the economist

LAST week my colleague looked at whether the word "fair" should have a place in political discourse. I'm afraid I couldn't help but imagine that question in the voice of the late lamented Phil Hartman. "What do we mean by 'fair'? It's just a word! Look, I'm a caveman. I don't understand your modern concepts of 'progressive taxation', or 'carried interest rules', or 'deliberately packing a collateralised debt obligation full of toxic assets and taking out a credit-default swap on it'. But what I do know is that my client is a decent, upstanding, God-fearing corporation that believes in America, and also holds title to the mortgages of seven out of the twelve jurors on this case. Is that fair? I don't know! I'm a caveman! But I hope you can find it in your hearts to rule that my client did not make any material misrepresentations of fact in its dealings with the Police Wives' Pension Association, just as my client has found it in its heart not to foreclose on your homes, yet. The defence rests."

To be, uh, fair, though, the question of the role of fairness in political speech is a fair...er, legitimate one. My colleague does a nice job of elaborating a few of the different notions of fairness that Barack Obama deployed in his state-of-the-union speech last week. Fairness is complex, and a commitment to fairness requires approaching it from different angles. (My colleague's effort to delineate these angles is head and shoulders above the blog post he references by Dilbert creator Scott Adams, which I find pretty useless. Mr Adams begins by arguing that there's no point discussing fairness because "Fairness isn't a natural part of the universe. It's purely subjective." This is gibberish; I don't understand what it's supposed to mean. There is not a human being on earth who does not have a conception of fairness and is not a psychopath. On what grounds can inalienable aspects of human consciousness be ruled not "natural parts of the universe"? Other such aspects of human consciousness include morality, reason, logic, freedom, comprehensibility and value itself. Are these natural parts of the universe? They're not made of quarks or photons. Is value itself "purely subjective", unmeasurable and thus not worth talking about? At one level, sort of; at another level, if you think value is purely subjective and unmeasurable, then you shouldn't be reading a publication called "The Economist".)

Anyway. Getting back to more interesting terrain, my colleague points out that Mr Obama's speech recognises a few different criteria of fairness. First, there's the "fair shot" criterion: everyone in American society deserves a reasonable chance at making it. As he says, guaranteeing everyone a literally equal opportunity would probably require kibbutz-like levels of invasiveness and restrictions on community and family autonomy; but we should be able to arrive at some reasonable sense of what constitutes a decent equality of opportunity, including education. 

To me, the takeaway on this version of fairness is this. My colleague and I probably agree that on any reasonable assessment, poor Americans don't get a fair shot. As even David Brooks and Charles Murray are recognising, America is (at least) a two-class society. If you look at intergenerational mobility comparisons between the America and northern Europe, the glaring difference falls at the low end of the income scale: Americans born in the bottom income quintile have very limited chances of making it out. This is because American public schools in poor neighbourhoods stink; it's because of the disappearance of decent-paying jobs for unskilled but hard-working stiffs; it's because America's social safety net for adults is stingy, incompetent and neglectful, so poor kids' parents are overburdened and have nobody to make up for the parenting and life skills they lack; and it's because the parents who are in that bottom quintile started out as kids in the bottom quintile, and reproduce the effects of the deficient system they were raised in, recreating the whole problem for the next generation. Now, it may be that it's not actually possible for "us" (whoever that is) to fix this sort of social problem. Crooked timber of humanity, and all that. But if you believe that congenital poverty is ineradicable, that to be born poor is to be doomed to poverty, then you have to pay moral tribute to the fact of social unfairness. If to be rich is lucky rather than deserving, then the lucky rich owe assistance to the unlucky poor. Either persistent poverty can be solved, in which case let's see your solutions; or there shall be no further moralising about the undeserving poor. People who lack the power to change their fate do not in any meaningful sense deserve it.

Second, there's the idea of fairness as "doing your fair share". My colleague uses the example of two people sharing the duties of shoveling snow off a walk, where the stronger one's fair share may be larger than the weaker one's. (In the Netherlands' egalitarian political culture, the familiar refrain is that "the strongest shoulders should carry the heaviest loads".) But:

Suppose I'm a surgeon pulling down six figures. Perhaps doing my fair share is to pay 33% of my income in taxes. But, hey, wait! My sister, who could have been a surgeon, chose instead to make pottery in a little hippie arts colony. She makes only as much as she needs to get by, works relatively short hours, smokes a lot of weed with her artist friends, and pays no federal income tax at all! If paying 33% of the money I make saving lives is doing my fair share, then it's hard to see how my sister—who could have been a surgeon, or some kind of job- and/or welfare-creating entrepreneur—is doing hers. But if she is doing hers, just playing with clay out there in the woods, benefiting next to no one, paying no taxes, then clearly I'm doing way more than my fair share. Which seems, you know, unfair.

I think the imputation here that the surgeon already deserves greater credit for saving lives rather than making pottery is misleading. The surgeon is getting paid lots of money for saving those lives. That's the reward. If I snow-shovel harder than you and complete 3/4 of the walk to your 1/4, and hence I get $7.50 of the $10 the neighbour pays us for it, then we're quits. If we're talking about a paid job on the free market, the fairness question arises only with regard to the taxes, not the work. (Holding market distortions aside for the moment; that'd make it too complex.) My colleague's aside about feeling guilty for not becoming a surgeon and working for Medecins Sans Frontieres actually makes the point clear: if you did this, you would earn less money than a surgeon working in America at market rates, you would thus indeed be doing more than your fair share, and you'd pay less in taxes.

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DAVID FRUM quotes the following passage of Charles Murray's new book, "Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960 - 2010", in the midst of a long, scathing review (about which I here enter no opinion):

Data can bear on policy issues, but many of our opinions about policy are grounded on premises about the nature of human life and human society that are beyond the reach of data. Try to think of any new data that would change your position on abortion, the death penalty, legalization of marijuana, same-sex marriage or the inheritance tax. If you cannot, you are not necessarily being unreasonable.

I found this exceedingly odd. I can easily imagine what evidence would cause me to change my position on any of these issues. How about you? It's a fun exercise, let's try.

Abortion. This is far and away the hardest one. I favour legal abortion. I don't think embryos or fetuses are persons, and I don't think it's wrong to kill them. I also don't think infants are persons, but I do think laws that prohibit infanticide are wise. Birth is a metaphysically arbitrary line, but it's a supremely salient socio-psychological one. A general abhorrence of the taking of human life is something any healthy culture will inculcate in its members. It's easier to cultivate the appropriate moral sentiments within a society that has adopted the convention of conferring robust moral rights on infants upon birth than it would be in a society that had adopted the convention of conferring the same rights on children only after they've reached some significant developmental milestone, such as the onset of intelligible speech. The latter society, I suspect, would tend to be more generally cruel and less humane. This is just an empirical hunch, though I feel fairly confident about it. But I could be wrong. And I could be wrong in the other direction as well. If it were shown that societies which ban abortion, or which ban abortion beyond a certain point, exceed societies which don't ban abortion in cultivating a "culture of life", which pays off in terms of greater general humanity and diminished cruelty, I would seriously weigh this moral benefit against the moral cost of reducing women's control over their bodies. Also, if it were shown that abortion tended to damage women's mental and physical health more than forcing women to carry unwanted pregnancies to term, I would tend to look more favourably on restrictions on abortion, especially for minors.

Death penalty. This is a lot easier. I oppose the death penalty. But if the death penalty were shown to be (1) a very effective deterrent of murder and violent crime, (2) non-prejudicially applied, and (3) very rarely applied to the innocent, I would support it in especially heinous cases of murder.

Legalisation of marijuana. I support legal weed! If it were shown that marijuana is super-addictive, impossible to use responsibly, and that its users predictably harm others and/or egregiously harm themselves, I'd support something in the neighbourhood of status quo prohibition.

Same-sex marriage. I'm so pro, I almost wish I were gay so I could have one. If compelling evidence were unearthed that showed that widespread same-sex marriage really would precipitate the unraveling of the traditional family and subsequently the stability of society and the ruin of us all, I suppose I'd settle for the right of same-sex couples to shack up.

Inheritance tax. I don't have an especially strong opinion about this, other than that the "death tax" tends not to be very efficient and that large bequests aren't an especially important source of inequality or the reproduction of class. So, I guess I'd need to learn that inheritance taxes don't create a lot of wasteful, evasive resource shuffling, and do significantly contribute to class mobility if I were to develop a more favourable opinion of them.

That wasn't so hard, was it? It's worth noting that "the nature of human life and human society" are themselves subjects about which we have some empirical evidence, and that reasonable "premises" about these ought to be responsive to that fact.

Mr Murray argues that many of our policy opinions are grounded on deep premises "beyond the reach of data" on his way to noting that the data he presents in "Coming Apart" are something of an inkblot onto which he expects we will (not unreasonably?) project our prior opinions. He writes:

A social democrat may see in parts 1 and 2 [of the book] a compelling case for the redistribution of wealth. A social conservative may see a compelling case for government policies that support marriage, religion, and traditional values. I am a libertarian, and see a compelling case for returning to the founders' conception of limited government.

If the data really so radically underdetermine the policy implications, isn't the reasonable response simply to withhold judgment?

LOOKING around at her fellow volunteers making phone calls to voters on behalf of Mitt Romney, Lee Weiss can’t help but snicker. “I’ve never seen such a clean-cut looking crowd,” she says, “and I’m clean-cut looking myself.” Indeed, even though many of them are not Mormon, as Mr Romney is, the people bustling through this temporarily leased factory space in Las Vegas are all clad in Mormon chic, an impeccable version of business-casual. They seem also to be practicing the work ethic of Mormon missionaries, placing their calls relentlessly and with imperturbable good humour. This is the prodigious organisation of the Romney campaign on display.

This particular phone bank, and Mr Romney’s entire machine, was successful in Nevada, where Mr Romney won the Republican caucuses on February 4th (as he had won that state in 2008). But yesterday the machine fell short, when Rick Santorum, a Catholic archconservative on social issues whom gays love to hate, swept three contests. These included an upset in Colorado, which was supposed to be similar to Nevada—western and with many Mormons among its Republican voters—and thus a safe bet for Mr Romney.

Instead Rick Santorum, steadily improving as a debater, speaker and campaigner, succeeded where Mr Romney has most notably failed: in inspiring enthusiasm among voters. In Minnesota, the former governor, Tim Pawlenty, himself a former presidential candidate, was campaigning for Mr Romney. Mr Romney had won the state in the 2008 primaries. Nonetheless, Mr Santorum triumphed and Mr Romney came in a poor third after the libertarian Ron Paul.

The other race, in Missouri, was a beauty contest that allocated no delegates (this happens, confusingly, at another vote in March). And Newt Gingrich, another candidate trying to outflank Mr Romney on the right, was not even on Missouri’s ballot. But Mr Santorum’s victory was decisive here as well, adding to his momentum and helping him to raise money.

More importantly, this Santorum surge, after his earlier victory in Iowa, is the latest reminder that Mr Romney has a problem with evangelical and blue-collar conservatives in general, and with the midwest in particular. This matters, since the area includes crucial swing states. Mr Santorum will now be arguing that he, rather than Newt Gingrich, is the man to spoil Mr Romney's party.

Mr Gingrich, by contrast, has a hard February ahead of him. Already in Nevada, he had to dispel rumours that he would drop out of the race, insisting that he would “go to Tampa”—ie, stay and collect delegates until the Republican convention in August. Only 219 delegates have so far been allocated, out of 1,144 needed for the nomination. So his strategy is to keep going through the remaining contests in February (Maine, Michigan and Arizona) until March, when the race visits several states in the South which are more amenable to him, including his native Georgia, which he represented for 20 years in Congress. If he can manage that, he will reach for the big prize of Texas in April.

The contest is thus turning into the party elders’ nightmare. They have begun to unite behind Mr Romney, hoping to focus all attacks on Barack Obama. Instead, Messers Romney, Gingrich, Santorum, and even Mr Paul, must now attack one another. Many of their one-liners are good, meaning dangerously memorable even in November. Mr Gingrich, for example, delights his crowds by calling Mr Romney a “Massachusetts moderate” and belittling him as “little Food Stamp” next to Mr Obama’s “big Food Stamp”.

All this prevents Mr Romney from following his preferred strategy. All along, he has tried to look presidential by attacking Mr Obama rather than other Republicans. But each loss is forcing him to descend into the gutter of attack ads against his Republican rivals. He hopes to do well in the next several contests, from Maine to his native Michigan and Mormon-friendly Arizona. But if he can’t seal the deal by March, things could get ugly.

DESPITE receiving a round kicking, Newt Gingrich is not giving up on his moon base. To support his cause, Mr Gingrich has invoked the two animating forces of a previous space age: John F. Kennedy's vision of sending a man to the moon and the threat of some other nation getting there first. This is standard fare in any argument in favour of human space exploration. It's also based on a flawed reading of history.

Kennedy's great moon venture was a politically motivated ploy that may have turned out differently had he lived. For a while, the strategy seemed crucial in proving the inferiority of communism. But behind the scenes the president admitted to being "not that interested in space", and by 1963 he had begun a major rethink of the programme because of its "fantastic expenditures". At the United Nations that year he asked whether America and the Soviet Union ought to be involved in such "duplications of research and construction", and proposed a joint lunar programme. After a cool reaction from the Soviets, Kennedy was assassinated a few months later and the moon race became his legacy. But it was not a lone dash that Kennedy had envisioned as much as a joint venture, and although his spirit is often invoked when new cosmic voyages are proposed, the former president had little interest in the universe outside of Earth's atmosphere.

More importantly, if a "race" back to the moon actually exists, the economic rationale for going (to claim resources) can be achieved by sending robots, or a small number of temporary visitors assisted by machines. Money can be made without creating a lunar colony, but it seems colonisation in and of itself is Mr Gingrich's goal. And that presents a problem. We already know that short periods of near-zero gravity are extremely unhealthy for adults. They suffer significant losses in bone density and muscle atrophy after only six months on the space station. How about a lifetime on the low-gravity moon? And what about the children?! The human developmental process is designed for Earth's gravity, meaning a moon pregnancy would involve serious risks. Any child that survived would be crushed by gravity if they tried to return to the Earth.

At this point one could mutter something about developments in technology that could overcome basic human biology, but even humanity's mastery of technology cannot overcome the facts. The moon is a cold, airless, lifeless lump of rock a long way away. Only a lunatic would want to raise kids there.

I SEE that Karen Handel, the pro-life vice-president of the Susan G. Komen Foundation widely believed to have played a leading role in its short-lived decision to cut off grants to Planned Parenthood, has resigned. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution's Jim Galloway reprints her letter of resignation. Here's an excerpt I found worthy of note.

I openly acknowledge my role in the matter and continue to believe our decision was the best one for Komen’s future and the women we serve. However, the decision to update our granting model was made before I joined Komen, and the controversy related to Planned Parenthood has long been a concern to the organization. Neither the decision nor the changes themselves were based on anyone’s political beliefs or ideology. Rather, both were based on Komen’s mission and how to better serve women, as well as a realization of the need to distance Komen from controversy. I believe that Komen, like any other nonprofit organization, has the right and the responsibility to set criteria and highest standards for how and to whom it grants.

Let's get this straight: Ms Handel defends the decision to cut off funding to Planned Parenthood as part of an effort "to distance Komen from controversy."

If this was in fact the strategic concern, then clearly the decision was spectacularly inept. Worse yet, Ms Handel appears genuinely deaf to the irony that as a result of the cut-off, the Susan G. Komen Foundation is now itself precisely the sort of "controversial" organisation that other donors will refuse to work with—perhaps not due to "anyone's political beliefs or ideology", but simply because, well, you know, we can't afford to be associated with that type of...controversy.

This, obviously, is part of an ancient political dance. First you get politicians and ideologues to throw some mud. Then you come to the neutral civil-society groups and pressure them to drop their ties or be accused of taking sides. "It's not that we have anything against you, per se; we just can't be associated with something so controversial." I can plug this into a civil-rights context, a McCarthyite context, and so forth. I'm trying to think of a context where it's not reprehensible, but none come to mind.

THE past few days have brought some new calls for Mitt Romney to directly address the fact that he is a Mormon, notably from Frank Bruni in the New York Times and Randall Balmer at the New Republic. It's not as if people ever stopped talking about this issue, but there are several factors that helped drive Mr Romney's religion back into the spotlight, including the fact that he is ever more likely to be the Republican nominee; that he won the Nevada caucus on Saturday with a lot of support from Mormons there; and that Michael Kranish and Scott Helman, reporters for the Boston Globe, have just released a new biography, "The Real Romney", excerpted at Vanity Fair.

The latest round of commentary suggests that Mr Romney needs to talk about his religion not because people are curious about Mormonism, but because they are curious about Mr Romney himself. Here's Mr Ballmer:

There’s no doubt that, to some extent, the voting public’s interest in Mormonism is informed by prurience. But that’s not to say it should be dismissed entirely. What ought to interest us about Romney’s faith are not the vagaries of Mormon theology, fascinating as they are, but how he understands that theology, how his faith informs the way he lives, his sense of responsibility toward others and how that might affect the way he governs.

And Mr Bruni:

His aloofness, guardedness and sporadic defensiveness: are these entwined with the experience of belonging to a minority tribe that has often been maligned and has operated in secret? Do his stamina and resilience as a candidate reflect his years of Mormon missionary work in France, during which he learned not to be daunted in the face of so much resistance that he won a mere 10 to 20 converts, according to “The Real Romney,” a biography published last month?

There are two ways to interpret the argument that Mr Romney should talk about his religion: as a political analysis, that Mr Romney risks alienating voters if he takes a coy line on this, and as a normative comment, that voters have a right to know about his religious beliefs. Both are suggested in the pieces at hand, although Mr Ballmer seems to focus on the former, and Mr Bruni on the latter.

Neither is very convincing. As a political matter, it may be the case that Mr Romney's Mormonism has alienated some evangelical voters, but even if he is awkward about these questions, he remains the frontrunner for the Republican nomination. And while recent polls have suggested that nearly a quarter of Americans are leery of supporting a Mormon for president, it's hard to disentangle that finding from the fact that roughly half of Americans are apparently leery of supporting Mr Romney or any other Republican.

The second argument, that Mr Romney has a particular responsibility to talk about his religion because he is a Mormon, is where we get into more interesting territory. It would be reductive to say that this is just about prejudice. If you're running for president, you can expect people to check your teeth and kick your tires, and if you've had a life experience that is unfamiliar to a lot of people, that part of your biography is bound to attract curious attention.

As to the substance of the matter, it may be that Mr Romney's experience with Mormonism has affected him in ways that we haven't fully considered. I called Matthew Bowman, a historian who has a new history of the religion (and is a Mormon himself), to ask. Mr Bowman flagged a couple of things. Mormonism has a "really strong communalist bent", for example, partly as a result of its historical tensions with the federal government; you could draw a line between that and Mr Romney's support for small-government conservatism. Another consideration: "Mormonism is not a very theological religion", Mr Bowman said; in a typical sermon, you're more likely to hear a call to do good deeds rather than a critical inquiry about the nature of God. That, he continued, might infuse some of Mr Romney's noblesse oblige.

I was glad I asked because the conversation gave me some food for thought with regard to Mormonism's standing in American society. You can see how some people might get suspicious, for example, if evangelical Protestants are thundering that Mormonism is theologically treacherous, and Mormons are asking if you need a ride to the airport. And it's probably not a stretch to say that a president's formative experiences, religious or otherwise, do impact their administrations in interesting ways. In her new book about Barack and Michelle Obama, for example, Jodi Kantor argues that Mr Obama's sangfroid about West Wing squabbling traces back to his relationship with his parents—"to hold those around him to strict standards would have left him with no one"—and you could argue that George W. Bush's interest in providing funding to fight the HIV/AIDS pandemic was a function of his Methodism, given that church's traditional emphasis on social justice. But we should be careful about extrapolating too much from these lines of inquiry. This is political journalism, not psychoanalysis. All of the phenomena described could be rooted elsewhere, and as a voter, a candidate's character traits themselves are presumably more relevant than the underlying causes thereof. In the current case, it's clearly Mr Romney's right to decide whether he wants to talk about his religion, just as it's the voters' right to base their decision on whatever substantive or silly reason they prioritise.

(Photo credit: AFP)

THE process to determine the Republican candidate for president in the general election is playing out now; the process to determine the Democratic nominee was supposed to have ended four years ago. Alas, it has not. Residents of at least six states have challenged Barack Obama's eligibility to appear on their states' ballots, because they claim he is not "a natural-born citizen", which article II of the constitution requires candidates for president to be. The argument here, about which more below, is that "natural-born citizen" refers to children born in the United States to two American parents, and that because Mr Obama's father was a Kenyan citizen Mr Obama himself is ineligible to become president. Last Friday, Michael Malihi, an administrative court judge in Atlanta, became the latest to rule against this piffle. Eight citizens challenged Mr Obama's eligibility; they were represented by, among others, the indefatigable Orly Taitz, and also by Mark Hatfield, who happens to be a Georgia state representative.

Mr Malihi's ruling weighs in at a compact but decisive ten pages. The plaintiffs charged that Mr Obama carries a fraudulent social-security number, a forged birth certificate and Indonesian citizenship, and that his real name is either Barry Soetoro or Barack Obama Soebarkah. In support of these claims, Mr Malihi found "the testimony of the witnesses, as well as the exhibits tendered, to be of little, if any, probative value, and thus wholly insufficient to support Plaintiffs' allegations." The witnesses whom Ms Taitz called to testify (you can read them here, in the transcript) were never tendered as experts; they simply asserted claims about Mr Obama without providing the court (or anyone else) with any convincing reason to believe those claims.

The court also, yet again, settled the old "natural-born citizen" argument, relying heavily on a 2009 decision by an Indiana court that held that "persons born within the borders of the United States are 'natural-born citizens' for Article II, Section 1 purposes, regardless of the citizenship of their parents." That case, like this one, was filed to stop Mr Obama from becoming president, and that decision rested on centuries of Supreme Court precedent and English common law. The opposing case rests on a willfully idiosyncratic reading of an 1875 Supreme Court case called Minor v Happersett. In that ruling, the Court wrote, "...it was never doubted that all children born in a country of parents who were its citizens became themselves, upon their birth, citizens also. These were natives, or natural-born citizens, as distinct from aliens of foreigners. Some authorities go further and include as citizens children born within the jurisdiction without reference to the citizenship of their parents. As to this class there have been doubts, but never as to the first. For the purposes of this case it is not necessary to solve those doubts." In other words, Minor did not settle the question of who was and was not a natural-born citizen, as the plaintiffs claim it did, it deliberately left the question open (as does the constitution, which does not define the term). The Supreme Court has held and lower courts affirmed that natural-born citizen refers to anyone born in the United States.

Now, having read all that you might well ask who cares. Hard-core birthers ye will always have with you; they rely upon a hardy zombie of an argument and a resolute imperviousness to facts. But for four years Republicans have been dipping their toes in the fetid swamp that is birtherism, too scared to call a lie a lie. Besides, it proved useful in whipping up suspicion and hostility against Mr Obama. The interesting question now is what happens if Mitt Romney selects Marco Rubio, born in Miami to two Cuban parents, as his running mate? What happens if Nikki Haley or Bobby Jindal, born in America to Punjabi parents, seeks the presidency in 2016? If Mr Obama is ineligible then they are too. My guess is you will see the swamp left to the swamp creatures.

(Photo credit: AFP)

NOWHERE near enough attention is being paid to the way the diplomacy around the Syrian civil war is playing out. Nowhere near enough. The other day I noted that nothing had made me as pessimistic about development aid as the endgame of our failed intervention in Afghanistan. Today let me paint a stroke in the other direction: nothing has made me as optimistic recently about the prospects for a broadly international, pro-human-rights, anti-authoritarian foreign policy that brings together America, the democratic world, and many of the emerging-market/non-aligned countries as what's happening right now around the Syria question. The complete isolation of Russia and China in the Security Council vote on sanctions last week is a watershed moment. It not only, as my colleague writes, cemented the image of Russia and China backed into a corner together in defence of authoritarianism. It also strengthened the tentative cohesion formed during the Libyan revolution last year between the democratic West, Arab democracy movements, and the Arab League.

The Western criticism was echoed in the Middle East, where Arab powers like Saudi Arabia and non-Arab Turkey have turned decisively against Assad in recent months.

"Unfortunately, yesterday in the U.N., the Cold War logic continues," said Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu. "Russia and China did not vote based on the existing realities but more a reflexive attitude against the West."

Arab League head Nabil Elaraby said the body still intends to build support for its plan. The veto "does not negate that there is clear international support for the resolutions of the Arab League," he said in a statement seen by Reuters.

The Security Council's sole Arab member, Morocco, voiced "great regret and disappointment" at the veto. Ambassador Mohammed Loulichki...said the Arabs had no intention of abandoning their plan.

Burhan Ghalioun, head of the opposition umbrella Syrian National Council, called Moscow and Beijing's veto "a new license to kill from these two capitals for Bashar al-Assad and his criminal regime, which just yesterday killed 300 people." The SNC said it held Moscow and Beijing "responsible for the escalating acts of killing and genocide."

Protesters stormed the Russian embassy in Libya's capital Tripoli Sunday, climbing on the roof and tearing down the flag. Men held up a banner saying: "Libyan revolutionaries are ready to fight with their brothers in Syria."

This is simply extraordinary. At Foreign Policy, Colum Lynch notes that Vitaly Churkin, Russia's ambassador to the UN, blamed the backers of the resolution for promoting a strategy of "regime change". Mr Churkin seems to have phoned in his quote from a secret city in Siberia where the year is still 2003. There is a world of difference between an American request in the UN Security Council for authority to launch an invasion of a stable country, and a proposal for sanctions under a Security Council umbrella on a regime that is actively slaughtering its own citizens in order to cling to power in the face of a popular uprising. And when the Arab League, the relevant local multilateral group, is strongly behind the proposal, that should settle the question.

What is Russia thinking? The reflexive Russian opposition to international sanctions against authoritarian regimes facing popular uprisings would make some sense if Russia itself feared becoming the target of such sanctions; but that seems a remote prospect, and should it come to pass, Security Council resolutions would be the last thing Moscow has to worry about. It might have made sense in the days when the USSR acted as a vetoing aegis in the Security Council for a worldwide bloc of authoritarian client states prone to periodic revolts. But Russia's remaining client states are a paltry and threadbare lot. Does Moscow really think that sticking its neck out pre-emptively to forestall any potential future sanctions vote in case of an uprising in Belarus is worth earning the hatred and contempt of the youth of the Muslim world? It's a debacle, and strong evidence for Stephen Holmes's argument that the Putin regime, far from a latter-day revanche of efficient Soviet central command, is a dysfunctional and disintegrating mess.

As for China, the vote is yet another in a series of recent strikes against the notion that Chinese "soft power" was poised to vanquish American hard power in the developing world. Over the past three years, China has proven inept and pointlessly confrontational in its push to seize control of the South China Sea. A relatively subtle American policy of offering help to regional countries looking for a counterweight to China, orchestrated with unobtrusive but pointed intent by Hillary Clinton, has proven extremely effective. Against all expectations, Western influence suddenly seems to be winning out even in Myanmar. In southeast Asia these days we are the soft power, China is the hard one, and we're winning.

I could go on, but I'm really just supplying more and more examples to underscore the basic point. For the past three years America has been walking softly, and it's working very, very well. Ten years back, America often found itself isolated, struggling to pull together "coalitions of the willing" packed with small client states. Lately, we have been finding ourselves in the majority, along with the democratic world, while Russia and China front a dwindling coalition of the unwilling. To some extent, this reflects a smart, subtle foreign-policy presence in which we have done a vastly better job of looking at what other countries actually want, and seeing where our interests align, rather than trying to bully other countries into supporting our goals. To some extent, it's luck: the Arab spring happened.

And to some extent, there's a personal factor. Look through the Pew Global Attitudes project data on confidence in the US president. In almost every country, you'll see a dramatic or startling increase in confidence between 2008 and 2011. In Germany and France, George Bush had approval ratings in the low teens in 2008; Barack Obama's approval has never dropped below 80%. In Japan and Britain the shift is nearly as striking. In Egypt, the corresponding figures are 11% and 35%. Even in Russia itself, they are 22% and 41%. When Hillary Clinton and Susan Rice try to win backing for American positions at the UN, the exceptional popularity of the president they represent in other countries is obviously a factor. Commentators who envision Barack Obama running on his foreign-policy successes in this year's campaign generally adduce examples like the assassination of Osama bin Laden and the crippling of al-Qaeda. Perhaps these are the examples that figure most clearly in the American voter's imagination. It would be nice, though, if voters evaluated presidents' foreign policies on the basis of whether they had won the respect of the world and advanced American interests internationally. The evidence of recent American foreign-policy effectiveness isn't that we've shot a lot of bad guys. It's that when our UN ambassador calls the Chinese and Russian vetoes of action on Syria "disgusting", she's speaking for the overwhelming majority of the world, and they are in the isolated minority.

(Photo credit: AFP)

I'M GLAD to see the Washington Post's editors make a point I grumpily repeat in almost every live-blog. Low-skill, undocumented immigrants can't "get in line", instead of entering and working in America illegally, because there is no line. As the Post notes, Republicans aren't alone in repeating empty "get in line" rhetoric; the president does it too.

Granted, Mr. Obama and Mr. Romney have different ideas of how the “line” would work... In the end, the distinction is meaningless—because there is no line, not even a relevant visa category, for millions of immigrants.

Here’s why. A large majority of the 11 million illegal immigrants are unskilled or low-skilled Mexicans. Many of them have no relatives over age 18 who are either U.S. citizens or permanent residents in possession of green cards.

That makes them ineligible for any realistic visa category. They are barred in most cases from employment-based visas, which favor skilled and well-educated applicants, and from family-based visas, which require applicants to have spouses, parents or siblings who are U.S. citizens or hold green cards. (Even the “line” for those visas often takes 15 to 20 years or more.) There is simply no immigrant visa category for which most unskilled Mexicans qualify and no realistic prospect they could be legally admitted to the United States. About half of the unauthorized adults in the country are Mexicans who probably have no category for admission, according to Pew Hispanic Center senior demographer Jeffrey S. Passel.

Yet American demand for low-skilled workers remains. So they will come. And they will come illegally, because they must. It's very important to note that workers from south of the border act more as complements than substitutes for similar American workers. Perfect enforcement of the law as it stands would lead to a shortfall in the supply of low-skilled labour and reduce the productivity of sectors that have benefitted from the complementary specialisation of native and migrant workers.

The Post sensibly proposes a guest-worker programme. Short of an EU-style integration of North American labour markets, a large guest-worker programme is the only policy that promises to accommodate economic reality without creating a caste of unauthorised workers especially vulnerable to exploitation. The "rule of law" will prevail only when the law is re-drafted to accord with necessary and natural patterns of migration and trade. Newt Gingrich alone among this season's presidential contenders grasps the necessity of a guest-worker programme. As this isn't a particularly popular stance among conservatives, for this Mr Gingrich deserves some recognition and praise. Perhaps because the idea of a guest-worker programme doesn't exactly thrill most Republicans, Mr Gingrich tends to emphasise that his proposal includes a biometric ID-card system managed by American Express, Visa, or MasterCard. (Why not Diner's Club?) A spoonful of corporatism helps the medicine go down, I guess. At least Mr Gingrich wants to create a line would-be workers can "get in", which is more than can be said for his GOP competitors, or the president.

FOR the past few months the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has been warning that America is facing an "epidemic" of prescription-drug abuse. At the Huffington Post, Radley Balko argues that the crisis is overblown, and that America's anti-drug policies are getting in the way of its public-health response to the problem of chronic pain:

There's no question that prescriptions for opioid painkillers like Oxycontin and Percocet have soared in recent years. It's also clear that there are some rogue doctors and "pill mills" who unscrupulously hand out prescriptions, sometimes to patients who shouldn't get them, sometimes to drug addicts and drug dealers pretending to be pain patients. But it's also far from certain that the painkiller abuse and overdoses are as dire as the government is making it out to be. And to the extent that there is a problem, it's due more to a decade of aggressive policing, obstinate federal law enforcement agencies, and the encroachment of law enforcement into the practice of medicine than lax government oversight. The DEA in particular has been scaring reputable doctors away from pain management since the late 1990s. People who suffer from chronic pain simply can't find doctors willing to treat them over the long term. The unscrupulous doctors and pill mills in the headlines have sprung up to fill the void.

It depends what you mean by "dire", I suppose. The CDC has been much concerned about drug-overdose deaths; the overdose death rate has more than tripled since 1990. In 2008, the most recent year for which data are available, some 36,000 people died of overdoses. That's a small number relative to the overall population, but it's roughly on par with the number of people who die in car crashes, and it does represent a troublesome increase. Most of those overdose deaths are due to prescription drugs, largely painkillers, and as epidemiologists point out, the rate in prescription-drug overdose deaths is directly correlated with the increase in prescriptions over that period:

There's no reason to minimise the problem of chronic pain, or to vilify doctors, most of whom are presumably conscientious about prescribing powerful and addictive opioids and narcotics. However, law enforcement is encroaching for a reason, which is that there have been many documented instances of unconscientious behaviour from rogue doctors running "pill mills", and from pharmaceutical companies themselves. Mr Balko says that interventions from law enforcement "have cast a chill over the treatment of pain." I'm sure that has happened in some cases. But looking at the trend line depicted above, I don't see any evidence that the aggregate effect has been to limit access to painkillers.

Mr Balko is right to say that cracking down on access to painkillers could have unintended consequences, and that's something policymakers should be aware of as they proceed with their efforts to monitor and control access to prescription drugs. There is a danger that patients turned away from doctors will suffer severe pain; there's also a danger that they will try to assuage their pain—and attendant addiction—through other means. In an interview last week Jane Maxwell, an epidemiologist at the University of Texas, told me that she worries that as police start to shut down the pill mills, some people who have developed addictions to synthetic opioids may turn to real opiates, like heroin. These are powerful drugs, which partly explains why policymakers are so concerned about the possibility for abuse.

Did you know that the "war on drugs" is nominally over? In 2009 Gil Kerlikowske, the head of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, said the administration would stop using the term, and although rhetoric is just that, there does seem to be a growing acceptance that drug abuse is more of a public-health issue than a criminal-justice concern. A "war on painkillers" would probably prove to be as unsuccessful as the "war on drugs" was, but that doesn't mean that the government has no appropriate role in monitoring the distribution of these prescription drugs or any others. For more on this topic, see this week's paper; my colleague J.F. and I have a story scheduled about how American drug policy is changing in response to patterns of drug abuse, including the rise of prescription-drug deaths.

MATTHEW YGLESIAS writes that he hasn't gotten too exercised about the New York Times' article on the plight of the Chinese workers who make Apple products because he's seen what it's like to work on a Chinese farm. Fair enough. Mike Daisey, the tech enthusiast/performance artist whose piece "The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs" has partly touched off the current anti-Apple/anti-Foxconn backlash, talks about standing outside the gates at a Foxconn plant talking to workers who slave terrible hours under mind-destroying conditions, doing things that cripple their bodies. My reaction was to recall the time I spent standing outside the gates talking to workers at the world's biggest laser-printer factory, Canon's plant in Hanoi, back when I lived there; and while they had their complaints, they almost uniformly considered themselves lucky to be among those who had gotten out of their villages and passed the entrance exams to win a coveted regular-salaried factory job. On the other hand, that very eagerness meant that many village applicants were preyed upon by "employment placement firms" who made them empty promises of a guaranteed factory job in exchange for upfront payments (ie, bribes) equivalent to many months' salary, which would leave their families desperately in debt when they didn't actually get a spot. Tran Phuong Thao made a pretty great film on this a few years back, "Dreaming of Becoming a Worker", but unfortunately it doesn't seem to be available online.

Anyway, that's one angle: sweatshops are awful, but working a tiny rice farm is clearly worse, judging by the workers' own preferences. However, the stance one takes on this depends on the question one is asking. An article on hardships in the garment industry in New York in 1909 might have elicited the response that things couldn't be too bad since people were still immigrating from eastern Europe by the millions to take these jobs. Clearly they were better off working in a sweatshop in Manhattan than leading a miserable existence of poverty and repression in a shtetl in Poland. But at the same time, these workers were angry enough at the conditions they were subjected to that they staged the massive shirtwaist strike that year. Needless to say, that kind of politically free labour organisation is much harder to conduct in China because the state bans the formation of independent unions not controlled by the Communist Party. There's a sequence in Mr Daisey's piece where he describes seeing Foxconn's perfectly open blacklist of employees who are to be immediately fired and not accepted at other factories because they are "troublemakers"; Mr Daisey notes that in a fascist dictatorship, you don't have to resort to euphemisms the way management does in democracies. And that, too, rings true from my talks with underground Vietnamese labour activists. It's hard to say how big the discount is on the manufacturing price of an iPhone due to the Chinese state's ability to repress the formation of labour unions, but it's not zero.

So I think the issue here is really what question we're asking. If we're saying people should launch a campaign to force Apple to put more pressure on Foxconn to improve working conditions and obey their own nominal corporate codes of conduct, including an unprecedented transparency campaign where obnoxious busybodies from civil-society groups can drop in at factories unannounced all the time and bring production to a halt if violations are uncovered—I honestly don't see how this can hurt. Forcing the Chinese state to allow independent labour unions would be great too, but this may be impossible because for a Communist dictatorship that's a direct mortal threat to the ascendancy and legitimacy of the state. You could make an intellectual case for a Pigovian tariff on Chinese goods that tries to compensate for the absence of political rights, but beyond trying to calculate how much labour repression cuts the price of a Chinese transistor as compared to a Thai one (which might not be much), I'm not sure how one would (to put it bombastically) put a price on freedom.

But here's one part of the New York Times' series on Apple that I found incredibly interesting, though it doesn't seem to have gotten much press. In the first article of the two-part series, they repeatedly talk about the point at which Apple began shifting its focus away from its famous automated plant in California, where iMacs were assembled by zillions of whirring robotic arms, to Foxconn's factories in China. At Foxconn, iPhones and iPads are assembled largely by hand, with assembly lines of thousands or tens of thousands of workers giving themselves crazy repetitive motion stress disorders. The transition of manufacturing from America to China is generally viewed as an inexorable one, due to the low cost of Chinese labour and the virtuous circle of development of the Chinese electronic-manufacturing complex. But in this case, we seem to be seeing a reversal of the other, far more dominant inexorable trend: that of the industrial revolution towards ever-increasing automation. John Henry appears to be beating the steam drill. This is pretty weird, and it's hard to believe it isn't a temporary deviation from the norm. At some point iPhones are going to be assembled by robots, not people trying to imitate robots. But with east Asia by now utterly dominating the global network of electronics manufacturing, it may be that the shift to robotic iPhone factories will happen in China (as it already is), not in America. Does this matter for American workers? For America's trade balance? Is there anything to be done about it, even if it does?

(Photo credit: AFP)

AN UPDATE to the previous post about the rift between Susan G Komen for the Cure and Planned Parenthood: Komen has announced that it will continue to work with Planned Parenthood. The reversal follows several developments, including, crucially, Jeffrey Goldberg's reporting at the Atlantic that the policy that Komen had initially cited in cutting off the funding—the policy of not giving any funds to organisations that are under investigation—was actually a new policy created in order to cover its desire to cut off the funds in question.

The debate over this will continue; unsurprisingly, both Komen and Planned Parenthood have raised a lot of money from their respective supporters over the last few days, and the whole fracas has pushed the abortion debate back into the political spotlight, where it will remain, despite the reversal. Komen's reversal may be bad tactics—as various wags have pointed out, the organisation has now irritated pro-life people in addition to pro-choice people—but on the substance, it was a solid call. Planned Parenthood is fundamentally a women's-health organisation, not a political combatant, despite what you hear from some segments of the right; and Komen is a charity with an interest in women's health.

One aspect of this that I think is worth flagging is that it is the second time in two weeks that vocally upset people have had a demonstrable effect on an issue. The first, of course, was over the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act. After a semi-centralised backlash around the internet—the Wikipedia blackout, the statements from big industry players like Google, and the clamour on Twitter, Facebook, and other social media—both bills have been postponed indefinitely. You can also, arguably, see this phenomenon at work in, for example, the end of ethanol subsidies. This suggests that public opinion can actually make a difference in politics, at least when the most compelling arguments are on its side. That's a cheering prospect for a small-d democrat, particularly in the age of SuperPACs and so on.

IMAGINE you head a municipal utility company. Your coal-fired power plant is aging. Your plant is among the 47% of American plants that have not yet installed the scrubbers needed to bring it into compliance with new EPA regulations. You therefore face a choice. Do you a) install the scrubbers, b) build a new coal-fired power plant, c) build a natural-gas-fired power plant or d) invest in solar or wind power? All four options are expensive, and none is perfect, but the latter two, in most circumstances, are clearly the better options.

A week ago I wrote an article arguing that we are in or nearing the end of the American coal era. The country's coal-fired power plants are aging; natural gas abounds; the installation costs of renewables are falling; and environmental regulations are growing stricter and being properly enforced. Coal may well continue to provide more energy than any other single source for some decades to come, but it will probably never again generate the majority of America's energy, as it did for much of the 19th and all of the 20th centuries. Still, coal will not vanish overnight. Neither will mountaintop-removal mining, which now accounts for much of the coal Appalachia produces. But, as this video shows, some ingenious Kentuckians are figuring out how to restore removed mountaintops.

ROSS DOUTHAT, making a communitarian argument that government expansion comes at the expense of voluntaristic association, writes:

Every tax dollar the government takes is a dollar that can’t go to charities and churches.

A good rule of blogging discourse is that you should respond to the main thrust of a post, rather than tangential nitpicky issues. But I'm going to break that rule for reasons I'll explain later, and point out that this claim here is just transparently not true.

Let's say I'm a reasonably generous person, and I give 5% of my disposable income to charity. Say I have $10,000 in disposable income, so I give $500 a year to charity. Now the government raises my taxes by one dollar, so I have $9,999 in disposable income. How much will I give to charity? I would have to be extremely weird or vindictive, or have a strange emotional relationship to the recipients of my benevolence, to take the entirety of that $1 out of my charitable giving. In all likelihood I'll continue to give 5% of my disposable income to charity, meaning I'll give $499.95 to charity. So for someone who gives 5% of disposable income, every dollar the government takes is perhaps 5 cents that won't go to charity.

This is pretty obvious when you consider that every dollar the government takes is a dollar that "can't" go to charities and churches only in the same sense that it can't go to buying an iPhone or shoes for your daughter. But if you had the dollar, you couldn't have given it to charity and used it to buy an iPhone and shoes for your daughter. The dollar is doing too much work here. The proper way to express this is that every dollar the government takes from someone in taxes will reduce their giving to charities and churches by a fraction proportional to that person's propensity for charitable giving.

Now, Mr Douthat is arguing that the type of collective social action we engage in through the vehicle of government often drives out other kinds of collective action. But this is a pretty weak way to make that argument. Government spending is 100% collective social action, so when the government takes that dollar you get a dollar's worth of collective social action. Private spending ends up being devoted to collective social action at a much lower rate, probably in the single digits. So if you're trying to get collective social action, you'll get vastly more bang for your buck through taxes.

In any case, charitable giving is tax-deductible. So when the government increases the tax rate, it actually makes charitable giving more attractive relative to spending or investment. If I'm a hedge-fund executive and my tax rate is 15%, then if I decide to spend a dollar rather than give it to charity I'll only get 85 cents' worth of stuff. If the government eliminates the carried interest rule and starts charging me a marginal rate of 35%, then if I decide to spend that dollar rather than give it to charity I'll only get 65 cents' worth of stuff. This will further mitigate the effect of my reduced disposable income on my charitable giving.

You can take this one step further if you like: what is the tax money being spent on? Does it increase the salary of a government worker by $1? What if that government worker also has a 5% propensity to give her disposable income to charity? In that case the charity gets their 5 cents right back again and there is no loss at all. What if the dollar goes to reducing the federal deficit? In that case, if you believe in Ricardian equivalence, it will make no difference at all: consumers have already factored in expectations of future taxes to pay off government debt, so their spending decisions will not change. If on the other hand you don't believe in Ricardian equivalence then what happens when an extra dollar is taxed depends on many other conditions in the economy. Lots of things could happen.

None of this addresses the issue of voluntarism: people have control over who they give charity to, and the kind of collective social action in which you exercise that kind of choice is important and different from the government kind. Then again, the government kind is important too: it's important to have to contribute to collective social action even when you don't like everyone who's involved and don't have the final say over what gets done.

But that's not really why I'm writing this post on what may at first seem like an annoying and nitpicky issue. The reason I'm writing this post is that the formulation "every dollar of taxes is a dollar that can't be spent on (my particular area of concern)" is a pervasive rhetorical figure that is simply not true. It's a bad intellectual habit that confuses people into thinking that taxes have something to do with issues they actually have nothing to do with. We should make our arguments about what government should or shouldn't do without confusing things this way.

IN THE latest edition of the New Republic, Robert Kagan, a senior fellow at Brookings and noted Kagan, serves up a ponderous rebuttal to the proposition that America is in decline. I don't disagree with Mr Kagan that America remains, for the foreseeable future, securely hegemonic, which is the thesis he is most anxious to establish. But I am sceptical of Mr Kagan's assumptions about why American unipolarity must be so jealously protected, which he announces at the outset of his essay:

The present world order—characterized by an unprecedented number of democratic nations; a greater global prosperity, even with the current crisis, than the world has ever known; and a long peace among great powers—reflects American principles and preferences, and was built and preserved by American power in all its political, economic, and military dimensions. If American power declines, this world order will decline with it. It will be replaced by some other kind of order, reflecting the desires and the qualities of other world powers. Or perhaps it will simply collapse, as the European world order collapsed in the first half of the twentieth century. The belief, held by many, that even with diminished American power “the underlying foundations of the liberal international order will survive and thrive,” as the political scientist G. John Ikenberry has argued, is a pleasant illusion.

There is much to quibble with here. It may be that the current global dispensation to some extent "reflects American principles and preferences". If it does, however, it's not because it "was built and preserved by American power", except in a rather trivial sense. The American model of political economy has proved in many ways to be the world's most successful. As the 20th century's main rivals to capitalist liberal democracy failed, polities worldwide looked to the example of Western Europe and North America, and this led to a glad flowering of democracy and prosperity. But America didn't cause the world's numerous socialist and/or authoritarian experiments to fail. Those regimes faltered first and foremost because socialism and authoritarianism tend not to work out in the long run. And America didn't compel aspiring first-worlders to try market economies and democratic governance. The nations of the world could see for themselves what was working and, in their own ways, have mostly followed suit.

If American power does wither, it will be due to America's failure to maintain really first-rate institutions. The ensuing world order would indeed become, as Mr Kagan has it, one "reflecting the desires and the qualities of other world powers". But that's simply because the capitals of the world aren't full of blithering dopes who wouldn't know what to do if Brookings senior fellows didn't tell them. Smart countries will want to emulate those that remain or have become first-rate. And, as far as I can tell, people who become accustomed to wealth and freedom don't have to be bullied and cajoled into wanting to keep it. Because they have grown rich, they'll have the means to keep it. Which is why it's absurd to think that if America loses its lustre, the peoples of the world will inevitably suffer under the dark reign of Russian or Chinese bad guys. Other wealthy, liberal democracies can have huge navies, too, if we'd let them. Mr Ikenberry's alleged "pleasant illusion" looks pleasantly solid to me. 

Mr Kagan gives it his all arguing that the "rise of the rest" does not mean America's not still undisputed king of the hill. But Rosa Brooks, a Georgetown law professor, is right that the skyward trajectory of the BRICs does mean America's relative influence has waned, and that that's a happy development:

[A]s Reagan recognized, a decline in relative American power is a good thing, not a bad thing — if we can turn rising states into solid allies. Remember "Gulliver's Travels"? True, it wasn't much fun for Gulliver to be the little guy in the land of Brobdingnagian giants, but it was even less fun to be a giant among the Lilliputians. Like Gulliver, America will prosper most if we can surround ourselves with friendly peer and near-peer states. They give us larger markets and improve burden-sharing; none of the global problems that bedevil us can be solved by the United States alone.

The global public goods Mr Kagan rightly prizes—peace, stability, unimpeded trade routes—will be more, not less secure if the burden of their provision is more broadly distributed. And America is more likely to remain worth emulating were it to redirect some significant portion of the trillions spent maintaining its hegemony into more productive uses. 

(Photo credit: AFP)

AFTER Mitt Romney's bruising victory over his rivals in the Florida primary, our correspondents debate whether he is now the inevitable Republican nominee

IN AN article I wrote last week on Alabama's immigration law, I referred to Samuel Addy, an economist at the University of Alabama who was trying to determine the overall costs of the law. Mr Addy has just released his cost-benefit analysis, and it makes for compelling—and, at nine pages, brief—reading, for the law's supporters and opponents alike. Blissfully free of the moralising, hyperbolic language that both sides of this debate too often use (the police are not the Gestapo; undocumented immigrants are not a horde of disease-ridden scofflaws), Mr Addy seeks to provide information that will let legislators and Alabamans determine whether the law is worth the costs it imposes. He is scrupulously fair-minded.

First, the potential benefits of the law. Mr Addy identifies four: savings from the costs of providing services to illegal immigrants, increased safety, more "business, employment and education opportunities for legal residents" and "ensuring the integrity of various governmental programs and services". To those I might suggest adding a fifth, one routinely brought up by supporters of laws such as Alabama's: the unquantifiable benefit of, as Mitt Romney puts it, "ensuring our immigration system respects the rule of law". To supporters of laws like Alabama's, this might in fact trump all other concerns. The law is the law, they might say, and if we flout it here it becomes an ass elsewhere. But, of course, you could make the same argument about speeding. Both are civil infractions but neither is a crime; both deliberately flout a clear law. In any case, as that benefit is my proposition not Mr Addy's, I'll save this discussion for a later post.

The two services illegal immigrants are most often believed to use are hospitals and schools. Determining the exact amount saved is difficult because finding the exact number of illegal immigrants who used those services is difficult. But in 2010 the vast majority (82%) of children born to illegal immigrants were American-born, and hence entitled to public education. As for health-care, Mr Addy argues some savings will accrue if illegal immigrants leave Alabama, as they have, but it is unclear how much. Determining to what extent Alabama will become safer as a result of HB56 requires knowing how many crimes illegal immigrants in Alabama tend to commit. In 2010 Alabama had an estimated 120,000 illegal immigrants, and a population of 4.8m. If it is a rate far higher than the general populace—far higher because they comprise a small portion of the total population—Alabama will become safer overall. A similar calculus applies to determining the benefits to government services.

Next, the immediate costs. These include costs to the state—implementation, enforcement, and litigation to defend the law in court—and to businesses such as farms, construction companies and restaurants that hire undocumented workers. Supporters of the law may well contend that businesses should not hire undocumented workers, or that the federal government and civil-rights groups ought not sue the state. But that is not an argument, at least not here; costs are what they are, in the actual world that exists, not the one that should exist.

Last, the less direct costs. Economic developers, Mr Addy says, "have noted that the new immigration law projects a negative image of the state to the world, making it difficult to recruit foreign companies". Alabama has attracted hundreds of foreign businesses in the recent past; they employ around 54,000 people in the state. After a German Mercedes exec got chucked in jail for not having the right form of ID on him, a St Louis newspaper published an op-ed urging the company to relocate. Missouri, it said, is "the Show-Me State, not the 'show me your papers' state." It's a good line, but one imagines Alabamans will find it less funny if businesses start taking other states up on their offers. Finally, there is the overall revenue and demand loss that happens when 40,000 to 80,000 workers leave the state. Mr Addy's analysis pegs the GDP contraction attributable to this law alone at 1.3 to 6.2%, as well as $56.7m-264.5m in state income and sales-tax losses and $20m-$93.1m lost in local sales tax (the high variance is due to uncertainty about the precise number of people who left, as well as their total income and the amount they spent and remitted).

Now, high costs alone are not an ironclad argument against this or any other law. Investigating, say, extortion or racketeering cases can be expensive; that is not a reason to legalise extortion and racketeering. But supporters of the law must honestly answer for and defend the costs that the law incurs. Simply saying we need to do something about illegal immigration, this is something, therefore we must do it is not enough.

FAIRNESS played a central role in Barack Obama's state-of-the-union address, and I suspect it will play a central role in the president's re-election campaign. But what does Mr Obama have in mind when he deploys the f-word? It may not be the case that fairness is, as Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert, puts it, "a concept invented so dumb people could participate in arguments". But it cannot be denied that fairness is an idea both mutable and contested. Indeed, last week's state-of-the-union address seems to contain several distinct conceptions of fairness worth drawing out and reflecting upon.

Toward the beginning of his speech, as Mr Obama was trying to draw a parallel between post-second world war America and today's post-Iraq war America, he offered this rather stark choice:

We can either settle for a country where a shrinking number of people do really well while a growing number of Americans barely get by, or we can restore an economy where everyone gets a fair shot, and everyone does their fair share, and everyone plays by the same set of rules.

Here we have three distinct conceptions of fairness in a single sentence.

To get a "fair shot" is to be offered the opportunity to participate fully and succeed within the country's institutions. This is, I think, the least controversial conception of fairness in America's political discourse. Conservatives who strenuously object to the idea that the American system should aim at "equality of outcomes" will sometimes affirm "equality of opportunity" as an alternative. But this is a mistake. To really equalise opportunity requires precisely the sort of intolerably constant, comprehensive, invasive redistribution conservatives rightly believe to be required for the equalisation of outcomes. If one is prepared to accept substantial inequalities in outcome, it follows that one is also prepared to accept substantial inequalities in opportunity.

Getting a fair shot doesn't require equalising opportunity so much as ensuring that everyone has a good enough chance in life. The content of "good enough" is of course open to debate, but most Americans seem to agree that access to a good education is the greater part of a "good enough" and thus fair shot. Naturally, there is strong partisan disagreement over the kinds of education reform that will do right by young Americans. And there is also disagreement over elements of a "fair shot" beyond education. For example, many liberals believe workers don't have a fair shot at achieving a decent level of economic security without robust collective-bargaining rights. And many conservatives believe that an overly-strong labour movement invites outsourcing by raising domestic costs, and thereby deprives American workers of a fair shot at employment. There may be some fact of the matter about which policies are most likely to benefit students or workers. But if one is more fair then the other, how would we know?

What is it to do one's "fair share"? In small groups, it's clear enough. If my friend and I are shoveling the front walk, my fair share of shoveling, and his, is about half. Often we adjust for differences in ability. If I am big and strong and my friend is small and frail, his fair share may be as much as he can manage. That won't mean that the whole remainder is my fair share, though. If we're going to get the walk shoveled, I may have to do a bit more than my fair share. These things get complicated quickly. That's why the question of what it means for an American do his or her fair share, qua citizen, is completely baffling.

Suppose I'm a surgeon pulling down six figures. Perhaps doing my fair share is to pay 33% of my income in taxes. But, hey, wait! My sister, who could have been a surgeon, chose instead to make pottery in a little hippie arts colony. She makes only as much as she needs to get by, works relatively short hours, smokes a lot of weed with her artist friends, and pays no federal income tax at all! If paying 33% of the money I make saving lives is doing my fair share, then it's hard to see how my sister—who could have been a surgeon, or some kind of job- and/or welfare-creating entrepreneur—is doing hers. But if she is doing hers, just playing with clay out there in the woods, benefiting next to no one, paying no taxes, then clearly I'm doing way more than my fair share. Which seems, you know, unfair.

Are you doing your fair share? How would one know? Actually, I just made myself feel slightly guilty for not going to med school and joining Médecins Sans Frontières. But unless government can come up with a way of taxing the leisure of people who aren't doing as much as they might for kith and country, I reckon I'll just stick to part-time pro blogging and let all you 9-to-5 suckers finance the necessary road-building and foreigner-bombing.

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NOTHING in my life has made me as pessimistic about development aid as the course of the American intervention in Afghanistan. The New York Times' Graham Bowley reports that unsurprisingly, the country is set to drop into a drastic recession as foreign aid dries up over the next few years. That's because foreign aid amounted to 97% of the economy in 2010, and will largely disappear by 2018.

Already, the housing bubble is deflating. A typical house normally costs $30,000 to $230,000 depending on size and location, but deals dried up and prices dropped by $10,000 to $50,000 last year as people worried about the pullout, though prices bounced back in December, Mr. Babakarkhail said.

The same tremors are being felt about 20 miles away on the icy hills north of Kabul, where Miraj Din, 48, who used to deliver food and firewood in a wheelbarrow, now manages Mumtaz’s Car Salesroom, selling imported cars to the country’s elite. Last year, he sold about a dozen cars a month, but this year he is selling only one car a month as Afghans with enough money to buy these fancy vehicles delay their purchases or move their money abroad, he said.

I think I've seen figures showing that foreign aid was actually greater than the country's entire GDP in 2011. That sounds impossible, but I'd imagine it reflects the fact that foreign aid is often spent on salaries for Western consultants and equipment from donor countries, so it never really enters Afghanistan at all. Which, in many ways, is a good thing. The fewer dollars and euros flowing into Afghanistan, the less its incredibly backward economy is distorted by foreign cash. Mr Bowley reports on a boot factory that is finding that with foreign-aid money disappearing, the army has begun ordering cheaper Chinese-made boots, threatening the good $240-per-month jobs it offers its employees. This isn't surprising. Those employees' salaries are no doubt driven up by the very high salaries unskilled Afghans can earn as security guards for Western aid workers and so forth. The boot factory won't be able to compete with China until the Westerners leave and salary levels drop—at which point they'll have to worry about massive Chinese economies of scale, inferior transportation problems that make it impossible for them to compete for foreign markets, and so on.

The NATO intervention in Afghanistan was an attempt to do a military intervention right for a change. This time, rather than parachuting in, blowing up the offending society, and leaving, we were going to stick around and fix their country. But fixing a country like Afghanistan is a massive undertaking, requiring a massive foreign presence; and the very massiveness of that presence doomed the effort to fix things. The romantic vision of the transformation of Afghanistan involved passionate Westerners with graduate degrees donning local garb and riding on donkeys to dirt-poor villages to educate their girls and extend their agriculture. But Westerners with graduate degrees don't much want to sit around on donkeys in dirt-poor villages, particularly not when the Taliban will kill them for doing so. They want to ride out to the village in an SUV, train some locals to teach the girls (or better yet, train some local trainers), drive back to the city, hit the gym and turn on the laptop. Besides which, they have to turn on the laptop, because the congressional subcommittee has told USAID to mandate that they report monthly on progress in 37 different categories of target indicators in exchange for their NGO getting the grant.

To be fair, how would they even know whether their training-the-trainer missions were succeeding unless they conduct some monitoring and evaluation surveys of stakeholders, run the surveys through a social-sciences statistical application and compare them to other projects or to results in previous years? And who's going to administer those monitoring and evaluation surveys? There are like 50 Afghans in the whole country who can read and write English and understand that they're not supposed to just fill out the surveys themselves with the "correct" answers. And those Afghans have by now figured out that they can charge salaries of $30,000 a year because if the NGO doesn't get them, it won't be able to compete for the next USAID grant. Which means hey, these Afghans can afford a new house! And with a whole bunch of them trying to buy new houses, the price of houses does what the price of houses does. As do the prices of everything else. Pretty soon you have an economy that's gone completely haywire, and even though everyone realises that the whole house of cards is going to collapse the moment USAID leaves and suddenly those research assistants are only worth $5,000 a year rather than $30,000, there's nothing anybody can do about it except try to get as many dollars as they can while the getting is good, and transfer them out of the country to somewhere safe against the moment when it all falls apart.

Or, as the Senate Foreign Relations Committee report last June put it, “Foreign aid, when misspent, can fuel corruption, distort labor and goods markets, undermine the host government’s ability to exert control over resources, and contribute to insecurity.”

In sum, we violated the prime directive. Violating the prime directive was, in fact, the entire mission: we wanted to fix Afghanistan. We were willing to spend a lot of money as long as it produced results. What we've learned is that development aid doesn't work this way. You can't get more definite results, or speed up the process, by spending more money. In fact, spending more money will most likely screw things up. We already learned this once, in Vietnam; now we've learned it again. Development aid will be successful where it takes a lower profile, doesn't spend so much money, and sets goals for itself that are modest and achievable within the constraints of what the locals actually want to do and what they're capable of doing. One other suggestion: it may seem sexier and more noble to develop a country that's in the middle of a war, but it might work better if you try a country that isn't.

(Photo credit: AFP)