One doesn’t have to be any sort of radical to be appalled that thousands of police, working with federal troops and agents, would “lockdown” an entire city—shutting down public transit, closing virtually all businesses, intimidating anyone from leaving their home, and going door to door with SWAT teams in pursuit of one suspect. The power of the police to “lockdown” a city is an authoritarian, borderline totalitarian power. A “lockdown” is prison terminology for forcing all prisoners into their cells. They did not do this to pursue the DC sniper, or to go after the Kennedy assassin, and I fear the precedent. It is eerie that this happened in an American city, and it should be eerie to you, no matter where you fall on the spectrum. You can tell me that most people in Boston were happy to go along with it, but that’s not really the point, either. If two criminals can bring an entire city to its knees like this with the help of the state, then terrorism truly is a winning strategy. (And we should also keep in mind that the overwhelming majority of the massive police response did not aid in capturing the suspect—it ultimately turned on that old fashioned breakthrough—a normal denizen calling the authorities with information.)

If America suffered a bombing like the Boston Marathon atrocity every week, America would feel like a very different place, although the homicide rate would only be about one percent higher. I acknowledge the maiming was on a mass scale, but this kind of attack has to be taken in perspective in terms of how much of a risk it poses to the average American, because we have to consider what response the people would tolerate in the event of more frequent or far worse attacks.

If the people of the United States will cheer seeing a whole city shut down, even for just a day, in the event of a horrific attack that nevertheless had 1/1000th the fatalities and about two percent of the casualties of 9/11, what would Americans support in light of another 9/11? What about a dirty bomb going off in a major city? The question has nothing to do with what government wants to do, or whether police statism is a goal or simply a consequence. What will the *people* want and expect the government to do if tens of thousands were chaotically killed and injured in a terrible terror attack, or if many small attacks hit the country? I fear they would welcome the abolition of liberty altogether, given their reaction to last night. That, of course, is altogether the wrong response. If we cannot look at the police reaction last night very critically, there is really no hope for even moderate protection of our civil liberties today.

The brilliant Glenn Greenwald tweeted today:

Must-read from ProPublica: The Drone War Doctrine We Still Know Nothing About (via @robertgreenwald)

Must reading indeed. Here’s what I don’t get about the drone debate. Why the @#$% did it take so long to start? Admittedly, I’ve grown somewhat numb to the fact that so-called conservatives are attacking the current POTUS about issues that seemed somehow obscure to them when Shrub was manning the con. Still, one would hope that basic human decency would, maybe, cause some kind of reaction to senseless killing of men, women, and children even in the far-away Middle East. Yet, there has been an alarming lack of concern about the drone program before now. Given CIA director nominee John Brennan’s recent cageyness about plans to use drones domestically, everyone is up in arms. The British are coming! One drone if by land! Two drones if by sea!

ProPublica sums it up nicely:

Consider: while four American citizens are known to have been killed by drones in the past decade, the strikes have killed an estimated total of 2,600 to 4,700 people over the same period.

Four American citizens killed–over the past decade–added to the pending plan to deploy drones domestically, signals the apocalypse. Several thousand non-Americans, is, well, another day at the office. One suspects that there are more than a few Americans who think such action is warranted, particularly since we’re “at war” with Al Qaeda or some such.  Really? Well then, how to reconcile this little tidbit?

“What about the people who [are killed and] aren’t U.S. citizens and who aren’t on a [known terrorist] list?” asks Naureen Shah , a human rights and counterterrorism expert at Columbia Law School. Of the few thousand people killed, Shah notes, “it’s hard to believe all of these people are senior operational leaders of Al Qaeda.”

Indeed. Are there really several thousand Al Qaeda “senior operational leaders” in Yemen and/or Pakistan? No. Furthermore, the standard for deciding to deploy a deadly drone strike is, shall we say, remarkably, embarrassingly  disgustingly, low.  U.S. officials are using what is termed a “‘reasonable man’ standard.” Let us again return to ProPublica, because I cannot say it better.

Asked what the standard is for who could be hit, former Ambassador to Pakistan Cameron Munter recently told an interviewer: “The definition is a male between the ages of 20 and 40. My feeling is one man’s combatant is another man’s – well, a chump who went to a meeting.”

So, there you have it. Certainly, this author won’t be confused with a military strategist any time soon, but one feels pretty safe in saying that is not a defensible standard for deciding who dies. We can certainly be excited that people like Rachel Maddow are asking hard questions about drone deployment given Brennan’s pending confirmation. However, just like the Tea Party’s tardy recognition of fascism under the previous statist Czar, it just strikes me as a little late, now that we’re all enjoying the audacity of hope.

Better late than never I guess!

…cross-posted at the LRCBlog.

Romney bans certain kinds of guns; Obama supports war and Bush-era doctrines; Romney enacts (even more) socialist-fascist health care; Obama has a near opaque administration in spite of the desire to be transparent.

The so-called “left” promotes a policy (say, universal healthcare or the individual mandate or the health care exchanges). The “right” opposes it. The opposition is usually superficial and us used as talking points to obtain votes. The object of power is power, after all. Assuming the policy becomes law, and assuming (as is often the case) it receives widespread support, the right becomes less vociferous about repealing the law. At best they want to reform; usually either nothing happens or the mildest of cosmetic changes are made, if only to appease the fringe party supporters. Today’s progressive, becomes tomorrow’s conservative. Already, for example, the financially devastating Obamacare that was such a hot topic a year ago is starting to go away in the eyes of most–that is, if you don’t have a business facing ever-higher health care costs. Soon the right will stop talking about repealing it or replacing it with something else. Florida governor Rick Scott, who initially opposed setting up the FL healthcare exchange, has changed his tune–how unexpected!

On the other “side” of the political spectrum, the totalitarian and warmongering right wing, whose most recent icon and trend setter is GWB, pushes for war and empire and crackdowns on civil liberties. The left claims to oppose it. When Bush II was in power the progressives, ever irate, regaled us with their smugness (and, as we now know, insincere) opposition to the Bush administration’s policies and tactics. Enter a democratic president. Oh my–what happened!? Suddenly Obama adopts and relishes in continuing core Bush doctrines as well as expanding into new territories of despotism: droning and NDAA come to mind. Today’s warmongering conservative is tomorrow warmongering progressive.

I for one welcome our new unipartisanship overlords.

I have never understood the popular infatuation with Ernesto “Che” Guevara, the Argentine-born Marxist revolutionary who instigated socialist revolts in three countries, or why people would want to wear clothing emblazoned with his face.  The man was a mass murderer, after all, and the architect (along with Fidel Castro) of the communist police state that rules Cuba to this day.  Unless one believes murder, wealth seizure and destruction, and the abrogation of civil liberties are justified means to political ends, why would anyone want to celebrate a person who engaged in all of these atrocities?

Thor Halvorssen, founder of the Human Rights Foundation, doesn’t understand it either, and in an open letter to Urban Outfitters published on Huffington Post this week, he questions the company’s reasons for offering Che-themed merchandise:

Although Guevara’s image has appeared on countless items for consumption over the last few decades as a symbol of change for the better, Guevara’s actual record is that of a brutal tyrant who suppressed individual freedom in Cuba and murdered those who challenged his worldview.

Guevara undoubtedly played a key role in the overthrow of the dictatorial Batista regime in January of 1959. However, despite promises of a new democratic government, within a few months he and Fidel Castro had designed and installed a full-blown police state that deprived the overwhelming majority of Cuban citizens of democracy and human rights.

From 1959 to 1960, the new government carried out summary executions of at least 1,118 people by firing squad. Guevara himself presided over the notorious La Cabaña prison, where hundreds of the executions took place. For comparison’s sake, the Batista regime was responsible for 747 noncombatant deaths between 1952 and 1959. The Cuban revolution under the direction of Guevara also saw the rise of forced labor camps which gave way a few years later to full-scale concentration camps. These were filled with dissidents, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Afro-Cuban priests, and anyone else who had committed “crimes” against the new moral revolution.

Note: it appears that Urban Outfitters no longer carries the poster that prompted Halvorssen’s letter.

It’s not just Urban Outfitters, of course; many companies over the decades have offered Che’s mug on everything from key chains to jackets to backpacks, snapped up primarily by college kids who dig the rebellious motif, or by hipsters who appreciate the irony of a leftist revolutionary icon being used to enrich filthy capitalist pigs.  Either way, Halvorssen’s letter is a welcome reality check.

Just so long as they don’t start selling Obama T-shirts.

As I sat on one of those metal benches, retying my shoes after enduring yet another near-cavity search courtesy the TSA, something both rather obvious and rather sad dawned on me. It is, in fact, the answer to the question that heads this post, and that answer, by the way, is “No.” As a matter of fact, “Hell no.” As I sat there, I contemplated how much more intrusive the searches could get before the public rose up and said, “Enough!” Simultaneously, a conversation I had enjoyed with a fellow traveler as we stood in a very long line at the Monroe County (Rochester) International Airport rolled around in my head.

She had quipped, as we inched closer to our turn in the scanner, “I’m just glad that we haven’t had a bra bomber yet.” We laughed, but it was more out of pain than humor. She and I both knew that we were experiencing a real-life reenactment of the Stanford Prison Experiment, and that things would get worse–likely a lot worse–before they got better. (And that’s making the very large assumption, an assumption I might characterize as a pipe dream, that things will ever get better.)

As an aside, and just to provide some context for my conclusion, I recall talking to an executive from ExxonMobil 10 to 15 years ago. It was at that time when gas prices had just begun to creep up to levels that before then had seemed unthinkable. As I recall, the highest they had been was nearing $1.50/gallon, although that figure is just a guess. As I whined about the prices and how people would cope, he calmly asked me: “Wilt, do you think prices are at the highest level they could reach while people still buy lots of gas?” I thought about it a minute and had to conclude he was correct. Gas could (and probably would) far exceed that price level without any real reaction from the public, except whining as they drove their SUVs 35 miles to work alone. The same logic is true of the practices at Airport Security Theatre.

At what point do you think people would refuse to endure more? I submit that TSA could install curtains, with TSA-employed nurse practitioners and physician assistants performing very thorough “security checks” and all we’d have is longer lines. Shucks, people might begin to use the occasion for informal check-ups! I can hear the conversations now. “Bill, how are those hemorrhoids?” “Feels good Stan, and we’ll see what the nurse says at Airport Security next week. I’m flying on business.”

Coincidentally to all this thinking, I was in the midst of reading R. Dwayne Betts’ “A Question of Freedom.” It is a prison memoir of a young man sentenced to 10 years, spending much of it in maximum security prisons–and in “the hole” much of that time–for car jacking someone as a teenager. While Betts’ story is fascinating for a number of reasons, what struck me most viscerally was this statement he makes in a chapter entitled, “Prison 101…” Says Betts, “Prison life is a series of small indignities that you’re made to adapt to.”

Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

Cross-Posted at LRCBlog.

Conrad Schumann fleeing East Berlin

Who built the Berlin Wall and why?  According to a recent piece by Keith Veronese at io9:

The Berlin Wall spanned 155 kilometers, combining concrete walls and razor wire topped fences to create the border. Numerous checkpoints and over 300 watchtowers stretched along the wall. The German Democratic Republic constructed the wall to keep anti-socialist individuals present in West Germany out of East Germany.

Au contraire.  In contrast to the propaganda that Keith apparently fell for (back in the day, the GDR used very similar words that Keith used), the GDR actually built the wall to stymie a brain drain, the exodus of East Germans fleeing to the West.

Just how big was this exodus?  Between the partitioning and gerrymandering of Germany following WWII with the Potsdam Declaration in 1945 and 1961 (when the wall was built), there were roughly 3.5 million East Germans who fled to the West.

So yea, Keith’s claim is quite a head scratcher — who are these “anti-socialistic individuals” trying to get into the East?  David Hasselhoff?  Heidi Klum?  Thomas Mann?

According to Michael Crammer in German-German Border Trail, “675,000 people fled to West Germany between 1949 and 1952.”  More specifically regarding the brain drain, according to this well sourced wiki entry:

By 1960, the combination of World War II and the massive emigration westward left East Germany with only 61% of its population of working age, compared to 70.5% before the war.^[68] The loss was disproportionately heavy among professionals—engineers, technicians, physicians, teachers, lawyers and skilled workers.^[68] The direct cost of manpower losses has been estimated at $7 billion to $9 billion, with East German party leader Walter Ulbricht later claiming that West Germany owed him $17 billion in compensation, including reparations as well as manpower losses.^[68] In addition, the drain of East Germany’s young population potentially cost it over 22.5 billion marks in lost educational investment.^[71] The brain drain of professionals had become so damaging to the political credibility and economic viability of East Germany that the re-securing of the Soviet imperial frontier was imperative.^[72]

All told between 1950 and 1988, there were roughly 4 million East Germans that migrated to the West (if you did the math: on top of the 3.5 million that fled prior to the erection of the wall, there were approximately 660,000 East Germans that managed to immigrate and flee to the West between 1961 and 1988.  The wall fell down in November 1989).

Yet you didn’t have West Germans fleeing in the opposite direction, en masse.  Nor were there oodles of machine guns nests on the West side pointed at… the West shooting these non-existent West German refugees.

In fact, this brain drain was so problematic for the East German economy (many of the migrants were teachers, doctors and engineers) that the GDR built a wall down the entire border of the country — not just in Berlin.  It was called the Inner German Border (innerdeutsche Grenze) and according to a 2003 research findings more than 1000 people died trying to cross over to the West through it.  Here is an excellent entry regarding the escape attempts across the IGB (and here is an awesome entry on the collapse and fall of the IGB).

And more to the point, why were they fleeing?  Why would anyone want to flee a utopian socialist paradise?

Needless to say, volumes have written about why socialism cannot work a priori (for starters see Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth).  Many more have been written on why the experiments in the Eastern Bloc and the Soviet Union would and did fail.

But in the end, a more poignant question is: why didn’t East Germany buy out the West?  Why didn’t West Germans flee to the East?  Why did the West German experiment with freer markets and open trade (“the Miracle on the Rhine” or Wirtschaftswunder) create a wealthier and healthier population compared to their culturally identical cousins?

Two words: organic prices.  Prices reflect scarcity relative to supply and demand.  In a planned economy the organizers have no inherent method for creating coefficients for their mathematical formula’s — all of the numbers they use are arbitrary and/or taken from existing foreign markets.  In contrast, in a market-based economy, prices arise due to interactions with producers, suppliers, entrepreneurs, consumers — via organic interactions.

This phenomenon is also illustrated contemporaneously in North and South Korea — the freer and better fed South Korean’s are more than 3 inches taller than their Northern counterparts.

99 Luft Balloons in the margin

Ceteris paribus, West Germans basically paid a huge tax to buyout — and bailout the East (in short the East German political class ran out of “other people’s money” and the Soviets couldn’t afford to subsidize them).

In alternative world the GDR could have simply gone bankrupt, stayed an independent country and merely opened all of its borders to trade.  Instead the Two Plus Four Powers agreement basically got the FRG (West Germany) to pay a big tax to have their “comrades” reunited.

Because this “buyout” was done top-down, there are still huge imbalances that German policy makers have tried to band-aid over (like labor issues, e.g., paying East Germans not to work).  Of course the biggest taxpayer handout the FRG ended up giving to the GDR: the deutschmark exchange (see below).

This actually set the stage for the current Euro crisis (see Phillip Bagus’ excellent book, “The Tragedy of the Euro“).   The French agreed to reunification with the stipulation that the new Germany would support the Euro which basically meant the West Germans would be yet again, the unwitting financial backbone to another planning failure.

To wit:

The Deutsche Mark played an important role in the reunification of Germany. It was introduced as the official currency of East Germany in July 1990, replacing the East German Mark (Mark der DDR), in preparation for unification on 3 October 1990. East German marks were exchanged for German marks at a rate of 1:1 for the first 4000 Marks and 2:1 for larger amounts. Before reunification, each citizen of East Germany coming to West Germany was given Begrüßungsgeld, greeting money, a per capita allowance of DM 100 in cash. The government of Germany and the Bundesbank were in major disagreement over the exchange rate between the East German mark and the German mark.

France and the United Kingdom were opposed to German reunification, and attempted to influence the Soviet Union to stop it.^[8] However, in late 1989 France extracted German commitment to the Monetary Union in return for support for German reunification.^[9]

Last note: be sure to watch the fantastic film, “The Lives of Others” regarding this frequently forgotten period of history.

References:

[8] “Thatcher told Gorbachev Britain did not want German reunification”. Michael Binyon (London: Times). September 11, 2009.

[9] Ben Knight (2009-11-08). “Germany’s neighbors try to redeem their 1989 negativity”. Deutsche Welle.

[68] Dowty, Alan (1988), “The Assault on Freedom of Emigration”, World Affairs 151 (2)

[71] Volker Rolf Berghahn, Modern Germany: Society, Economy and Politics in the Twentieth Century, p. 227. Cambridge University Press, 1987

[72] Pearson, Raymond (1998), The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Empire, Macmillan, ISBN 0-312-17407-1

Years ago there was a great Non Sequitur (or maybe it was The Far Side) cartoon in which the main character, a man, opens the door and looks up at the sky.  The caption read something along the lines of “Bob likes to make sure whoever is watching him, thinks he is happy” (kind of like what Jim Carrey did in The Truman Show).

I would of course be able to locate the comic but alas, Google Images is basically blocked in China and I (smugly) out of principle – try not to use proxies and VPNs (otherwise it makes you feel too comfortable, distorts the reality of the adolescent geopolitics in this country).

Which brings you to the recommended weekend reading courtesy of Wired: Hidden History: America’s Secret Drone War in Africa

It is jam packed with good solid numbers about how many UAVs & UCAVs are being used in Somalia and elsewhere.  If War Nerd was still around, he would surely be able to use it to (rightly) agitate F-22 and F-35 fanboys.  After all, if less than a few hundred relatively cheap drones are able to do the work of dozens of manned airwings, there really is no military justification for spending $1.5 trillion building out the F-35 fleet.  Let alone the $40-50 billion for a next-generation bomber.

If you’re looking for your fill on what drone warfare is shaping up to look like, be sure to check out the definitive repository from Reason.  The ACLU also has a dedicated section on domestic drones.

My own thoughts: the civil libertarian in me shakes my head at this but government owned and operated drones are probably not going away, anywhere.  In fact, they probably already operate – or will very soon – above every big metro in the G-20.

And as I mentioned yesterday, I think the surveillance panopticon both developing and developed countries are building is something that would have occurred freely and voluntarily anyways due to so many narcissists, land appraisal/land management, and to prevent insurance claims against negligence (e.g., apartment property owners building CCTV networks to lower their insurance premiums against vandalism, carjacking, etc.)  In fact, here is a privately funded domestic drone you can by from Amazon for a mere $300.

Now back to the matter at one: one wonders if Bob in the comic strip was smiling at the new Eye in the Sky from the Army or Key Hole successors like Misty from the NRO.  Maybe Alice knows (see this entry for the corny inside joke).

One of the most frequently asked questions that readers email me is a variation of the title, should I move from my relatively comfortable First World domicile and venture forth to China?

My short answer: No.

The big question after that is, why should you?  What is the motivation for moving elsewhere?  What are the opportunity costs of making such a decision?

I think advising young people to leave the US for a long period of time is probably not a good career move.  I know this first hand.  Sure as a “gap year” or exchange student program might be <insert cliché> culturally useful in opening up your eyes to how other cultures work, but anything more than a couple years and you are going to get left behind skill wise in the US (or wherever you hail from).

You might have recently seen Shanghai Calling and thought, gee that foreign world is fantabulous.  And to be totally honest: on the surface it truly is a romantic bohemian siren call.   But what they didn’t show you is that by-and-large, you might as well be unemployed because your skill set is probably going to get rusty.

Litmus Test 1: Division of Labor

If your goal is to make yourself (and as a consequence, the world) wealthier, healthier and just plain richer  — take action in a region  you have a comparative advantage.  Aside from language skills, I doubt the typical twentysomething libertarian has more than a handful of productive capabilities that cannot already be found in China.  In fact, the WSJ had a piece earlier this year about just this, how the expat is an endangered species for this exact reason.  And there is plenty of anecdotal evidence suggesting this flight-back-to-the-OECD trend may continue (see this excellent essay from Prospect magazine).

This is not to say that China (and other developing countries) no longer needs foreign experts.  But are you really a foreign expert?  Write down a list of things you can do comparatively better than your Chinese counterpart.  What is your marginal productive value and what is the typical salary an expat with your skillset makes in China?

Unfortunately I think part of the draw to China is a “grass is greener” kind of syndrome.  Yet this is naïve.  There will always be a mythical nirvana du jour.  Just as Dubai was 10 years ago, Eastern Europe was 20 years ago, Japan was 30 years ago and even the Soviet Union was… 80 years ago.  Ad infinitum.

Litmus Test 2.1: Libertopia

I cannot tell you how many libertarian authors in the blogosphere are absolutely gaga over the supposed China miracle.  Heck, I am most certainly guilty of the seen and unseen back in 2008 (see here and here).  But after moving out here many moons ago, I have since publicly admitted that I was completely and utterly wrong (off the top of my head there have been only a handful of libertarianesque financial analysts that have been consistently bearish [realistic] on China over the years: Mike Shedlock, Marc Faber, Doug Casey, Mark DeWeaver).

This region is not a bastion of libertarianism.  And it will probably never be.

Let me count the ways it is not

Remember, this section is to show how the US – with all of its quirks, faults and rights abuses – still has more libertarian freedoms than China.

During the recent China versus Philippine’s Scarborough shoal dispute, the PRC restricted tourist flights to the Philippines, restricted the importation of foodstuffs (e.g. bananas) from the Philippines and many Chinese policy makers echoed jingoistic comments nearly as bad as these anti-Japanese comments (it’s okay, the political elites hate taxpayers too).

I know it is hard for some to imagine, but yes, the birthplace of The Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution still has malicious assholes too.

Who knows how many people died in these upheavals or are being killed here today, certainly don’t believe the numbers the PRC publish anymore than someone should trust the US official tabulations.  There are dozens of labor camps no one really talks about, who knows how many are killed there (or disappeared).

In fact, one lady was finally released from a labor camp (it’s easy to make your prison population’s numbers smaller than the US, just reclassify “prisoners” as “laborers”) who was imprisoned for calling for justice for her daughter — once it reached a crescendo on Weibo.  And the arbitrariness of being thrown into one of these “labor camps” is nail biting — just ask this other young woman. (More on China as a real police state here and here).

Speaking of which, why aren’t civil libertarians up in arms about what the PRC is doing in the South China seas?  The Chinese political class is saying that “hey, once upon a time Chinese fishermen worked down here thus these are all our islands… even if they are a few miles off the coast of another country.”  If they can make this claim, why can’t any heritage group evict current property owners?   And hey, this headline sounds very anti-imperial for sure:  “China to formally garrison disputed South China Seas“.

China is not libertarian by any stretch of the imagination.  Many of the policy makers want to rule the world.  They feel that they are still the “Middle Kingdom” — the center of the civilized world and even relish the day they are not just “62%” on the way to becoming a superpower (purportedly again).

To suggest that they would be less assholes than the Americans is really hard to swallow.  Again I’m not defending an American empire — I would like it peacefully dismantled as fast as possible — but I am saying the reality of the situation is that China would be no kinder a world ruler than the US.

Litmus Test 2.2: Smoke and Mirrors

Whenever there is an economic downturn in the US, politicians will typically play “wag the dog” and invade a country.

Whenever there is an economic downturn in China, policy makers at all levels blame the laowai (first the Japanese) and kick them out (and it is not like there are a whole lot of foreigners to kick out… mere 600k).  The century of humiliation was horrible for China and the political class here uses it as a tool for their own gain during tough times.

And to be fair: perhaps more libertarians should move out here for a year or two, just so they can appreciate how awesome the US is.  Yea, I said it, the US is still awesome in many respects.

Gimme some of that nice clean air!  And food that won’t kill you because of poison and gutter oil!  After all, there are reasons why the US is still the top destination for FDI and immigrants of all stripes.

China in the past 3 months:

• Last week the crew from CNN got roughed up outside of the courthouse in Hefei trying to find out info about the Gu Kailai case (Bo Xilai’s wife).
• The anchor for Al Jazeera got kicked out of China.
• Virtual blockade of a neighboring country (if you condemn the US blockade of Cuba, you should also condemn the Chinese blockade of the Philippines).
• Bloomberg News has been blocked now for more than a month for reporting about the financial tomfoolery of the family of the upcoming president, Xi Jinping.
• In-media, a HK based news source that is critical of the PRC was broken into and computers were destroyed.
• Dozens of words are banned each day on all media (Weibo, Baidu, news).
• Yang Rui, the head Chinese anchor for CCTV News (the only English-based mainland TV station out here… he’s the Sino equivalent of Larry King) called for all “foreign trash” to get kicked out of China.

Again, this is not to say that there are no problems in the US, that US foreign policy is love-thy-neighbor.  It is not.  This is simply to counter the claims by some writers currently wearing rose-tinted glasses.

Now you’re just being redundant

I think the surveillance panopticon both developing and developed countries are building is something that would have occurred freely and voluntarily anyways due to so many narcissists and to prevent insurance claims against negligence (e.g., apartment property owners building CCTV networks to lower their insurance premiums against vandalism, carjacking, etc.)  In fact, here is a privately funded domestic drone you can by from Amazon for a mere $300.

And again if your goal is to get away from Facebook face detection, why would you want to come to China?  It has just as big and omnipotent a CCTV network.

• How many blind human rights activists are fleeing detention and monks burning themselves in the US?  Slim to none.
• Twitter has actually publicly fought the US police state (like the OWS and NYPD) and in the event that they lose, will actually post how many court orders they receive.
• In China, Sina just deletes tweets (like they deleted the US Shanghai consulate because the consulate published smog alerts) and users have no idea if they have submitted your details for the police to come throw you into labor camps (similar as a prison but spelled differently).  Bill Bishop recently noted that Sina’s operating costs have risen in part because of the need to hire more human censors (see here for more perspective about censorship in China).
• I could go on and on about China’s internal financial problems (see here and here), but suffice to say: China has huge non-performing loan numbers (NPL) coming out (double digit failure that is destroying any productivity just check out the 10-year NPL high in Wenzhou) and an aging workforce with huge pension liabilities, which believe it or not, is in worse shape than the US.
• China is utterly dependent on exports and is actually depreciating the yuan (RMB) relative to the USD over the past 5 months (source 1 2 3).
• China has built numerous face projects (mian zi gong chen) that are entirely unproductive and amount to little more than modern pyramids.
• China has to import large amounts of food (soybeans, pork) because they have evicted so many farmers and paved over good fertile land with parking lots and malls no one goes to.

If there was a prolonged global depression, where would you rather live: in a country that produces 20-30% of the worlds calories and the best medical practitioners — or live in a country that has to import cows from Australia because it refuses to liberalize beef bilateral trade with a certain U-S-A?  Even if a USD  currency collapse occurs its not like the US-based farms disappear, doctors melt into ooze or hospitals instantly fall apart.

And since China still pegs the RMB (which they have depreciated the past 5 months as noted above) to the USD, they will be in a world of hurt as they must necessarily import the fiscal and monetary policy of the US Fed and Treasury.

The unpleasant truth to the libertopia fantasy is this:  the Chinese political class is not a meritocracy (nor is the US for that matter).  Its leaders and policy makers are not libertarian goldbugs  secretly planning on floating the RMB and/or adopting a commodity-backed currency.

If your primary motivations of coming to China is to be in the Promised Land, you will be gravely disappointed.

Litmus Test 3: Monaco is nice this time of year

Aside from a few outliers such as the Nordic countries (until the oil runs out and hospital bills drain the taxpayer dry), Switzerland, Monaco and a handful of city-states financially dependent on recycling laundered money (pro observation from Andy Xie), where else can a young twentysomething libertarian move to long-term?

As I have mentioned before, as a western expat I am part of privileged member in China.  But if you want to interact with normal Chinese people, it can get frustrating because they are manhandled in even more nebulous ways by hongbao-desiring officials.  Believe it or not, but uncertainty in legal proceedings is measurably worse in China (see the annual CPI report from Transparency International and the EodB annual study from the WB) — and there is little reason to believe it will get better.

So unless you work for a big multinational that wants you to do a “tour” to build up your overseas credentials and pays you the full Mercer expat package, moving to a developing country is probably not a good career choice.

And to borrow the words of a friend, one of the worst features of some libertarians is their tendency toward hyperbole. It also seems to be a tendency for both new and old hat libertarians alike to want to burnish their libertarian credentials by seeing who can say the most outrageous anti-US comment.  If the US is really so terrible compared to other countries, then why don’t you just leave?  I did and again, the other side of the rainbow is not pretty.

And for what it is worth: I doubt the US will in the short run, “get safer” (pre-9/11) so I don’t think that particular indicator is a really good litmus test or condition for when expats should return to the West.  But if one wants to live a relatively free and economically prosperous life, the US is still best, by far.

Especially if you’re you do not have a <insert outlier> passport.

[Special thanks to the following for their insightful discussions: Stephan Kinsella, Manuel Lora, Anthony Gregory, Robert Wicks, Brian Martinez, Vijay Boyapati]

It is a truism that you can become jaded working in just about any country.  But a healthy bit of skepticism is just what the doctor ordered when dealing with extraordinary claims.

For example, one frequent comparison between the US and China involves defining a police state (which I discussed several weeks ago).

Exhibit A

Last week a gunmen killed 12 moviegoers at a Batman premier in Colorado.

At the same time, half a world away, a massive thunderstorm flooded the greater Beijing metro with the heaviest rains since the PRC was founded.  And due to poor drainage infrastructure at least 77 residents died from drowning and electrocution.

Both of these incidents were horrible, yet it was the aftermath that is key to illustrating which country is more free than the other.  For example: to stave off criticism of flood management, the censorship regime in China subsequently shoved a dozen words and terms down into the memory hole.

These censored search terms include:

 •    mayor (市长)
•    briefing (通报): A Beijing spokesperson announced the new official death toll, revised up to 77.
•    death toll (死亡人数)
•    Fangshan + death (房山+死亡): The Fangshan district is one of the most severely hit by the flood.
•    Beijing + death (北京+死亡)
•    Beijing + Ji Lin (北京+吉林): Refers to Ji Lin, one of Beijing’s vice mayors, who resigned yesterday along with Mayor Guo Jinlong.
•    secretary + resign (书记+辞职)
•    secretary + leave class (书记+下课): Refers to leaving office.
•    Li Shixiang (李士祥): Another vice mayor.
•    Anshun (安顺): Wang Anshun has taken over as acting mayor.
•    Jinlong (金龙): Guo Jinlong
•    Zhang Gaoli (张高丽): Party Committee Secretary of Tianjin, accused by netizens of covering up the cause of the Tianjin mall fire in June. Many have been comparing Zhang to Guo over the past few days.

Entire Weibo accounts (the Chinese equivalent to Twitter) were deleted because they were critical of the CPC response.

Even seemingly independent newspapers such as one operated by the Southern Daily Group were censored:

Eight pages of reporting on the Beijing flood were pulled from today’s edition of Southern Weekend before going to press. Several of the paper’s editors have voiced their anger on Weibo, while some reporters have posted photos of the missing copy, complete with the handwritten remarks of censors. Weibo posts from Southern Weekend staff have been deleted en masse by Sina.

In contrast, everyone and their cousin responded to the Aurora Colorado shootings.  Volumes were written from the traditional print media alone not to mention endless streams of Twitter posting, Facebook scribbles, and forum posts.

All the American publications went: uncensored.

Exhibit B

Yet at least one commenter – Tom Blanton – sees the US as something worse than China, stating:

Crackdowns on illegal immigrants take place in America, as do the arrest of dissidents. The recent arrest of the NATO 3 comes to mind. Terror plots planned by the FBI to entrap half-wits have occurred frequently. America’s high rate of incarceration should also figure into the equation of whether America is a police state. Vans that scan pedestrians and a NSA that screens vast numbers of e-mails and phone calls exist in America. How does this compare with China? Databases on American citizens have eroded our privacy and SWAT teams invade homes to serve warrants for victimless crimes.

I suppose if you believe that America is not an empire and has a free market system with honest elections, you probably believe that America is not a police state. Certainly, Obama is not as bad as Stalin and Bush was no Adolph Hitler. This doesn’t exactly make them great guys. I think America is an empire. No, it’s not exactly like the Roman or British empires. I don’t think a free market system exists in America. Yet, it isn’t exactly like Cuba. Is it a police state? Yes, in many ways. Perhaps it will look more like one after the local police become further militarized and there are 30,000 drones flying over America watching us. With 25% of the world’s prisoners in American jails and the growth of the prison-industrial complex where the corporate owners that operate prisons lobby for tougher and tougher laws, we may soon see what cannot be denied is a police state.

I am not going to defend the militarization actions that have and continue to take place in the US.  The civil libertarian inside of me shakes my head at this but drones are not going away, anywhere.  In fact, despite the  concerted efforts of the ACLU and of other similar organizations elsewhere to remove them, drones probably already operate above every big metro in the G-20.  And short of an alien invasion, there is honestly nothing anyone can do about it.

In addition, with the advent of relatively cheap phones, always-on broadband and the proliferation of scalable, reliable databases: we have voluntarily built our very own panopticon that is here for the long-run (RF hobbyists are even unintentionally building out the panopticon by tracking where every flight goes).

The incarceration rate in the US is also abysmal (and as a libertarian, the only tolerable rate is arguably zero).   Do you know what China’s real incarceration rate is? Maybe just as high, Jacob Sullum wrote that:

The source for the Chinese estimate is the International Centre for Prison Studies at King’s College in London, which in turn relied on the Chinese government’s numbers. I don’t think I’m going out on a limb by suggesting that we should be skeptical of anything a totalitarian-cum-authoritarian government says about touchy, potentially embarrassing issues like how many of its citizens it imprisons. The official number at the end of 2005 was 1,565,771, but the King’s College report says that does not include “more than 500,000 serving administrative detention in re-education-through-labour camps,” according to the Chinese government’s own count; “350,000 in a second type of administrative detention…for drug offenders and prostitutes,” according to a U.S. State Department estimate; or pre-trial detainees, whose number “is not known but has been estimated at about 100,000.” Assuming those numbers are correct (a big assumption), ”the total prison population in China is about 2,500,000.” That still gives the U.S. a higher incarceration rate, but not a higher total number of prisoners. And if the Chinese government actually had a few million people in re-education camps, instead of the half a million it claims, how would we know?

Aside from being able to visit a few African and Middle Eastern countries, PRC citizens cannot leave unless they get a visa.  A visa is very hard to get.  Only the well-connected, good test takers (e.g., high IELTS, TOEFL, GRE scores), the rich and the elite are usually able to get one.  And I should know due to the struggles my Chinese friends, students and coworkers have trying to get them (normal people with normal jobs and little amount of assets).

In addition, the average Chinese person cannot move into a new city without registering first.  The hukou registration system still exists — it is reminiscent to the internal Soviet passport — and is not going away anytime soon.  As a consequence it creates two legal classes of citizenship: urban and rural.  And rural peasants trying to move up in the world cannot merely stroll into Shanghai and apply for a new hukou — they must either bribe their way (giving a red envelope – hongbao – to get “sponsorship”) or marry someone who has one which has resulted in many “sham” marriages.  Otherwise the migrant workers cannot reap the benefits of what their taxes pay such as the ability to attend local schools.

Exhibit C

The sino blogosphere is (temporarily) losing one more of its well-written members: Charles Custer of ChinaGeeks announced yesterday he is packing up with his family and moving from Beijing asap.  While politics were a determining factor in his voluntary repatriation, the two top reasons are:

- The air pollution in Beijing

- Food health and safety

The air in Beijing is notoriously bad, in fact the only reason it was slightly healthier during the 2008 Summer Olympics was because the CPC forced nearby factories to close down and restricted motor traffic by half (e.g., based on the license plate number there were specific even-only days and odd-only days that you could legally drive in the metro).

The air in Shanghai can be extremely bad as well.  In fact, the US Consulate in Shanghai publishes the air quality each day on Twitter and used to on Weibo.  But the CPC disliked this so much that two weeks ago, they had Sina Weibo remove the official US Consulate account.  Axed.  Deleted.

The food safety issue is something that simply will never go away with the current political system.  For example, this past week aflatoxin has been found in baby formula — a sub-industry plagued by corruption and never ending amounts of toxic exposés (pun intended).

You cannot get food safety without independent transparency. You cannot get independent transparency without free speech. You cannot get free speech in a real police state.

Notes in the margin:

I have met numerous expats over the years in my travels throughout China that believe that just because you are “white” and sound educated, you can walk into any company and command a high wage (and they say it just like that with a straight face).  While this may have been the case 10-20 years ago, it simply is not true anymore.

In fact, the WSJ had a good article earlier this year discussing Asia’s endangered species: the expat.  While the productive quality may not always be the same as their Western counterparts, many junior-level positions can be and are being adequately filled by local human resources.  After all, with 300 million people learning English out here, odds are some of them will be able to master it and other disciplines (see here and here).

Which brings up the issue of pay.  Surely expats that are the crème de la crème can command higher wages?  You would think so, but alas, there are capital controls in this realm as well.  Dan Harris – an American attorney in Beijing – recently wrote an excellent post about the legal upperbound limit to expat salaries:

Many times over the years American clients of ours have asked us whether their buyers in China are telling the truth when they claim not to be able to pay the American company more than $50,000 in one year.  Our response has always been that we were dubious of such a claim because we have other clients who get paid millions of dollars each year by their China buyers, but if they want us to research this issue for them, we would be happy to do so, at our regular hourly rates.

We had never researched this issue….until now.

And even now, we did not exactly do the research ourselves.  We are involved in a case with a number of other law firms and in that case one of the Chinese parties said that they could not pay one of the law firms more than $50,000 this year.  As you might have guessed, when a law firm’s own money is at issue, the research gets done and the following is what the law firm found:

• China controls inbound and outbound foreign exchange flows.  If a Chinese citizen needs to make an overseas payment it is required to purchase the foreign funds with RMB from a bank qualified to do foreign exchange business.  Most banks in China are qualified to do foreign exchange business.

• When converting RMB to a foreign currency at a Forex Bank, the bank is required to review whether the outbound capital is for investment or for regular payment.  Outbound capital investment refers to overseas equity investment and is strictly restricted. Outbound regular payments are permitted, including those for overseas tours, training, relatives visitation, business negotiations, meetings, service, labor, etc.

• Legal service fees paid to an American lawyer for the service rendered is deemed a regular payment item.  Chinese citizens can convert and remit freely up to USD $50,000 equivalent per year. Conversions exceeding the USD$50,000 quota is still possible, but the citizen cannot complete it at a bank counter freely; he or she must apply to the local State Administration of Foreign Exchange for written approval.  Chinese banks will not let the extra conversion go without seeing SAFE’s approval letter.

• To secure approval to exceed the USD$50,000 limitation in yearly payments to an American attorney, the Chinese citizen needs to submit documents verifying the underlying transaction. The application documents mainly include: (1) an engagement letter/contract signed between the Chinese party and the American attorney; (2) notarization and legalization of the engagement letter/ contract; (3) tax return certificates of the US payee (theoretically the US attorney needs to pay Chinese withholding tax for the revenue gained from China); (4) a request for payment from the US attorney.

Well now we know.

Over the past several months I have been discussing this topic with several civil libertarian writers.  A number of different organizations such as Freedom House (which publishes an annual report “Freedom in the World“) have tried to quantify – via a number of metrics – the various levels of police statism.

While hardly scientific, I have created a simple litmus test to be used here in China:

Can you publish “We live in a police state” in public and not have it removed/censored and not end up in jail?

For example, there are a near infinite amount of anti-Bush, anti-Obama, anti-Schwarzenegger, anti-Rick Astley, anti-ALF sites throughout the series of tubes.  Yet many of these politically-tuned sites are made and hosted in the US, yet are not (currently) blocked nor are the authors thrown into US jails.  (Though that could change if the extraditions stemming from IP and whistle-blowing cases of Kim Dotcom and Julian Assange are any indication).

The same cannot be said here in China, where the mere mentioning of civil mass unrest or political results in you being disappeared, your accounts being deleted and your own name being thrown down the memory hole (Liu Xiaobo anyone?).

For example, a few days ago Bloomberg published a detailed critical report regarding the financial ties of the family of the new, upcoming Chinese president Xi Jinping.   As a result, the entire Bloomberg portal has been inaccessible here on the mainland and still is inaccessible as of this writing.

Yet according to some US pundits, seditious comments (or at least, how they define seditious) against the US state should warrant a clamp down on civil liberties.

For example back in 2005, Charles Krauthammer tried to justify limits to civil libertarian tolerance, stating that:

Call it situational libertarianism: Liberties should be as unlimited as possible — unless and until there arises a real threat to the open society. Neo-Nazis are pathetic losers. Why curtail civil liberties to stop them? But when a real threat — such as jihadism — arises, a liberal democratic society must deploy every resource, including the repressive powers of the state, to deter and defeat those who would abolish liberal democracy.

Several months later, similar sentiments were echoed by Ben Shapiro who proposed:

At some point, opposition must be considered disloyal. At some point, the American people must say “enough.” At some point, Republicans in Congress must stop delicately tiptoeing with regard to sedition and must pass legislation to prosecute such sedition.

Unintentionally, this is an endorsement of the current China censorship model.  And worse, such sentiments by both US pundits and members of the political class today are problematic for Western human rights organizations.  After all, if the land of the free keeps Guantanamo open and unleashes ICE agents upon the net, why should China listen to Hillary Clinton lecture the PRC about human rights and censorship abuse?

Visualizing abuses

Perhaps the EFF or ACLU or some other civil libertarian organization could make an infographic illustrating what restrictions on our civil liberties have taken place during 4 or 5 frenetic periods.  They could even use the ones Shapiro cited in the aforementioned article (Civil War, WW I, WW II, Vietnam).

I would wager that civil liberties as a whole have probably been measurably squashed upon over the past century and a half (especially due to the disastrous War on Drugs), but because of smarthpones, Youtube and cheap net access, we are now able to show more liberties being violated and abuses taking place.

Or in other words, yes there has probably been on the aggregate more violations, but our knowledge of past abuses is severely limited to the low-tech era of that time.

For example: the Japanese internment camps are a bit of a head scratcher.  I remember the first time I read about them and was like, how was this tolerated?  Demonization, fear, hysteria.  Would this have been able to take place today with smartphone vigilantism?  Hard to say, though the propaganda by some pundits and educators towards Muslims in the US has included a push to place this demographic group in similar camps en masse (just for the record, Islamic practitioners in the US comprise less than 1% of the population).

So back to technological tools: it is kind of like earthquakes and seismic detectors.  Yes our ancestors knew earthquakes were taking place in the pre-Industrial past, but they had no idea just how many.  Yet various religious sects point to the “huge amount of earthquakes” that take place each year as some kind of proof of an impending apocalypse.  But the truth of the matter is, we now only just started being able to use machines to reliably analyze and store such vibrations and movements.  Ceteris paribus, there were probably just as many quakes in the past as there are now.

Notes in the margin

I think we as libertarians certainly agree that Lew Rockwell is by every measure, a libertarian.  Unfortunately some people that email him are incorrect at times.  For example, this past spring a reader said that:

China is trending towards more freedom and the US is trending towards authoritarianism, so any comparison just chronicles where we are at the moment, and not where we’re obviously going to be ten years from now.

I can say this based on my conversations with my son: for most people that would fall into a comparable social class, China is no where near as authoritarian as the US, and where authority is exercised it appears to be with more restraint.  There is no TSA at Chinese airports.  My son has entered the country when the customs and immigration checks were simply closed (because it was outside normal working hours) and walked off the plane and into Beijing.

On the surface, there are a lot of “rules” in China, but no one pays any attention and the authorities don’t enforce them.  My son never had any problems finding what he wanted on the internet, was never stopped or hassled by the authorities, and never had any official interference in anything he did there. Their legal system is not as harsh and punitive as ours is…..at least judging by the anecdotes I’ve heard from my son.

Yes, there are lots of problems there…especially among the lower socio-economic class, and things are very different than in the US, but he loves it there.

This is simply not true.

Two days after posting that, on April 27th, Beijing began a crackdown on visa violations, deporting foreigners across the northern metropolis.  A month later, this crackdown became part of a 100-day nationwide crackdown on illegal/overstaying foreigners.

And a new law was just passed here last week in which employers will be fined 10,000 RMB ($1,580) for every illegal foreigner hired (it takes effect a year from now).

Thus to counter the comment at the LRC post above, China is probably not trending toward freedom.  At least vis-a-vis overt public policies.  And as Bill Bishop recently noted, it remains to be seen how the Chinese political class  will be able to manage a censorship regime with a plethora of cheap smartphones and microblogging sites — though a panopticon is also a distinct, increasingly real, possibility.