That leads to certain anomalies.  For instance, our “All Local” station features a host who lives in, and broadcasts from, Wisconsin—and not just across the border, but about as far away as Chicago is from Rockford.  He is a good host, having actually once lived here, and he is quite willing to talk about Rockford news and controversies.  Yet there is still something odd about the idea of a “local” show originating from someplace that cannot by any stretch of the imagination be called “local.”

Most of the discussion of the potential demise of local newspapers and other local media has blamed their decline on the rise of the internet.  There may be some truth to such assessments, but not in the way in which they are usually framed—namely, that the internet somehow magically provides us with up-to-the-minute news about everything we need to know.  In all but the largest cities, it is still hard to find local news on the internet—and, in the largest cities, it is equally hard to find useful news on a scale that could reasonably be called local (i.e., at the level of the extended neighborhood).

Rather, even most self-billed “local” news sites feature a high proportion of national and international news, much of it obtained from wire services.  Why go to the website of my local newspaper or TV station to read about Barack Obama’s decision to release Bush-administration torture memos, when I can find everything I need to know on the front page of Google News or the Drudge Report?

Worse yet, why bother watching the “local” news or listening to “local” talk radio or reading a “local” newspaper when much of the content is neither local nor fresh, having been available online for many hours before the program started or the issue went to press (much less showed up on my doorstep)?  It is hard to see a bright future for a business model that depends on a customer base that has limited access to the internet (or, at best, limited interest in accessing the internet), since that audience is shrinking every day.

This is the point at which all the “local media is dying” reports claim that the problem is insoluble, that the newspaper is finished, that local TV stations would be better off showing Seinfeld reruns at 6:00 p.m. and local talk radio should give way to the prepackaged musings of Rush Limbaugh or Ed Schultz.  Sometimes they halfheartedly suggest one alternative: Local newspapers can transform themselves into online-only publications, and thus compete with Google News for pageviews and, more importantly, the ad impressions that bring in revenue.

All of these assessments are based on the idea that there is no market for anything that is truly local.  And when we look around at the homogenization of entertainment and food and everything else under the sun, that argument seems almost unassailable.  Almost.

Until we consider the possibility that people aren’t interested in local news sources because there is nothing really local about them.  To take just one recent—local!—case in point: On Friday, April 3, Hassan Abujihaad, a former U.S. Navy signalman and a convert to Islam, was sentenced to ten years in prison for revealing classified information on ship movements in the Persian Gulf to the operators of a jihadist website in Great Britain.  The local media here in Rockford picked up the story from the newswires and ran it on their websites.  For them, it was just another national news story.

Except that it wasn’t.  It should have been on the front page of the next day’s Rockford Register Star, and it should have received top billing on the six o’clock news that evening.  Why?  Because, as longtime readers of Chronicles and this column know, the story depended on a local connection.  Abujihaad was at one time the roommate of Derrick Shareef, the local jihadist who hatched a plot in 2006 to toss grenades into the midst of crowds of Christmas shoppers at the largest mall in the Rockford area.

Shareef’s arrest was made possible through the efforts of an FBI informant, and that same informant was able to leverage the fact of the arrest to get Abujihaad to provide, on tape, key evidence that led to the latter’s arrest.

In other words, without the Rockford connection, Abujihaad would likely still be a free man.  Rockfordians might well have found that of interest—certainly of more interest than the sentencing alone, which is how all but one local news outlet reported it.

That outlet, TV station WQRF (FOX 39), is to be commended for discussing the local connection, but even they confined it to a two-minute segment on the evening news that aired right before the local sports.

There is a business model for local news, but until newspapers and radio and TV stations take seriously the motto “All Local. All Day,” they will continue to struggle—and to fail.

The public, meanwhile, believes the federal bailout is primarily helping the bankers and others whose poor behavior caused the trouble.  The Obama administration, as a consequence, has felt obliged to proceed without going to Congress to give its effort democratic legitimacy.  Instead, it has used the Federal Reserve and FDIC to create ten trillion dollars of its support.

Both the Bush and Obama administrations decided they would not let the bankrupt go bankrupt.  Natural forces, if allowed to work, would quickly put the weak to sleep, leaving stronger firms to pick up the business.  The problem with the decision to intervene is that, once made, there is no reasonable way of stopping.

Then why intervene?  The bankers say you can pay us now or later; we are all tied together like climbers on Mount Everest; we are all too big to fail.  You are doomed if you let us go.  British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, in his March 4 address to Congress, stated:

We tend to think of the sweep of destiny as stretching across many months and years before culminating in decisive moments we call history.  But sometimes the reality is that defining moments of history come suddenly and without warning.  And the task of leadership then is to define them, shape them and move forward into the new world they demand.  An economic hurricane has swept the world, creating a crisis of credit and of confidence. . . .

And we need to understand what went wrong in this crisis.  That the very financial instruments that were designed to diversify risk across the banking system instead spread contagion across the globe.  And today’s financial institutions are so interwoven that a bad bank anywhere is a threat to good banks everywhere.

The “contagion,” in large part, is something called credit default swaps (CDS), which were unknown to ordinary human beings before September 2008.  In 2001, there were $900 billion of them; in 2008 there were $46 trillion.

There are two types of credit default swaps.  In the first, the buyer owns a security and purchases insurance to protect against default.  This sounds strange: If you thought a security might default, wouldn’t you just sell it rather than bet against yourself?  The explanation is that the banks used the credit default swaps to evade capital requirements—banks are required to hold some capital against their loans and investments—but the regulators accepted the swaps to show that there was no risk of default and, therefore, no need for capital.

In the second type of credit default swap the buyer of insurance does not own the underlying security; instead, the seller and buyer pretend that he does.  These so-called synthetic or naked credit default swaps are pure gambling.  In the 19th century many American cities had what were known as bucket shops.  A bucket shop had a New York Stock Exchange ticker and would post quotations as they came in.  Rather than buy the stock, the customer bet on the tape—e.g., 20 shares of sugar at $100.  The shop took a commission: If the stock went to $105, the shop paid; if it went down, the customer lost.  Customers could also short a stock.  Edwin Lefèvre’s 1923 classic Reminiscences of a Stock Operator vividly describes the turn-of-the century bucket shop.  The shops were partially blamed for the Panic of 1907, and the states outlawed them shortly after that.  Of course the New York Stock Exchange, where customers bought the underlying assets, continued to be legal.

The “synthetic” credit default swap is a revival, 100 years later, of the bucket shop.  Could anyone defend the return of gambling shops?  Well, yes, President Obama’s principal economic advisor Larry Summers could.  In July 1998, as deputy treasury secretary, he explained to Congress that the derivative market “in just a few short years” had become “highly lucrative” and a “magnet for derivative business from around the world.”  The market, Summers continued, is developed “on the basis of complex and fragile legal and legislative understandings.”  It was true, he added, that “questions have been raised as to whether the derivatives market could exacerbate a large, sudden market decline.”  Summers didn’t think so, noting that the derivatives supported “higher investment and growth in living standards in the United States and around the world.”  Moreover, there was no reason for concern, since

the parties to these kinds of contract are largely sophisticated financial institutions that would appear to be eminently capable of protecting themselves from fraud and counterparty insolvencies and most of which are already subject to basic safety and soundness regulation under existing banking and securities laws.

Summers explained that the market was based on an “implicit consensus that the OTC derivatives market should be allowed to grow and evolve without deciding” the legal issues—i.e., whether derivatives violated laws prohibiting bucket shops, gambling, and trading in unregistered securities, not to mention doing so outside the regulated options exchange.  “At the heart of that consensus has been a recognition that ‘swap’ transactions should not be regulated . . . whether or not a plausible legal argument could be made” that the contracts are “illegal and unenforceable.”

The huge derivatives market, according to Summers, was based not on law but on “understandings” and an “implied consensus.”  Summers never explained how the exotic devices would be of any help to the real economy or why the market needed secrecy to operate.  When the market broke, the secrecy turned out to be malignant.

Did the CDSs violate state anti-bucket-shop laws?  Without question.  Then why isn’t this huge market illegal?  It was, until the waning hours of the Clinton administration, when a lame-duck President and a lame-duck Congress immunized credit default swaps from state law.  The Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000, 100 pages in length, was introduced in both houses on December 14 and passed, without debate, the next day.  The President’s Working Group on Financial Markets, led by Summers and Alan Greenspan, wrote Congress that it “strongly supports” the bill, which would maintain the U.S. “competitive position in the over-the-counter derivative markets by providing legal certainty and promoting innovation, transparency and efficiency in our financial markets.”  Section 17 of the 11th-hour bill states, “This Act shall supersede and preempt the application of any State or local law that prohibits or regulates gaming or the operation of bucket shops.”  The immunizing law was folded into a spending bill, so no congressman had to be on record as voting for it.

Unshackled, the CDS market prospered.  It was immune from federal regulation and state law.  That meant it operated in total secrecy—simply bilateral contracts between parties.  And the parties—banks, investment banks, hedge funds, and AIG—made bets that no gambling parlor in London or Vegas would countenance.  For example, AIG took someone’s bet on the price of oil 50 years from today.  Some laid bets on whether Bear Sterns, Lehman, or AIG would go bust.  AIG bet that some workers’ 401(k) plans would not lose any market value.  (That one cost taxpayers $40 billion.)  These bets can’t be reasonably valued, and because of the secrecy of the market no one can be sure where they are.  Consequently, anyone you are doing business with may be holding one.  If one goes off, he will be instantly bankrupt—a fact that removes the trust necessary to conduct business.  Hence, the Depression we now face.

In his Budget Message, President Obama said he would act with “unprecedented transparency and accountability.”  What had caused the crack-up?  His answer: an “Era of Profound Irresponsibility.”  This was no doubt true but not that informative.  The President’s “transparency” has been a little weak.  Not until March 15, 2009, did we find out that the AIG bailout of September 2008 was really designed to funnel $12.9 billion to Goldman Sachs.  And $108 billion—or over two thirds of the taxpayers’ $170 billion—went overseas to European banks.  Bank of America got $4.5 billion, and Citigroup, Merrill Lynch, and Morgan Stanley received between $1 and $3 billion each.

The AIG bailout paid out—in full—the bets Goldman and others had made.  What was the social purpose of that?  Goldman even announced that it was not at risk; it had covered its bets elsewhere.  Why had Goldman insisted on full payment from the taxpayers?  They owed it, they said, to their shareholders.  Now, several months later, we still do not know what the winning bets were that we paid off in full.

The last 20 years or so have witnessed the evolution of a failed financial system.  Traditional commercial banks and investment partnerships, without giving any real notice to the public, changed the nature of their business.  Finding revenues from lending and underwriting too small, they set sail for more adventurous seas, where they discovered a treasure trove of derivatives, including credit default swaps.

The new financial system’s incentives are all short term.  Securitization rewards the origination of a loan without respect to its quality, at the expense of the ultimate holder.  The incorporation of the investment partnerships meant the managers could follow the lead of our modern corporations and run the corporation for their benefit.  They could take the profits—in 2006 Goldman Sachs had 50 employees who made more than $20 million—and leave the risk with the shareholders.

President Obama’s policy of trying to reinflate the bubble—see TAIF (an effort to revive securitization) and Public Private Investment Group (an effort to make taxpayers finance purchases of rotten assets from banks)—is a bad idea.  Remarkably, his administration has not even proposed dealing with the cause of the problem—the “naked” credit default swaps.  Today, CDSs are traded as secretly as ever.  Some standard types, if the parties choose, may pass through a nonguaranteeing clearinghouse—a pitiful half-step to appease critics.

The current system has a bad design.  We need to simplify and separate the banks’ utility functions from casino activities that should be carried on elsewhere.  In February MIT professor of economics Simon Johnson said, “Are you going in with the bankers or are you being tough with bankers?  They [the administration] don’t want to upset the banking industry and that’s the heart of it.”

Presidents get to choose—they can pick conventional or unconventional advisors.  Given the current financial crisis, when it comes to economic advisors, you would not think the President would appoint the guys who wrecked the train—Summers and Geithner—to fix it.  President Obama picked Larry Summers, a former Harvard president, to be the head of his White House National Economic Council.  The President says he meets with Summers every day.  Is Summers likely to give unconventional advice?  Well, on April 3, the White House reported that in 2008 Summers earned more than $5 million from a hedge fund and $2.7 million in speaking fees from Wall Street companies.  The speaking fees included Goldman Sachs ($135,000), Citigroup ($45,000), J.P. Morgan ($67,500), and the now-defunct Lehman Brothers ($67,500).  White House spokesman Ben LaBolt said the compensation did not represent a conflict of interest and really was not surprising since Summers is “widely recognized as one of the country’s most distinguished economists.”  Maybe, although it is not unreasonable to suspect that he would naturally want to preserve a system that has richly rewarded him.  Every President gets the advice he wants.  President Obama’s problem is that his choice is conventional.  Summers’ policy of reinflating the bubble won’t work; the public is past it.

We need to try to correct the harm done by the infamous Section 17 of The Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000.  Let the sun shine into this secret market.  Let’s disclose all the facts so we can finally figure out who owes what to whom.  That would be a beginning.

This article first appeared in the June 2009 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

You can see photographs of Popcorn on the world-wide web, a scrawny old man wearing overalls, a faded flannel shirt, and the wreck of a brown hat—the splay of his red-gray beard covering his chest, sad eyes seared by the gaze of the Beast.  One snapshot shows him standing by his Model A Ford, with mom corn and pop corn painted on the front bumper.  Another with Willie Nelson’s arm around him.  A third with him holding a copy of Me and My Likker, his autobiography.

You can even go to YouTube and see a snippet of The Last One, a film about Sutton, made by Neal Hutcheson, whose North Carolina company, Sucker Punch Pictures, features Appalachian stories and themes.  The Last One is a step-by-step workshop on how to make a still and run off your very own moonshine, with Popcorn and assistant J.B. Rader as instructors.

It’s like watching a segment of Paula Deen on the Food Network.  Popcorn talks you through the exacting process, starting with the selection of a site and ending with the sampling of the finished product.  You can sense the true artisan’s quest for perfection in his careful explanation of each step.  This is no hustler, out to make a quick buck.  Scuttling around the copper kettle and tubing, sealing the contraption with his skeletal thumb, he is the master of a great craft, cooking one more batch for posterity, “the last run of likker I’ll ever make.”

By the time Hutcheson shot this film, Popcorn was already a mythic figure.

Everybody in that part of the country knew who he was and what he did.  Of course, he had no intention of stopping, any more than Michelangelo considered stopping after finishing the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.  Sutton went right back to the old copper cookery, and no one seemed to mind—except for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF).  Perhaps for them he had become the embodiment of surd evil.  Perhaps his local fame reflected poorly on their competence and relevance.  Whatever the case might be, last year they swarmed all over his three-still operation and heaped numerous charges on his back, already bent double from hauling 25-pound sacks of sugar to mix with the sour mash.

Following Popcorn’s arrest, ATF Special Agent James Cavanaugh proclaimed, “Moonshine is romanticized in folklore and in the movies.  The truth though is that moonshine is a dangerous health issue and breeds other crime.”

Not as dangerous to health as the ATF.  You will recall that this same agency was complicit in killing 78 people at Waco, including 21 children and 2 pregnant women.  When it came time to investigate this federal massacre, the chief of ATF operations at Waco said there were no guns on the government helicopters.  Under questioning, he changed his story, admitting there were indeed guns, just no mounted guns.  A bullet from a hand-held gun is just as lethal as one from a mounted gun.

Who was the leader of the ATF at the Waco massacre, whom critics have charged with lying to investigators?  The same James Cavanaugh.  Question: Over the years, who has posed the greater threat to human life—poor old Popcorn Sutton or the federal government, led by trigger-happy hotshots like Cavanaugh?  The evidence seems clear.  The score is at least 78-0, not counting Ruby Ridge.

Here’s what Popcorn said about moonshining, in general, and his own operation, in particular:

If you ain’t got the proper equipment to start with, then you don’t need to get in the business, because you don’t need to kill a bunch of people and make ’em sick . . . I wanted to make a product that they’d come back and see me when they got that drunk up.

Apparently, he knew more about the equipment he was using to make whiskey than Cavanaugh knew about the equipment the government used to kill civilians at Waco.

Following Popcorn’s arrest and subsequent death, plain folks expressed their anger on the world-wide web.  On a site called Smokey Mountain Breakdown the following appeared:

[R]evenuers suck.  Like our federal government doesn’t have better things to do.  But we keep making them bigger and fatter, and creating new departments for them to run and staff.  Defend the country, deliver the mail, I’m thinking that’s about enough for them to handle.

I HOPE YOU BASTERDS ARE HAPPY NOW YOU HAVE DONE TOOK A DAMN GOOD MAN FROM US WHY BOTHER OLD TIMERS LIKE THIS I DONT CARE WHAT ANYONE HAD OR HAS TO SAY POPCORN YOU ARE THE MAN BE CAREFULL WITH THE SWEETNESS IN HEAVEN DONT GET ST.PETER TO DAMN DRUNK LIKE THAT DAMN BIG FROG LOL A TRUE REBEL CALLED HOME TO BE WITH GOD REST IN PEACE POPCORN YOUR MEMORY WILL LIVE ON IN US ALL

East Tennessee has been robbed of a man who was a part of history.  I met Popcorn a few years back, and I thought he was precious[.]  I never heard tale of any time he ever hurt a soul[.]  They should have just let him be to continue his craft.  Well, I’m sure ole Popcorn knew he had many freinds and aquaintences that will be missing him.  I bet he is in Heaven tending a Golden Still.

While many attitudes and values have changed over the past 200-plus years, some have remained constant.  Government still wants to tax sin, in general, and whiskey, in particular.  Ordinary people believe fiercely, unequivocally that such taxes are wrong, indeed downright wicked.  What we see in the case of Popcorn Sutton is the continuation of the Whiskey Rebellion, which began in George Washington’s administration and threatened the very existence of the new nation.

In the late 18th century whiskey was more than merely a solace against bone-chilling winter and—with an average of seven children per house—a way to sweeten the lengthy confinement between harvest and spring planting.  (“Maude, tell them children to shut up, and bring me my jug.”)  It was also a money crop and, along the frontier, a medium of exchange.

“How much is that cotton dress in the window?”

“Three gallons, Ma’am.  But it’s been there for a while.  I’ll give it to you for two.”

It was Alexander Hamilton’s idea to impose an excise tax on whiskey—to raise revenue to pay off the war debt of the colonies and to establish the right of the federal government to jerk the chain of the newly freed citizenry.  As Hamilton put it, the whiskey tax was “more as a measure of social discipline than as a source of revenue.”  Hamilton was the quintessential apostle of Big Government.  Aaron Burr did the right thing for the wrong reason.

The law specified that small producers of whiskey would be taxed at a rate of nine cents per gallon, while large producers would pay only six cents per gallon.  President Washington—who was a large producer—thought Hamilton had a good idea.  So did Congress.  Again, some things haven’t changed.

On the other hand, small farmers, who remembered fighting a revolution in part over the Stamp Act of 1765, felt betrayed.  This was the first time the new government had flexed its muscles, and folks in the boondocks didn’t like it a bit.  In the hills and hollows they concluded that this was just the kind of situation for which the Second Amendment was created.  Their struggle for independence began in South Park Township, Pennsylvania, and spread southward and westward.  Soon a loosely organized but well-armed resistance movement was flourishing nationwide, directing their attacks against the likes of tax collectors, mail carriers, and courts—i.e., government agents.

George Washington—who had fought and defeated the armies of a tax-mad king—wasn’t about to let the same thing happen to his own duly constituted government.  He declared martial law, recruited some 13,000 men, and appointed Lighthorse Harry Lee as their commander, with written instructions to fight those “who may be found in arms in opposition to the National will and authority.”  It was the first time a president assumed that the will of his government and the will of the people were identical—but by no means the last.  To underscore that proposition, he even rode out at the head of the army, which was just about the size of the force he’d led against the British.

Instead of Braddock, Washington’s army pursued a folk hero—nameless and faceless—called Tom the Tinker.  To this day, no one knows for sure who he was or if, indeed, he ever existed.  In a sense, it doesn’t matter.  In many states, groups organized, calling themselves Tom the Tinker’s Men.  They narrowed their focus to target whiskey-tax collectors and those who collaborated with them, if only by complying with the law.  Of the latter group, historian William Hogeland wrote:

You might find a note posted on a tree outside your house, requiring you to publish in the Gazette your hatred of the whiskey tax and your commitment to the cause; otherwise, the note promised, your still would be mended.  Tom had a wicked sense of humor and a literary bent: “mended” meant shot full of holes or burned.  Tom published on his own, too, rousing his followers to action, telling the Gazette’s editor in cover notes to run the messages or suffer the consequences.

Though the army was effective in Western Pennsylvania, Washington didn’t even attempt to enforce the tax in the hills and valleys of the outlands.  Today history books concentrate on success in Pennsylvania and ignore failure in the rest of the country.  As Murray Rothbard explained,

Washington, Hamilton, and the Cabinet covered up the extent of the revolution because they didn’t want to advertise the extent of their failure.  They knew very well if they tried to enforce, or send an army into, the rest of the back country, they would have failed.  Kentucky and perhaps the other areas would have seceded from the Union then and there.

In 1802, Congress repealed the law that precipitated the Whiskey Rebellion.  However, today it is still illegal to make whiskey, even for your own consumption—a law that defies common sense.  As a consequence, the spirit of Tom the Tinker lives on, particularly in the mountains of Appalachia, where white lightning remains a respectable beverage.

To his admirers, Popcorn Sutton was the reincarnation of Tom the Tinker.  Had he been a purveyor of pornography or methamphetamine, he would have been a pariah, loathed by the very people who found him quaint and heroic.  Whiskey is different from dope and smut.  It just is.

Popcorn was arrested because somebody couldn’t keep his mouth shut.  One of his “still sheds” caught on fire; and both the county and local fire departments came to put out the flames.  Before they had completed the job, Popcorn showed up and asked the firefighters to please not mention the presence of three stills, coils of copper wire, bags of sugar, sour mash, and more than 800 gallons of moonshine stored in the remains of an old school bus.  Somebody ratted him out, and the feds swooped down on his property and hauled him away, along with his paraphernalia.

He hadn’t been arrested since 1998; and in the past he’d been given probated sentences, since no one took what he’d been doing too seriously.  This time Popcorn promised never to do it again; he pled ill health, saying, “I’d like to die at home rather than in a penitentiary.”  The court was unforgiving.  The prim judge said he’d heard no expression of remorse and sentenced Popcorn to 18 months in prison.

Popcorn waited until the word came to surrender.  Then he did what he believed he had to do.  He climbed into his old Ford Fairmont—the one he’d traded three jugs of moonshine for—shut the windows, and cranked up the car.  That afternoon, his wife, Pam, found him, dead of carbon monoxide poisoning.

“He got his letter to report Friday, and he just couldn’t handle it,” she said.  “We tried everything we could to leave him on house arrest, and they wouldn’t do it.  So I thank the federal court for this.”

Some of his admirers have said that the making of moonshine is a dying craft, that Popcorn was the last great practitioner.  They complain that there’s no money in moonshine anymore, that soon enough no one will even know how to make the stuff.

Don’t you believe it.  The spirit of Tom the Tinker and Popcorn Sutton will rule the mountains until the final trumpet echoes in smoking valleys.  Raw-boned mountain boys already know it isn’t just the money.  It’s the incomparable thrill of thumbing your nose at Alexander Hamilton.  Popcorn has left them the how-to DVD.  A dozen young towheaded adventurers are back in the mountains right now, soldering coils together, cooking sour mash, listening to the drip, drip, drip of their own fierce defiance.  And they don’t give a damn for George Washington’s army.

This article first appeared in the June 2009 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

Immigration, Neighbors, and Enemies
by Thomas Fleming

VIEWS

The Economic Impact of Immigration
by Peter Brimelow
Paying for the Privilege.

You Should Have Been Here Yesteryear
by Roger D. McGrath
When the Golden State was paradise.

California Crash
by John C. Seiler, Jr.
The Golden State today.

Mandating Failure 
by Edwin S. Rubenstein
Federal insistence on multilingualism.

NEWS

Bailing Out the Bucket Shops
by William J. Quirk
Obama’s expensive status quo.

REVIEWS

The Empire Is Naked
by Tobias Lanz

Toivo Koivukoski: After the Last Man

plus

John Lukacs on James Grant’s Mr. Market Miscalculates:The Bubble Years and Beyond

Andrei Navrozov on D.J. Taylor’s Bright Young People: The Lost Generation of London’s Jazz Age

Clark Stooksbury on Kathryn Olmsted’s Real Enemies: Conspiracy Theories and American Democracy, World War I to 9/11

CORRESPONDENCE

Letter From Tennessee: Marvin “Popcorn” Sutton, R.I.P.
by Tom Landess

VITAL SIGNS

Literature: Forgotten French
by Tony Outhwaite

Film: Errol Flynn
by Christopher Sandford

COLUMNS

The Bare Bodkin
by Joseph Sobran

Under the Black Flag
by Taki Theodoracopulos

Breaking Glass
by Philip Jenkins

The Rockford Files
by Scott P. Richert

In the Dark
Revolutionary Road, The Lemon Tree
by George McCartney

What’s Wrong With the World
by Chilton Williamson, Jr.

DEPARTMENTS

POLEMICS & EXCHANGES
AMERICAN PROSCENIUM
CULTURAL REVOLUTIONS

POETRY

Missing Mass and
Soul of the North
by Timothy Murphy

ON THE COVER

Cover photo by David McNew/Getty Images.
Inside illustrations by Melanie Anderson.

It is not surprising that Barack Obama and the other leaders of his Democratic Party of the Left refuse to take measures to protect the American people from mutants and aliens.  After all, they hate the people, the country, and its traditions.  Just to put a period to his loathing of the old America, President Obama returned a bust of Winston Churchill to the British government.  No reason was given for snubbing our wartime ally, but everyone knows the reason: Churchill took steps to suppress the Mau Maus—a gang of terrorists who expressed their protest against British rule by murdering and raping British farmers and their families.

The Grand Old Party of the Center Right is hardly more patriotic than the Democrats.  Oh, it is true that a senator here and a congressman there have made speeches about illegal immigration—hardly ever about the real problem, which is legal immigration—but the Republicans are controlled by a libertarian/Wall Street Journal mind-set that has relegated nation-states to the dustbin of history.  Here is the one point on which Marxists and libertarians are in complete agreement: Neither nations nor communities nor even families should command the loyalties of free and equal individuals.

Claude Polin, in a brilliant article on fraternité (Catholica 100), has shed some light on this convergence of right and left.  He points out that any authentic notion of human brotherhood is excluded by the modern attachment to the other Jacobin articles of faith, liberty and equality, because “a being who conceives himself as totally free and essentially equal to his counterparts (semblables) must experience a natural propensity to treat the other as a means of serving his own ends.”  This explains why exchange is the dominant mode of social interaction in the modern world in which “each seeks the society of others only insofar as he finds his own interest in it and through which he makes every effort to maximize it.”  When moderns do invoke the concept of human brotherhood, they are either hypocritical egoists who know that to enjoy the right to maximize their own interest they must pretend to grant others a similar right, or else they are members of an officially designated group of victims who, though they are brothers in misfortune, are not brothers to all mankind.  Brotherhood requires us to believe we are all the children of God, made in His image, and it is that image—that capacity for virtue—that we must love even in our worst enemy, not his vices or even his membership in the club of privileged victims.

To extend our friend and colleague’s point, we can say that, insofar as parents and children are motivated by liberty and equality, they will regard their relations not as a series of duties and affections arising from ties of blood but as a set of reciprocally profitable exchanges.  The ties of common citizenship, being weaker and less natural, will hardly be felt at all by the free and equal.  Who would go to war, defend a border, or restrict trade if such exertions were not personally advantageous?  Marx hated nations and states, but the doom of historic nations was already pronounced by the classical liberals of the 19th century.

And yet it is Christianity, not Marxism or liberalism, that usually receives the credit or blame for the repudiation of loyalty and patriotism.  Pseudochristian leftists—including far too many Catholic bishops in the United States—make the preposterous claim that Christ came to liberate us from the duty to defend borders or respect the law.  Antichristian nationalists, following in Nietzsche’s drunken meandering footsteps, complain that Christianity weakened Western man’s resolve to defend his interests against other peoples and races.  Paradoxically, many of these neopagans are also followers of Adam Smith, Ludwig von Mises, and Milton Friedman—the liberal gurus who did their best to dissolve all the bonds linking human beings and to replace them with (to use a phrase Marx borrowed from Carlyle) the cash nexus.

If the neopagan nationalists had ever read any history, they would, perhaps, be puzzled by the behavior of Christian warriors like Justinian and Charles Martel, Saint Louis and Saint Joan, but their response would be that Saint Joan was a bad Christian who did not understand Christ’s message as well as they do—ill-read pagans though they are.  What else did Jesus mean in His Sermon on the Mount?

Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbour, and hate thine enemy.  But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you . . .

Some pacifists, Christians among them, have construed this passage to imply an express condemnation of all forms of violence and all use of force whether in self-defense or national defense, but neither the context of the passage nor the wider context of the Scriptures and tradition would bear out this interpretation.

Jesus is primarily addressing His followers, the brethren He had assembled from the towns of Galilee.  Like most Mediterranean peoples, the Jews were a fractious and litigious lot.  In Greek, the enemy He refers to is an echthros, that is, a personal enemy, and not the foreign enemy (polemios) who rides in to slay, rape, and pillage.  A personal enemy is someone with whom you are having a dispute over a property line, an inheritance, or insults that may have been exchanged when the two parties were in their cups.  Anyone who has lived in a small town, suburban neighborhood, or co-op apartment building knows that man is not just wolf to man but also weasel and jackal, ready to start a lifelong quarrel over a loose dog, an unpainted fence, or a noisy party.  What a waste of time and energy this can be, especially among brothers who are told to love one another.

It is true that Tertullian completely rejected the Roman Empire and, consequently, all forms of imperial service, including soldiering, but Tertullian was an extreme rigorist who withdrew, with other Montanists, from the Christian mainstream.  Earlier Christian apologists, such as the author of the “Epistle to Diognetus” and Aristides the Athenian, only singled out Christians for their moral purity.  Otherwise, “Christians are not distinguished from the rest of mankind by country, speech, or custom,” and, although they are treated as aliens, they shoulder the burdens of citizenship.

Saint Augustine regarded the charge of pacifism as a slander used to discredit Christians as loyal Roman citizens.  In a letter to an imperial commissioner, Augustine argued that the admonitions to turn the other cheek and not repay evil with evil have to do with the Christian’s mental disposition and not with the need to correct, with charity, an erring son, a criminal, or an invader.  John the Baptist, after all, did not tell the soldiers to lay down their weapons and desert but was content with instructing them to “do violence to no man, neither accuse any falsely; and be content with your wages” (Luke 3:14).  The barbs were aimed at soldiers who augmented their incomes by collaborating in the extortions of tax collectors.

When a Christian engages in killing, either as executioner or soldier, it is the ruler and not he who is morally responsible.  The soldier is merely the instrument of a ruler whose power comes from God, as Christ informs Pilate during His interrogation.  Saint Paul sums up the Christian position succinctly: “Not in vain does he [the ruler] hold the sword” (Romans 13).

Vengeance belongs to God, who then delegates that power to the ruler, who is to protect the innocent from violence by punishing lawbreakers and defending his kingdom or empire against invaders.  His subjects or citizens, correspondingly, have a duty to pay their taxes, obey the laws, and defend their country.  This reasoning depends on an important premise, that a commonwealth—whether city republic or kingdom or empire—is a legitimate human institution that requires the power to defend itself.  In the high Christian Age, Thomas Aquinas would make it clear that Christians owe a primary moral duty to their family and a civic duty to their commonwealth.  All other arguments are, quite simply, moral heresy and lead to pernicious consequences.  The greatest Catholic moral theologian, St. Alphonsus de Liguori, while laying down conditions for a just war, is careful to explain that a conscripted subject does not sin even by fighting in what turns out to be an unjust war.  “I was only following orders” may not be an excuse for a war criminal, but it is a justification even for the citizens of a republican government that has decided to go to war.

To delegitimate nations, some radicals misleadingly cite Paul’s statement that, in baptism, “There is neither Jew nor Greek” (Galatians 3:28), but this statement is aimed at repressing quarrels that broke out between gentile and Jewish Christians.  The sentence continues, “there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.”  And yet, so far from uttering a word against slavery per se, he instructs slaves to obey their masters, and  Paul, who has been unfairly stigmatized as a misogynist, can hardly be accused of pursuing a feminist agenda.

Some leftists have pretended that Christians cannot restrict immigration into their country, even if they believe it is harmful to their nation’s security and prosperity.  They cite such statements as “Thou shalt neither vex a stranger nor oppress him: for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt.”  Like most prooftexts taken out of context, these sentences are open to misinterpretation.  Did strangers possess the same rights as Jews?  Certainly not.  A foreigner who approached the tabernacle was put to death (Numbers 1:51).  A Jew could charge interest on money loaned to a stranger but not to a Jew (Numbers 23:20), and the Jews’ ethnic first cousins, the Edomites, only gained full rights after three generations of living with the children of Israel (Numbers 23:10).  The Torah did prescribe justice and kindness to strangers, but when Solomon conducted a census of the strangers in Israel, he was sufficiently alarmed by their numbers as to send many of them off to do hard labor.

Like most ancient peoples, the Israelites were intensely chauvinistic.  By their own (exaggerated) account in Joshua and Judges, they exterminated the populations of Canaan when they entered the Promised Land, and, once installed there, the tribes were forever quarreling with one another, their non-Jewish neighbors, and, more perilously, with the great kingdoms of the Middle East.  The prophets warned the kings of Judah and Israel repeatedly, but the Jews did not heed them, and the result was the Assyrian conquest of Israel and the Babylonian captivity of the Judeans.

In an outburst of quite justifiable xenophobia, the Israelites, returning from the Babylonian captivity, separated themselves from non-Jews and made a covenant not to intermarry with them (Nehemiah 10: 28-30).  When a Hellenistic kingdom replaced Persian rule, the Maccabees led an uprising against a universal empire that overrode local distinctions.  Later, under Roman rule, the Jews refused to accept the fact that Herod had established Greek city-states, and when the emperor did not find in their favor, they staged the rebellion that led to their destruction.

Greeks and Romans wondered, rather unfairly, why Jews could not get along like other conquered peoples, but whatever use we make of the Old Testament as a political inspiration, it is simply disingenuous to argue that the Jews’ undoubted kindness to sojourning strangers constitutes an argument against either defensive war or immigration restriction.

Catholic and Orthodox rulers and their subjects had no reluctance to defend their commonwealths against pagans, heretics, and their fellow communicants, and, if they had no other piece of Scripture, the story of the Tower of Babel would have informed them that their Creator had established separate peoples and warned them against any attempt to corral all the nations into a world government.  Christians only began to lose their will to defend themselves during the Enlightenment, precisely the period when they began to replace their Christian Faith with the moral absurdities of John Locke and Adam Smith, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Immanuel Kant.

I am not concerned to defend any nationalist policy or any particular immigration law.  My object has been to point out the dishonesty and absurdity of “Christian” arguments against waging war and restricting immigration.  When pastors and priests, bishops and theologians today defend illegal aliens or invoke the doctrine of “civil disobedience,” they are not speaking as Christians but as Marxists or Hindus.  And when supposedly conservative writers try to tell Christians that they have undermined the West, it is time to tell them that they are defending a West to which they do not belong.

This article first appeared in the June 2009 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

 (We were puzzled to find no sign of this.  We were also puzzled by the extraordinary behemoths reported to be common in American college football.  As Baby Boomers who clearly remembered the Labour government’s extension of food rationing until well after World War II, we decided it must be the orange juice.)

But now my American anchor-baby teenage son reads Time as a substitute for conversation while scarfing down breakfast before school.  (Oddly, he doesn’t like orange juice.)  So I got to see this item in the April 20 treezine: “Undocumented And Undeterred: A rough economy and tough enforcement have put unprecedented stress on illegal immigrants.  What one Oregon town tells us about why they’re staying, by Nathan Thornburgh.”

It was mostly the usual twaddle, insisting that eliminating America’s illegal (“undocumented”) immigrant population is, literally, unthinkable.  This only confirms repeated opinion-poll findings, including the April 20 Rasmussen Reports, which indicated that there exists an enormous gulf on this issue between Americans and what Rasmussen calls the “political class.”  (Rasmussen reported that 66 percent of Americans think it is “Very Important” that illegal immigration be dealt with—but only 32 percent of the “political class” agreed.)

Some aspects of Thornburgh’s brief for national liquidation caught my attention.  For example:

As tempting as it is in places like St. Helens to try to send the illegal immigrants packing, it would be a bit like letting AIG or GM collapse: it might feel good and it might be morally justified, but in the long run it would just increase the misery on Main Street.  Like it or not, with more than 10 million Margaritos [the illegal-alien hero of Thornburgh’s sob-story lead] from coast to coast, illegal America is simply too big to fail.

Now, I realize that there are differing opinions at Chronicles about the wisdom of allowing the flaky financial superstructure (as opposed to the sound productive foundation) of worthy Midwestern industrial enterprises to “collapse.”  But there can be no disagreement that, as an analog for illegal immigration, Time’s comparison is absurd.  There are some ten to twenty million illegal immigrants in the United States, but they are overwhelmingly unskilled, and many are children; thus, their total economic output is relatively small—probably less than one percent of the U.S. Gross Domestic Product.  (That’s not net of their costs to the American taxpayer, through schools, hospital emergency rooms, etc.)  A systematic rooting out of illegal immigrants, similar to President Eisenhower’s very successful Operation Wetback, would cause, at most, economic ripples, many of which would cancel each other out.

Actually, the Time story was far from the worst immigration-enthusiast story I’ve ever seen.  It conceded fairly that “there is a sincerity to the most ardent activists against illegal immigration in St. Helens, a sense that their town is trapped in the swale of a very bad economic cycle and that the undocumented workers might be making things worse.”  It profiled an heroic local activist, Wayne Mayo, who organized a local ballot measure to fine employers of illegal aliens: “He was outspent and outorganized by regional activist groups—he raised $430, they raised more than $70,000—but his proposal still won by 15 percentage points.”

Karl Rove and assorted Republican campaign consultants, call your offices!  (On second thought, don’t bother.)

What struck me most about the Time story, however, was not its human-interest huffing and puffing—that’s par for the course in immigration-enthusiast reporting—but its profound economic illiteracy.  This aspect is distressing to me as a journalist, because the consensus among labor economists has not altered since I reported the state of the technical debate in relatively simple English in my book Alien Nation: Common Sense About America’s Immigration Disaster in 1995.

First, the immense influx of immigrants inadvertently unleashed by the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, and the simultaneous collapse of the southern border, may raise GDP somewhat—but the bulk of that is captured by the immigrants themselves in the form of wages.  Hence the Time article’s anecdotes of happy illegals, which the author evidently expects to be compelling.

Second, the influx has been, in aggregate, of nugatory net benefit to native-born Americans.  Thus, while immigration may not have caused the collapse of the Oregon timber industry, it certainly has not been a cure.

Third, immigration interacts with government transfer-payment systems to impose a net loss on taxpayers.  In some parts of the United States, this is really serious.  In California it exceeded $1,000 per year for every native-born American household as long ago as 1996, according to the National Research Council’s report The New Americans.

This point is completely lost on Time’s Thornburgh.  One reason his illegal-alien hero Margarito refuses to leave Oregon is that his autistic son gets 24 hours of special education in St. Helens, compared with only 1 in Mexico.  Tragic—but who’s paying?

Fourth, while immigration does not benefit native-born Americans in the aggregate, it does cause a significant redistribution of wealth among Americans—shifting as much as two percent of GDP from labor to capital, basically by beating down wages.

Showing restraint unusual for an immigration-enthusiast sob story, Thornburgh didn’t quote any local employers saying what good (meaning cheap) workers the immigrants are.  (That may be because he was shocked by the low pay Margarito received for cleaning out the back of a St. Helens store, although such exploitation—the job was obviously off the books—is precisely the point.)  But Thornburgh doesn’t have to quote anyone.  As a member of the mainstream media elite, he can interview himself every time he uses his expense account in a Manhattan restaurant.

I reviewed the state of the “economics of immigration” debate in a long interview with Harvard’s George Borjas, the preeminent authority in the field and himself a Cuban immigrant, which was published in the compendium Immigration and the American Future (Chronicles Press, 2007).

Borjas reported no serious challenge to the consensus, which he played a considerable part in developing.  We discussed a 2005 paper by economists Gianmarco Ottaviano and Giovanni Peri (Rethinking the Gains From Immigration: Theory and Evidence From the U.S., published by the National Bureau of Economic Research), which purported to find that immigrants had actually increased the wages of the native-born and which, not coincidentally, had received a lot of publicity.  Borjas criticized the paper on technical grounds.  (The authors have subsequently retreated.)  We also discussed a 2002 paper by economists Donald R. Davis and David E. Weinstein (Technological Superiority and the Losses From Immigration, NBER), which suggested that immigration was inflicting a much larger loss on native-born Americans than had previously been thought and which, again not coincidentally, had received almost no publicity at all.  Here, Borjas respectfully punted, saying that the result of the study was important but derived from trade theory, which was alien to him as a labor economist.  He added that the authors had a hard time getting the paper published and that, as far as he knew, no Ph.D. students were doing the research necessary to confirm the theory.

Even the ivory tower is not totally unswayed by the political pressures that shape the mainstream media—but it has, at least, acquitted itself more honorably.  Thus, the conclusions of The New Americans—essentially what I outlined above—have never been reported in the Wall Street Journal.

More recently, Borjas himself has returned to the broader question of immigration’s economic utility.  In The Analytics of the Wage Effect of Immigration (March 2009, NBER), he argues not only that the short-run effects of immigration must be negative for wages but that the long-run effects may also be negative, depending on the effect of immigration on the consumer base.  In other words, the damage to American workers may be, for practical purposes, permanent.

For me, the ultimate question about the economics of immigration has always been whether it secures some economic benefit for Americans that they could not secure for themselves.  Regardless of the details of its impact, is it necessary?

Somewhat surprisingly, there is no debate about this at all, perhaps because the question is so rarely asked.  I once got Julian Simon, who never really has been replaced as the designated immigration-enthusiast go-to economist since his premature death in 1997, to concede the point.  “I’ve never said it’s necessary,” Simon replied (Forbes, August 30, 1993).

If it’s not necessary, why does America’s political class insist on it?  Why are Americans being required to transform themselves for nothing—and even to pay for the privilege?

Peter Brimelow is the editor of VDare.com and author of Alien Nation: Common Sense About America’s Immigration Disaster, which can be downloaded for free at his site.

This article first appeared in the June 2009 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.