Power is Power is Power

The Bolsheviks established a government with power sufficient to appropriate any and all property. Somehow they didn't give much thought to just how a government that powerful would be kept in check.  Maybe they thought, well it will be our government so why should it go wrong (fortunately, America's founding fathers did not think that way). The vast majority of prominent Bolsheviks, if they lived into the 1930s, were eventually rounded up and murdered by their own creation. What were they thinking? Activists have a tendency to believe that the kind of power they envision and identify with will remain "good". Desperation can breed sloppy thinking. The Russia of 1917 was a terrible place; things were in flux; now was the chance to change it ...

Fast forward to the 1990s. Russia seemed for the moment to be headed towards Democracy, but to a group of radical free marketeers who were somehow charged with transforming the economy, it seemed desperately important to get the "means of production" back into private hands. Apparently which private hands didn't seem to matter. Everything was in flux; the moment could be lost if not seized now. And so vast enterprizes came to be privately owned by ex party hacks and a few "wild west" style entrepreneurs. Newly billionaires got total control over the media, and elections were highjacked, and Russia reversed course, away from democracy and free speech. Enormous piles of money in the midst of a population that had lost all its savings, and was lucky if they received any wage at all, could buy just about anything.

Businesses big enough to buy and sell small or poor countries can rival the most misguided states when it comes to destroying freedom and democracy. Look at Russia, and look at the history of Latin America. The U.S.'s Founding Fathers set up a system of competition between branches of government to make it less likely to devolve into absolutism, but government is our only tool for disciplining the potential tyranny of wealth. When too much power is taken away from government, as with Weimar, and the Russia of the 1990s, it invites takeover by some other power, which then becomes, in effect the government. The next step after a government small enough to "drown in a bathtub" is typically not pretty. For Russia as a case in point, see Sale of the Century by Chrystia Freeland.

The Free Market, The Public Sector, and What Should Government Do?

A major and perhaps the greatest problem with the purist libertarian position -- that the ideal government should only stop crime, enforce contracts, and protect us from outside threats -- is summed up in the aphorism "To the man with only a hammer, the whole world looks like a nail." The Cold Warriors who wrote The Ugly American were quite ready to celebrate smart applications of violence. But they had quite a list of things for which the U.S. needed something other than that hammer with which to fight the Communist powers, and blamed much of our failure up to that time to our lack of capacity and willingness to use imaginative non-military methods to push back against the Communists. They pointed out things that the enemy did, like having embassy staff that knew the local language and lived much like the locals, like running schools in Southeast Asian countries teaching the skills people needed most -- a sort of Soviet Peace Corps 10 years before the U.S. tried that. The Communists seemed to value provision of peaceful benefits, as much as they valued the ability to pull off vicious underhanded dirty tricks, and both served them well, while U.S. policy-makers seemed to only envy their efficiency and freedom from scruples. It is a shame the title "Ugly American" became a byword for something that only played a small part in the book -- American boorishness. It was much more about lack of imagination (to use something besides the hammer) and common sense together with the ability to connect to people of dramatically different culture.

Turning to the aim of domestic peace -- consider what I heard recently about the California prison system, where the philosophy of only punishing and stopping criminals basically robbed it of effectiveness once all training and educational programs were stripped away (need to expand this). In the TV series The Wire, you had policemen and women with a very deep understanding of criminals as human beings, but not any less "tough" as a result. You had people fighting crime with a very effective combination of force and of empathy (dare we say even love, at times -- consider "Bunny", the black police commander who adopted a young man who had seemed to be on the road to viciousness).

The idea of the "empathetic warrior" has always been deeply interesting to me, from the imaginary "Caine" of the "Kung Fu" series (a naive fantasy I admit) to Joseph Stilwell, they have fascinated me. It is the opposite of the idea that when fighting something, you must treat the people who embody that thing (e.g. criminality or the Communist ideal/delusion) as embodiments of evil to be crushed. It calls for the ability to imagine that they could be something else. This includes the interrogator, like David Alexander (How to Break a Terrorist) who can "turn" an Islamic terrorist rather than (usually futilely) trying to beat information out of him.

I have to face head-on the idea that there is something "parental" about this attitude, and that is just what many people abhor (i.e. the "nanny state"). But all of the bad parenting in the world doesn't invalidate the idea of taking responsibility for children with compassion and force when needed. And all of the stupidities and crimes perpetrated by governments and parties in the name of dreams of a better world (whether that "better world" is a socialist or free market ideal) do not invalidate the idea of a community somehow acting in a collective fashion to try to promote the welfare of its individuals with compassion, imagination, and at times, but as little as possible, force.

Most people, though they may sing the praises of freedom (Burke "snuff the approach of tyranny in every tainted breeze"; Johnson's "yelps"), know this on some level, but then their minds get stuck in some particular rather perverse image of what that looks like -- one that reassures individuals that it is not their responsibility and none of their business -- a simplistic view of the "benevolent dictator". It might be Winston Churchill not preventing the bombing of some town so that the Germans would not discover their intelligence leak, or the Colonel played by Jack Nicholson shouting "You can't handle the truth". I'm sure that Soviet era Russian textbooks could provide many more such romantically tinged vignettes of leaders making "the hard decisions", but why dwell so much on such examples. I suspect there is some kind of agenda, maybe conscious or maybe not, behind the propagation of such images.

The Need for Real, not Theoretical Economic Freedom and Momentum

In 2003, Iraq was turned into a nation of people with no jobs and no way to get jobs, no daily routine, and essentially nothing to lose. However, the existence of an occupying power, and a few fanatic demagogues filled the void for many of those newly directionless people, and what happenned next is pretty well known.  It should have been predictable

Let me take a stab at a rough division into sectors of economies in the modern world:

• Government proper - military, police, courts, postal service, tax collection, ...
• Government-industrial complex - i.e. most manufacturing in the USSR as well as in Saddam Hussein's Iraq, but should we also include road building and maintenance in the U.S.?
• Education - may well belong to some larger category - to be determined.
• Private goods-creation (industry but also building, restaurants, ...)
• The business of exchange of everything else
• The Primordial Soup, from which new political life forms are apt to emerge. The people with nothing to do and nothing to lose.

So you could say one factor in Iraq was that perhaps half the population got thrown into the primordial soup overnight. A similar thing happenned in post-Soviet Russia.

Iraq seems to have been approached with the simplistic idea that, with the help of the "invisible hand":

  Toppling the dictator ==>
          Freedom and Democracy ==>
                  Things will be "normal" like in the U.S.

Had our government instead done a sober analysis of the institutions that kept peoples' lives from falling apart, and tried to preserve their continuity (with improvements to be made over time), we would not have set up such a breeding ground for both plain criminality (first looting and trashing the infrastructure) as well as terrorism.

These institutions included "inefficient" state run industry (by the quotes I'm not asserting it was efficient, but compared to what? To nothing being manufactured, and people having no place to go to work?), which I gather the occupying forces tried to disband overnight, as well as the military, which was either disbanded or non-functional during the period when most of what was left of Iraq's infrastructure was destroyed, which made it far more difficult to bring back any sort of normal economic life, which in turn multiplied the number of people being dumped into the primordial soup.

The disbanding of the state industrial complex was done in the name of Free Marketism, but it took the Iraqis further away from the ideal of a humming society of people producing and exchanging goods.

"Free marketers" tend to be fixated on noninterference and nonparticipation by government to the point of overlooking the destruction of the closest thing to a market that there was, and leaving a chaotic vacuum, as happened in Iraq and Russia.  The Russia case is well described in Sale of the Century: Russia's Wild Ride from Communism to Capitalism.