Corruption and poverty in the Third World are often observed together. But which causes which? Which is the chicken and which the egg? Take the town of Juarez in Mexico, which is right across the border from El Paso, Texas. The BBC recently characterized the violence there as a struggle between the forces of law and order and violent drug cartels. Good versus evil. But others are not so sure. Some residents, who refused to be named, saw the drug cartels as a symptom of the lack of law and order in Mexico. In that narrative, the government was simply another gang fighting for the very same spoils the drug cartels were striving for.
The children of El Paso’s Glen Cove Elementary School have not been told that a gunman shot their classmate dead. Nor have they been told that someone across the Rio Grande in Mexico thought nothing of killing the seven-year-old. Or that the gunman left Jociel Ramierez alone to die, as the blood seeped out of his body on a busy roundabout. … He may not be the first US citizen to be killed in what have been called Mexico’s drug wars, but he probably is the youngest. His death is also a vivid illustration of how low Juarez has fallen, and how little the Mexican authorities seem able do about it.
When Felipe Calderon became president almost three years ago, he declared war on the drug cartels that he blamed for the breakdown of law and order across the country. … The Mexican government believes that given time it will win the fight. … some are beginning to question that certainty … People like Jociel Ramierez’s aunt, who prefers not to be named for fear of retribution, and who has a different solution to the problem: “We have to end corruption, maybe that’s the way to finish it.”
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The BBC authors argue that what is fueling corruption — and by extension the drug trade — is poverty. “Poverty is blamed for driving many into the arms of drug cartels.” And poverty, in the eyes of some is the inevitable consequence of globalization. Others however, have taken a different view. Corruption is the problem. In that narrative the arrow of causality goes at least partially in the other direction. Nations are not corrupt because they are poor. Countries are poor because they are corrupt.
“We have an unsustainable economy – a globalised economy – which pays very low wages. That allowed an alternative economy to be created which also globalised – drugs. Both economies are playing here. Juarez is a very important place for both.” … the Mexican economy functions for an elite group – not for the average person. A teacher for instance gets 3,000 pesos every week ($230) – transporting drugs around the country can get you up to 30 times more than that he tells me. Poverty is driving many into the arms of the very cartels the government wants to wipe out. …
Many, though, like the businessman who prefers to remain anonymous, believe it will take something more. “What we need to change is our political model. We need to establish to establish a rule of law that functions, that gives rights to every citizen, so that they are not taken advantage of.”
In many ways the question of which end of the poverty-corruption system to begin represents the central problem in development — and even counterinsurgency — theory. Two economics professors, Raymond Fisman and Edward Miguel in a book called Economic Gangsters appear to link the two in the following way: in much of the world there’s simply no incentive to being honest and therefore dishonesty has become a way of life. Anyone who doubts that can simply follow Third World diplomats at the UN as they flick away their parking tickets.
Meet the economic gangster. Hes the United Nations diplomat who double parks his Mercedes on a New York street at rush hour, because the cops can’t touch him — he has diplomatic immunity. He’s the dictator, the warlord, the black marketeers, the unscrupulous bureaucrat who bilks the developing world of billions of aid and keeps many communities in a cycle of violence and poverty.
Now the economic gangster is likely to be the Western diplomat’s friend, if only because that is who commonly must deal with in countries like Mexico. And he is likely to receive sympathetic treatment from members of the Western Press — what with his colorful local costume, quaint accent and penchant for blaming all the ills of the world on the West. But to most of the people in his home country the economic gangster is the man on the big white house on the hill with an army of bodyguards to protect him.
To Professors’s Fisman and Miguel the basic solution is simple: at least the principles were — to use economics to increase the benefits of honesty and increase the costs of dishonesty. They write: “Basic economic principles … can help guide us … greater government financial transparency … increasing the salaries of government officials to reduce bribe-taking … the stick in the policeman’s cost-benefit trade off … credible threat of punishment … that’s all there is to it.”
But as the (UK) Times Higher Education website put it, asking the Western intelligensia to put their faith in such principles is asking for an awful lot. How can anyone trust greed and fear, or worse yet a combination of greed and fear — the policeman’s cost-benefit trade off between a slightly larger salary and a much higher threat of punishment — to reduce corruption and poverty in the Third World. But the Times site was at least willing to admit that the concept seemed appealing.
It is hard to think of a better time for a book with the title Economic Gangsters to hit the shelves. At the peak of the financial crisis, terms such as “greed”, “morality” and “financial crimes” dominated public and political discourse. Obvious to everybody, “economic gangsters” had been at work in financial markets, which were now in need of a strong injection of morality after unrestrained market forces and immoral bankers had failed us utterly. … Economic Gangsters is the latest example in a string of popular accounts of economics that offer to show how to make use of its insights in all realms of life.
But the misgivings about relying on the simple power of markets are not entirely misplaced. Fixing the incentives are not “all there is to it”. Somebody has to jump start it and take the first step; to insist on the road audits in Indonesia or shame corrupt officials in Bogota. Somebody has to take Kenyan cops to court and shepherd the proposal for slightly higher police salaries through its byzantine bureaucracy. Somebody has got to un-elect corrupt Mexican officialdom and put the finger on gangsters in Juarez. In other words, somebody has got to take the risk and bell the cat, to get the ball rolling, simply to sell the idea that standards ought to exist and market forces have to be harnessed to end corruption and poverty. That’s all there is to it, but it’s a lot.
Breaking the cycle of corruption, poverty and violence in the Third World requires an initial infusion of force and good governance in order to make the subsequent economic development work. The experience in Iraq dramatically demonstrated that security was not simply the outcome of economic development, it was its also its necessary condition. Security and governance was at once the precondition and the outcome of creating a correct system of incentives. The egg was necessary for the chicken and the chicken necessary for the egg. The administration’s current dilemma in Afghanistan stems from their desire to create the former without the latter; to use diplomacy and economic development to achieve security without protecting it with security. They want the egg without the chicken; to produce something from outside the cycle. No wonder President Obama is taking such a long time to figure it out.
The decision to commit an initial infusion of force or influence to establish good governance represents the riskiest part of the intervention curve. Once the incentive-punishment function is established, things can proceed more easily. But that initial step is fraught with political risk. In the early 19th century, military commanders understood that greatest cost would have to be borne the troops who made the breach in the enemy defenses. They were called the Forlorn Hope. In the market for heroes the payoff was simply what Napoleon called “a bit of colored ribbon”.
A forlorn hope is a band of soldiers or other combatants chosen to take the leading part in a military operation, such as an assault on a defended position, where the risk of casualties is high. The term comes from the Dutch verloren hoop, literally “lost heap”, and adapted as “lost troop”. … In the days of muzzle-loading muskets, it was most frequently used to refer to the first wave of soldiers attacking a breach in defences during a siege. It was likely that most members of the forlorn hope would be killed or wounded. The intention was that some would survive long enough to seize a foothold that could be reinforced, or at least that a second wave with better prospects could be sent in while the defenders were reloading or engaged in mopping up the remnants of the first wave.
A forlorn hope was typically led by a junior officer with hopes of personal advancement. If he survived, and performed courageously, he was almost guaranteed both a promotion and a long-term boost to his career prospects. As a result, despite the risks, there was often competition for the opportunity to lead the assault. The French equivalent of the forlorn hope, called Les Enfants Perdus or The Lost Children, were all guaranteed promotion to officers should they survive, so that both men and officers took up the suicidal mission as an opportunity to raise themselves in the army.
So while the problems in Mexico, Iraq, Afghanistan and maybe Chicago will in the long run be solved by fixing the “incentives problem” — a conclusion for which we should always be indebted to Professors Fisman and Miguel for — the task will have to be achieved under the protection of a Forlorn Hope: a generation of politicians, policemen, soldiers and activists for whom there will be no reward. Not even the dawn. Though one hopes for the colored ribbon or at least the fond memory of Felina at Rosie’s Cantina.
“‘Twas once in the saddle I used to go dashing,
‘Twas once in the saddle I used to go gay.
First to the dram-house, and then to the card-house,
Got shot in the breast, and I’m dying today.”Muffle your drums, play your pipes merrily,
Play the death march as you go along.
And fire your guns right over my coffin,
There goes an unfortunate lad to his home“Get six jolly cowboys to carry my coffin,
Get six pretty maidens to bear up my pall.
Put bunches of roses all over my coffin,
Roses to deaden the sods as they fall.”
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The rule of law is supposed to be the Jews’ contribution to western society, the people of the book.
But, what happens when you cannot follow the book?
Ayn Rand covered this in Atlas Shrugged, “of course you can’t follow the laws, that’s what they’re there for!” With violations on record, you make an “extra-legal” deal, or you die.
If the book is bad, you get corruption – and poverty. Maybe neither causes the other, nor cures the other. Maybe that’s the real problem with Islam, too – a bad book, people use it as a sanction to beat others, and everyone is compromised. Or, write a bad book on purpose – like, Rules for Radicals! We often complain about this with China regarding intellectual property rights and trademarks. I’ve seen the argument, that’s why Chinese companies cheat – all products are anonymous, there is no incentive to follow the laws and build up your reputation for the benefit of future sales and profits.
No easy answers.
So it goes.
"Breaking the cycle of corruption, poverty and violence in the Third World requires an initial infusion of force and good governance in order to make the subsequent economic development work."One of Team 44′s first legal steps was to re-establish funding for abortion in Mexico. Does that count as force, good governance or subsequent economic development?
DHS is now touting the screening southbound shipments for cash and weapons. Speaking of “lost heap”.
Effective problem resolution usually requires prior accurate problem identification.
This is a great opportunity to ask if anyone knows what happened to the blogger and blog Mark in Mexico
When, name me a time in history, when Mexico hasn’t been a basket case?
We abet the drug problem by having an almost insatiable appetite for cocaine and weed. I’m not sure we can blame an obviously inferior people for using to their advantage the environment they are encouraged to feed.
Sound:
http://tinyurl.com/6l3bjp
This post is aptly named. Relying on an administration practicing “the Chicago way” of governance will only deepen the problem. Until our younger generations “grow a pair” and wise up, we are sunk. And unfortunately our southern neighbors will suffer even deeper consequences of our frivolous perfidy.
If anyone solves Mexico’s problem it will have to be a generation of Mexican politicians, intellectuals and military men who can become the Forlorn Hope of their country. In general that’s what it takes. About all the US or a foreign country can do is cheer them on, or when necessary, defend against foreign intervention by those who would perpetuate the problem.
In practice the opposite often happens. Diplomats and businessmen often do business with and become personal acquaintances of these “economic gangsters”, who are often not without individual charm. Gangsters are interesting and diplomats and academics are often more than willing to be interested. Moreover the incentive to do work for the development banks or UN agencies plus the ideology of guilt creates the eternal justification to play the foreign aid game, even though it is really a terrible thing consisting of poor people in rich countries giving money to rich people in poor countries. And therefore it has the odor of sanctity about it despite the fact that it is largely useless and funds the academic left into the bargain.
The West also needs a Forlorn Hope. People who are willing to say the obvious about foreign aid and “development” for example. But try criticizing the UN — let alone a UN diplomat who uses parking tickets as scratch paper — and you too will find your hopes forlorn.
All of these approaches assume implicitly that those attributes which have made the West the most successful civilization in world history are somehow possible to graft onto other systems which have not had similar success. Is this even rational? Think of Southern California (US) vs Baha California (Mexico). Virtually identical geologically and geographically — identical in terms of the natural resources each possesses — (vast coastlines, mountains, deserts) yet one is the epitome of First-World prosperity, rule of law, and civilization, the other is a veritable sewer of human degradation, poverty, and corruption. The difference is in the software — the people — the society — the civilization. Mexico, because of her software, is congenitally corrupt, poor, broken, and doomed to fail. It’s virtually impossible to graft better software onto the miserable joke of Mexico’s existing software and expect anything other than what we see: A failed state.
Now think of Pakistan and India. Both are cut from identical cloth in terms of history, resources, and attributes, except one is Exhibit A in illustrations of the demerits of Islamic software, the other is Exhibit A in the benefits of a civilization willing to jettison those aspects of its original software to embrace First World software.
Modern intellectuals like to look at the abject failures of various Third World software enterprises and blame First World software for those failures. This is hardly the case. I initially supported the WoT because I wanted to administer a titanic drubbing against the Islamic software that generated 9/11. What we got instead was a minor drubbing against Islam followed by an insane attempt to graft First World software onto the most backward recondite software of Islam. Meanwhile, the real culprits behind the reinvigorated Islamic Jihad, Saudi Arabia, various other vile Gulf Arab satrapies, Iran, and their various Islamic Frankensteins of Pakistan, “Palestine”, Syria, Libya, all remain completely intact. Not only that, Islamic “experts” like Noah Feldman and Reuel Marc Gerecht sold the snakeoil that we’d do well in these Muslim swamps to place Islamic Law (Sharia) at the top of the new constitutions we drafted upon the overthrows of Afghanistan and Iraq. In short, scoundrels and morons assured that every gain obtained by overthrowing two bad Muslim actors were completely nullified by rebooting with Islamic software rather than our own. Our utter failure was guaranteed at that point.
Sometimes I wonder if Mexico is a case of family values gone wrong. Mexicans tend to absolve themselves of any misdeed if it is done to protect or maintain one’s family. By extension this means that you have to think well of the folks who take care of you and yours, and you have to help them when called upon to do so. Sorta makes wrongdoing a matter of honor and personal responsibility.
VDH says that we get our civic responsibility stuff from the Greeks and the Romans. I don’t think they know about the Greeks in Mexico. Maybe it’s time they learned.
Maybe it will take, in Mexico and elsewhere, as Wretchard says “a generation of Mexican politicians, intellectuals and military men to set things right.”
I think it will take more. Go back to flicking away the parking tickets in NYC. The problem is the attitude. All the intellectuals, politicians and military men imaginable can’t fix that. Even Caesar and Augustus had a working culture that they could build on.
What’s needed, besides the politicians, intellectuals and military men — is something from the bottom up. Something that makes the diplomat not want to flick away the parking ticket, but to pay it, or to have shame that he is not; something that makes the criminal ashamed to kill the seven year old. It has to be not only rational to follow the laws, but just and proper and right to do so. Law by compulsion, by force — by rationality — is a second rate, inferior solution to a social problem. The better solution internalizes the desire to live at peace and in harmony and righteously with ones neighbors. In most societies, religion has filled this role.
The problem is not just one for the third world. Our civilization in general is consuming the moral capital accumulated by generations of religiously socialized, law abiding citizens. Since some of us have declared God dead, and that we’re each our own Gods, we rely to a greater and greater degree on compulsion and fear of consequences to ensure compliance with the laws.
Mexico and the Third World started, perhaps, at a different place. Judeo-Christian social and religious institutions, for a variety of reasons, never got a firm foothold there. But America and Europe are abandoning that particular past.
Maybe we will wind up, eventually, at the same place as Mexico? The war of all against all. Nature abhors a vacuum. What replaces religion? Nothing. . .except a new religion.
To Wretchard; Morton Doodslag; and El Jefe Maximo;
I have, for some time, believed that one of the unexpected positives of the massive immigration from Mexico, albeit illegal, is that enough of those who come here are being transformed, and will become the agents for change in their home land.
Drive through any southwestern town or city, and the number of Spanish language churches is striking.
Many of these churches are small, where the parisioners/members are becoming spiritually transformed and becoming schooled in the process of building a church community, and in the process of civics and democracy that is possible here in the US.
The number of these churches which have outreach back in Mexico is very high.
Mexicans are helping Mexicans, as Christians, and are participating as redeemed people, helping to effect the process of redemption of that culture south of the border.
This is where the fundamental change for Mexico, and other corrupt Third World nations will originate, in the change in individual hearts, a culture transformed from the bottom up.
As a diplomatic brat I lived in Mexico for 14 years, the last two in Ciudad Juarez. Corruption is everwhere, at all levels of society, all the time. It is a way of life for poor and rich alike. To a great degree it is cultural. The big man has a responsibility to take care of his followers, which is pretty much the model that Mexican society uses. I give the big man (anybody higher up the pecking order than me) his “mordida”, his bite, to get access to goods and services that he can obtain for me but which I cannot otherwise obtain for myself. He in turn has to grease the palms of those above him for the same reason. No mordida, “Te chingaste, cabrón,” too bad about you. This is why the Mexican president is only allowed to serve one term, rake in as much as you can get, then get out and let the next guy get his. Play the game and you’ll be taken care of.
The corollary is that if you don’t play the game you can’t be trusted, there are no grounds for reciprocity. To advance you must grease the palms of those who can help you, or you won’t advance. Once you have advanced you must do the same for those above, and grant favors to those below you who are greasing your palm, or you won’t get any cooperation.
Theft is pandemic. Everybody steals from everybody all the time. People spend a great deal of time and energy protecting whatever they have and looking for an opening to snag something from anyone else. It has come to such a pass that people steal not so much because they need or even want the object of theft, but because “Se dejó,” he left an opening.
Juarez has always been rife with violence. Mexico has strict gun control laws so in earlier times the killings did not involve firearms among organized groups, murder and assaults were always very high. For the vast majority of Mexicans sunk in poverty there is no recourse to the law, for this you must pay, amigo. No can pay? “Te chingaste, cabrón.”
In such a war of all against all I do not believe that a true market economy can develop. Nor can a healthy society. Yet this war obtains over most of the world. What is true of Mexico is true of Latin America, Africa and Asia. What is different about the US and the West in general is that in these cultures that war has been cut down to a low roar, which gets attended to by the authorities when it gets too obnoxious.
The best thing that could happen to Mexico is to be annexed by the United States and forced to live by American rules for a century or two. That should do the trick, one generation won’t.
One thing that third world elites are very good at is corruption. The globalized economy means that the targets of their corruption go way beyond Mexico City, Laredo or El Paso. Washington DC comes well within range and so does London, Brussels and Paris. Corruption is a self-replicating system. Either it is actively fought or it eventually gains the upper hand. “Fought” is probably the operative word. It’s permanent defeat is unlikely, but like the garbage or the stuff in the septic tank, it can be bounded if you keep throwing out the trash or getting the tank pumped out. But absent that it won’t go away
The first step ought to be not feeding it. Development aid should be stopped. Corruption should be explicitly recognized in public discourse. The problem with the UN is that it treats Su Excelencia El Presidente of the Republica Del Platano as though he were the head of a European nation state when that is not necessarily the case. To some extent, globalization can only continue if the working parts of the world system are protected, like an operating system, from the viruses. Otherwise, crash.
In Chicago, we have recently been saddened to learn of the suicide of one Michael Scott, a wheeler-dealer power-broker who has been around for decades, close personal friend of Mayor Daley, etc. Mr. Scott’s death has been officially ruled a suicide by the Cook County Coroner’s office.
Mr. Scott left no suicide note, had not been recently depressed or erratic, and was scheduled to testify soon before a Grand Jury. The most impressive thing about the suicide? Mr. Scott managed to shoot himself and then dump his own body in the Chicago River. Or perhaps he shot himself in midair as he jumped into the river. Or perhaps he shot himself while treading water in the river.
Corruption, like entropy, increases inexorably unless outside forces act to arrest the process. With Obama’s election and the accession to total power of the Dems, the Chicago Way is going national. I don’t think we have a prayer.
I can’t help but see a warning for us in the spiraling lawlessness infecting Mexico. Our academicians and law professors, the intellectual classes, could help Mexico, but they are so firmly and romantically engaged in advocating exclusively for offenders that they have made themselves worse than useless to any effort that involves restoring order, here or there. What a waste.
I will note that the Taliban’s claim to fame is fighting the corruption – of the secular authority.
Amadinejad’s claim to fame is also opposing the corruption – of the religious authority.
I still cannot make out if corruption is a cause or effect, except of some other fault much wider.
I think that an important component to corruption is the lack of political legitimacy. Mexico, for example, has had six constitutions since gaining independence. The ad hoc consitution of Queretaro, now in force, was cobbled together in 1917 by representatives of the various military jefes. (Economic gangster meet chaotic revolutionary conditions.) On paper, this constitution is an admirable expression of the progressive ideals of the age, with explicit articles treating the relationship of labor and capital, land tenure for the peones, etc. But, this high minded document ratified without popular representation has never been enforceable, contributing to a pervasive cynicism and hypocrisy throughout Mexican society.
By contrast, our venerable U.S. constitution is a simple rulebook providing a framework for competing interests to peacefully strive for power, while limiting that power. Because our constitution is so easy to comply with, our government and its officials have been an order of magnitude more accountable than such self consciously *progressive* nations like Mexico.
**
Stephen:
Here is Dalrymple with similar observations about Rhodesia/Zimbwabwe:
http://www.city-journal.org/html/13_2_oh_to_be.html
Mr. Scott left no suicide note, had not been recently depressed or erratic, and was scheduled to testify soon before a Grand Jury. The most impressive thing about the suicide? Mr. Scott managed to shoot himself and then dump his own body in the Chicago River. Or perhaps he shot himself in midair as he jumped into the river. Or perhaps he shot himself while treading water in the river.
Have you no faith in miracles? Johan Huizinga wrote that one of the things that distinguished the Middle Ages from our cynical world was the passionate intensity of life. They wept, dance and sang. Doubtless they also shot themselves while leaping into the river. Huizinga wrote of that distant age:
But maybe the old times live again in the city of the broad shoulders. Why only recently, the former chief fundraiser for former Governor Blagojevich killed himself in a lumber yard by swallowing the equivalent of 500 tablets of aspirin. Prodigies and portents are not unusual in certain places. Funny how people who won’t believe in religious miracles will believe in the even more astounding secular kind.
I have read that military coups arise when the military culture is more effective than the political culture to which it is intended to be subordinate. This seems to make sense and apply to a majority of the coups that have been performed in the past, but it does not offer hope for Mexico. The Mexican military is cut from the same corrupt cloth as the rest of the government, they have had to go to the extreme of manufacturing a unique indigenous rifle so that rifles stolen from the Mexican military could be identified. More than likely, this was done simply to make it harder for Mexican supply officers to sell the rifles outright. That’s never a good sign.
I’m well away from the Texas-Mexico border but it does get me to thinking how long it will be before the pathologies of the Mexican experience begin moving deeper into places like South Texas, southern Arizona and southern California. We don’t have Mexican gun-control laws, but as individuals our ability to repel boarders actively intent on taking local control from our own state and local authorities is limited. Most Americans have never been given the plomo o plato choice with a gun to their head or that of their loved ones.
It does make you wonder how BHO would handle a large-scale spillover of Mexican violence into America. It would tend to call into question our large commitment to pacifying and defeating The Other in the Middle East while ignoring The Other just across the river, at least in terms of troop commitment and budget. When the border fence is being held up on environmental grounds, it makes me think that some people aren’t real serious about having a border at all.
Oh, shoot… I just had an ugly thought, Wretchard: The force behind the “Forlorn Hope” does not have to be beneficent. I fear that militant Islamic radicalists are utilizing their own verloren hoop in setting footholds in what used to be non-radicalized societies. Forget what they’re doing in the west for a moment; recall that for the last three decades they’ve been taking then “modern” societies in the middle east and Asia and regressing them with their own advance troops. Some simply start a regressive strain of Islam in society; others whom openly cause violence. The result ends up being the degeneration of those nations from once forward looking islands of progress into backwards-leaning conservatories of Islamic radicalism. We’ve already seen it in Iran from the overthrow of the Shah to the government they have now, and we’re seeing that same battle between modernization plus future-oriented progress and radical islamicism plus militancy in Pakistan. And it started small.
The line has mostly been held in the former Yugoslavia, mostly thanks to US involvement in protecting Muslims by virtue of them also being Croatian, but let’s understand that that battle is not over. The line was won years ago in Turkey, and by the Turks themselves amazingly enough. But the line has been lost elsewhere. The Forlorn Hopes the Islamicists have sent have been remarkably successful in too many places. And that is cause for alarm, definitely.
Not like we haven’t seen this coming already. This is merely a new analogy for a threat that’s been screamed about since the 70′s.
“Corruption is a self-replicating system. Either it is actively fought or it eventually gains the upper hand.”
Quite true — the fruit trees have to be cleared of worms constantly, or they are destroyed. But where is the reward for the fighters? If they’re fighting corruption, by definition they are passing on the easy rewards, the free fruit. . .not taking what it would be easier for them to have by just looking the other way while the bad men throw the other fellow in the river; by letting them use your unplowed field as a coke landing strip; or closing your eyes while they shake down local proprietors for protection money.
The problem we are coming up against is that there’s no reward for not being corrupt, and no hope either for the non corrupt. The simple feeling of righteousness that you are non-corrupt while 90 percent of your neighbors laugh or hate you is not enough. At least some of your neighbors need to help, or there needs to be something more to it (the promise of a hereafter, the approval of the local parson and the local social structure) or you’re likely to find that the corruption fighters are beaten before they begin.
Religion used to supply an additional reason for righteousness, and we have not managed in the west to replace it.
There is an alternative — the corrupt authoritarian State, where corruption is in power, and so strong there that nothing stands against it. But I do not see how you operate a Republic or preserving any kind of liberty is possible absent religion.
I live in Tucson, not the DMZ like El Paso but full of our own drug violence. The border is largely non-existent as far as the drug trade goes. The soldiers of the cartels have plenty of compadres on our side, gang bangers, underclass dropout thugs, It really is a breakdown of order. Josh said in #1, “the book is bad” The book isn’t bad, it’s been rejected by our lawless culture and mocked and derided by the elites. I’m with Happygirl. The cure in Mexico and here is found in turning back to God and embracing his truth and redemption.
Tamquam@10
I think your Hobbesian point is spot on. In bourgeois market economies the war of all against all is explicit and regulated by the rule of law. In countries founded by marxist influenced intelligensia the anarchic market is viewed suspiciously as something evil to be bent to the government’s will.
General observation: the more government intereferes with markets, the more opportunities for corruption. Indeed, the more necessary corruption is to actually get anything done.
My vote is that corruption comes first; take a look around you. Two centuries of labor and lawful (well, most of the time) work are being squandered here in the US. The “big men” are above the law. People that should be in prison become Secretary of the Treasury or Czar of something or another. ACORN and SEIU get special treatment hidden away in gargantuan spending bills that amount to little better than government-funded bribes to political operatives. We are drifting (rapidly) toward the old Tammany Hall model of doing business. Who are we to criticise the Mexicans.
Mexico’s problem is incredibly simple – the Mexican government is trying to fix things.
America has an armed, informed and empowered populace. Mexico doesn’t. The Mexican people have no security – their government disarms them. And then their government fails to provide basic security. So Mexico should be used as an example of what happens when you depend on the government to take care of you.
People want subsistance, but Mexico already has that. They’re not that poor.
Once people have subsistance, they want the Good Life, which usually means “living better than the neighbors.”
Everything else being equal, people prefer achieving the Good Life quickly rather than slowly, and easily rather than with difficulty.
Building a large personal net worth legally takes many years of hard work. Taking a bribe is as easy as holding out your hand, and only takes a few minutes.
But because The Good Life is relative to the lifestyle of your neighbors, it’s not about poverty. It’s about Rule of Law. One only takes the bribe if one thinks one can keep it. But if you think you can keep it, you take it – regardless of how wealthy a nation you live in. Just look at the US Congress. Charley Rangel, anyone? What matters is achieving The Good Life – eating at the Good Restaurants, wearing the Good Suits, drinking Good Wine, hanging out with the Good Aristocrats, etc.
A low national income relative to the 1st World only aggravates this situation a bit, because profits from the USA’s drug sales can pay for dozens of Mexican politicians but only 1 or 2 American ones. The Good Life is more cheaply acquired in Mexico, compared to acheiving the same relative status in the USA.
If Mexico wants to end this cycle there are two tactics that will help. One is decriminalizing (and regulating) the drug trade. Without outsize profits it’s harder to buy politicians. But that’s the easy fix, and only the smaller one. It works for drugs (see Portugal’s example), but it won’t work for all crime. Human trafficking, for instance, can never be tolerated.
The bigger fix, and the more important one, is enforcing real rule of law. From the top to the street, no one can take a bribe – and failure to obey this rule needs very serious consequences. Outlandish consequences even, to break a vicious cycle. Consequenes more severe than the cartels can threaten for non-compliance. Hit them where it hurts, and values will change.
As for the Forlorn Hope, there can be rewards. There can be statues built, families provided for, honors bestowed, and (for those who survive) the reward of higher rank. Those who take the lead in bringing rule of law are the ones you want in charge anyway. They can serve as the example that young Mexicans will then desire to grow up to be. And so a nation changes.
——–
Yes, it’s rational. Software is upgraded over time. India and China are a prime examples; as nations they continues to improve and learn. The British were particularly good at transferring their “software” wherever they went, which is why former British colonies (aka, Hong Kong and the Bahamas) are far better off today than their French or Spanish counterparts.
———
That’s an odd statement to make. Mexico is extremely Catholic, as Spain was. The problem is that Spain was still a Feudal nation when it built its Empire, without a history of Rule of Law (as Britain had had since 1215 A.D.). That’s the missing ingredient – not “Judeo-Christian social and religious institutions.”
A lot of the third world revolutionary’s appeal is their aim of eliminating corruption. We saw that with the Communists and even the Taliban. Once they win they don’t tend to live up to their promise of clean rule, but during an insurgency they often do run a cleaner administration than the government.
happygirl@9
It is amazing how Mexicans are abandoning a lukewarm catholicism and embracing pentecostal, assembly of god, latterday saints, baptist and other protestant faiths.
I was so encouraged when PAN (Partido de Accion Nacional) finally defeated PRI (Partido Revolucionario Institucional) in 2000 with the election of Vicente Fox. It looked like democracy and rule of law might get a chance in that unhappy country. Sadly, the center-right lacked the power, and were themselves too rooted in the pervasive corruption, to combat both the entrenched elite and the narcoterrorists.
The political base of PAN is small business and the growing Mexican protestant reformation. Back in the day when it was really dangerous to question the PRI one party state, the uniform of brave PAN activists was dark slacks, white shirts and ties – looking to all the world like mormon missionaries …
I think it is time to be honest. Nearly all Latin America, African, and most Middle Eastern, South Central Asian, and SE Asian peoples are simply incapable of governing themselves. This is certainly true of Mexico, and most of Latin America, which has been a repeated failure over, and over, and over again for its entire history. The Philippines also falls into that category.
These peoples have deep, ingrained problems that make them incapable of self-rule in anything that does not resemble a cross between Mad Max or Waterworld.
First and foremost, is the Big Man syndrome. Tied directly to tribalism. Which leads to lack of nationalism, and a large cooperative group based on national identity. The way in which Eugen Weber in “Peasants into Frenchmen” described the growth of French national identity instead of endemic regionalism/tribalism/separatism. All of which took centuries of eradication by dedicated and industries French kings to destroy and create in its stead a French nation of cooperative men.
Mexicans are Mexicans — they are no more capable of good government and decent ruling among themselves than Nigerians, or South Africans, or Brazilians, or Argentinians. Most human beings throughout history have been incapable of decent self-rule.
The conditions for it seem to be a relatively “flat” and non-hierarchical society, relatively high IQ, economic growth, group-national identity, limiting competition for women, good status for women (and freedom though not absolute), and compelling reasons for group cooperation (enemies, environment in flux, threats to food/energy resources etc.) This leaves basically Europe post 1550 or so, America, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada, Japan post 1945, and South Korea post 1988.
If we are honest, we would admit there there is not even the POSSIBILITY for Mexicans, Filipinos, Africans, Indians, Afghanis, or Pakistanis to live in a place where decent and good government exists.
BECAUSE that would require them to cease BEING Mexicans, Filipinos, Africans, Indians, Afghanis, and Pakistanis in the FIRST PLACE.
The best way of dealing with them is to recognize their character, innately ungovernable, and alternately punish and engage (with various tribal allies) them. Mexico and the Philippines and Afghanistan will always be hellholes because the people who live in them create it. They WANT it that way. Because it is who they are: Big Man afflicted, tribal, poor position of women, brutal competition for women, hierarchical, and low IQ for the vast populace which lives in appalling ignorance and superstition. NGO Westerners make this worse, no doubt, but let us be honest. It is the people themselves who make their nations. [And this characterized Europe for almost all of its historical existence, only luck and determination over centuries allows peoples to crawl out of mankind's default mode of existence.]
No need for a Forlorn Hope. Simply treat failed peoples as they are. Failed. Honestly. Not the least is telling them they are failures, why they are failures, and why they are likely to remain failures for centuries if not forever.
looking to all the world like mormon missionaries
I think the members of the Forlorn Hope wear many guises: the tie and white shirt of the Saints, the soutane of the Catholic seminarian, maybe even the headcover of the Muslim girl. At one time they wore shakos or bowler hats. Maybe they wear baseball caps too. The place doesn’t matter, whether under cypress or laurel, pine or palm. What matters is the man, and often it matters only to him.
Waiting for a generation of Mexican leaders who aren’t corrupt and will lead their country to greatness is:
a. hopeless
b. really hopeless
c. really, really hopeless
One might as well attempt to dive to the bottom of the Marianas Trench using a snorkle.
In fact it is a waste of time to even consider the entire Mexican situation. If they become any more aggressive however in our southwest and with gangs such as MS-13 then (some of you don’t read any further) then we’ll find it necessary to teach them who the big dog is and give no quarter in doing so.
Or a “Don’t Tread on Me” tee shirt at a Tea Party …
Adelante!
If forlorn hope is the first wave of attack, then we’re talking about sending in the 10th or 11th wave here as we’ve been losing the war on drugs for a long time now…
Why not stop sending in waves of cannon fodder by cutting the source effectively with regulated legalization of drugs? Prohibition was destructive to the rule of law as everyone became used to breaking the law. If most of our presidents admit to doing drugs now, can we not see how ridiculous our system of laws has become if most people including our presidents are criminals?
Wretchard @ 16 – As the kids say, “LOL”
Whiskey seems to be saying the problems with corrupt societies in the 3rd World are both cultural AND racial. Methinks the “racial” part doesn’t play. While it MIGHT be true that Anglo-Saxon populations today as a whole have a higher IQ than Arabs, Hispanics, Asians, Pacific Islanders, etc., the average human IQ today is also probably higher than the average human IQ of 500 years ago. (Citation?) And yet, those people with lesser IQs 500 years ago still gave us the Enlightenment, Western civilization, and liberty.
It’s the culture, stupid.
Thank you, Wretchard
I had not heard of Jose Rizal before. He was an implacably noble man, quite unlike our clay-footed postmodern heroes.
The sentiment is a more elegant iteration of Patrick Henry’s cry.
I think the lesson is the more *hopeless* the cause, the more urgent and noble the effort. Sometimes we Americans need to appreciate how gentle is the path our fathers laid before our feet.
Liberation theology sees itself as the forlorn hope. I have to admire the motives, even as its adherents ally themselves with what seems to me to be the false hope of socialist revolution. The socialist slogans of the resistance aren’t persuasive to me. The Hondurans I’ve met haven’t exhibited any revolutionary fervor.
Here’s a missive from Sister Mary Kennedy in Honduras. She’s a good woman, and she does good work in her village. I know that, up close. But I wonder if the road she wants to travel isn’t the proverbial one paved with good intentions. (I’m always noticing, but never surprised, at the lack of any reference to God or Jesus among the sisters. “Movements, si; God, no.)
“Hello dear friends,
I am back in Honduras now after two wonderful months of visiting family and friends in the U.S. Unfortunately I haven´t returned to find a better situation in the political mess I left at the end of August.
The coup government continues the violent repression against the passive resistent movement and is plowing full speed ahead towards what are being called very fraudulent elections. The OAS, many governments on the international level, and an increasing number of Hondurans have made public statements that they will not recognize the results of the elections held under a coup government. Several candidates have officially renounced their participation in the elections for the same reason, including the candidate for the independent ballot and the mayor of San Pedro Sula, the industrial capital of Honduras. Unfortunately the U.S. government has stated publicly that they will recognize the results.
There is a strong movement right now to boycott the elections and from the coup gov´t. endless threats of repurcussions, including a massacre on the 29th, the day of the elections. I would ask you to continue to pray for the Honduran people that they are protected from violence and also have the courage and strength to continue their non-violent resistance. The corruption in Honduras has been uncovered by the very people who have been the most deeply involved for several decades through their involvement in the coup. It´s literally unbelievable how blatant the corruption is, beginning with the media and their manipulation and control of the real news.
We count on your continued support and solidarity with our struggling people who deserve a country that lives and operates with dignity and justice. I am so grateful for their willingness to continue the struggle at any cost. I think they have come to realize that it´s the only way; they have nothing to lose in the end. To give one´s life for something that vital is really to reclaim it.
Gratefully,
Mary
Liberation theology sees itself as the forlorn hope
The point of the forlorn hope is that it should ultimately triumph. The sacrifice only acquires meaning when it is crowned with victory. Torpedo 8 at Midway.
The problem with Liberation Theology is that it is too easy to get caught up in the romance of the “struggle”, the endorphins of exertion; too easy to fall in love with the night without remembering that it is all about the dawn. Ultimately the world must be saved by combination of the ordinary and the extraordinary. At the last a good world is all about simple things. Even foolish things. A world made by heroes will be a stirring joint, but maybe too stirring for comfort.
We need Rosie’s Cantina. We need the guys who only want to go sailing on Saturdays. It’s true that we need the lordly and compelling leaders, but heck, what’s life without breadsticks and buffalo wings?
I’ve read that, despite there being plenty of poverty in El Paso, the crime rate there is markedly lower than in Juarez; indeed, lower than many other non-border US cities.
I’ve also seen it noted the vast difference in the outcomes in the former British colonies vs the Iberian. Even unto the Philippines-Korea-Hong Kong in 1950 vs now. Then: Philippines among most prosperous in Asia, Korea poor, HK relatively so. Now: situation reversed. It’s a puzzle why Spain’s children have lagged when so many of them are resource rich.
Juarez and Nuevo Laredo are tempting places to park a semi with a nuke hidden inside — you know, right at the border? Take out Laredo and/or El Paso without being detected. The perpetrators may not even have to be suicide bombers. In 15-20 minutes they can be far enough away from the blast to survive it, even at city traffic speeds.
Morton #6:
The comparison of Baja and SoCal brings to mind an old joke.
An American citizen from San Diego was visiting Mexico and asked why, by simply stepping across the border, a person could go from a poor Third World country to a rich First World one.
The Mexican replied “That is because you stole the best part of our country.”
Knowing there was no real geophysical difference between both sides of the border, the American asked “What part of the country is that?”
The Mexican replied “The part with all the good roads.”
Mexico is what you would have if ACORN ran a whole country.
Alta California has the Sierra Nevada – lots of water.
Baja California has the southern extension of the coastal ranges – little water.
Geography makes a difference.
I’ve spent two years in El Paso, TX (85 – 87). From what I gathered, situation worsened a lot afterwards.
I don’t have any solution or insight to the chicken and egg problem. But want to point out that culture all over (esp. in the West) played not a small role. Poverty does not have the old meaning anymore.
It used to be an man can do an honest day’s work, get paid for his labor, and nobody will look down their noses at such things.
Now it seems it is worse than a crime and more shameful if you are ‘poor’ or not in the IN-loop or don’t belong to the IN-crowd.
Wrong, 39. Konyok:. The Sierras do not provide near enough water for Alta California. But the importation of water from afar does require political and engineering enterprises. working for the greater good of a region. Does that suggest something to you? Maybe Baja lacks the cohesiveness required to put together mind-boggling projects such as those.
The Spanish — and then Mexican — inhabitants of the pre-Mexican War Southwest were all flirting with the idea of secession from Mexico proper. They found the central Mexican government distant (both literally and figuratively), unresponsive and corrupt. Texas succeeded with the infusion of aggressive Anglos (they were there originally at the behest of the Mexican government). The slow-to-act New Mexicans and Californians were overtaken by events.
So, while the Hispanic southwesterners may not have wanted to become Americans, neither did they wish to be Mexicans anymore.
The “Reconquista” narrative of La Raza is based on a lie, assuming that they want the region to rejoin Mexico.
The Mexican replied “The part with all the good roads.”
-reminds me of the immigrant university student who, when I asked the class how they thought the first settlers got to British Columbia, replied, “The Trans-Canada Highway?”
The failure to understand, let alone win, the prisoner’s dilemma is the recurring failure of humanity just as the dilemma is the recurring challenge. But, heh, we’ve gotten this far. The time when people are most likely to learn the need for shared faith is when their lives are really on the line.
But nothing new, let alone good, can come into the world without some kind of big man leading a way. As W. suggests, the lack in the potential of “liberation theology” is its inability to account for this pragmatic necessity. We need to turn the big men into better big men. Find ways to give some of the drug dealers creative outs at the same time as their mortal existence is put under threat by the forlorn hope brigades.
Konyok #26:
The political base of PAN is small business and the growing Mexican protestant reformation. Back in the day when it was really dangerous to question the PRI one party state, the uniform of brave PAN activists was dark slacks, white shirts and ties – looking to all the world like mormon missionaries …
I did not know that.
Keep in mind that it was a few centuries until Christianity and the Hebrew scriptures had a deep influence on the Roman Empire and became a transforming influence on that culture. We are in for the long haul; in many ways the epitome of the Forlorn Hope has been the message of Christianity.
Consider the 11th chapter of Hebrews, often called the Hall of Faith. It opens with
“Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. ”
Then the Faith Heroes are listed: Abel, Enoch, Noah, Abraham, Sarah, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, and Moses. As written “These all died in faith, not having received the promises, but having seen them afar off, and were persuaded of [them], and embraced [them], and confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims on the earth. For they that say such things declare plainly that they seek a country.”
And it continues: “And what shall I more say? for the time would fail me to tell of Gedeon, and [of] Barak, and [of] Samson, and [of] Jephthae; [of] David also, and Samuel, and [of] the prophets:
Who through faith subdued kingdoms, wrought righteousness, obtained promises, stopped the mouths of lions,
Quenched the violence of fire, escaped the edge of the sword, out of weakness were made strong, waxed valiant in fight, turned to flight the armies of the aliens.
Women received their dead raised to life again: and others were tortured, not accepting deliverance; that they might obtain a better resurrection:
And others had trial of [cruel] mockings and scourgings, yea, moreover of bonds and imprisonment:
They were stoned, they were sawn asunder, were tempted, were slain with the sword: they wandered about in sheepskins and goatskins; (Of whom the world was not worthy:) they wandered in deserts, and [in] mountains, and [in] dens and caves of the earth.
And these all, having obtained a good report through faith, received not the promise:
God having provided some better thing for us, that they without us should not be made perfect. ”
We have been this way before. In fact, it is the story of our civilization, that of redeeming it one heart at a time. There really is no other way, despite the continual appeal to the Big Political idea.
Archaeology, paleontology, each will have his say
But both insist that man came from one place
From Africa to Europe and from there along the way
To Asia and Pacific, filling space
That once was verdant plain or forest, ice or brutal heat
They tracked the game and gathered tree hung fruits
But by and by they found that plants gave more for them to eat
And so they built their huts and put down roots
Now if this story’s true then we are somehow all the same
Though clearly we have taken different paths
For some their lot was poverty with someone else to blame
While others built their temples and their baths
And with the baths came law and with the law came order too
And written constitutions and the like
And with consent of governed came society that’s new
Where wealth and freedom brought the golden spike
That ushered in a continent where free men could breathe free
And build a better world for kith and kin
While elsewhere people lived the life they lived back in BC
Who know not where they are or where they’ve been
Where clans and other big men rule the way the world is run
And all the words and deeds of first world men
Can’t change the fact that law for them is barrel of a gun
And nothing ever changes now or then
Whiskey, how do you explain social progress then? How do you explain Hong Kong going from backwater village to global metropolis in 50 years? How do you explain the differences between modern day Chile and Venezuela? Why are all the minorities you mention able to participate in Anglosphere nations at the highest levels?
For God’s sake man, how do you explain Richard Fernandez if you truly believe that “there is not even the POSSIBILITY for … Filipinos … to live in a place where decent and good government exists.”?
The double-think you must put yourself through to see a Thomas Sowell, Richard Fernandez or Ayaan Hirsaan Ali participate, succeed and thrive in a Western society and still believe what you believe must be whiplash inducing for the normal man. I couldn’t stand it.
If you actually knew anything about how cultures grow and improve over time you would never say the things you say. Just spend some time on the Indian sub-continent with the reformers there, who are successfully dragging their countrymen to freedom and prosperity, without giving up their Indian identities either I might ad, to see what I mean.
OT slightly but suggested by several of these comments, has the US reached a point where the legalization of drugs might achieve two rather important objectives? 1. The denial of funds to criminal enterprises – thus making their career choice less attractive? 2. Empower an even greater abusive use of pharmaceuticals among the elites who currently “apologize” for drug use and users – thus distracting “those who care” from their present political ambitions and activities?
Just thinking out loud
The chicken and the egg of the Third World are one and the same. It’s called DNA. And it’s about time we admitted there’s not a damn thing we can do about it absent re-colonization.
As someone once said, more or less, there’s nothing wrong with Mexico that 40 million Swiss couldn’t cure.
49erDweet@41
I disagree. The Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers flow from the Sierra Nevada, providing most of California’s water. (Another topic for another day: the Obama administration cutting off irrigation water to the Great Valley, America’s vegetable basket, to *protect* the Delta Smelt.) The Colorado river, providing the balance of Califoria’s water, flows from the Rocky Mountain. By the time the Colorado denoues into the Sea of Cortez it’s flow provides a tiny allotment of water to extreme NE Baja California and NW Sonora.
The rest of Baja California has virtually no water resources. Nada.
Baja does lack the cohesiveness for grand engineering project, but it also lacks the resources. Their only hope is cheap desalinization.
To give you a similar example. Russia’s police, the Militsiya have always been corrupt even back into distant prerevolutionary times. They are paid a bare pittance, because the government presumes they will earn their living wage “on the street” by taking bribes. Thus corruption is universal. the policeman needs to take the bribe to feed his family. Now the clever American intellectual has a brilliant solution. Simply pay the policeman a decent salary, and he will be glad to cease extorting his bribes, and thee system will be fixed. Not so fast. In practice, the cynical policeman will gladly pocket his new living wage, and continue taking the bribes just as before. Now you have new personnel costs and the same old corruption.
In the middle ages in Russia, an official appointment of a noble to a responsible governing position, such as governance of a province or district, was called a kormlenie literally, a “feeding”. I do not think Mexico is much different. Some cultural habits are too ingrained to be changed.
Konyok #15
A very worthwhile read about Dalrymple’s time in Africa. Yes it does shed some light on why Mexico persists in its corruption.
http://www.city-journal.org/html/13_2_oh_to_be.html
Wretchard @ 5:
I love your characterization of foreign aid: “poor people in rich countries giving money to rich people in poor countries”. Priceless!
I think El Jefe Maximo and whiskey are on the right track, but the reason is religious, not racial. Specifically the rule of law has been most successful, and free markets with respect for property rights arose in Protestant Christian nations.
Look at a globe: until about 1960 all the most stable, prosperous and free societies were Protestant (except France — I don’t get that one).
I suspect that the Protestant Reformation, with its “Priesthood of the Believer” encouraged individual personal responsibility and de-emphasized religious hierarchical authority in everyday life.
Adam Smith could never have written “The Wealth of Nations” in a Catholic country.
WRT Mexico its problem is the same as ours: the War on Some Drugs. That breeds the corruption which is inevitably followed by poverty. Mexico started off less prosperous and healthy than the US, so it’s in worse shape.
But the US won’t be far behind if we don’t clean up the corruption pronto. I believe one of the essential steps is ending the War on Some Drugs, which has led to a war on the US Constitution and individual liberty.
49. Konyak: Historically Alta’s initial major water project was taking Colorado River water away from Baja and Sonora. The fact that Mexico lacked the political will and power to prevent that outcome speaks volumes. And since I’m a split-stater Californian I hold that in reality Alta is stealing the other, Norte California river water you mentioned, in order to quench their insatiable thirst. Otherwise we agree.
Let me suggest something a bit more nuanced.
Each society has certain cultural and constitutional traits or predispositions that make it more or less susceptible to corruption and to economic development. Differences between such societies may initially be fairly subtle, tho.
We can then get a situation of chaotic response, or hypersensitivity to initial conditions. If something (internal or external) starts that society down a path toward either corruption or economic stagnation, it may fight it off and re-stabilize itself. If it can’t, it enters a situation of positive feedback between increasing corruption and increasing impoverishment, each feeding off and increasing the other. The result is a Mexico or maybe Zimbabwe, where both corruption and poverty are endemic and mutually supportive.
Lots of examples of the destructive side, not so many obvious ones of the other– maybe in part my ignorance, and in part that such societies nip those things in the bud before they enter the non-specialist history books.
24. Brock:
Once people have subsistance, they want the Good Life, which usually means “living better than the neighbors.” …
But because The Good Life is relative to the lifestyle of your neighbors, it’s not about poverty. It’s about Rule of Law. One only takes the bribe if one thinks one can keep it. But if you think you can keep it, you take it – regardless of how wealthy a nation you live in. Just look at the US Congress. Charley Rangel, anyone? What matters is achieving The Good Life – eating at the Good Restaurants, wearing the Good Suits, drinking Good Wine, hanging out with the Good Aristocrats, etc.
And another way to surpass your neighbors is to hold them back and exclude them from the good things by sumptuary laws or restrictive environmental law. Herein we discover the secret key to the Green Movement.
$230/week is not $23/ week. Mexico is not that bad off. If the legal system was reformed then it could become very wealthy. They have the natural resources to fund meaningful investments and, unlike most of the petroleum exporters, except pre-Khomenei Iran or pre-Chavez Venezuela, they have an educated middle class and a entrepreneurial base to build on. “Poverty” is a cheap excuse for offloading the problem. It is a mislabeling of Envy by Middle Class activist rent seekers and a few wealthy transnationals, the diplomats, who use the intellectual rent seekers as background noise to generate a cash flow from the West.
The needed order can come from either inside or outside. This is basic Weberian Sociology. For a healthy modern society the charisma that induces respect for the law should be institutionalized into the bureaucracy and the legal code. That results in Organic Solidarity, wherein the people support the rule of law because the Law is seen as an expression of their sovereignty. In Mexico they are still stuck in a Patron system of personalized charisma and authority. Efforts to institutionalize the rule of law after the 1911 revolution in theory transferred the authority from individuals to bureaucrats and the PRI. That is why it is the Party of the Institutionalized (permanent) Revolution. The model is straight Leninism but it was designed to combat Caudillismo. In doing so it attempted to institute the stable legal system without risking the passions and possible corruption associated with democracy.
Unfortunately that model, and its early variants in Europe, such as the Byzantine and Caliphate systems and the late Spanish KIngdom, and some other late 19th to early 20th century efforts, as well as modern post Mao China, end up with the worst of all systems. They get stagnating innovation, sclerotic bureaucracies, rampant corruption, and regional violence. Singapore has fared better but it was highly dependent on the charisma still being personalized in a founding Leader and that may not endure his departure.
If a society can not make the jump from primitive feudal Caudillo style justice to modernity what is to be done? From the 1950s until the 1990s the answer was to ignore them. We paid off our SOBs to keep a lid on and sent money to CARE and UNICEF once a year and considered an exotic vacation to a controlled resort, after retirement. 9-11 changed all that, we can’t ignore these places any more even if they are 7,000 miles away. Mexico is 7 inches away and moving our way.
The alternative method of achieving social cohesion and respect for the law for those who have not reached Organic Solidarity is Mechanical Solidarity. That is to say you obey the rules not because they are your rules, or at least your communities accepted rules but because some really big ugly guy, preferably on a horse, is in your face making you obey. Everybody starts out there and we hope that they get past it. Most places are still ruled that way and find it very hard to make the transition.
For example in theory Islam provides for a high degree of consensus being needed to legitimate the rulings of a secular leader, who is bound by religious doctrine and a need to respect the members of the Ummah. Unfortunately that supposed Democratic or Organic element is vitiated by the rulers expectation to follow the example of Muhammad, who ruled as an arbitrary despot.
So if the society can not achieve a state of Organic Solidarity and lawlessness threatens to spill over to the global community how can we respond? First we can get a local to attempt to impose a state of Mechanical Solidarity. That is when we support a local warlord despite the screams of the Grauniad. When that fails, as it has in Somalia and may in many other places, the historical answer is to impose the Rule of Law from outside and engage in an intense period of tutelage that could enable the society to internalize the legal code. That demands sustained effort over time and at least initially the application of uncompromising force. What it would mean in a real sense is the resumption of a system of colonial administrations of dependent territories that incapable of self government.
Those who begin the process are only Forlorn if the effort is abandoned to soon. The truly brave souls are those within the occupied community who turn from the obvious, and often remunerative, path of violence and risk opprobrium by leaping into the breach to help their societies internalize the rule of law. Ramon Magsaysay and Jose Rizal did that in the Philippines and George Washington, the man who would not be King, did that in America.
Some articles:
Have ‘Los Pepes’ touched down in Mexico?
http://smallwarsjournal.com/blog/2009/11/have-los-pepes-touched-down-in/
Religion might NOT be the answer.
http://u.tv/News/Brazil-crime-wars-Spidermans-story-of-drugs-and-Jesus-in-Rios-slums/ffdfe843-528a-4e46-b72b-a69e0e2a5dda
http://afpak.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2009/10/26/british_muslim_gangs_and_the_chemical_jihad#comment-89222
And finally – back home.
http://www.city-journal.org/2009/19_4_corruption.html
49er #47:
I recent article I read attributed the increased violence in Mexico to the government’s crackdown on the drug gangs there. This made the pickins’ slimmer and so the gangs have had to fight over the remaining scraps.
I am afraid that drug legalization would just mean they would find something else as an illegal enterprise. If the will is there and the morality does not exist then the problem will just move to another source of revenue.
And, of course, the fools who think that “legality” equates to “US Government Approved and Therefore Totally Safe” will have their last shred of good sense depart their heads.
Here in the U.S., organized crime is finding it much lower risk and more profitable to defraud the US Govt through Medicare and Medicaid scams. Of course, Single Payer Universal Health Care will stop all of that….
The elephant in the room here is drug consumption in the US….several years ago the Wall Street Journal opined if only the executives of the Fortune 500 would stop doing cocaine there would be no drug promblem for Mexico….
21. Konyok: “In bourgeois market economies the war of all against all is explicit and regulated by the rule of law.”
Rule of law is key. Where there is no rule of law the lex talonis‘s writ rules, whether wielded by a chaotic mess of individuals and interest groups or the state. Only in West do we have a system of laws that supersede naked force.
Much conspiratorial conjecture going on here:
We have learned that those who murder Americans while shouting “Allahu Akbar” are
“self-radicalized.”
Similarly, the Mexican miscreants referenced above are
“self criminalized.”
Think of it as the triumph of individual initiative.
Isn’t it frightening to contemplate just how mind-blowingly high our national elites are all the time? I think that more than anything explains why the whole decision making apparatus seems hopelessly broken e.g., Mexico disintegrating right in front of us and we do nothing to contain the damage.
Mexico doesn’t make this list:
Ten Most and Least Corrupt Countries
A look at the world’s 10 most corrupt and 10 least corrupt countries according to the Corruption Perceptions Index report published Tuesday by watchdog Transparency International.
ht – Quirk
DR/42–Correct. Northern Mexico had about the same relationship with the central government as our westerners did with the folks Back East. Central Mexico was rich, first-settled, full of wealth, aristocrats, and virtual slavery for many who were not genetic Europeans.
The North, by contrast, was the frontier–dangerous, tough, but available to someone with determination and disgust with the caste system down south. Thus their mind set was one can get what he’s willing to fight for; one should be judged by his character, not his skin or lineage; and a wish to be left alone by meddlesome and bigoted officials.
So, yes, there was sympathy for separating from the Mexican government of the time but it never got anywhere–Texas beat them to it and the moment was lost.
Mexico is now, and always has been a prisoner of socialism. First, it was the Spanish who would look after the natives, and then it was the Church who siezed some control from the Spanish so the Church could look after the natives.
The Spanish looked after the natives then the Church looked after the natives. Both needed power and wealth to ‘look after’ the natives. The Church has long since lost real power in Mexico and are now limited to the role the Catholic Church plays in the USA.
All the power in Mexico is now and always has been in the hands of those who would ‘look after’ the natives.
We need to look at our own government; it smells to me of somebody trying to ‘look after’ the natives.
I love your characterization of foreign aid: “poor people in rich countries giving money to rich people in poor countries”. Priceless!
It’s an old saying in the development business, which contains the most idealistic and the most cynical people on earth. Anyone who is still not cynical after five years be very, very careful of. I remember one guy who was really enthusiastic about the “business” and last year I read he had been busted on a sex scandal somewheres. Like I said, be very, very careful about smart people who think development is the greatest thing since unsliced bread.
Latin America was conquered and settled by the more turbulent spirits left over from the successful reconquista, heralding an obsolete, crusading Catholicism, bringing the stultifying inquisition and the economic sense of those too good to work or go into trade who had turfed out those who did–the Jews–and who expected to find gold, or huge latifundia with acres of slaves.
The veterans of the English Civil War went to Ireland.
The US was first settled by English middle class tradesmen and farmers.
I visited the University of Guanajuato, founded about the same time as Detroit, iirc.
At that time, the our colonies were shacks about as far inland as a ship’s cannon could carry, it was said.
Now we’re the big dog?
Culture, man, culture.
Buckley once remarked there had never been a succesful Latin Catholic country, thereby excluding France and Belgium, I suppose. And Weber famously wrote “Protestantism and The Rise of Capitalism” which everybody I knew claimed to have read.
Some time back, Salinas’ party was caught with his/their hand in a state’s finances. He had the PRI dash off a check for $30 mill to cover it. Imagine the dems with $30 mill in petty cash.
I agree with the posters who look at the evangelicals and other non-Catholics as possible help.
It was that kind who led England out of the Restoration and the Regency.
Yeast.
Maybe.
whiskey,
You did kinda step on it this time. Maybe time for a more nuanced restatement?
Habu,
MS-13 are Salvadorans or other Mesoamericans. They are not Mexicans. They should IMHO be treated as an invading army. Their children should be denied US citizenship. The law already has a provision denying citizenship to a child of a camp follower of an invading army. If ICE was unshackled then they could begin to make a real difference in this problem. Of course that is the complete opposite of what is happening.
Hopeless cases like Somalia are easy. Mexico is bad but not hopeless. That is why it is a hard problem.
Doug,
In Chicago they take a list like that as a challenge.
Whiskey is right on the money when he points at tribalism as the nexus for most third and fourth world countries problems.
You ask to explain how this country or that country can make whatever progress they are making. First off they’re making “progress” at sub glacial speed; secondly if enough time and pressure is applied coal turns to diamond, thus in a world that has the USA in it some progress is bound to rub off on them by virtue of even some of the t-shirts we send them. You know, t-shirts that have little sayings on them or even the symbol for pi.
No, I’m in the corner that says colonialism ended about a hundred years too soon. Had the industrial nations had a chance to exploit the labor longer it would have been to their advantage to keep the labor force healthy and educated. Instead, the anti-colonialists push short circuited the only chance the tribes had at greater maturation on an accelerated pace.
Even in this country some have a reto-tribalist instinct in identifying themselves as hyphen this American or hyphen that American. Tip O’Neill said all politics were local. Well they’re tribal too. Sort of like Habu and his Marine Corps tribalism. The difference is that some tribes are simply better than others.
But when the Mexicans lost Cisco and Pancho it all just turned to mush south of the border. A darn shame too.
Illegal and addictive drugs are a scourge for Americans and Mexicans. The US could kill two birds with one stone by shutting down the border and enforcing strict immigration laws. Yes, there are other markets for their drugs but none so large and wealthy as the US.
No market, no corruption, no drug addiction, no war on drugs, no drug crime, no drug murders. By simply taking control of the border and immigration a litany of dreadful problems could be addressed. Then the real work in Mexico could begin in earnest.
It is not unreasonable to conclude that the elites in the US and Mexico do not want to solve these problems.
It needs to start with “tough love” – stop any aid to those countries until the level of corruption/other misbehavior drops dramatically. In the long run that would result in drastically less suffering for the people there than they would suffer in the short term. But we aren’t willing to do that.
Doug, the problem is that there are about 100+ nominees to make the most corrupt list and likely less than 30 who could be nominated for least corrupt and pass the Red Face test. So a country has to be All World corrupt to crack the Top Ten.
67. Lifeofthemind
MS-13 are Salvadorans or other Mesoamericans. They are not Mexicans.
I’ll bet you there are some Mexicans in that outfit but for the most part I stand corrected.
Heck, if I’m gonna be wrong let me say that they all look alike anyway. Carmen Miranda the exception when she was alive.
Habu,
You are baiting us. Put the glass down. No correction, pick the glass up and put the keyboard down.
One reason, aside from the fact that you know better, not to throw out the “they all look alike” line is that it attracts trolls. While you may like eating them some of us object to the foul odor. Besides is your idea of immortality to be part of a LGF thread on “See we told you PJM was full of …?” As for Ms Miranda I bet she looks less like them when she is dead but alive she could read me my rights any time.
Another chicken and egg question: did domestic corruption in USA precede globalization as a necessary precursor for ambitions that demanded larger venues or did it accelerate as a result of pressures introduced by globalization?
It just seems smug and specious to me to be intellectually tut-tutting about the corrupt Mexicans when our own institutions – government, military,** business, even science – are putting on a remarkable display of something all too similar.
** It looks to me like the military’s been cleaned out pretty good – lots of recently retired generals on book tours – quite the opposite of a previous poster’s suggestions that Bush drove out all the good military guys. Indeed, he seems to have driven out the dead wood.
Rumsfeld drove out a lot of old guard types.
Bush should have driven out a lot more than he did, I think, but I believe most of the good ones stayed.
Under the Obamanation, who knows.
One of the more interesting governmental reform programs I heard of was a proposal to establish a Department of Deadwood in any given Third World country. Maybe any country would benefit, not just the Third World ones. Anyway it works like this.
The Department of Deadwood would employ bureaucrats to do nothing. They would be employed at full pay and with full pension. In return, their duties were to read the newspapers or watch TV (which would be provided) until 5 pm came up. They could even do overtime. They would be employed to watch crises coverage on TV. But in no case were they ever to do anything.
The consultant claimed that if he could move 90% of government employees into the new department any given country would take off. I’ve often wondered why no Nobel Prize winning economist has seriously taken up the idea, which actually has real merit.
77. W: Department of Deadwood. We could the same thing with congress. Create a third house of deadwood. One term in another house and one is automatically seated in the third. No exceptions. What a great governance we could have. Thanks, W, for reminding us.
Josh
Under the Obamanation who knows
My seat of the pants prediction. Almost anyone with over 12 years in will try to stick it out to retirement. Anyone over 20, except for clinging dead wood that sees promotion opportunities or those who waited for their shot at a real command and can’t say No, and almost everyone under 10 years in past their initial obligation, will get out. That will mean a real shortage at the O-3 and O-4, and some shortage at the O-5 levels, most O-5 and O-6 or O-7 will stick but we lose the best senior flag ranks O-8 through O-10. For the Army that means I think the Company Commanders (Captains) and Battalion Commanders (Lt Col) grades will get out as well as the Majors in between who are the heart of Middle Management and future Commanders. While Brigade Commanders (Colonels) and ambitious Brigadier Generals would likely stick around awhile if prospects look good, senior Generals are probably thinking about a book tour and a teaching or corporate job.
This is a disaster and it will take 15 years to rebuild from it. Training, the most important kind that comes from experience, will suffer. Good people will die.
wretchard
The Department of Deadwood
IBM in the old days ran that way. There were whole departments, buildings full of talented Engineers who had created legacy projects but who were not part of the newer technology trends. No one was fired. They showed up and had nothing to do.
49erDweet,
That is the idea behind the late 20th century House of Lords.
People got kicked upstairs.
A humbling reminder that for some of our comrades the Forlorn Hope is not merely a debating topic:
http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=D9C1F5780&show_article=1
The mullahs are handing out death sentences to democracy activists.
Might we soon see Farsi equivalents to Jose Rizal’s poem?
thus in a world that has the USA in it some progress is bound to rub off on them by virtue of even some of the t-shirts we send them. You know, t-shirts that have little sayings on them or even the symbol for pi.
-heard a story about an American who married a nurse/immigrant from central America. She was from some backwater tribe and her stories about the men back home had hubby a little worried about meeting these tough guys when he went to visit his new family. After slogging it up some jungle river in a little boat he finally meets father- and brother-in-law. Bro is wearing a t-shirt “I was at Barnie Lefkowitz’ Bar Mitzvah, NYC 1987″; Dad is sporting a “Proud to be Gay” shirt.
Regarding military retention, there will be a similar effect on enlisted time in service retention, Early out option 15 yr retirement could result in a total clean out, that takes decades to recover.
“Nations are not corrupt because they are poor. Countries are poor because they are corrupt.”
This is truth on the scale of nations, while there is a corresponding truth on the individual scale:
Individuals are not un-creative because they are poor. Individuals are poor because they are un-creative.
These truths strike at the heart of Marxism which preaches the lie that human creativity, profit and property derived from enterprise is unjust; that “Social Justice” derives from equalization of property through coercive State power, turning a blind eye to the individual labor which created the property. But what about the State? What is wrong with Marxist “Social Justice?” What is to keep the Marxist State from becoming greedy – self-serving – enraged – or violent? What is the fly in the Marxist ointment? For the answer, read the following:
“The People’s State of Marx … will not content itself with administering and governing the masses politically, as all governments do today. It will also administer the masses economically, concentrating in the hands of the State the production and division of wealth, the cultivation of land, the establishment and development of factories, the organization and direction of commerce, and finally the application of capital to production by the only banker — the State. All that will demand an immense knowledge and many heads “overflowing with brains” in this government. It will be the reign of scientific intelligence, the most aristocratic, despotic, arrogant, and elitist of all regimes. There will be a new class, a new hierarchy of real and counterfeit scientists and scholars, and the world will be divided into a minority ruling in the name of knowledge, and an immense ignorant majority. And then, woe unto the mass of ignorant ones!”
“It is precisely this “new class” that reflects the defining contradiction of modern leftist reality: The goal of complete economic equality logically enjoins the means of complete state control, yet this means has never practically achieved that end. Yes, Smith and Jones, once “socialized,” are equally poor and equally oppressed, but now above them looms an oligarchy of not-to-be-equalized equalizers. The inescapable rise of this “new class” — privileged economically as well as politically, never quite ready to “wither away” — forever destroys the possibility of a “classless” society. Here the lesson of socialism teaches what should have been learned from the lesson of pre-liberal despotism — that state coercion is a means to no end but its own. Far from expanding equality from the political to the economic realm, the pursuit of “social justice” serves only to contract it within both. There will never be any kind of equality — or real justice — as long as a socialist elite stands behind the trigger while the rest of us kneel before the barrel.”
http://97.74.65.51/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=13978
Wretchard #77:
Back in the early 70′s I recall an editorial (I think it was by an engineer) that said that much mischief could be avoided if the Government would hire every single lawyer when he got out of law school and keep them busy at pointless tasks so as to prevent them from bothering the productive elements of society. As opposed to their doing pointless tasks that do bother the productive elements of society, which is what they will do if left to their own devices.
I believe that the transfer of the GITMO prisoners is entirely explainable as the lawyers having their way so to further their “industry.”
“Nations are not corrupt because they are poor. Countries are poor because they are corrupt.”
Countries are poor because of criminal government. What is criminal government?
Criminal government is the arbitrary law of an elite oligarchy of individuals who are more equal before this law than others – more equal than “the masses.” Criminal government is that which deeds its self the God-given rights of individuals – to his/her property – to his/her liberty – to his/her life. Criminal government is that which derives its power without the informed consent of the governed. Criminal government is defined by breaching the firewalls of our Declaration of Independence and Constitution.
“Law is often but the tyrant’s will, and always so when it violates the right of an individual.” Thomas Jefferson
“The two enemies of the people are criminals and government, so let us tie the second down with the chains of the constitution so the second will not become the legalized version of the first.” Thomas Jefferson
Storm Rider,
I think that Jefferson’s statement would cover Goldman Sachs, Hank Paulsen and Tim Geithner pretty thoroughly.
We are all on the road to Serfdom……
Habu #69, Truepeers #81:
Some months back Smithsonian Magazine had an article about a B-17E that had crashed in the jungles of New Guinea in WWII. A group of Americans came to recover the airplane and take it back to the USA for restoration. The people in the nearest village were distraught. One even said “The village nearest that airplane did not even have a name. If they had left the airplane there tourists would have come to see it and the village would have a name now.”
I wonder about people whose only hope for the future is an airplane built by someone else that crashed over 60 years ago. I wonder what hope they have if they have not even managed to name their village in all that time.
By the way, the government there, after issuing permits for the removal of the aircraft and collecting appropriate fees, changed its mind and at last report the crated remains of the B-17 were sitting, awaiting the red tape to be cleared up.
Exhelo #71:
I read a few years ago where an African intellectual said just that: “For God’s sake, stop the foreign aid! It is destroying us!“ Insated of trying to figure out how to do what is needed in the country the governments there pretty much sit around and figure out how to divide up the foreign aid.
E. Nigma,
We are all on the road to Serfdom
I prefer Bob and Bing on The Road to Morocco.
Blogged under the title “Breaking the 4th Wall.”
Governance is still catching up with globalization, which brought forth a gigantic Goose laying lots of golden eggs in the last decade of the 20th century. That created an implied crisis, which we are now in the middle of dealing with. The the huge increase in monies created the incentives to rig the economic game before governance could catch up with it. It also created stresses in traditional institutions of governance that were adequate in a smaller, less globalized world but were unable to contain the much more mobile and powerful elites which grew in lockstep with the size of the economic engine.
Now the crisis in governance is threatening to round on the Goose and slay it. It will probably be one of history’s greatest ironies that the development of the oil industry and the huge increase in both the service economy and to the Third World monotonically empowered the groups most hostile to sustainable economic freedom. Narcotics gangs, oil cartels, shady financial empires they grew, like an infection, on all the nutrients that oozed from every pore.
And now, those some forces are using the fact they were able to game the system as an argument against the system itself. “Oh see what it let us do. Better put us in charge so we can stop dreadful people like ourselves.” But there’s no turning back. Technology moves on. I am sure agriculture and industrialization created similar upheavals, though the parallels are not exact. History never repeats, but it rhymes.
Unfortunately there is no quick fix. Our perils and our joys will be bounded by the same days. I wasn’t kidding when I said that beer and buffalo wings were part of the same world as the Forlorn Hopes. Angels and demons, heaven and earth, hope and despair, the best of times and the worst of them. Story of our lives and it comes with the turf. For we were made to be free, almost condemned to it.
Konyok/15: “I think that an important component to corruption is the lack of political legitimacy. Mexico, for example, has had six constitutions since gaining independence.”
National Constitutions are bound to fail if they do not have a sacred purpose; that is to equally secure the individual’s unalienable (God-given) rights to life, liberty and private property – creative pursuit of happiness.
National Constitutions are bound to fail if they can be twisted into “Living Constitutions,” i.e.: Constitutions which arbitrarily and irrationally derive from an elite oligarchy rather than from “We the People.”
National Constitutions are bound to fail if they do not have a rational means to secure a sacred mandate.
“Oh see what it let us do. Better put us in charge so we can stop dreadful people like ourselves.”
What is this, are you bucking to be the ghostwriter for Tim Geithner’s autobiography?
Brock — By not possible, I mean the people. Individuals can and do change, I have no doubt whatsoever that there are quite a number of absolute (Mozart/Gauss level) geniuses in Africa, the most benighted continent. Its also likely that it would take efforts of centuries for a social environment for that genius to bear fruit. If that.
Look at Europe. It took ENORMOUS luck, with “enough” Roman culture surviving (btw Victor Davis Hanson notes that the late Western Empire was perhaps a third slave), agriculture not conducive to giant plantations, enough tribal pagan freeholding surviving among the invaders, geography amenable to “smallness” and also cohesiveness, and then the Black Plague wiping out so many people that the survivors could enter into new areas, along with trans-Atlantic/Pacific trade routes opened to bypass the Muslim stranglehold on the eastern trade. It took ALL THAT AND MORE to change Europe from being a miserable, cold, tyranny-ridden, violent hell-hole that resembled “Mad Max” with lots of snow and rain.
And EVEN THEN it took approximately 1500 years from the end of the Roman Republic to have Europe even approximate “Good Goverment.” Charles Taylor and his limb-hacking would have been quite at home with the Viking “blood eagle” and the Pagan Viking raiders. Heck Charlegmagne probably killed about half a million pagan Saxons during the Saxon Wars. MOST of Europe during the Dark and Middle Ages saw CONSTANT warfare killing on the levels of Africa today per capita. Heck in the Thirty Years War a THIRD of German speakers were murdered or died of plague — and that was AFTER the Renaissance.
Chile, Hong Kong, and Singapore are either island city-states (suffering on the good graces of their neighbors) or a very recent and fragile exception. Venezuela is likely to perpetuate its dysfunction and spread it to its neighbors quicker and longer than Chile lasts with good government.
Having been to China, I am VERY skeptical that even it can ESCAPE THE DEFAULT HUMAN VALUE. Which is bad governance, corruption, violence, and criminality on a large scale. True story, I was there on some Dept. of Energy boondoggle involving “clean coal” (what a laugh, China is the most filthy place on the planet) and came to visit a Senior Engineering professor at his office at Tsinghua University. Tsinghua is the equivalent of MIT in China, or perhaps Stanford, to Beijing University’s Harvard/Yale. Anyway, the lights were all out (this was Summer, ah Summer in Beijing!). The stairway was dark, and had … no handrails whatsoever. I had a tiny pocket flashlight that I turned on and groped my way through the dark. The elevators did not work. Chunks of concrete were missing in the staircase, too. The visit was quite pleasant. The professor learned, astonishingly adept, and her English impeccable. I learned quite a bit on the general scope/scale of what had been proposed by the Chinese Power Ministry for Clean Coal (promptly tossed in the trash can of course by the real powers). On the way back to another appointment across town I took a taxi, which went on one of Beijing’s freeways. With broken guard-rails acting like spears pointing out towards traffic, which included bicycles, donkey carts with the ubiquitous coal, BMWs of important officials, and the ever-present PLA trucks. When I arrived at my appointment I quickly entered a hotel restroom to wash my face clean of the coal dust that had covered me (nearly all Beijing taxis lacked Air Conditioning).
This is China. Filled with quite a number of brilliant people. Who will go nowhere, in aggregate, because the Chinese people LIKE being Chinese. Which among them is a penchant for corruption, Big Man disease, rampant pollution, violence, repression, and personal habits that are astonishingly filthy (including public urination and more of kids and adults). I saw it myself. It took decades of a MASSIVE dose of repression and hard laws by Lee Kwan Yue just to make Singaporese less “Chinese” and more civilized. This with the luck of a man less corrupt and more concerned with his people than most leaders. Operating on a City State.
PC lectures on multiculturalism and diversity and the kumbayah power of Third World self-actualization mean nothing. The ugly hard truth is that while all peoples produce genius and talent, most cultures are good at perpetuating themselves (because people LIKE corruption, violence, greed, tribalism, Big Man-ism etc.) and bad at good governance.
This is what History teaches us.
India is filled with mostly tribal, low-IQ villagers who speak about 75 different languages, are ridden with caste/hierarchical rivalries, idiot superstitions and appalling customs. China is slightly better but a polluted basket case, imagine a Roman Empire that never really fell but contained people with languages and identities mutually untillegible and with the kind of brotherly love that characterized England-France-Germany in the past few centureies. Both India and China approximate the worst of Europe circa A.D. 600-1200. Have 900 years and astonishing good luck to spare?
Mexicans or Filipinos are neither racially, morally, or spiritually inferior to Europeans or Asians. But they are certainly attached to their way of life, and practically all would prefer to remain as they are than become what the Swiss, or Danes, or Americans became. They would rather live in relative poverty, violence, and corruption than change who they are. Look at Mexicans in the US — they revert back to Mexican ways and counts of single motherhood, crime, educational attainment, etc. Mexicans in the US certainly don’t want to become “American” in the way of the folks parodied in “SWPL” website and book. They don’t shop at Trader Joes for organic arugala and Tofurkeys. According to Heather McDonald at City-Journal, the Hispanic rate of illegitimacy is over 50%.
It is time to accept that the West can be neither a hero nor villain, IF the Third World ever changes it will be centuries of hard work and gargantuan amounts of Luck. We can neither “save” the Third World or “destroy” it, and it is time for us to accept reality and realize the limits of our power — at best we can minimize the threat of the Third World by engagement and punishment as needed. Most Third World peoples LIKE being what they are — certainly the AK-47 allows them to use violence to create a new system. And those that have done so have merely re-created the old (Cuba, South Africa, Burma come to mind).
This “hero” business where the West believes it can “redeem” a people quite happy in the “normal” human condition simply has to be dispensed with. It is time to realize that the West is simply a happy accident and huge exception to humanity, not the rule.
The BBC underwhelms. Mexican police are famously corrupt. In this context “corruption” means in league with the bad guys, the drug cartels – a huge problem. But *increasing* violence indicates resistance by others besides the police, because for that idea to make sense, law enforcement in small towns would have just been bought off or bought into, and after a few bullets here and there things would be somewhat peaceful. The wholesale murders suggest something different.
Putting Mexican law enforcement in its proper section, because this internal rot is a main problem, we have: the drug cartels, their cohorts in officialdom (like mayors), and the police vs. the federal administration, the military, and regular Mexicans, who are individually becoming more armed and pissed off by the day. Isn’t this a civil war? It looks that way to me.
Whiskey,
I can accept what most of what you say, but, your assertion of Mexican girls reverting to type through single parenthood is simply wrong. (To tell the truth, a further distinction does need to be made. Rural Mexico retains the traditional patriarchal mores. Urban Mexico shares a lot of the modern pathologies. Most rural Mexican migrants face a choice: go to Mexico City, Guadalajara or Monterrey, or to El Norte. What decides the choice most often is where family members or friends from the same village have gone. The great majority of the migration to the United States is rural, but, most of the criminality is of urban origin.)
Mexican squalor is, indeed, Mexican squalor. The great tragedy of the Mexican diaspora though is the absorbtion of American squalor. What americanization that takes place is ghettoization. There ARE no social programs in Mexico, but, like all migrating humans they quickly adapt to local conditions.
Mexico, in particular, has always been a mystery to me. I’ve lived most of my life in Los Angeles, Mexico a two-hour drive away, but I’ve only crossed the border a couple of times, and those long ago. Why? Mostly because I’m scared, of the Napoleonic system, and corruption. And Montezuma’s Revenge. Actually, my experiences there were entirely mundane and peaceful (and healthy), but even so.
I have enough trouble trying to understand the US and cope with the systems here.
OTOH, give it twenty years, and who knows, things might just equalize, or reverse. Would never have imagined saying that, twenty years past but looking forward today, I just don’t know anymore.
btw, I really appreciate the posts here by those more traveled and experienced than I, re Mexico, China, and of course wretchard’s writings on the Phillipines.
BS. Blame the other as victims are wont to always do. As Tamquam says: “Te chingaste, cabron.” (To translate and very literally, “You’re f–ked, goat.”) Hell no. It is just the patron system that has always been in place. It is very similar to the Islamic one — me and my brother, etc.
Everyone blames the drugs for their own base instincts. The Communists have been working in Mexico for years. First in Chiapas and Yucatan then moved north into Sonora and Chihuahua. The Communists use the drugs and gun running to fuel the collapse they desire. That the Mexicans have survived this long is testimony to how tough they are.
I live in a border state and can tell you that those lovely ‘immigrants’ bring their corruption with them.
As happygrl said @ 9:
After I quit laughing, I had to correct this grl. The ones that make up to el Norte have NO intention EVER of going home to live. NONE! NADA! They got out and stay out. They do make trips home on the Holidays . . .. hauling broken down cars, trucks and vans to sell and pay for the trip. That is it. Then they come back promptly to go back to work. I know lots and lots of these folks personally. Es verdad. They have made it to El Dorado and they are not returning home except to visit.
Darren @ 17 said:
D, they are here and they have NO FEAR. It is fairly quiet in Phoenix, San Diego, Albuquerque, and El Paso because if the gunfire gets TOO loud they know their days will be numbered. Those cities are the major trans-shipment points for the drugs going north. La Eme (M), better known as The Mexican Mafia and MS-13 have out fought the Bloods and Crips for control of East LA. They make the black gangs look like wimps. La Eme is a product of the CA prison system. Go view “American Me” with Eduardo Jaime Olmos. (He had a contract on him for a long time due to the true nature of the film.)
whiskey @ 27: I usually agree with you but on this one you are wrong……. and quite bigoted.
Mark @ 34: Nope, doesn’t play. Catholic Liberation Theology is just the same as Cone’s Black Liberation Theology, a tool of the Communistas. Has always been and always will be. Read Che. Unfortunately the Catholic Nuns in SA have gotten bitten by this bug without seeing the folly of their philosophy. Even the Popes have said so.
The solution to Mexico is to close the border tight, tight, tight. Not a gnat gets through without sanction. Open to trade, open to people who are legal. Closed to all illegal activity. The situation is what it is because it has the sanction of the leaders of both countries – Mexico and the US. If they wanted it otherwise would they not make that happen with ease? Of course they would.
Congress and pResident Pantywaist want:
>10.2% unemployment
No solution to Afghanistan
Iran to have the bomb
Russia running a muck in Europe and near Asia
The ChiComs owning our debt
ETC, ETC.
I see two people have already posted links to Dalrymple’s article on Rhodesia. I would also like to heartily recommend it. Ever since I first read it, I have come to consider deficient all those ‘incentivizing’ solutions which do not find it necessary to say a word about the culture of the people they are supposed to motivate.
It was quite an eye-opener for me, so I beg your indulgence for quoting the relevant parts at length:
http://www.city-journal.org/html/13_2_oh_to_be.html
[The author is speaking of his time as a Doctor in Rhodesia, while it was still under colonial rule]
“The young black doctors who earned the same salary as we whites could not achieve the same standard of living for a very simple reason: they had an immense number of social obligations to fulfill. They were expected to provide for an ever expanding circle of family members (some of whom may have invested in their education) and people from their village, tribe, and province. An income that allowed a white to live like a lord because of a lack of such obligations scarcely raised a black above the level of his family…
These obligations also explain the fact, often disdainfully remarked upon by former colonials, that when Africans moved into the beautiful and well-appointed villas of their former colonial masters, the houses swiftly degenerated into a species of superior, more spacious slum…. [because] the fortunate inheritor of such a villa was soon overwhelmed by relatives and others who had a social claim upon him. They brought even their goats with them; and one goat can undo in an afternoon what it has taken decades to establish.
It is easy to see why a civil service, controlled and manned in its upper reaches by whites, could remain efficient and uncorrupt but could not long do so when manned by Africans who were supposed to follow the same rules and procedures… The thick network of social obligations explains why, while it would have been out of the question to bribe most Rhodesian bureaucrats, yet in only a few years it would have been out of the question not to try to bribe most Zimbabwean ones, whose relatives would have condemned them for failing to obtain on their behalf all the advantages their official opportunities might provide. Thus do the very same tasks in the very same offices carried out by people of different cultural and social backgrounds result in very different outcomes.”
W@93: Dept. of Energy boondoggle involving “clean coal” (what a laugh, China is the most filthy place on the planet)
Coal can be gassified, which reduces carbon emissions to effectively zero, as in south Florida, or even just scrubbed, although to lesser effect, as is currently required for all new plants stateside. Low sulfur deposits, such as those located in the west require less treatment (burn cleaner) than the high sulfur deposits in Appalachia.
Konyok,
The great tragedy of the Mexican diaspora though is the absorbtion of American squalor.
RagnarD,
La Eme is a product of the CA prison system.
The Official Line in Latin America is that the US is exporting crime and corruption South. That is why Napolitano’s initiative to inspect Southbound traffic, separate from the possible merits of the program, fits a larger narrative.
Traditional patriarchal cultures have the tools to control the pathologies, corruption and latent violence, we associate with them. The key word in my last sentence is “latent.” In a small rural traditional community life is very organized and disciplined. Everyone knows their place. While there is the potential for young men to turn violent it rarely happens. Those impulses are either exported, into the military if kept socially redeemable or into criminal gangs that prey on outsiders but at a social cost or they are sublimated into religious and social rituals. That is why tourists can visit an authoritarian hell hole and remark on how peaceful and friendly everyone was. The price people pay for that level of control is ignorance and stagnation.
When I taught in the most dangerous school in New York City there were only two parts of the system that worked. By worked I mean maintained a functioning classroom atmosphere in which some level of education could take place.
First was the Special Ed program which is run as a separate world at vast cost in which there are usually two adults present with a very small number of students. The teacher is under little pressure to achieve results so any progress makes them look like a genius. In the very controlled conditions many emotionally disabled students do respond and I have known Special Ed teachers who love their work.
When the system insists on moving the identified Special Ed students into the general population, known as “Mainstreaming” chaos results. Remember that many of the regular students are not evaluated as belonging in a special program because there are pressures not to make the diagnoses due to the costs involved. Mainstreaming always comes with the promise of additional support resources and stirring PC affirmations of inclusion and exposure being a valuable teaching experience for all concerned. They lie about the resources, the idea is to cut costs, and the rhetoric reveals a typical elitist program that uses human beings as objects in an emotionally motivated experiment at the cost of real education and opportunity.
Second was the Bilingual program. Before I started teaching my prejudice was to object to a special program for Spanish speakers on political grounds, then I saw what happened. Note that the term Bilingual covers two formats, one in which students are mixed in with the general population with additional special services offered. That is similar to mainstreaming Special Ed students and leads to disaster. The other system that works is where Bilingual is really Monolingual and is run as a separate system with its own teachers and student body, in effect a school within a school. The closed Spanish language classrooms worked. They were an island of calm in a sea of chaos.
Picture the Social Studies department office, with three or four teachers hanging around on their off period. A student pokes his head around the door, “Hey Teach I needs (or my Teach needs, or Da Man needs) this copied.” The response would be “Drop dead” or some variant thereof. A second student arrives and knocks on the door. “Who is it?” “Pardon Señor, Professor Salazar sent me. He would like to know if I could make some some copies please?” “For Professor Salazar? But of course. I shall make the copies for you.” People stand up to help and smile at the student. Teachers would volunteer to cover “Professor” Salazar’s class if he was not there.
Two students arrive in The Bronx on the same day. They both come from islands in the Caribbean. They both come from so far back in the hills that you have to pump in sunlight. They both show up there first day in crisp white shirts and dark pants and new shoes. Both are soft spoken and polite. One comes from an Island where the official language is English and the other from an island where the official language is Spanish. In point of fact neither is really fluent in a standard form of any language, they both might as well have come from the Moon. The Spanish speaker goes into the special program and the English speaker into the regular program. In 60 days the student placed in the regular program is trashed. His pants are falling off, his mouth is foul, his associates are criminals, his prospects are nil. The student placed in “Professor” Salazar’s class has a fighting chance.
To be blogged under the title “American Chaos.”
Corruption originates in basic human moral weakness, and is transmitted, not genetically, but through the culture. Cultures arise from their religions and are shaped by them. Of all cultures, those based on Protestant Christianity are the least corrupt.
Doug @ 63: In the list of the 10 least corrupted countries, 9 were countries with cultures based on Protestant Christianity. Of the 10 most corrupt countries, 7 were countries with cultures based on Islam.
Countries affected by Islam seem especially prone to severe corruption. The Spanish culture was also heavily influenced by Islam during the 800 years of occupation by the Muslims. The Spanish language is full of Arabic words, for instance. Latin American Spanish culture, begun about the time the Muslims were ejected from Spain, still retains things like some of the Arabic treatment of women. The chaperone system was still common in Mexico City in the 1960s, for instance, when I was doing research there. Latin American cultures also have some of the dysfunction of the “honor” systems reminiscent of those of the Arabs, more cruel, vengeful and volatile than Anglo cultures. But more hopefully, also more centered on the extended family.
There is also the fact that countries based on Catholic cultures are notably more corrupt than those based on Protestant Christian cultures. That reflects their attitudes toward the Bible in the 15th century. Catholics did not encourage ordinary people to read the Bible. But Protestants did. They promoted literacy too, so more people could read the newly-available cheap printed Bibles. So Protestants had the advantage of more wide-spread literacy, especially in the Bible. More Bible-reading caused ordinary Protestants to try harder than ordinary Catholics to be more moral people. The result was less than normal corruption in Protestant cultures. That was good for business and for more-democratic government. But it came from the inside of individuals rather than arising from any form of government.
The Christian-based culture of the West is the foundational determinant of its being less corrupt. The founders of the American republic did warn us that without “a religious and moral people” their republic would not work. That makes sense. If something on the inside of people does not tell them corruption is wrong, there can never be enough policemen in the world to diminish or stop corruption.
Many efforts have been made to transplant the less-corrupt democracy of the Anglo cultures to non-democracies. Whether it can be done on a permanent basis is still to be seen. Without also transplanting Protestant Christianity, the basis for transplanting a lasting democracy may be doubtful.
It may well be that what is needed to spread non-corrupt democratic governance is more missionaries and more domestic evangelists in the long run. Without that, the transplants may not survive.
In fact, the question for the West is whether having lost so much of its own Christianity, can it hold onto its own waning relatively non-corrupt democracies, or even survive?
I recall a law school discussion — now many years ago — in which we were asked to define ‘middle class.’ There was a lot of talk about incomes, levels of education, preferences in culture, and so forth. My offering was something different: I argued that the middle class can be operationally defined by the manner in which it views the law. The upper class sees the law as simply another tool (among many) to be used in advancing and protecting its own interests. The lower class sees the law as an entitlement that can only belong to someone else–by reason of having no say in how the law is written, changed or administered. Only the middle class considers the law to be equally applicable to ALL, regardless of their economic station, political beliefs or social connections.
Perhaps what Mexico really needs is a larger middle class…
happygrl (44):
That beautiful definition of faith from Hebrews I had entirely forgotten, at least on a conscious level. But even when I (wrongly) regarded myself as an agnostic (from roughly my late teens to fairly recently) I intuitively struggled toward a re-realization of faith thus defined.
This whole post of yours is wonderful.
Jamie Irons
In almost every thread one or more commenters brings up various reasons to legalize drugs. It is important to remember that the drug culture is new in the U.S., dating only from 1964. Before that, there were almost no drug users in the U.S., except in tiny cultural pockets of some musicians, some ghettos and some Hollywood types.
The new drug culture was purely a creature of the hippies/boomers. It was also a part of the long list of new problems and malignant dysfunctions that ballooned drastically with the rise of that generation, beginning in the 60s, such as increases in out-of-wedlock births by 600%, divorces by 300%, teen suicides by 300%, huge decreases in the ability to read, etc., etc., etc. All concurrent with, and brought about by, the Boomer generation and those disgraceful scoundrels who helped indoctrinate them. (Of which I was one.)
Before the 60s and the Boomers, there was no “drug culture” and no “drug problem.” No drug lords, no countries overwhelmed by drug lords with their mass murders and corrupting of governments. No destruction of the lives of the youth of many countries by early addiction. No collateral effects from large numbers of “recreational” dopers.
Why keep trying to keep the drug culture going? Let it go. It is not like alcohol, which has always been there. It is new. Give it whatever chance it may have to fizzle out. Why is it worth preserving? Just which great benefits has it brought? May it eventually die out, at least when the generation that started it dies of old age.
LOTM @ 56:
That charisma doesn’t grow on trees — basic morality comes from religion, and ethics follows from that. Both must be in place, along with respect for private property, before a rule of law can be established. All these are pre-requisites for freedom and general prosperity.
The problem in places like Mexico is how to inculcate that basic morality in a large group of poor people.
Richard Aubrey @ 67:
He was of course correct, and the Eastern rite societies haven’t been havens of freedom and prosperity either. The problem IMO is hierarchical church authority, which is too easily corrupted and co-opted for political oppression. I didn’t know about Weber’s book; thank you for the pointer.
wretchard @ 77:
I love that idea, with the further proviso that no one else would be hired. Eventually the Dept of Dead Wood would be, you know, dead.
whiskey @ 93:
Exactly!
Years ago I was in a ship that called for about two weeks in Sierra Leone, and attended the annual Peace Corps “hail and farewell”, during which all the volunteers came to the capital for a few days. Those departing were thanked for their service and introduced to new volunteers, who were briefed before being sent into the wilds.
I spoke with a discouraged departing volunteer. Living in one village for two years, she had been unable to persuade people to get drinking and cooking water from the river upstream from the “sanitary” site.
Later I sailed with an officer who had spent two years in the Congo before he went to sea. I told him the Sierra Leone story. He chuckled and told me he had about the same success in the Congo.
GerryP,
Max Weber made the case for The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. In fairness he might have overstated the influence of small nations with bad climates on the Northern periphery of Europe and understated the amount of scientific innovation and entrepreneurship that arose in Catholic regions of Germany and areas influenced by German culture, such as Northern Italy, France and Hungary.
The disproportionate influence of Scandinavians and Scots may have been due to their willingness to relocate and the significant contributions of the Northern Catholic regions may have been obscured by two factors. First they were contained between hostile Islamic and Protestant regions and relatively land locked. Second, and this relates to the first issue, their intellectuals and entrepreneurs were less likely to relocate. Northern Italians often identify more with Germanic Mitteleuropa to the North than with their co-nationals to the South. If the country ever broke in two I think the North would debate naming itself Ostrogothia, New Lombardy or South Switzerland.
The Protestant emphasis on individual salvation and moral responsibility is consciously modeled on the Jewish concept of Righteousness. Puritans would call each other a “Good Jew” as a compliment. That did not mean that they were not anti-Semitic if they ever encountered an actual “Hebrew.” In Judaism there is a tension between two forces. First is the need for the collective, it takes ten to make a minyan. “God will meet with 10 street sweepers but not with 9 rabbis.” Community and family are what makes us human. They are the manifestation of a divine blessing. The ultimate punishment that can befall a sinner is to be cut off and have no parents, wife or children. Second is the idea of individual responsibility. God only absolves sins against God and not harm done to another person. You have to clear your own debts.
It is possible though for the sins present in a community to result in harm to an innocent. The consequence of that increases the responsibility of the individual sinner within the group who failed to act to reduce the risk to the innocent. Each person in Sodom was responsible for the harm that befell any innocent trapped in the city when it was destroyed.
The Commandments are not policy instructions for a Leader acting on behalf of the collective but obligations on each person to conduct themselves ethically. Each is obligated to treat God’s creation fairly, not to abuse or be wantonly cruel, as in the laws on diet or not yoking a mother and her calf together. Each is obligated not to abuse their family, as in the sexual prohibitions. Each is obligated to love the stranger.
While both Christian and Moslem advocates would argue that at heart their ethical messages are the same the differences are important. In Catholicism, and other traditions that rely on the absolution of sin through the Eucharist, individual responsibility is subsumed in a collective and God absolves you of responsibility for Sins committed by harming other people. In Protestantism the difference from Judaism may be more subtle. Judaism is not a proselytizing religion. The stranger is left alone to seek their own truth and leadership is shown by example. For Christians the obligation to Witness takes on a more positive nature. This can be shown in the desire to reform and change the world through Good Works or political action that secular Liberals who come out of the Protestant tradition, or Counter-Reformation Catholic movements, exhibit.
In Islam the concept of individual responsibility is overwhelmed by the ever present example of the conduct of Muhammad, the emphasis on ethics being the responsibility of a political ruler who acts and instructs on the communities behalf, and the need to submit to the judgements of experts on how to interpret a welter of conflicting precepts. The cost of error is so high that for any individual to take responsibility and act ethically against a popular but sinful pressure is almost impossible. For a Lot to face down a crowd to protect two strangers in an Islamic community would take a lot.
To be blogged under the title “On Religion and Ethics.”
GerryP @ 101:
As often happens in the BC, someone else explains my thoughts better than I. Thank you for elaborating.
In Protestant Christian societies, not only was literacy encouraged but people were expected to be accountable to God directly instead of through a priest. I believe this structual difference was necessary for the widespread development of individual initiative, creativity and responsibility.
Luther was right that the Church was horribly corrupt; I suspect he was wrong in believing it could ever be anything else. My mother’s family was from a VERY Catholic part of the US. The sale of indulgences that so enraged Luther in 1517 was still happening there — in the 1950s.
Any large organization eventually puts its own bureaucracy’s interests ahead of whomever’s the organization was intended to serve. For an even more recent example in the Church see the pedophilia scandal.
Looks like a taller version of a starving North Korean.
LOTM @ 108
Great post! Very instructive.
Rodney Stark agrees with you about the role of the North Italian Catholics in the development of capitalism. He also points to the earlier banker-like role of some monasteries and also their role as points around which new “unauthorized” villages grew up with their commerce and relative freedoms. (He is an interesting sociologist – an agnostic wno now teaches at Baylor!)
Wonder what the world would be like now if the Jews had proselytized? Interesting thought, huh?
GerryP @ 105:
You’re right, and all of that was actively encouraged by the Communists to undermine our society. Let’s remember who our real enemies are.
Those of us who advocate ending that massive failure known as the War on Drugs would like to do exactly that — let it go. The problem is that authoritarian do-gooders refuse to let it go. If they would, the enormous profits would go away, along with the allure of forbidden pleasure. Smaller profits would not sustain the corruption we have today, and eventually drug use would decline tremendously.
Legalizing drugs is not a cure-all, but it would be a step back to individual responsibility for individual choices.
GerryP,
Thanks. Hope you keep your blog up.
Some Jews did proselytize. We call them Christians. But they forgot some important bits on the way we figure.
Seriously, not proselytizing has probably proven a survival tactic. I did an earlier post here about the Nature of God and why Jews are reluctant to seek converts. Aside that is from the “What, are you nuts? We don’t need any crazy fanatics” factor.
If your father was a Hearst you would have gotten a more lucrative book deal.
Mariner @ 112
Thanks for your kind remarks.
My question for you: Is there a country where that has actually worked out that way? And I hope you are not going to say “Holland.”
LotM @ 108:
I have visited both northern and southern Italy, and it’s hard to believe they are part of the same country. The atmosphere is different, the culture is different, the architecture is different, even the food is different.
AFAIK the Italian Renaissance took place entirely in the north. I’m hardly a scholar, but I can think of no important Renaissance figure from the south.
GerryP @ 114:
OK, I won’t say Holland.
The US isn’t like Holland in any important way. Why would you think American society would respond the same to drug legalization as Holland?
Why not believe it would respond to the end of drug prohibition much as it responded to the end of alcohol Prohibition?
Mariner @ 116
I don’t know that we can safely compare alcohol and drug use and/or prohibition in the U.S. Alcohol use is as old as civilization, pretty well covers the world and is used by all U.S. generations. Drug use in the U.S. is new and mostly leaves out some generations. I think we need to be wary of unintended consequences in situations that are not more closely comparable than this one. Maybe it would work out as you and others hope. Maybe not. I am skeptical. It is a big chance to take. The reasons sound good, but do you really know? Can anyone?
LOTM @ 113
Thanks. I feel guilty about neglecting my blog. Heck, I even feel guilty about taking time to comment this much!
But I’m still doing heavy rehab after a knee replacement, because it really works. Also getting ready to replace the other knee in about 3 months, which also motivates me to do a lot of strengthening in advance. It’s fun to be getting so fit after being slowed by a bad knee. (If people don’t want a bad knee, they shouldn’t jog as long as I did.) Don’t know what took me so long to fix it.
As for being a Hearst kid so I could get published faster – too late. Ingenious suggestion though.
Whoops, the new thread just went away.
mariner,
I have blogged on the lack of love between North and South in Italy. Many Northern Italians curse Garibaldi for grafting the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies onto the new Italian State that Cavour and Mazzini created. Outside of Naples the common language was Greek until Mussolini introduced radio.
Drugs have come a long way since the hippie days. How does one legalize crank?
GerryP:
Drug use in the U.S. is new and mostly leaves out some generations.
Well, no, to be completely correct: Drug use such as opiates and cocaine have been around for as much as 150 years in the U.S., with morphine (Laudanum) having been around for medicinal purposes much longer. Morphine and opium-smoking addiction were big problems in the second half of the 19th century. The opium dens that dotted the American landscape were, unfortunately, one of the triggers that led to the Chinese Exclusionary Act (which, ironically, is the foundation of our modern concept of “legal” vs. illegal immigration. I’m not complaining, just explaining by putting things in historical perspective).
Life, I just noticed it too, just missed the end of the plot, with juge Brugière and Brigitte !
uh, please, put it back on line !
GerryP:
Your understanding and historical chronology about American drug (narcotic) use is simplistic and incomplete. It has been around for much longer and more pervasive than you are assuming.
However, I’m not saying this to negate your underlying points about “being careful what we wish for” in legalizing recreational drug use. I believe you are still correct in your assumption that drinking has much firmer roots in western society than drug use. Also, I need to ask this question of all commenters on the subject of drug legalization:
If we legalize drug use, will this eliminate illegal drug use and the illegal trade and criminal element that comes with it?
It’s NOT a trick question. Think it through.
Geithner gave away the store in AIG bailout
Bucks from Us to Goldman Sucks
Last week I praised Afghan Minister of Mines Mohammad Adel as an “honest technocrat.”
With egg all over my face I have to report that he is alleged to have taken $30 million in bribes to award China the copper contract at Anyak. I fear a perfect example of Wretchard’s thesis of the Economic Gangster.
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601091&sid=aW52kQwvDhyo
http://money.canoe.ca/News/Sectors/Mining/2009/11/01/11595746-ap.html
A lot of U.S. taxpayer money went into both studying this enormous copper deposit and into assisting the Afghans in developing a regulatory structure to manage this kind of resource. Whoops.
Don Rodrigo @ 121
Useful and very interesting historical perspectives, Don Rodrigo. Well done.
But I was pointing out that massive drug use, on today’s scale, is new. The uses you point out were by small minorities, in limited areas of the country, and for limited periods of time not extending to the present or even to the 1960s.
Remember that before WWII, 75% of the population lived in small towns of 5000 or less. As the opium dens you mention were only in certain large cities, most of the population was never exposed to them. And while opium was used for awhile in medicines sold over-the-counter and cocaine was included in the first Coca Colas, such uses did not last very long. Neither led to wide-spread frequent recreational use.
The recreational drug use that started in 1964 rapidly grew to a scale not previously seen in the U.S.
It was that unprecedented large scale that made it into a new nation-wide problem, affecting everything from the justice system to social services to the economy to ruined lives for many young people and their families. Not to mention the wars, corrupted governments in many parts of the world and thousands of murders.
It is anything but a small or trivial matter. It is hard to imagine a sensible or redeeming justification for it.
P.S. Don Rodrigo, I just now saw your # 123 . Good reasoning, and I agree with your question at the end. (Hard to make direct replies in the mix of trying to respond on time.)
The most useful lesson in recent developments of social sciences and economics sounds almost trivial: culture is important! But this truth is systematically rejected by ideology of multiculturalism, which holds all cultures as equally “good” and valuable. Thus we are proposed a false choice of cause and effect between powerty and corruption. But actually both are symptoms of a backward, dysfunctional culture. And this culture even has its proper name: amoral familism. Historically it is a remain of a tribal society. Tribalism is incompatible with universal moral code, rule of law and even statehood. Historically it was for the first time successfully overcame by a Mosaic law, the first monotheistic religion which made the law sacrosanct. Christianity brought this attitude to heathens, and the degree to which tribalism is uprooted correlates with the degree to which Christian moral has replaced tribal traditions. The most profound impact of Christianity into family life came with Reformation. In Catholic world religion and moral are often weakly coupled, tribal customs are alive and well, and Mafia thrives.
But I was pointing out that massive drug use, on today’s scale, is new. The uses you point out were by small minorities, in limited areas of the country, and for limited periods of time not extending to the present or even to the 1960s.
Actually, GerryP, they were not small minorities. You are correct that the proportional use (in relation to population) is higher today, but not by much. Ordinary citizens did succumb to available narcotics back 100 or more years ago, and suffered accordingly.
As the opium dens you mention were only in certain large cities, most of the population was never exposed to them.
Well, not quite. The Old West was dotted with opium dens — they were a great source of corruption kickbacks. The Earp brothers made money off of these dens while in Arizona. The Earp’s nemeses at the OK Corral were frequent patrons of these dens, and Wyatt’s woman was a morphine addict. Many soldiers post-Civil War suffered this addiction as a result of treatment for war wounds.
Again, though, I’m clarifying, and not contradicting your main points. Most small towns, as you implied, had none of these narcotics-related pathologies (hence all the warnings to young’uns of the time about the evils of the big city). Perhaps what is most important in bolstering your point of view is this: one of the reasons that 19th-century drug addiction was more common than normally assumed is because the narcotics were legal and easy to obtain. This is a primary reason why a crackdown came about starting in the early 20th century — authorities and reformers were becoming alarmed at the prevalence of narcotics abuse. Unfortunately, the alarm was also bolstered by bigotry against the Chinese and the ‘Negro problem,’ but that was the temper of the times.
And again, I ask the commenters here my question:
Would legalizing recreational drug use eliminate the illegal use of those drugs and the accompanying criminal connections?
GerryP @ 105 said:
Wrong. It was mainstreamed in the “60′s” but it was there all along. That is what they wish you to believe. Truth is cocaine, morphine and heroin were patent medicines available in tinctures and as concentrate forms. Marijuana was the herb of choice for the poor.
Go deep. Go deeper now. Also, the advent of the Marxists coming out of Europe fleeing the Nazis. Those guys who brought us multi-culti and PC. And post 1917 activists who came to conquer out of Russia. (McCarthy was a drunk and all sorts of things but he was not wrong.) You had the symptom not the pathology.
GerryP @ 126:
If you think it is massive in today’s society that tells me a lot about who you hang with. Having been on both sides of that particular track I will tell you that you are wrong. When I hung with druggies we thought everyone used. When I stopped, I realized that few did. The real truth is less than 10% of the population will ever touch the sh-t.
Prohibition did a lot more than make alcohol illegal. It was just a part and parcel of making a lot of common substances banned ……. so they could be controlled and taxed. Sound more than a little familiar for today’s news?
Dear Don Rodrigo,
You are a gentle, tactful man. Thank you. I didn’t know about the opium dens scattered around the Wild West outposts, or about the Earps. Fascinating. No doubt the traveling snake oil medicine salesmen had a lot to do with the availability of opium-laced medicines. But back then – who knew? No doubt many did not realize they could get addicted.
Personally, I thank God for opiates and other pain killers. Worth their weight in gold for surgery, wounds, terminal cancer, and much more.
One thing I learned from the women I knew in prison (about 90% of whom were addicts) was the terrible problem they faced when surgery or real pain loomed. The usual pain killers were not going to be adequate for them, because of the high tolerance they had built up to opiates and other pain killers. They usually would not succeed either, in getting medical personnel to give them a much-larger-than normal dose of painkiller. So they were going to suffer tremendous pain if they wanted treatment.
Conversely, when they left prison for the street, many OD’d when they returned to drugs. After their long absence from the scene, many could not tolerate the standard drug strength on the street. Many, many of them would tell you “prison saved my life.” They meant that one way or another, drugs would have killed them if they had remained free.
All that gives me a somewhat more drastic view of “recreational” drugs than someone simply observing the non-addicted week end users. But the lives of people like the ones I knew in prison are worth considering too.
Tamquam, Read the Ph.D. thesis in Economics, University of Texas at Austin, by Dr. Leonard Gattica. He write the first economic model of patron client politics. Patron/client politics is the political system of most countries in the developed world and even in jurisdictions of the US such as south Texas, Chicago and the University of Texas at Austin.
On ending the War on Drugs:
I needed to take one PhysEd course in college, and I chose tennis. There was actually a textbook for that class; it was about 50 pages long.
I still can’t play tennis worth a damn, but after 35 years I still remember a very important principle, bold-faced in that thin book:
We are losing the War on Drugs, and along with it we’re losing our Constitution and our society. IMO we should change this losing game post haste. It’s true that we can’t know all the consequences, but we already see the horrible consequences of the present policy. In this case I’d rather “fly to others [ills] that we know not of”.
to: Jamie Irons # 103
Thank you for your kind comments.
Never mind fixing Mexico, it’s far too late. The rot of corruption is taking broad hold in the US. The poverty and violence is sure to follow.
The “forlorn hope” only works when those in power are not corrupt. What if a prize for doing good goes to someone with the best public relations, the best press coverage, or the one who simply bribes the general to give him a medal?
One of the reasons why the Nobel Peace Prize is now regarded with such contempt is because it has historically gone only to those who somehow advance the interests of Swedish foreign policy. Hence, Hitler and Stalin were beneficiaries as well as the occasional genuine hero.
When there is endemic corruption with a regime with no ideological bearings, the “forlorn hope” works in reverse. Hence, the panic in 1975 that ensued in South Vietnam when President Thieu tried to evacuate the central highlands.
I would argue that a regime of government requires a raison d’être, without which it is a hollow shell. Bureaucrats need a reason to not be corrupt. Priests need a reason to not be corrupt. Government leaders need a reason to not be corrupt. It helps if one believes in a religion where God (or “the gods”) is neither corrupt nor arbitrary. Perhaps corruption is not so much a cause of a lack of legitimacy, but rather its effect.
Afganistan is historically a tribal confederation masquerading as an empire (much like medieval Ethiopia) within a region accustomed to being a series of satrapies within the Persian Empire. Its present configuration is the result of the combined arms of the United States and the Northern Alliance. This puts the United States into the odd position of being an overlord.
Now, imagine a satrap comes to the court of the King of Kings. Then, imagine the Padishah gratuitously chewing out the satrap in public for the satrap’s corruption. Never mind the Padishah’s own corruption. Never mind how press accounts of the corruption of the Padishah’s court get squelched. Never mind that the nickname of the lord of the state next door is “Mr. 10%”. No, the satrap must crack down on corruption or else the Padishah might not send any more troops to quell raids by bandits, never mind that opium has become the life blood of the economy of his satrapy. That satrap is scared; he is glad for every day of life he has because he knows the grisly fate of the previous satraps.
If the satrap had been reminded in private of the necessity of reform, the satrap may have listened. Yet, by humiliating the satrap in public, the Padishah undermined the satrap’s legitimacy. As it is, arguments are raging in provincial capitals whether the Padishah is seeking to undermine the Empire, he is acting incompetently, or whether the power of his office is merely going to his head much as it did for Caligula and Nero. Grumbling is rising in the ranks of the imperial guard. Yet, since the present Padishah is still seen by half of the empire as a living deity in a new Ptolemaic religion that promises “Change”, court rivalries are mostly rhetorical. For the time being.
Wars often provide opportunities, like the number of experienced helocopter pilots after Viet Nam. Before that time, few news channels had their own helos, now they all do. The forlone hope for the drug trade could be the adrenelin junkies coming back from the Middle East. The opportunities for them is hitting the drug dealers and keeping whatever the capture (money). A couple of hairy raids and some of them can retire. So you have the right skill set coupled with the right reward. What we don’t have is the will.
Whiskey @ 93
I have been to China also, 2004 and 2008.
The airports were clean the cabs were clean the hotels were clean the restaurants were clean and the stores were clean.
The people with one exception were polite friendly helpful and clean.
At one stop in Chongquing we met a Ford executive who was sent to build a factory from the ground up. He said there was not an alley in this city of millions that he would be afraid to be alone in at three o’clock in the morning.
The crime rate in China is very low.
We visited an elementary school in Nanchang where the daughter of our guide attended. It was huge and clean and so were the kids.
The air is very dirty and you can’t drink the municipal water.
I know the country runs on bribes
and politics but the average Chinese is as decent as the average American.
My brother visited the roman ruins of Ephesus in Turkey last month. What struck him most was that that public latrines there were communal. He showed pictures of great round or square houses with hundreds of latrines around the edges facing inward. Apparently going to the bathroom was considered to be an opportunity for a great social event–like a luncheon or a catered dinner today.
I looked online for some pictures. Here’s one–but its not nearly as grand as some pics that my brother brought back.
Behaviors change over time for all people everywhere.
I agree with 9. happygrl: The change will come to Mexico from the bottom up.
It bears noting however that the backsliding being experienced by Britian (Britian was the topic of the preceding post)coincides with the abandonment of the church by the population at large. Much of the remnant christians there follow a debased protestantism.
Catholicism is still dominant in Mexico. I’ve heard it characterized as something very medieval and very different from american catholicism.
Behaviors can change for both better and worse. There is considerable evidence that Great Britian is getting worse. Hard to say about Mexico because everything is so obscured by Mexican blood letting.
The Mexicans are world class murderers. Five times more americans are killed in Mexico annually than anywhere else in the world. More Americans have been killed by illegals aliens mostly from Mexico than have been killed in the middle east wars.
imho the border needs to be sealed and the illegals kicked out. The Mexicans steeped in American culture would start a real revolution in Mexico.
Sound impossible? I also think that within the decade technological change will make it possible push inexpensive fresh desalinated water into the deserts of Mexico turn them green and effectively triple the size of that country.
Let’s draw a plumb line on our age.
Understand that in the last month NASA confirmed the presence of significant amounts of water on the moon by rocketing one satellite into a crater and then rocketing another satellite through the debris thrown up by the first satellite. Analysis of the debris by the second satellite in the seconds before it crashed showed the presence of water.
That means that all the primary ingredients for colonization of the moon are available on the moon: water, power, oxygen.
But imho serious space colonization won’t get started until the second half of the 21th century. The first half of the 21st century will be about turning the deserts of the world green & doubling the size of the habitable planet.
Seems the problem with the editor is firefox specific.
Confucian ethics is also based on personal responsibility, and in many aspects emulates Puritanism. No wonder, in many Third World countries the only successfull entrepreneurs are Chinese nationals. This also explains why Protestantism has so many followers in South Korea.
Mexico’s Drug War