“Bush’s first-term policies benefited the rich and yet he remains most popular in the poorest states”

Let’s be careful not to jump to conclusions based on the ecological fallacy. According to exit polls, Bush lost the South among voters making $50,000 / year and less; if only voters making $50,000 / year and less had voted, Mississippi, Georgia, North Carolina, Florida, Arkansas, and Virginia would all be blue states, and South Carolina and Louisiana would have been too close to call.

Certainly there are lots of reasons to worry about the degree to which white working-class men in the South participate in the rise and maintenance of hard Right politics. But we should be worrying much more about the ongoing political and cultural stranglehold of the white economic elite in Southern states; they are far more reliably and far more lopsidedly skewed to the Right, and they are the ones who are usually responsible for this mess.

james mentioned: “Oh yeah, the US leaving Somolia really did wonders for those peasants who stayed (and probably were praying for an end to warlord rule).”

Actually, it did; the best thing that the U.S. ever did for Somalia was to get the hell out and leave them alone.

There are many, many problems in Somalia; the country is poor and life is hard. But the civil war has long since evaporated, things are much better than they were in the mid-1990s, and in fact Somalia is doing considerably better by many measures (such as availability of food or percentage of the population living in extreme poverty) than neighboring countries. Better, in fact, than many richer African countries.

Once the prospects of looting foreign aid dried up, the warlords gave up and the civil war petered out. Somalia has been without any effective central government for 13 years, and things seem to be going well precisely because they haven’t got any government. This should not, actually, be very surprising, if you keep in mind the sort of governments that most countries in the area have.

For more, see Andrew Cockburn’s feature on Somalia in the National Geographic @ http://magma.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0207/feature3/ and the recent report “Anarchy and Invention: How does Somalia’s private sector cope without government?” from the World Bank @ http://rru.worldbank.org/Documents/280-nenova-harford.pdf

Hope this helps.

Or, better yet, you can use http://tinyurl.com/ to chop those monstrous URLs into something manageable. For example, the review of the Incredibles can now be accessed through:

http://tinyurl.com/6gax6

Enjoy!

“Amanda: I figured it was something like that. But wouldn’t the thought cross his mind that, “Hey, if I shoot her, then both her AND the baby would die?”. It’s the absence of that thought that makes me wonder.”

It seems like it would have to have crossed his mind. But I think the conclusion to draw from that is simply that he did not care, when he shot her, whether or not the fetus died. It wasn’t about saving the fetus; it was about taking revenge on his ex-girlfriend for refusing to obey his orders about how to use her own body.

As Sheelzebub put it on her blog, he ain’t pro-life; he’s an abusive sociopath. (I’d like to add only that in that respect he’s no different from the vast majority of the so-called pro-life movement.)

“Suicide bombings”, of course, are not the issue. The issue is bombings that target civilians (would it be better if they were dropping the bombs from planes?)

Ben gave his view. I happen to disagree strongly with him about the targeting of settlers, but I don’t see any reason to think that he is being disingenuous about his position. Do you? If so, what is it?

Oh sure. Once Arabs murder someone, there will be always a lot of people who will say “well, actually Jews organised that”. There’s a lot of nutjobs out there, and some of them happen to hate Jews and Israel. You are not alone.

Frodo, do you know anything in particular about how the Sabra and Chatila massacres occurred? This isn’t just some bullshit conspiracy theory about ZOG or Mossad. It’s a simple fact about how it was that Phalangist militias came to be in the Sabra and Chatila refugee camps, and how it came to be that Palestinian refugees could not get out once the slaughter began. It’s not very complicated: the Israeli military surrounded Sabra and Chatila with tanks, and then asked the Christian Phalange militias to pass through the encirclement in order to “restore order” and “liquidate” the mythical “terrorists” in the camps (which were populated by unarmed women, children, and old men after the PLO withdrew to Tunisia). The Phalange at the time was smarting for revenge for the assassination of Bashir Gemayel. What did they think the Phalange was going to do? Deliver cookies?

Numerous Israeli military officers have said that they could see what was happening in the camps, and told their commanders, and told Sharon, but that they would not do anything to stop it. After the massacre, over 400,000 Jews in Israel rallied in protest and denounced then-Defense Minister Ariel Sharon as a murderer. All raving anti-Semitic conspiracy theorists, I’m sure. Or perhaps not.

Save your complaints about “hating Israel.” The issue here is not who lives in Israel or what it is. The issue is that atrocities like Sabra and Chatila are completely indefensible. That would be true, no matter who committed them.

… Fortunately, markets do work, so there’s no need to fear doing that.

“You are mistaken. Perhaps you looked at studies that only take into account direct government aid, and do not consider costs like education, health care and infrastructure. Education costs alone, for the children of poor immigrant workers, far exceed the money those families contribute in taxes.”

False. Studies such as Rea and Parker’s or Donald Huddle’s that show net tax deficits from immigrants suffer from numerous errors in estimating both cost and revenue, and inflate costs through the use of phony “job displacement” costs to social services. Perhaps you are looking at studies such as these, which routinely ignore revenues from taxes such as FICA, unemployment insurance, vehicle registrations and fees, state and federal gasoline taxes, etc., which simply ignores nearly $30,000,000,000 in taxes paid by immigrants every year.

In fact, accurate counts show that the annual cost of government schooling for immigrants’ children comes out to about $11,000,000,000 per annum. That’s a lot of bread, but certainly not more than the $70,000,000,000 or so paid in taxes. It turns out that immigrants cause a net local tax deficit due to educational costs; but so do native-born families. State-level impacts vary from state to state; the overall affect at all levels of taxes and spending, including such factors as education costs, comes out to a net annual tax surplus of $25,000,000,000 to $30,000,000,000 per annum once you’ve actually counted up all the taxes that immigrants actually paid. (You can see studies by, e.g., Michael Passel and Michael Fix. (Some of the research is dated, having been produced during the immigration debates in the mid-1990s. But if anything costs of immigrants to taxpayers have largely decreased as a result of measures such as the 1996 welfare reform bill.)

But set all that aside for a moment, in any case. Suppose immigrants did, in fact, cause a net tax deficit. What would follow? That might be a reason to push for measures that restrict the availability of government-funded services to immigrants (and save a cool $4,000,000,000 annually that was formerly spent on La Migra, while you’re at it); but it wouldn’t be any reason at all to justify further enforcing draconian immigration restrictions. So why aren’t you lobbying for restrictions on government benefits to immigrants rather than restrictions on immigration?

“Fruit pickers wages are several times higher in the U.S. than in Mexico. Why do you think that is?”

Because the agriculture industry in the United States is much larger and more productive than in Mexico, and because the percentage of the population willing to do hard farm labor at prevailing wages is higher in Mexico than it is in the United States. Thus the marginal productivity of another farm worker in the United States is considerably higher than in Mexico. This is true in several hard working-class jobs outside of agriculture as well.

“What do you think would happen to wages in this sector”

I don’t know. Mises demonstrated that socialist economic calculation is impossible; so while I can take some guesses from the data on the table, there isn’t any definitive way to know other than to open up the market and see what happens.

That said, let’s take some guesses about general trends based on what we know about the factors at hand.

“if the US Government did not intervene to…

• enforce a general minimum wage?”

The U.S. government does NOT enforce a general minimum wage. It enforces a minimum wage in some industries, a different minimum wage in others, and none at all in some. In point of fact, several classes of agricultural workers (those working for employers who use 500 man-days of farm labor per year, those employed on the range for production livestock, and seasonal hand-pickers paid on a piece-rate basis, inter alia) are completely exempted from the federal minimum wage. No agricultural employees are covered under federal overtime requirements. As I’m sure you know, employers of undocumented immigrants often pay them under the table, and when they do so aren’t constrained by the federal law in what they pay.

”- control the flow of Mexican pickers into the U.S.?”

The supply of Mexican laborers in the United States would most likely increase. All things being equal this would cause wages to tend to decrease. But of course all things are not equal. Freeing undocumented workers from threats of La Migra substantially increases their bargaining power with employers, their ability to go to the court to report labor abuses such as debt bondage and outright slavery (there have recently been major cases uncovered in South Carolina and Central Florida). It would also open up many jobs other than traditional farm labor to immigrants (since finding a job would no longer require them to seek out low-visibility labor where payment under the table is common), which would tend to countervail against the increase in supply.

Short answer to a long list of worries: I think that there’s actually reason to think that government action keeps wages below where they would be on a free market. But there are countervailing factors and there’s no good way to know for sure which would prevail, short of actually letting the market work and seeing what happens. Fortunately, markets do work, so there’s no need t

“You people are idiots! Have you seen the pictures of mamed women, men and children in the Saddam regime? Where was your outrage then?”

Now let’s all play “Use ghastly tyrants as our moral compass.” Because, as everyone knows, if we just manage to be no worse than Saddam Hussein, that makes it all O.K.

Assholes.

“It’s not just for the possibility of revolt against a corrupt government, although that’s important. It’s also not just so the nation can defend itself without a standing army, something that sadly has gone straight out the window.”

Indeed. Also, just as importantly, an armed community can defend itself without an extensive professional paramilitary police force. (Not that the line between cops and soldiers is a very distinct one, at this point.) There’s a direct point of contact with history here: specifically, with the Black Panther Party. They armed themselves because they had a right to self-defense, and because if they could defend themselves there would be no excuse for the pigs (to use that term in its proper historical context for once!) to keep up their protection racket. Also because the cops were not only not protecting the Black community; they were often directly attacking it.

I think there’s a simple answer to why liberals and “progressives” are so keen on gun control. It’s because they’re comfortable with obvious coded racism. It’s unfortunate that that’s the only plausible explanation on offer, but I think that it is. Gun control laws have always been a tool of white supremacy, and when liberals start wringing their hands about how gangstas will be mowing their children down with Uzis and “assault rifles,” it’s pretty clear who it is that they have in mind, and who it is that they are scared of.

This isn’t to say that U.S. gun culture isn’t creepy and scary, or that it isn’t quite worthy of serious critique for its own racism and sexism. It sure is. But the answer is hardly disarmament.