Terrorists have claimed to be trying to disrupt economic activity in the west, through fear. While there was quite a bit of disruption following the 9/11 attacks, and a short-lived disruption in London transportation following the 7/7 attacks, it seems that the collective wisdom of the markets is that the attacks are not going to do lasting damage and that the prospects of targeted countries are good.

Lawrence Kudlow notes all of this and concludes:

All these markets are showing a lot of confidence in the future. I have long believed that stock indexes reflect the health, wealth and security of individual nations. Despite the radical Islamist assault and its attempted fear tactics, rising equity bourses surely suggest that the U.S.-British allied coalition of the willing is slowly but surely making enormous gains to defeat the totalitarians and to spread democracy and freedom worldwide.

This seems right to me.

My sympathies go out to everyone hurt by the bombings in London today.

I’m heartened, however, by the great comments I heard on the radio from Londoners who seemed unanimous in their understanding of who is at fault, and their resolve to not do anything to encourage more of this behavior.

Good for them!

The terrorists really don’t understand their enemies.

I somehow missed this last week, but Will Wilkinson wrote a great piece for the Cato Institute taking to task recent criticisms of Bush’s “ownership society” proposals.

Senator Barack Obama characterized letting people keep some more of their money as “Social Darwinism”, and Benjamin Barber argued that Bush “is trying to seduce us back into the state of nature, where the strong dominate the weak and anarchy ultimately dominates the strong and the weak, undermining security for both.”

Both of these men seem to think that community and cooperation consist entirely of government programs that coercively transfer funds from some people to others.

But, they forget (or don’t understand) that markets are highly cooperative, and genuine community exists largely outside of government programs. Here are some of Wilkinson’s words:

Seriously, Obama’s equation of the American ideals of ownership, independence, and autonomy with “Social Darwinism,” Barber’s charge that Social Security personal accounts are a ploy to reinstate Hobbesian chaos, these are signs of the sickness at the heart of contemporary liberalism: the inability or unwillingness to recognize the cooperative market order — our system of mutual benefit based on ownership and exchange — as the primary source of American prosperity, security, and solidarity.

WHAT IS OBAMA’S ALTERNATIVE to ownership? Taxing one citizen to pay another. Contemporary liberals have a bad habit of confusing social cohesion with the volume of government transfers, as if the coercive pattern of taking and giving was the measure of order and the test of our hearts. This is what leads Obama and Barber to so easily confuse ownership with anarchy, autonomy with chaos.

But here on Earth, where the United States is located, advanced market economies like ours function through immensely complex voluntary networks of interdependence and cooperation. To provide citizens with a bigger stake in the market through ownership is to integrate them more fully into a web of mutual support that is vastly more intricate and organic than the pattern of government transfers could ever be. People in societies like ours, who grow none of our own food, make none of our own clothes, and would not know how to build shelter if our lives depended on it, are truly “in this together.”

Modern market societies — ownership societies — are the paradigm of interdependent, mutually advantageous cooperation, and are as far as can be imagined from the society of atomistic predators Obama invokes to stir the disdain of the fresh-faced graduates of Knox. Market societies — ownership societies — are wealthy because they rely on and reinforce a high level of social trust and norms of cooperation.

Quite right.

I have canceled my Verizon DSL service.

The details aren’t that interesting, but the bottom line is that on Friday I lost service and Verizon was unable to help me get service back until, perhaps, the following Wednesday (because of the July 4th holiday). There were many frustrating aspects to this issue that I think border on fraudulent practices, and I recommend that anyone considering purchasing Verizon DSL service to seriously pursue other options if they are available.

The good news is that there is competition in the broadband area, and by Saturday I was up and running with a Comcast cable modem (and I switched my home network to wireless at the same time).

I think I’m going to dump my land-line soon and switch over to an Internet phone service like Vonage. It’ll be cheaper, and Verizon will be getting none of my business!

If you’re considering switching to Comcast for their High-Speed Internet, or Vonage for their phone service, let me know; they have referral programs whose benefits we can share.

I’m going to follow Eugene Volokh’s lead and put in a good word for the Institute for Justice.

The Institute for Justice is a civil liberties public interest law firm that focuses largely on those areas of most interest to libertarians (e.g. property rights, free speech, school choice, etc.) As their website describes their work:

Simply put, we sue the government when it stands in the way of people trying to earn an honest living, when it unconstitutionally takes away individuals’ property, when bureaucrats instead of parents dictate the education of children, and when government stifles speech. We seek a rule of law under which individuals can control their destinies as free and responsible members of society.

If these are things you believe are worth supporting, then I urge you to support the Institute for Justice, as I do.

Also, if you are as outraged by the recent Kelo decision as I am, you might consider giving particular support to their Castle Coalition project which focuses on eminent domain abuse in particular.

And this gives me a chance to repeat my praise of justice Thomas and another excellent dissenting opinion.

Kerry Howley at Reason has a nice piece up about the recent controversy about Microsoft’s MSN Spaces blog software enforcing Chinese censorship against certain words used in blog entry titles.

I agree that the criticisms of Microsoft are silly, and that those bloggers who want to circumvent restrictions will easily be able to do it.

My main complaint, though, is that it seems to be very common for people to criticize some person or company (particularly Microsoft) by comparing the actions to an imagined ideal, rather than currently realistic alternatives. They are letting the unrealizable perfect become the enemy of the good.

The question is NOT: “Should Microsoft refuse to comply with these restrictive Chinese laws and bring down Chinese repression by the sheer force of its moral rightiousness?” This is just not a realistic possiblity.

The question is: “Would things be better if Microsoft supplied Chinese bloggers with a, somewhat restricted, forum for sharing information and ideas; or none at all?”

These are the realistic alternatives, and the answer seems obvious to me.

Matt Welch has written a nice, short, article about how the Raich decision helps enable the government’s addiction to lying about drugs in general and marijuana in particular.

The War on Drugs aggravates me on many levels.

It aggravates me philosophically because it violates individual liberty and responsibility for risk-taking. It’s just wrong to forcibly prevent someone from acting on a considered judgment about what to consume or buy for personal use.

It aggravates me practically because of all of the waste, corruption, liberty infringements, and real crime that come with prohibition. Especially now, when we have genuine security threats to focus on, this misuse of resources to do much more harm than good is particularly infuriating.

I was going to write a post praising Clarence Thomas for his reasonable decision in
Gonzalez v. Raich
today, but Radley Balko already did it, with all of the good quotes, here. I’ll just quote part of the opening paragraph of Thomas’ dissent:

If Congress can regulate this under the Commerce Clause, then it can regulate virtually anything and the Federal Government is no longer one of limited and enumerated powers.

Thomas insists on interpreting the Constitution as limiting federal power. Others seem to see it as allowing federal power limited only by whether or not they happen to like the particular policy.

I hope Bush has the opportunity to appoint several more Justices like Clarence Thomas. Unfortunately, I’m sure that someone like that would trigger the “extraordinary circumstances” loophole to the filibuster compromise.

I can’t say that I’m surprised by the decision. I expected the left-liberals on the Court to side with virtually unlimited federal power. I was curious which way Scalia and Kennedy would go, and the anti-drug-user weasels showed their colors. So, I guess the case is valuable to show us where they stand.

I’d also like to mention that I think Randy Barnett did a great job of arguing the case, and his work really seemed to connect with Thomas’ thinking as Thomas quoted him three times in the dissenting opinion.

Eugene Volokh has written a good post about forcing religious morality on others. It’s similar to the argument he made here.

Eugene argues, correctly, that all lawmaking and moral line-drawing come from the desire to implement our morality, and that we all have moralities that are ultimately based on unprovable axioms. Therefore, there’s nothing procedurally improper about people with religion-influenced morality engaging in this activity.

I agree with Eugene about this. The separation of church and state doesn’t require the separation of churchmembers and state. I would go on to say that many religious moral ideas are superior to many secular moral ideas. Most religions are informed by centuries of moral debate and reasoning, and they continue to improve.

However, I think he might go a bit too far when he says things like:

Those of us (like me) who draw secular lines shouldn’t feel superior to those who draw religious lines here…

This seems to approach the idea that all paths to moral ideas are equivalent. I don’t think they are.

I do think that there are better ways to approach moral truths than to assume the truth of scripture. If you don’t want to spend much time thinking about morality yourself, then perhaps adopting the doctrine of a major religion or a well-respected moral philosopher might be a decent way to go. But, if you really care about understanding and acting upon moral truths (or at least the best moral ideas yet discovered), you should want to choose the best method available, and I think that’s a secular one.

I don’t think Eugene uses secular moral reasoning because he flipped a coin one day and Secular beat Religion. He does it, I’m guessing, because he made a conscious, informed, judgment that religious moral philosophy is sub-optimal in some important respects. It’s better to choose a method that is rational, open to criticism and improvements through argument. As I said, most religions today have some of this, but they are also burdened by lots of doctrine that doesn’t tolerate or stand up to argument very well, and is thus handicapped as a method of approaching the truth.

So, while it’s true that it’s not outrageous or procedurally inappropriate to want your moral views to inform policy even if they’re based on religious belief…that doesn’t imply that there isn’t a better way, or that we shouldn’t prefer that our president would use it.