Books and Movies

This weekend being the traditional kick-off of summer, I thought I’d take a moment to suggest some books and movies you might enjoy.

If you have the time and the inclination, you might want to add these titles to your summer reading list:

Murder City – Charles Bowden’s account of the drug war-fueled carnage in Ciudad Juárez, where rape, corruption, and murder have become the rule rather than the exception. Fighting an unwinnable drug war can’t possibly be worth this much death.

Give Me Liberty – Naomi Wolf is an interesting writer, and an excellent civil libertarian. She comes from the progressive tradition, and her latest book Give Me Liberty is her call to “take back the country.” The book does show her strong leftist streak, however, and her notion of taking the country back seems to be limited to direct democracy and standard inside-the-box political action. Still, her book is worth the read and she’s not wrong about the state of civil liberties in this country – and to her great credit, she recognizes that the attack on those liberties is a bipartisan effort.

Constitutional Chaos – Andrew Napolitano could be a libertarian Limbaugh. He has a presence that is well-suited to mass media, a résumé that shows he knows what he’s talking about, and an “in” with the Fox News crowd. He may be the only person in America who can speak of civil liberties in a way that will resonate with the red states. Constitutional Chaos is a collection of anecdotes illustrating the various ways in which the government routinely places itself above the law.

A Path to Freedom – After watching the movie Michael Collins, I decided to read more about the Irish revolutionary. A Path to Freedom is a collection of essays he wrote in defense of the treaty he had recently signed with the British, which led to the establishment of the Irish Republic and sparked the Irish Civil War.

Crash Proof 2.0 – Peter Schiff’s analysis of the global economy is a lot more sensible than anything we’re likely to hear from Washington. These days I can’t even look at my stock portfolio’s performance without taking a Dramamine first. I’m starting to think that the question before us now is not how to change the political culture, but rather how best to protect ourselves and our loved ones in the face of the oncoming economic storm. Crash Proof provides some suggestions.

Lincoln Unmasked – Thomas DiLorenzo takes another whack at the Lincoln piñata. It’s a good book, but doesn’t really seem to go much beyond what he had already covered in The Real Lincoln.

The Imperial Cruise – Finally someone has decided to tell the real story of Teddy Roosevelt and the legacy of his bloodthirsty imperialist rampage across the Pacific. In The Imperial Cruise, James Bradley explains how US imperialism set Japan on its own militarist course and created a formidable enemy to fight years later.

And here are some movies and documentaries I’ve watched lately, all of which are available for instant viewing on Netflix:

Cocaine Cowboys – Former Miami drug dealers reminisce about the bad old days.

The Union: The Business Behind Getting High – This is a really good Canadian documentary on the marijuana trade north of the border. Again, the only way to win the drug war is to stop fighting it.

Gallipoli – This Australian movie starring Mel Gibson is an oldie but a goodie, and it poignantly illustrates the absolute folly of war. What possible threat did the Turks pose to Australia? An important question to ask whenever one’s government starts rattling the saber.

Howard Zinn: You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train – This documentary, narrated by Matt Damon, was my first introduction to Howard Zinn. An interesting guy, Zinn. Great on war and civil rights, but completely clueless on economics.

Iraq for Sale: The War Profiteers – Halliburton, KBR, CACI, Titan, Blackwater. Another reason to support the separation of business and state.

War Made Easy – Narrated by Sean Penn, War Made Easy provides an overview of the pro-war propaganda campaigns used by the US government over the years. As one might expect, it’s heavy on Bush’s build-up to the Iraq war. They’re not wrong, but I would have liked to see them go farther back in time. Government pro-war propaganda is hardly a new development, after all.

The End of America – This is a video discussion of Naomi Wolf’s earlier book by the same title. Her thesis is that there are ten steps needed to turn an open, free society into a closed, totalitarian society. The game plan was implemented by the Nazis in the 30s, and she draws parallels to the Bush years.

Michael Collins – Liam Neeson plays the title character in this biopic of the Irish revolutionary. It’s a fascinating story, and one I’m interesting in learning more about.

Frontline: Ten Trillion and Counting – This PBS show is worth watching if only for its comic relief value. Watching Forrest Sawyer stumble around economic concepts he clearly doesn’t understand is amusing enough, but the show’s internal contradictions are what is truly fascinating. After spending most of the program lambasting George Bush for spending too much and running up too much debt, they then turn around and praise Obama for doing the exact same thing. True to the Keynesian tradition, the show argues that Bush’s deficit spending was bad, but that Obama’s even greater deficit spending is exactly what we need to correct the problems caused by too much deficit spending.

The Great Fiction

The 19th-century French economist Frederic Bastiat once wrote that the state is the great fiction through which everyone attempts to live at the expense of everyone else. As the recent domestic troubles in Greece show, however, this fiction cannot last. Reality will assert itself eventually, and the longer that process takes the more painful it will be.

Given that the United States is in every bit as much financial trouble as Greece (if not more), how painful do you think our return to reality will be? For far too long our government has pretended that consumption is the cause, rather than the consequence, of wealth. To this mistaken end, the Fed has engineered the destruction of the dollar and has accelerated that process at an alarming rate over the last decade. The great fiction that prosperity comes from the printing press now passes as common sense among politicians, journalists, and Keynesian economists. Because this particular fiction has endured for so long, the inevitable return to reality may be very painful indeed.

And though Bastiat’s original observation still holds true, it seems that the modern American state has decided to kick it up a notch. These days the state is not only the great fiction through which everyone attempts to live at the expense of everyone else (see Obamacare and Social Security), but it is also the great fiction through which everyone attempts to live a consequence-free existence.

Perhaps you’re a homeowner who took on a mortgage you can’t really afford. No problem. The government will simply foist the cost of your error onto the bank that loaned you the money so that you can avoid foreclosure and keep the house you shouldn’t have bought in the first place. Why should you have to suffer the consequences of your bad decision?

Or perhaps you’re the bank officer who loaned the money to the homeowner who couldn’t afford the mortgage. No problem. The government will simply make the taxpayer responsible for the losses so that you can shore up your balance sheets and continue to loan money recklessly. Why should you have to suffer the consequences of your bad loans?

Do you work for an automobile manufacturer that sold cars for less money than it cost to produce them? No problem. The government will simply take over your company, hand over a controlling interest to its union friends, and foist the losses onto the taxpayer so that you can continue to make the cars nobody wants. Why should you have to suffer the consequences of your own business model?

Are you a city councilman who invested your town’s money with an unsound financial firm? No problem. The government will simply take money from people living in other cities and give it to you instead. Why should you have to suffer the consequences of your own foolish investments?

It could be that you’re one of the dozens of governors who oversaw huge increases in spending during the bubble and now have no way to cover your bloated state budget. No problem. The government will simply tax people in all fifty states and then funnel some of the money back to you so that you can avoid having to tighten the public belt. Why should you have to suffer the consequences of your own reckless spending?

Did you choose not to buy health insurance and now have major medical issues? No problem. The government will simply make your neighbor pay for your health care instead. Why should you have to suffer the consequences of the risks you assumed?

Did you run a financial services firm that over-invested in risky derivatives? No problem. The government will simply declare you to be “too big to fail” and transfer wealth from Main Street so that the friends of Paulson and Geithner won’t have to close up shop. Why should you have to suffer the losses and give up that vacation home in the Hamptons?

These are all real-world examples illustrating the great fiction of our time – that the government can or should shield individuals from the consequences of their own actions. Although the government may have the power to shift the consequences – good or bad – from one group to another, it cannot eliminate them entirely. At some point, we will all have to face them.

The sooner we do, the less painful our return to reality will be.

National Panhandlers' Radio

KERA, the National Public Radio affiliate here in North Texas, is in the midst of yet another fundraising drive. It seems like they’ve been at it now for the past three weeks, and they’ve used a number of different appeals over that time. For the first few weeks they stressed how NPR delivers news content without any bias – and to the hosts’ credit, they consistently managed to hit the mute button in time to stifle their chuckles as they said it.

Today, however, I heard a new approach. NPR recognizes that many people (like me) do not donate because the station is funded in part by taxpayer money. So the host tried to overcome this objection by quantifying just how little of the budget is actually funded through coercion. Evidently the percentage varies a bit from year to year, but this year it’s “roughly equal to the unemployment rate in Texas.”

I wasn’t really persuaded by the “we only steal a little bit” argument, but she continued down this line of reasoning, saying, “So if you’re unemployed right now, you can assume the government is paying your share. If you are employed, we’re just asking you to pay your share.”

Huh? Wouldn’t the opposite be more correct? If you’re unemployed, you’re not paying the federal income taxes that are funneled to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. If, on the other hand, you are both employed and in the 53% of American households that do pay the federal income tax, then you already contribute to NPR - whether you like it or not.

So shouldn’t NPR really be aiming their pitch at the unemployed and the tax-consuming public instead? Or better yet, simply give up taxpayer funding altogether? Then they could eliminate their semi-annual beg-a-thons and see just how valuable their programming really is.

Or isn’t.