There are no good wars, but sometimes there are necessary wars. Of course, we should always be skeptical of wars, often rushed into too blithely, without careful consideration of the geopolitical consequences or the suffering that inevitably accompanies them. The United States has notably intervened too often and too widely, often believing that it can reorder the world by force. That said, nations, like people, have an inherent right to self-defense. Whether Ukraine resisting a brutal Russian invasion, or Israel responding to the barbarism of Hamas, sometimes wars are both justified and necessary.

We should also recognize that there is not always a moral equivalence between combatants. Yes, prewar Ukraine was too frequently corrupt. Perhaps we should have been more sensitive to Russian fears of NATO expansion. Russian speakers in the Donbas may have had legitimate concerns. But none of that justifies Russia’s invasion of a sovereign nation, the deliberate targeting of civilians, the use of rape as a weapon of war, the torture and murder of innocents.  

Similarly, the Israeli government’s treatment of Palestinians has been reprehensible. The isolation of Gaza, effectively an open-air prison, and the indignities heaped on Palestinians in the West Bank should be roundly criticized. The Netanyahu government has been divisive, anti-democratic, and expansionist. But that cannot possibly excuse massacring young people at a concert, burning and beheading babies, or raping and torturing civilians. That’s not resistance; that is evil.

We’ve all become cynical in recent years, with justification, seeing the world in shades of gray and trusting no one. But sometimes there really are good guys and bad guys. Even if the good guys are imperfect, the bad guys here should be readily apparent.    

There is plenty of room to be critical of Ukrainian and Israeli tactics. One can even oppose U.S. assistance to either nation, though I would strongly disagree. But if you can’t bring yourself to denounce the barbarity of Hamas or the aggression of Putin’s Russia, I would suggest your moral compass is in serious need of repair. Silence is complicity.

Update October 2024

While I stand by everything I wrote above, I must also express my concerns over Israel’s tactics over the past year. The right of Israel to defend itself and the depravity of Hamas is uncontestable. But that does not mean there are no limits to the tactics that can be used in self-defense. Israel’s disregard for the lives of Palestinian civilians crosses the line and risks squandering the moral high ground. It is wrong both morally and strategically.

After nearly 30 years in various roles with the Cato Institute, it is time to move on to new adventures and new opportunities.  Actually, I was prepared to gently slide into retirement, but it turns out that I still have important things to say.  So, today (April 3) I will take up a new position as a senior fellow with the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity (FREOPP).  In this capacity I will be continuing to speak out on the issues of poverty and inequality that are important to me.

FREOPP is a non-partisan thinktank, firmly committed to free markets, individual liberty, and limited government, but one that looks at public policy exclusively through a lens of how those policies impact those with wealth or incomes below the U.S. median.  Readers of my book, The Inclusive Economy, will recognize a holistic approach to fighting poverty, that encompasses issues ranging from criminal justice and education reform to housing policy, welfare reform, and economic development. It offers a bridge between left and right on ways to create greater and more widespread opportunity for those who are struggling most today.

I am deeply appreciative for my time at Cato. I had an opportunity to work with some of the finest scholars I know and believe I helped bring about important changes to both policy and public perceptions.  But all good things come to an end, and now I have an opportunity to tackle fresh challenges and bring my message to different audiences.    

I look forward to sharing this new adventure with you, my readers.  Onward and upward!

War is always a horrible thing – and the war in Ukraine is bringing that home to us in a way that is impossible to ignore.  Moreover, I have friends and people I have worked with, fellow libertarians, in both Ukraine and Russia.  As the war grinds on, and the Ukrainian people continue to suffer, I think it time to offer a few thoughts.

The case for staying out of the conflict is not an unserious one, and the concerns shouldn’t be dismissed lightly.

To start with, it takes more than a bit of gymnastics for the U.S. to claim the moral high ground on matters of war and peace.  It’s not just the U.S. invasion of Iraq, it is decades of propping up dictatorships and/or supporting regime change in Latin America, Africa, and Asia.  Even now, we continue to provide military support for Saudi Arabia’s barbarous war in Yemen. 

And, we probably should have been more sensitive to Russia’s geopolitical concerns in our race to expand NATO.  Russia may be paranoid, but that’s a long-standing condition of Russian foreign policy, and we knew it going in.  Moreover, there are still questions about whether the defense of Europe might better be accomplished through some-sort of EU-linked force rather than through an organization that by its nature threatens to drag the United States into a wider war.

Nor is our assistance to Ukraine cost-free.  The most recent package of military and economic aid runs to $40 billion on top of what we’ve already spent.  We will almost certainly end up spending even more before it’s all over  That’s real money, even by Washington standards.  The Biden administration may spend like there’s a magic money tree out behind the White House – but there’s not. 

Finally, the risks of our being drawn into a direct, shooting conflict with Russia are real and could be catastrophic.  If Russians and Americans start shooting at each other, the road to Armageddon beckons. 

But despite these legitimate concerns, I still favor aid to Ukraine for reasons of both morality and national interest.

Let’s be absolutely clear, whatever we’ve done wrong in the past, there is no justification for Putin’s brutal aggression against Ukraine.  Not only is the invasion unprovoked in any realistic sense, but it is being executed in the most criminal way.  Russia’s deliberate targeting of civilians, destruction of Ukrainian culture, and other war crimes are not something that can be ignored.  The idea, pushed by some on the far right, that Putin is conducting some sort of noble crusade against wokeness is a vile calumny that should not be entertained by civilized people.

Most wars are painted in shades of grey.  This one is far less so.  Ukraine was undoubtedly imperfect before the war, but there is a clear aggressor here.   Moreover, as noted above, the Russians are carrying out their aggression in a particularly heinous fashion.  I don’t believe that as a nation (or as individuals) we can turn away from helping the Ukrainians defend their country.

Moral outrage by itself is probably insufficient to justify U.S. intervention.  After all, horrors are being committed all around the world.  The U.S. cannot and should not be the world’s policeman.  Most often, that type of intervention not only fails to solve the original problem, but it can also generate more bloodshed and expand the conflict (see, for example, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria…).  The U.S. should only intervene if its national interests are at stake.

That appears to be the case in Ukraine.  Russian aggression has destabilized the post-war geopolitical and legal order in a way that threatens to invite other conflicts.  The outcome and the price inflicted on Russia and Putin will be watched carefully by dictators everywhere.  Moreover, Putin gives every indication that his aggression is unlikely to end with Ukraine.  Certainly, Moldova is in his sights, but so is much of Eastern Europe, the Caucuses, and elsewhere.  I’m generally skeptical of appeasement analogies, but this looks like a situation where it applies.

Under the circumstances, it seems more than reasonable to provide the Ukrainians with the support that they need to defend themselves – including weapons.  The Ukrainians are not asking for U.S. troops – I would oppose that – but are doing the fighting themselves – bravely and effectively.  Of course, we cannot give Ukraine a blank check.  At some point, we will have to discuss the differences between their interests and ours.  But for now, we should do what we can.

And regardless of what side of the larger debate about U.S. government policy you come down on, I urge all my readers and friends to contribute voluntarily to those charities and other organizations supporting the courageous Ukrainian people in their fight for freedom and independence. 

Slava Ukrayini!

If there is any mercy in this world, this is the last time I will ever have to write about Donald Trump.  I consider myself an objective analyst, and Trump makes it almost impossible to discuss him in an analytical way.  Still, as the Trump era ends, I think it is important to reflect on the last four years and to try to evaluate him in context. 

Looking strictly at policy, I would probably consider Trump a typically disappointing president, perhaps in the lower half of the disappointing presidents of my lifetime. 

He certainly had some successes. Justice Gorsuch was a brilliant choice for the Supreme Court, and while Justice Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett were less inspired, both are solid originalists and will come down on the right side of cases more often than not.  With a few conspicuous and sometime hysterical exceptions, his lower court picks have also been solid.  

And, before the pandemic hit, the economy was doing well – unemployment down, the stock market booming, wages rising.  There is room to debate the degree to which Trump’s policies are responsible (he inherited an economy rebounding from the recession), but I think it is fair to say that tax cuts, deregulation, and the president’s relentless boosterism was an important factor.  On the other hand, he too often championed crony capitalism and big spending, while ignoring the threat of a growing national debt.  Even before the multiple bailouts attributable to the pandemic, Trump was presiding over trillion-dollar deficits.  He steadfastly remains opposed to any serious reform of the entitlement programs that are threatening to bankrupt this country.

As with fiscal policy, Trump’s record on defense and foreign policy issues has been a mediocre mixed bag.  He helped midwife some important peace deals between Israel and its neighbors, and he gave rhetorical support to the idea of finally ending our “endless wars,” promising to bring troops home from places like Afghanistan and Syria.  But we ended up with more troops in the Middle East than before he took office, and he continued the Obama and Bush policies of bombing and indiscriminate drone strikes. Undoing the Iran Deal made the world less safe, and his back and forth diplomacy toward North Korea led nowhere. Until the very end, he saw Russia as some sort of quasi-ally. And far too often he coddled dictators and authoritarian rulers. Human rights didn’t just take a back seat to other interests, they didn’t seem to be part of the conversation at all.  Climate change remained unaddressed.

ll be the first to admit that my positions on these issues – in favor of unilateral free-trade and nearly open borders – is the minority view.  Still, it’s worth pointing out that the free movement of goods and people is both sound economics and a fundamental human right.  But even if one were to agree with Trump on these issues, he achieved surprisingly little.  He built less than 80 miles of new border wall in areas that didn’t have a wall before.  His trade war with China cost American consumers, farmers, and businesses billions of dollars, and still resulted in a net loss of manufacturing jobs. He picked trade fights with our friends like Canada, Europe, and South Korea that accomplished little, but alienated allies, and actually strengthened China’s role in the world.  His rewrite of NAFTA amounted mostly to tinkering that made trade slightly less free.

Trump’s response to the COVID pandemic, as measured by policy rather than his rhetoric, has not been as bad as sometimes portrayed by his opponents or the media. He was very slow to recognize the magnitude of the problem, but in fairness so were many of his critics.  Operation Warp Speed achieved a scientific miracle.  Yet leadership in a crisis matters, and here Trump was AWOL.  Failing to set an example for things like social distancing and wearing a mask was bad enough, but he allowed those things to become political issues which made it much worse.   There are reasonable debates about the effectiveness of broad shutdowns, but Trump didn’t debate them, he simply abdicated responsibility.   He seemed to act as though COVID was an afront to him personally rather than a threat to the American people.  There is no way he can escape at least partial responsibility for the virus’s catastrophic death toll.   

For most presidents I would stop there.  But policy was not the whole of the Trump presidency – it was not even the most important part.  There was also the petty feuds, bizarre tweets, and continuous stream of untruths. While pettiness and dishonesty are hardly unique to this president, Trump seemed determined to take those qualities to, dare we say, “Trumpian” levels. The same is true of his all too frequent attacks on our democratic institutions, particularly the free press.

But most importantly, there is no way to evaluate the Trump presidency without considering the ways in which he gave aid and comfort to racists, misogynists, Islamophobes, and anti-immigration zealots. This is not just one factor balanced against others. Trump’s casual affinity for racism and other prejudices was a fundamental affront to the American ideal. There is no way that people of color, women, the transgendered, gays, immigrants, and other minorities can feel like they are full participants in the American project while they are under attack from the highest office in the land. It is a stain, not easily erased, and it threatens both the unity of this country, and the hard-won progress that we had made.

And finally, there was his conduct since losing the election.  There is no need for me to go into the details of his refusal to concede, his peddling of bizarre conspiracy theories, and finally his incitement of an insurrection designed to overturn the Democratic process.   This country was divided before he was elected, but Trump manipulated those divisions for his own benefit.  In doing so, he did profound damage to this country.  That behavior alone should consign Trump to the trash bin of history. 

I expect to have more than my share of disagreements and disappointments with President Biden.  You will undoubtedly get to read about many of them here. But I for one look forward to a return to normal disappointment — rather than despair.

In their victory speeches, both Joe Biden and Kamala Harris pledged to make fighting “systemic racism” a priority of their administration. But what does “systemic racism” mean — and how should libertarians respond to it.

The term “systemic racism” has become politically contentious. There is widespread misunderstanding that leads some to take it as an indictment of themselves. They conclude that systemic racism means a system full of racists, but in fact the term means almost the exact opposite.

Most Americans, themselves, harbor no bad intentions toward people of color, nor do most people they know. They’re not wrong about that. Of course, they recognize that there are actual racists out there and that there are sometimes racist incidents, but they see those as occurring on the fringes of society, not something that implicates them.

But systemic racism is not about individual intent or behavior, nor even about whether someone is a good person or personally prejudiced.  Indeed, it has little to do with us as individuals at all. Rather, as NAACP president Derrick Johnson explains, systemic racism is “systems and structures that have procedures or processes that disadvantage African Americans.” Or, as the Aspen Institute puts it more broadly:

[Systemic racism is] a system in which public policies, institutional practices, cultural representations, and other norms work in various, often reinforcing ways to perpetuate racial group inequity….Structural racism is not something that a few people or institutions choose to practice. Instead it has been a feature of the social, economic and political systems in which we all exist.

History Informs the Present

America’s 400-year history of racial abuse, from slavery, to lynching, to Jim Crow, and beyond, is undeniable.  But even more insidious was the philosophical, cultural, and even theological development of an ideology of black inferiority and white supremacy in order to justify behavior that was so sharply at odds with this country’s professed beliefs.  This set of beliefs became deeply embedded in the law and social fabric of our country.

The key insight of systemic racism is that current laws and policies can perpetuate this legacy even in the absence of deliberately bigoted intentions from individual actors. The racial disparities of today are a result of the explicitly racist oppression that preceded it, which is still well within living memory and directly affected many individuals still alive today. And worse, many government policies today that are not intended to worsen and prolong these disparities built on injustice, have that very effect.

The effects of America’s mistreatment of African Americans and other people of color did not suddenly vanish with the passage of civil rights laws in the 1960s.  Even if one believed that racial animus evaporated with the stroke of a pen, the consequences of past policies and attitudes remain with us.  You cannot have a race in which one runner is loaded down with weights and chains, remove them before the final lap, and suggest that from there on is a fair contest.

Simply put, therefore, systemic racism is a combination of historical and cultural legacies that continue to put African Americans and other minorities at a disadvantage. Systemic racism is an indictment of the government policies that created that injustice as well as the government policies that continue that injustice today. It is a quintessentially libertarian explanation of how the effects of government policy do not always align with their intentions. The second and third order consequences of bad laws must be considered. Injustices inflicted by the state on a vast scale can have wide-ranging and long-lasting negative effects on a society.

Systemic Racism in Practice

The evidence for systemic racism is easy to see in disparities large and small.  These disparities include such examples as job applicants with black-sounding names being less likely than those with “white” names but identical resumes to receive callbacks for positions, and black hairstyles frequently being considered uniquely problematic for work or school.  It shows up in our health care system when doctors are less likely to believe complaints from black patients and when some medical textbooks continue to teach that African Americans feel less pain than whites.  It is apparent when schoolbooks leave out large swaths of African and African American history. Likewise, it is visible in the indignity of security guards who follow young black men and women around stores, and hundreds of similar slights.

None of this is to strip African Americans of agency or to suggest that they have no responsibility for their own life choices.  Nor does it imply that there has been no progress towards equality.  But it does mean that people of color face very different circumstances than do white Americans.  And the consequences of those circumstances can be both large and ongoing.

Consider just two areas where systemic racism puts African Americans at a disadvantage: criminal justice and housing. 

Systemic Racism in the Criminal Justice System

As Radley Balko has amply chronicled, dozens of studies show that the criminal justice system treats African Americans differently throughout the process, from street-level law enforcement, to arrest, to trial, to incarceration.  For instance, even though blacks and whites use marijuana at roughly the same rates, African Americans are arrested more than three and a half times as often for marijuana possession.  In some states, the arrest rate for African Americans is nearly six times higher.  And, of course, black drivers are stopped for pretextual reasons far more often than white drivers. While some have attempted to explain this away by suggesting that blacks speed more often, the disparity mysteriously diminishes at night when police have a harder time determining the driver’s race.

Nor are inequities in the criminal justice system strictly a function of the drug war.  For a wide variety of crimes, prosecutors charge black defendants with more severe offenses for the same underlying act. African Americans are sentenced to longer prison terms than whites convicted of the same crime and with similar criminal records.  And, once incarcerated, blacks are likely to wait longer for parole. 

Disparities in the criminal justice spill over into many other areas. A criminal record makes it more difficult to find employment post-incarceration.  Admission to a university or student aid or even renting an apartment can all be denied because an applicant has a conviction on their record.  It is estimated that involvement in the criminal justice system has contributed to removing nearly 1.5 million young black men from the marriage pool, thereby increasing non-marital births and the poverty associated with that.

Systemic Racism in Housing

Housing is another area where the results of systemic racism can be easily seen.  Just 47 percent of African Americans own their own home, almost 30 percentage points lower than white home ownership.  This is not an accident. For decades, housing segregation was the explicit policy of the federal state, and local governments.  For example, the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation, a federal agency that provided low-interest mortgages to first time homebuyers, insisted that any property it covered must include a clause in the deed forbidding resale to non-whites.  Even when government agencies weren’t directly involved, redlining, restrictive covenants, and other practices that limited homeownership  on the basis of race was all too common.  For example, Levittown, the quintessential American suburb of the 1940s and 50s, in its lease documents a provision that property in the community could not “be used or occupied by any person other than members of the Caucasian race.”

Even after such explicit segregationist restrictions were outlawed in the 1960s, zoning ordinances and other government regulations continued to make it difficult for minorities to integrate largely white suburban communities.  A quick look at overlaying demographic maps of most major cities shows little change since the explicit segregation of earlier decades.  Today’s regulations have locked in the patterns of the past.   

Housing is not just a question of whether black people live next to white people.  Educational opportunities, for instance, are too often distributed by zip code and tied to property values, especially in the absence of meaningful parental choice.  Exclusionary zoning too often forces the poor and people of color into neighborhoods with few jobs, high crime rates, and bad schools.  And, perhaps most significantly, housing discrimination has had a significant impact on black/white wealth disparities  For most families, their house is one of their largest and most valuable assets. Moreover, it is an asset that can be passed along to future generations.  But African Americans were deliberately locked out of this intergenerational wealth building.

A Libertarian Approach to Systemic Racism

What then should libertarians do about systemic racism?  Recognizing that people of color do not compete on a level playing field does not mean that we must embrace big government to solve those problems. Simply looking at both history and current practices tells us that, even when the government hasn’t been actively discriminatory, it has far too often served as a barrier to racial equality and achieving justice for past policies of explicit racism.  Similarly, there is no reason to abandon support for free-market capitalism.  Free markets are antithetical to racism, breaking down artificial barriers, and generating the wealth needed to bring about more genuine equality. Much racially disparate legislation stems from efforts to prevent people of color from participating in the free market. 

Libertarians are well situated, then, to help tear down the structures and institutions of systemic racism.  Notably, libertarians should continue to push for criminal justice reform, including an end to the wars on drugs, to open educational opportunities through increased choice and competition, to remove zoning and other restrictions on housing, and to free up labor markets.  

At the same time, libertarians have long recognized that private action and civil society are the most effective remedies for many societal problems.  Libertarians should cheer, therefore, the many private actors—from businesses to mutual aid organizations to activist groups—that are taking action to remedy extant racial disparities.  

At its heart, libertarianism encompasses the idea that every human being is of equal worth and dignity. Racism is a pernicious form of collectivism that is contrary to all that libertarianism stands for.  It is not enough, therefore, for libertarians to simply be passively “not racist.”  They should actively embrace anti-racist ideas and policies.  That means understanding, rejecting, and fighting systemic racism everywhere we find it, as we do all the other harmful consequences of unjust laws.