would impartial observers‚ and courts—react?

Anyone familiar with the Civil Rights Act of 1964 knows that it protected people of all races, religions, and both sexes—not just those now “preferred” by some government authority. The legislative record could not be clearer: Hubert Humphrey, the crusading liberal from Minnesota, dismissed the “bugaboo” of quotas and preferences. The law simply banned discrimination of all sorts and he hoped it would lead to Americans treating each other on the merits, not as representatives of “race.”

Most bugaboos are not real—or so we tell our children—but what will we teach them about this bugaboo? That discrimination is OK and it “doesn’t really matter?” Except it does matter to its victims and to the meaning of America.

Let us hope that the Court, and the American people, will come to their senses and rediscover the old-fashioned notion that “our Constitution is color blind”—the notion that drove the NAACP to win one case after another. Sadly, with the prize within reach, we Americans gave up the highest civil rights victory, and thus snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.

On the antiwar prospects for the American right. For those near San Jose, CA, my talk is at San Jose State University, the MLK Jr. Library, Room 225/229 at 7 PM.

Will the current outrage in Montgomery provoke a modern civil rights movement against eminent domain through the back door? It certainly should.

On Wednesday in Montgomery, developer Jim Peera displayed this map as part of his testimony at a public forum of the State Advisory Committee (which I chair) of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. The pins show buildings demolished by the city of Montgomery in 2008. As you can see, the vast majority are concentrated in one area which just so happens to be heavily black and low-income. Ironically, the area included the apartment of Rosa Parks.

Typically, the city will designate a building as “blighted” or a “nuisance,” sometimes using a subjective and arbitrary standard, as in the Jimmy McCalll case. It then bills the owner for the demolition costs. Because many of these owners are poor, they will either have to abandon their land or sell it at a high discount to either a private developer or the city. Even when they can afford demolition, taxes, and other costs, the city has repeatedly destroyed the current or best use of the land by changing the zoning designation to single-family housing. The result is the same: abandonment of the land or sale at bargain-basement prices.

Unlike conventional eminent domain, the owner under eminent domain through the back door has no right to compensation from the city, even in theory.

The New York Times reports that it recently received accidentally by email a copy of the latest findings and recommendations by the environmental marketing/messaging (i.e., propaganda) firm ecoAmerica. The firm “and allies in the environmental movement have been briefing officials in Congress and the administration” to re-cast global warming terminology because the public is not buying the scare-mongering of a climate crisis. Of course, political propaganda campaigns are nothing new, but the various interest groups pushing fervently for climate corporatism don’t want to lose what they consider their great opportunity now under an Obama White House.

Indeed, another New York Times article has reported that, “A Pew Research Center poll released in January found global warming last among 20 voter concerns; it trailed issues like addressing moral decline and decreasing the influence of lobbyists.”

Instead, according to ecoAmerica those seeking to build public support for environmental central-government planning should simply alter their communications to the following more soothing terminology:

• Old: “global warming”
  New: “our deteriorating atmosphere”
• Old: “carbon dioxide”
  New: “moving away from the dirty fuels of the past”
• Old: “energy efficiency”
  New: “saving money for a more prosperous future”
• Old: “the environment”
  New: “the air we breathe, the water our children drink”
• Old: “cap and trade”
  New: “cap and cash back” or “pollution reduction refund”

As further reported by the Times, ecoAmerica counsels that environmental communications should be kept vague with as little pertinent information as possible:

Another key finding: remember to speak in TALKING POINTS aspirational language about shared American ideals, like freedom, prosperity, independence and self-sufficiency while avoiding jargon and details about policy, science, economics or technology.

Of course, the “old” terminology was earlier concocted as environmental propaganda as well, and it has fallen short not because of misperceptions by the public, but because most environmental fear-mongering has repeatedly been shown to be either greatly exaggerated or completely unfounded and bogus.

For propaganda-free environmental analysis, stay clear of political spin-doctors and instead see the following Independent Institute books:

• Re-Thinking Green: Alternatives to Environmental Bureaucracy, edited by Robert Higgs and Carl P. Close
• A Poverty of Reason: Sustainable Development and Economic Growth, by Wilfred Beckerman
• Plowshares & Pork Barrels: The Political Economy of Agriculture, by Ernest C. Pasour, Jr., and Randal R. Rucker
• Hot Talk, Cold Science: Global Warming’s Unfinished Debate, by S. Fred Singer

When I began my academic career, I was fortunate to work in a department of economics in which several of my colleagues, including Yoram Barzel, Steven N. S. Cheung, and Douglass C. North, had a keen interest in property rights and their implications for economic action. I soon began to work in several related research areas, including contractual choice in agriculture, and over the years a number of my articles and important parts of my books have pertained to property rights in some fashion.

Perhaps the most important proposition in the economics of property rights is that people will not care for a resource they do not own as well as they will care for a resource they do own. It is amazing how much fashionable economic belief — for example, nearly everything ever advanced in support of socialism, as well as the bulk of what passes for environmentalist policy proposals — fails to take adequate account of this virtually axiomatic proposition.

But don’t take my word for it — or even the word of any of my illustrious former colleagues at the University of Washington. Take the word of Jesus of Nazareth.

In the tenth chapter of the Gospel According to John, Jesus is trying to make a point, but his listeners are not getting it, so he finally gives them a parable he can be sure they will understand (verses 11-13):

The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep. The hired hand, who is not the shepherd and does not own the sheep, sees the wolf coming and leaves the sheep and runs away — and the wolf snatches them and scatters them. The hired hand runs away because a hired hand does not care for the sheep. I am the good shepherd. I know my own and my own know me.

Hired hands must be monitored closely if the owner is to prevent them from diminishing or destroying the value of the capital he has provided for them to work with. In postbellum southern agriculture, for example, plantation owners monitored sharecroppers, to whom they furnished mules, more closely than they monitored tenants who furnished their own mules. The typical plantation layout placed the wage workers in fields closest to the owner’s house, the sharecroppers a little farther away, and the fixed-rent tenants in the most outlying areas. This arrangement allowed monitoring costs to be minimized. (Anyone who wants to see a thorough survey and analysis of these contractual arrangements might wish to consult Lee J. Alston and Robert Higgs, “Contractual Mix in Southern Agriculture since the Civil War: Facts, Hypotheses, and Tests,” Journal of Economic History 42 [June 1982]: 327-53.)

If you don’t care for economic theory or econometrics, just read the Bible.

Economist Anna Schwartz devoted ten years to gathering and analyzing the data that went into her book with Milton Friedman, A Monetary History of the United States, 1867-1960. It was the empirical rigor of that book that reminded economists and central bankers of a truth many of them had forgotten—namely, that excessive growth of the money supply drives up prices. Thus Schwartz helped set the stage for the monetary tightening that tamed the tiger of inflation in the United States and Great Britain in the early 1980s. Schwartz hasn’t let up—she’s still working diligently at the National Bureau of Economic Research, where she has worked since 1941. The implication here is that her opinion on money and the economy matters far, far more than most people’s opinions because she knows what she is talking about.

Although she has shunned the media spotlight, Schwartz shares her insights on the current financial mess in the spring issue of City Journal. Here are some excerpts from that article.

This lesson of the recent past seems all but forgotten, Schwartz says. Instead of staying the monetarist course, Volcker’s successor as Fed chairman, Alan Greenspan, too often preferred to manage the economy—a fatal conceit, a monetarist would say. Greenspan wanted to avoid recessions at all costs. By keeping interest rates at historic lows, however, his easy money fueled manias: first the Internet bubble and then the now-burst mortgage bubble. . . .

Greenspan’s successor, Ben Bernanke, has followed the same path in confronting the current economic crisis, Schwartz charges. Instead of the steady course that the monetarists recommend, the Fed and the Treasury “try to break news on a daily basis and they look for immediate gratification,” she says. . . .

Bernanke is right about the past, Schwartz says, “but he is fighting the wrong war today; the present crisis has nothing to do with a lack of liquidity.” President Obama’s stimulus is similarly irrelevant, she believes, since the crisis also has nothing to do with a lack of demand or investment. The credit crunch, which is the recession’s actual cause, comes only from a lack of trust, argues Schwartz. Lenders aren’t lending because they don’t know who is solvent, and they can’t know who is solvent because portfolios remain full of mortgage-backed securities and other toxic assets. . . .

What about “systemic risk”—much heard about these days to justify the government’s massive intervention in the economy in recent months? Schwartz considers this an excuse for bankers to save their skins after making so many bad decisions. “The worst thing for a government to do, though, is to act without principles, to make ad hoc decisions, to do something one day and another thing tomorrow,” she says. The market will respond positively only after the government begins to follow a steady, predictable course. To prove her point, Schwartz points out that nothing the government has done to date has really thawed credit.

Schwartz indicts Bernanke for fighting the wrong war. Could one turn the same accusation against her? Should we worry about inflation when some believe deflation to be the real enemy? “The risk of deflation is very much exaggerated,” she answers. Inflation seems to her “unavoidable”: the Federal Reserve is creating money with little restraint, while Treasury expenditures remain far in excess of revenue. The inflation spigot is thus wide open. To beat the coming inflation, a “new Paul Volcker will be needed at the head of the Federal Reserve.”

Many property owners came forward to tell their horror stories at the meeting the State Advisory Committee (which I chair) of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. Something is rotten in the home of the modern civil rights movement. I’ll post photos later today (time permitting). Here is the story in the Montgomery Advertiser:

Two men, Jimmie McCall and Jim Peera, told the committee that the city of Montgomery was using these ordinances to take land away from low-income minority property owners.

Both men have a long history with the city, and each has litigation against the city pending.

Peera is the owner of Avon Court Apartments, which he noted was about a block away from where Rosa Parks lived. The city had a portion of the apartment complex demolished after certain units were found to be unsafe.

Peera, who is from Africa, said he had a $1 million plan to revitalize the property and turn it into affordable housing but that the city blocked that project by rezoning the property from multi-family to single-family dwellings.

“This shouldn’t be happening in Rosa Parks’ backyard,” Peera told the committee members.

“I believe it’s what I call the backdoor to eminent domain. It’s all about control,” said Peera, who lives in Atlanta.

In McCall’s case, the black Montgomery resident’s would-be home was torn down before it was finished after the city’s housing codes office found it to be unsafe. He had planned to build his “dream home” on a two-acre property at 3118 Woodley Road.

McCall collects abandoned materials, like Southern Longleaf pinewood and old bricks, and resells them.

He had socked away a collection for himself and was keeping those materials on his property as he worked to build the home.

“This was going to be our dream home, as far as dream houses go,” McCall told the committee. He was wearing a T-shirt that read “Hands off my home.”

The Bush team said waterboarding was not a crime and was painless, but Reagan’s DOJ prosecuted a sheriff for using it to get confessions. This story also demonstrates the depravity of our justice system here at home.

The District Attorney of Contra Costa County, California—one of the wealthiest regions in the United States, with a median household income of $86,709—has announced that his office will no longer prosecute assaults, thefts, burglaries, felony drug cases, shoplifting, trespassing, and a host of other crimes, due to budget cuts.

Needless to say, an uproar has followed this announcement, and I’ve no doubt the D.A. will succeed in obtaining a different solution to the “crisis” than the current budget cuts.

This of course is a classic case of threatening to close fire houses and libraries as the first response to every threat of a budget cut: behind-the-scenes, high-paid bureaucrats, or new, high-paid “green” jobs or departments are never targeted. Instead, services whose cuts will be immediately seen are held out for sacrifice, with the predicted result that already hurting taxpayers volunteer another pound of flesh to save the sacred cow.

The lack of any kind of serious scrutiny by the lapdog press ensures the success, time and again, of this blackmail. Nowhere do I see any mention of the huge amounts Contra Costa has lost in providing police, medical personnel and firefighters with highly favorable health and retirement benefits without proper actuarial examination, resulting in unbudgeted-for, high costs as personnel age and ultimately retire with continued first class health and retirement benefits.

The 2009-2010 Contra Costa budget is 9% below last year’s, yet still 10% above that of 5 years ago. Households and companies across the country are facing income declines that much and far greater; but none is reacting by cutting its core activities.

Contra Costa residents should stare down this attempted blackmail, take a chapter from our book, To Serve and Protect, relieve the county government of its monopoly on police protection and justice services, and keep their taxes. As the book’s author Bruce Benson points out:

Government police forces, prosecutors, courts, and prisons are all recent historical developments, results of a political and bureaucratic social experiment which neither protects the innocent nor dispenses justice.