Article 3 (Heaven and Hell)

My older daughter was "dedicated" to Christ and his Church at Mars Hill Bible Church in Grand Rapids, MI. While living in Michigan, Mars Hill was the community we called home, and Rob Bell was/is the teaching pastor there. He is releasing a book at the end of this month entitled, "A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived. Love Wins." Maybe the title needs some work. To view a video intro to the book featuring Bell, go to: https://www.robbell.com/lovewins/. This book, for obvious reasons after you see the video, has caused quite a stir in many evangelical circles and beyond even though no one has read it yet.

The issue of eternal destinations has weighed heavily on me for as long as I can remember. C.S. Lewis, Lesslie Newbigin, N.T. Wright, and the Catholic Catechism have helped shape my thinking significantly. But the following questions still find their way into my thoughts now and then: How are warnings of individuals going to hell related in the biblical narrative to grand promises of a cosmic, universal renewal of all things? What is to happen to the creation that God called "very good" if both possible eternal destinations are believed to be fully outside of that creation? Why does the biblical narrative place such strong emphasis on seeking justice and righteousness in this world if eternal hell in the next life awaits most of the people we are meant to seek justice for? Doesn't it seem that many people don't believe the message of Jesus because of the Church's failures to communicate it accurately and to embody its norms adequately and as a result haven't many people simply never heard the actual message of Jesus nor seen the outward signs of a community animated by that message? Does it matter that most people have never heard (or seen) the actual message of Jesus adequately proposed? Is there no difference between a failure to recognize Jesus Christ as the one in whom salvation is offered and a conscious turn away from God toward evil? Don't certain versions of the gospel devolve into sales pitches for people to respond to Jesus' forgiveness out of blatant self-interest rather than love? I'm not saying that all of these questions are fair or that the assumptions behind them are all legitimate, but they have all entered my mind at one time or another. In anticipation of Bell's book and the onset of the Lenten season, I took a quick look around for some orthodox sources that do justice to a Christian understanding of heaven and hell. The following article is one such source.

First Things “Will All Be Saved?” (August/September 2001)
By Richard John Neuhaus

The question of universalism—whether all will, in the end, be saved—is perennially agitated in the Christian tradition. A notable proponent of that view was the great Origen, who, in the third century, set forth a theologically and philosophically complex doctrine of “Apocatastasis” according to which all creatures, including the devil, will be saved. “Origenism”—which is not necessarily the same thing as Origen taught—has been condemned from time to time, with the Emperor Justinian trying, unsuccessfully, to get a total condemnation at the Second Council of Constantinople in 553. Among theologians and church historians, there has been something of a rediscovery and reappreciation of Origen in recent decades, helped along in significant part by the voluminous writings of Hans Urs von Balthasar. The universalism question came in for broader discussion with the publication of Balthasar's little book Dare We Hope “That All Men Be Saved”? (1988). Balthasar's is a very careful argument, clearly distinguishing between universal salvation as a hope and universal salvation as a doctrine. He supports the former and rejects the latter. In sum: we do not know; only God knows; but we may hope.

While my book Death on a Friday Afternoon, published last year, is intended not as an exercise in systematic theology but as a poetic-devotional reflection on the seven last words from the cross, I do indicate there my essential agreement with Balthasar's position. I confess to being caught off guard by the vehemence of some criticisms on that score, and not only from putative defenders of orthodoxy who have personal axes to grind. Let me not exaggerate the problem: the book has been marvelously well received, for which I am grateful, and many people have expressed their disagreement with the published criticisms, for which I am also grateful. Nonetheless, when some people whose judgment you generally respect have misunderstood what you wrote, a clarifying word may be in order. Of course, I also hope that people will go back and read what I actually wrote in Death on a Friday Afternoon.

The hope that all will be saved is precisely that, a hope. It is not a doctrine, never mind a dogma. But some respond that we cannot even hold the hope, since it clearly contradicts the revealed truth that many, if not most, will be eternally damned. A different and much more troubling objection is that it makes no sense to be a Christian if, in fact, one can be saved without being a Christian. In this view, the damnation of others, maybe of most others, is essentially related to the reason for being a Christian. The joy of our salvation is contingent upon the misery of their damnation. If it is possible that all will be saved, it is asked, why not eat, drink, and be merry?

One critic goes so far as to write about all the wrong things that he would really like to do, that he would prefer to do over what he is doing, and that he would do, were it not for the fear of eternity in hell. It follows, he contends, that, without the damnation of many, perhaps of most, there is no point in being a Christian. This, I suggest, is profoundly wrongheaded and spiritually perverse. For one thing, one cannot rationally and knowingly choose to live contrary to God's will, since to do so is contrary to one's own nature, which nature is to live in accord with God's will. One avoids sin because to sin is to act against God and against oneself, not because, or not chiefly because, of the threat of future punishment. More precisely, punishment, understood as damnation, is the culmination of having lived against one's highest good, namely, God. It is doubtful that one could really want life with God forever if one does not want life with God here and now.

The Generosity of God



Such a perverse view is also more than a little like that of the laborers in the vineyard who complained that those who came at the last hour received the same reward as those who had worked all day. The master replies, “Take what belongs to you and go; I choose to give to this last as I give to you. Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me? Or do you begrudge my generosity? So the last will be first, and the first last” (Matthew 20). Some of the critics of the hope for universal salvation do indeed seem to begrudge the generosity of God entailed in that outcome. Theirs is a position of resentment dressed up as a claim of justice. “What was the point of my working so hard and so long if God is going to let in the riffraff on equal terms? It's unfair!” The eschatological upsetting of such attitudes (the last will be first and first last) is a constant in the teaching of Jesus.

Others, however, raise questions that should be taken very seriously. It would be absolutely wonderful, they say, if all were to be saved, but the Bible is very clear that that is not the case. There is no denying the powerful presence of passages suggesting a destiny of separation from God (e.g., Matthew 7:13ff., 25:31-46; Mark 9:45-48; Luke 16:23; John 3:36.) As there is also no denying the New Testament passages suggesting the redemption of the entire cosmos (e.g., Colossians 1:19-20; 1 Corinthians 15:22,28; Romans 5:18, 11:33-36; Philippians 2:10-11). If one gives priority to the latter passages, then the former may be understood as admonitory and cautionary, solemn warnings of a terrible possibility. If one gives priority to the former passages, it is not clear how we are to understand the latter. The passages cited in support of universal redemption can and often have been interpreted in other ways, as have the passages cited in support of the damnation of some or many. The Church in her wisdom has not definitively settled these exegetical disputes.

It is objected that Matthew 25, for instance, is “predictive.” The outcome is certain: “And they will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.” Yes, certainly, people who live that way until the very end will go to hell. But what if, having lived that way, they at the very end repent? Recall the thief on the cross. The Catechism of the Catholic Church reads: “God predestines no one to go to hell; for this, a willful turning away from God (a mortal sin) is necessary, and persistence in it until the end. In the Eucharistic liturgy and in the daily prayers of her faithful, the Church implores the mercy of God, who does not want ‘any to perish, but all to come to repentance'“ (1037). How can we know that anyone persists in mortal sin until the end? We cannot. Must we not hope that, according to God's desire (2 Peter 3:9), all will repent? If not, how can we pray that that is the case? Is it possible to pray for an outcome without hoping for it? Is it possible to pray and hope for something that you know cannot be?

In Death on a Friday Afternoon, I write: “From the cross Christ has already counted them all. And he assures us that none of them will be lost. He also sends out those whom we call missionaries to let them know they have been found.” The second sentence is susceptible of misunderstanding, and some have done their best to misunderstand it. The point of the sentence is not that everyone will be saved. The point, repeatedly underscored elsewhere in the book, is that absolutely no one is beyond the reach of God's love in Christ. All are found, and therefore are not lost. That some may choose not to accept the gift of being found is quite another matter. We pray and hope that all will accept the gift of salvation that is most surely available to all. At least for Catholics, the teaching is definitive: God denies no one the grace necessary for salvation.

A Sordid Reality



Make no mistake: Hell is real. Eternal separation from God is a distinct possibility to be feared, and to be feared first of all for ourselves. The passages of warning are to be taken with utmost, indeed ultimate, seriousness. God only knows who, if any, are damned. Our unqualified prayer is that God's will be done. Do I know beyond a possibility of doubt that I will not be damned? Of course not. To answer otherwise is the sin of presumption. I believe, I have a confident faith, that I will be saved because of the mercy of God in Christ. It is sometimes said that Protestants, who subscribe to “justification by faith,” know they will be saved, while Catholics only hope they will be saved. That is a distinction without a difference. Faith is hope anticipated, and hope is faith disposed toward the future.

“Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” That is the prayer that is absolutely without qualification. Only God knows God's will completely, and it is enough that God knows. In the splendid notes to the new translation of Dante's Inferno by Robert and Jean Hollander (Doubleday) we are told:

Beatrice's insistence [in Canto II] that she is not “touchable” by the grim powers of the pains of hell underlines the marginality of sin for the saved. Hell is simply not of concern to them. It is important to know, as one begins reading the poem, what one can only know once one has finished it: no soul in purgation or in grace in heaven has a thought for the condition of the damned (only the damned themselves do). Their concern for those who do not share their redeeming penitence or bliss is reserved for those still alive on earth, who have at least the hope of salvation. Hell, for the saved, is a sordid reality of which it is better not to speak.

We know that some are saved. At least Catholics know, on the basis of infallible teaching, that Mary, the mother of the Lord, is saved. And, although theologians are not of one mind on this, it is commonly accepted that those who are formally canonized are definitively declared to be in heaven. With respect to all the faithful departed, we are invited to have a generous expectation, “that you may not grieve as others do who have no hope” (1 Thessalonians 4:13). Moreover, there is plenty of room for the saved in the New Jerusalem, which we are told is approximately fifteen hundred miles in height, breadth, and length (Revelation 21:16). That's a city of a size that would cover more than half the continental U.S., and it will be more than a thousand miles high. It would seem there is ample space for everybody to be saved. (Where people who don't like cities will go, I don't know.) The details may not be meant literally, of course, but the picture of a well-populated heaven can, I think, be trusted.

How About Judas?



By way of contrast, we do not know who, if any one, is in hell. As John Paul II points out in his remarkable little book Crossing the Threshold of Hope, the Church has never taught that even Judas Iscariot is damned. A critic writes me that he will not be satisfied until I publicly declare my certain belief in a “populated hell.” I am afraid that he will have to remain dissatisfied. How on earth (emphasizing on earth) can I know for sure that hell is populated? One day we will know even as we are known (1 Corinthians 13), and presumably the saints in glory know now (although, as Dante suggests, they're not much interested), but we—here on earth and now—simply do not know.

There is that enigmatic statement of Jesus about Judas, “It would have been better for that man if he had not been born” (Matthew 26:24, Mark 14:21). He does not explicitly say that Judas is in hell but, on the other hand, it would seem that he cannot be in heaven. Were he in heaven—or in purgatory on his way to heaven—how could one say that it would have been better for him if he had not been born? Some theologians have speculated about another possibility. Since evil does not have independent ontological status but is the absence of good, perhaps the fate of Judas is that of total annihilation. Such a fate, joined to his terrible betrayal, would seem to warrant saying of him that it would have been better had he not been born. In any event, as John Paul II notes, the Church does not teach that even Judas is in hell. That does not mean he is not in hell; only that we cannot teach what we do not know.

The Demands of Justice



Here enters another consideration that is commonly expressed: our sense of justice requires that we believe some people are eternally punished. It seems the favorite candidate here is Adolf Hitler. As one critic writes, “If Hitler is not in hell, there is little reason why I, with my much lesser sins, should be in fear of going there.” There are all kinds of things wrong with that argument. Hitler may have repented, turning to the mercy of God, even as his finger pressed the trigger. Plus, rating “big” and “little” sinners is a very dubious business. I expect there are many petty tyrants in homes and offices who are every bit as disposed to evil as was Hitler, but who have a more restricted range of opportunity for acting on that disposition. Moreover, consider the Apostle who writes, “I am the chief of sinners” (1 Timothy 1:16), and so should we all say of ourselves, since, when it comes to sinners, we know chiefly about ourselves. Further, it is not our sense of justice but God's perfect justice that is to be satisfied. And, be it noted, that perfect justice is satisfied by the perfect sacrifice of Christ on the cross.

Then, too, there is the matter of purgatory. Not only Catholics, but thinkers such as C. S. Lewis and the contemporary Methodist theologian Jerry Walls suggest it is only fitting that there be an experience, and perhaps a long and painful experience, of purgation before we are ready for the beatific vision. The master's reproach to the disgruntled laborers in the vineyard (“Do you begrudge my generosity?”) notwithstanding, there is something that seems not right about the idea that Hitler or Chairman Mao or (enter your favorite villain here) should get to heaven without paying a steep price for their crimes here on earth. Are they finally to be treated the same as, say, Mother Teresa? That too seems not right. So maybe they have thousands of years (as we reckon time) in purgatory. And maybe, as one friend whimsically suggests, Hitler in heaven will be forever a little dog to whom we will benignly condescend. But he will be grateful for being there, and for not having received what he deserved. (As will we all be grateful for being there and not receiving what we deserve.) But with such thoughts we are in a realm of speculation and whimsy far beyond things on which we have a certain word from God, and far beyond our capacity to understand.

Why Evangelize?



So may we hope that all will be saved? Answering that question in the affirmative, some contend, undercuts the rationale of Christian evangelization. I respond to that objection in Death on a Friday Afternoon and in an extended commentary on John Paul's encyclical Redemptoris Missio (The Mission of the Redeemer) (FT, October 1991). I will not expand on that response here, but the gist of the argument is that the command and impulse to evangelize is premised not on the bad news that we do not know but on the good news (i.e., “gospel”) that we do know. To be sure, good news may be good in relation to the bad, but there is enough bad news that we know for sure that we do not need to pretend to know more bad news than we do in order to make the good news good. We know about God's saving work in Christ, and that “there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved” (Acts 4:12). As both Redemptoris Missio and the year 2000 statement of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Dominus Iesus, make clear, everyone who is saved is saved because of Christ, even if they have never heard the gospel. If they are in heaven, they will certainly know then that it is because of God's reconciling work in Christ. As it is usually put, faith's response to the gospel proclaimed and enacted in word and sacrament is the “ordinary means” of salvation. That is exactly right. At the same time, God is not limited to the ordinary. Why evangelize? Evangelization is most importantly driven by the means of salvation revealed, by Christ's clear command, and by the sharing of fellowship so that “our joy may be complete” (1 John 1:4). We know what we are to do, and why. But the fullness of what God can and will do for the world that He loves is not limited to what we do.

We may come at our question in a different way by trying this thought experiment: Do you know anyone of whom you would not say that you hope he or she is saved? Imagine that you could know everyone who now lives, who has ever lived, or will ever live in the future. Of whom could you say that you hope they are eternally damned? Perhaps in a fit of anger—or in an act of presumption in which you identified your moral indignation with God's perfect justice—you have said that you hope somebody is eternally damned, but you know you were wrong in saying or thinking that. “Forgive us our sins, as we forgive those who sin against us.” Is it possible to forgive someone and, at the same time, hope he goes to hell? I think not. After you have, in this thought experiment, said to absolutely everybody, “I hope you will be saved,” have you not declared your hope that all will be saved?

Quite apart from such a thought experiment, the fact is that we all pray that all may be saved. Is it possible to pray for that without hoping for that? I think not. It follows that we pray, and therefore we hope, that all will be saved. Catholics by the millions pray the rosary every day, adding at the end of each decade, O my Jesus, forgive us our sins, save us from the fires of hell, lead all souls to heaven, especially those most in need of thy mercy.



We pray and we hope, but we do not know that that will be the case. I have a terrible fear that it will not be the case. If all are not saved, if many or most are lost, I do not know-despite the many elegant explanations that have been proposed-how to square that with biblical passages and the theo-logic that suggest universal redemption. But God knows, and that is enough. We know that we are to proclaim the saving gospel, we know what we hope will be the case, but we know these things in the full recognition that the ultimate working out of God's mercy and justice eludes our certain grasp.

How to Disagree



Nevertheless, I expect that I may not have convinced everyone that we can and should hope that all will be saved. In that event, I hope we can disagree without quarreling, remembering Chesterton's observation that the problem with a quarrel is that it spoils an argument. And, as in all such disagreements, we do well to keep in mind the rule of Richard Baxter (famously reiterated by John XXIII), “In necessary things, unity; in doubtful things, liberty; in all things, charity.”

To which one need only add this necessary thing: all our puzzling, disputing, and speculating must finally give way to the most pure act of faith, which is doxology. So it was with St. Paul in his perplexity at the end of Romans 11, and so it must be with us. At the end of all our trying to understand, we join in declaring:

For God has consigned all to disobedience, that He may have mercy upon all. O the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are His judgments and how inscrutable His ways! “For who has known the mind of the Lord, or who has been His counselor?” “Or who has given a gift to Him that he might be repaid?” For from Him and through Him and to Him are all things. To Him be glory forever. Amen.

Articles 2 (The Federal Budget)

The Observer (American Orthodox Institute), “The Morality of the Growing Public Debt” (February 11, 2011)
By Msgr. Barreiro-Carámbula

If we promote the family and the related idea of generosity with life, we have to be concerned with the ability of young couples to form and raise their families. In order to raise children, a family needs a degree of economic stability; and even more it needs a real non-inflationary economic growth that steadily creates jobs, and also allows for the reasonable increase of salaries in real terms. As a consequence, we should promote an economy that will not be depressed by the obligation of paying off our growing public debt. It is time to discuss the moral injustice of constantly increasing the public debt limit.

The troubling situation of skyrocketing public debt has to be seen within the context of the current economic crisis. This crisis has short term causes in the mismanagement of financial institutions in the U.S. as well as in the housing bubble that was produced, in part, by government programs that decoupled the normal risk calculations from loan interest rates and policies. But it also has long term causes, which include the reduced birth rate and the constant growth of public spending, which in turn leads to a ballooning debt. The reduced birth rate decreases the effective demand of goods and services and puts a growing pressure on the social security systems, as fewer active workers have to sustain a growing number of retirees.
On both sides of the Atlantic the erroneous theories of John Maynard Keynes have been, and still are, being put into effect. He taught that in times of economic crisis consumer demand must be stimulated by government investment, and that an “attitude of saving” must be discouraged, as was recently noted by Ettore Gotti Tedeschi in L’Osservatore Romano.

A constant increase of the public debt “ceiling” leads to fiscal irresponsibility as the government becomes addicted to reckless spending, expecting that the debt limit will be constantly raised by Congress. Governments, like private persons, should limit their expenditure to their income.
If tax revenues are not sufficient to cover a nation’s budget, the government has three alternatives: they can reduce spending, increase taxes, or increase the money supply, which causes inflation. In order to stimulate their troubled economies, governments on both sides of the Atlantic have resorted to printing money and borrowing to cover their reckless spending, causing a very grave injustice to be passed on to the next generation.

For several reasons, there is a moral imperative to reduce the budget, but we will examine just two key reasons here. First, an expanding budget takes up a growing percentage of the wealth of a nation, and as a consequence, it tends towards socialism and totalitarianism. Second, more government spending is not the answer to our social, economic, or cultural problems, especially if those funds are administrated by a liberal socialist elite. Most of the social and cultural problems are of a moral nature, so it is only in the measure that the members of society are educated to live in accordance with the Law of their Creator that those problems can truly be addressed. In our current historical circumstances, we cannot expect that the government will exercise a positive leadership role in the substantial education of the population. Instead we should insist that the responsibility of addressing the social ills of society be left in the hands of the members of that society. To fulfill this mission, citizens must be liberated from undue government control, and must retain the necessary economic means to accomplish this mission. Government should not appropriate the economic means necessary to address the very real social and cultural problems that citizens are dealing with every day. This is in harmony with the principle in Catholic social doctrine known as subsidiarity.

In accordance with natural law and the social teachings of the Church, we have an obligation to help the poor and disadvantaged. But the best way to help them is not to entrust liberal civil servants with vast amount of financial resources. We have seen all too often that politicians would use funds intended to help the poor used rather as a means of social engineering, to construct a socialist and liberal society. The growth of government and the rise of the “transfer society” have, for many who were supposed to be helped by social programs, undermined a strong work ethic, and have replaced an ethos of responsibility with an ethos of dependence. We have to remember how this ethos of dependence has deep roots in European societies. Virtue and civil society have suffered in the process, as has economic progress.

We should also keep in mind that the best way to help the poor is not through financial entitlements but through a modestly but consistently growing economy that will generate new jobs. Civil society should also promote the necessary training to obtain those jobs. In the Gospel, the Lord says the greatest commandment is to “love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.” This means that we have to love God and our neighbor with all our intelligence, which means that we apply all our technical knowledge to serve the poor and the disadvantaged.

Increasing taxes reduces the incentives to create wealth and gives more power to government, which a risk that we have to avoid at a time when contemporary democracies are constantly sliding towards totalitarianism. The increase of taxes is a consequence of the massive growth of government in areas outside its core competency. The burden of proof regarding the benefits of expanding the government beyond its primary functions of maintaining law and order is on the proponents of such expansion, and it should suffice to say that the evidence is sorely lacking.
With regards to high inflation we have to consider that it tends toward immorality, social conflict and even to social collapse, which can in turn lead to the establishment of totalitarian regimes, as happened in Germany in early thirties. The main victims of inflation are those who live on fixed incomes, namely, the elderly and the poor. A high rate of inflation leads to immorality for many reasons. It leads to constant speculation. It destroys the incentive to save, which is a relatively safe way to generate capital and give some degree of economic security to families. Saving also has the great value of teaching us the importance of delayed gratification. As capital is eroded by inflation, interest rates have to go up to compensate, leading to absurd rates of interest that limit investment. If we limit the possibilities of investment we also limit the possibilities of real economic growth.

To counter the tendency towards personal savings, governments have resorted to very low, even zero percent, interest rates. This is done in order to augment the current demand for good and services, but it does so at the cost of sacrificing the future, because it severely limits a normal person’s ability to generate capital. Zero percent interest rates are factually equal to a transfer of wealth from the one who is a virtuous saver to the one who has become indebted. This really is an injustice because it is a hidden tax on poor savers, and a forced transfer of funds to over-indebted states, business people and bankers. It is evident that the reduction of interest rates mainly affects the poor savers because the well-to-do normally have more flexibility to protect the returns of their capital.

Is not uncommon to hear political, civic, and religious leaders speak of “intergenerational solidarity”. But to increase public debt is to negate this solidarity. Instead of bequeathing a patrimony, which is what most sane societies have tried to do in the past, we are leaving our debts to future generations. We are asking them to pay the principal and the interest on our debt with their labors. This is akin to forcing them into a form of indentured servitude to us, and it will last long after we have gone to meet our Maker. By law, one can reject an inheritance if has more liabilities than assets, but a citizen cannot reject public debt if he wants to remain a citizen: And he probably will want to remain an U.S. citizen because the alternatives outside of this country do not look very encouraging. Americans would do well to remember the wisdom of George Washington, who, in his farewell address in 1796, denounced “ungenerously throwing upon posterity the burden which we ourselves ought to bear.”

Anyone who is concerned with future generations has not only the right, but the obligation, to insist that it is immoral to keep piling debt on the shoulders of our children and grandchildren. And piety is no substitute for policy: Any increase in spending in one area must be paid with serious reductions in others, starting with the defunding of and/or the dismantling of the health care bill, known as the Affordable Care Act. Further, entitlements like Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid have to be brought under control. It is evident that a decreased birth rate leads to an increase in the age or retirement—it is just a question of simple accounting. It is also clear that the nation’s debt is a national security risk, because nations that do not have America’s best interests at heart can use their ownership of our debt to exert pressure and influence our policy.
The current generation must now accept as obvious that it has arrived at the point at which it can no longer pay its debts. To put it in simple terms, we can’t “kick the can down the road” anymore, because we’ve come to the end of the road. Defaulting on our debt will destroy the contemporary illusions of society regarding the competency of contemporary governments to effectively govern. It will convince many members of society that the federal government has to reduce itself to the primary functions of the state which are the maintenance of law and order, and leave many other meritorious but secondary functions in the hands of the states or local communities, applying the traditional principle of subsidiarity.

Irresponsible economic policies generate a double jeopardy for future generations. First, their inheritances are lessened by policies that affect the generation of capital, like zero interest rates. Second, and worse, because of our profligacy we are piling on them a massive debt that they will never be able to pay, and which they should not have to pay. Both policies are deeply immoral and are gravely offensive to the responsibility that we have to those who follow in our footsteps.

Since September 1998, Msgr. Barreiro has been the Executive Director of the Rome office of Human Life International. In Rome, he started an apostolate with priests and seminarians from all over the world who are studying in the Eternal City. Msgr. Barreiro has published hundreds of articles on theological and life issues, and historical subjects in popular and scholarly publications. He was appointed a Chaplain of His Holiness on March 26, 2004.

Reference: http://www.aoiusa.org/blog/2011/02/msgr-barreiro-carambula-the-morality-of-the-growing-public-debt/

Capital Commentary, "Budget Realities and Political Courage" (February 25, 2011)

By Michael J. Gerson

This is a transcript of a radio address broadcast on KDCR radio in Sioux Center, Iowa.

Some of the most important choices recently made by Congress concern the budget. The House of Representatives has passed legislation that would cut federal spending for the rest of the year by more than $60 billion. The Senate and the President are deciding how much of these spending reductions they are willing to accept. An impasse could produce a government shutdown.

None of us envy the choices that members of Congress are now forced to make. Everyone agrees that the current fiscal direction of the federal government is unsustainable. Instead of securing the blessings of liberty for our posterity, we are weighing down posterity with unfair burdens. But deciding where to cut is both difficult and important. The budget is a statement of our government’s political and moral priorities.

It is still early in the budget process. But so far, the priorities of Congress have been unbalanced. To understand why, it is necessary to know a few facts about the budget. What we normally think of as federal spending—money for things such as education, or food stamps, or foreign aid—is only about 12 percent of the federal budget. But this category, called discretionary spending, is where the House GOP made its cuts—reducing funding for child nutrition, AIDS drugs and malaria programs.

The largest portion of the federal budget is called mandatory spending—funding for entitlement programs such as Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. This represents about 40 percent of the budget, and it is growing. By 2030, combined spending on entitlements is likely to exceed half of all Federal spending. A growing percentage of the budget will also be consumed by interest payments on our national debt. This leaves a shrinking amount of money for important and compassionate functions of government. Put another way, America’s fiscal crisis does not exist because the government spends too much on child nutrition or AIDS treatment. It exists because of expansive entitlement commitments, an aging population and rising health care inflation.

Debates on discretionary spending are important. Our government should not waste money on ineffective programs. But discretionary spending is a sideshow, even a distraction, from the main governing task: getting entitlement spending under control so it does not crowd out all other government spending.

This has not been the focus of the federal debate. President Obama’s budget avoided significant entitlement reform, kicking this problem down the road. Republicans have also not stepped up with a plan, though there are now indications they may do so in the Spring. Making the first move on entitlement reform will not be easy for anyone. Programs that help the poor are easier targets because they have limited political constituencies. Entitlement programs, in contrast, help the middle class, which has much greater political clout.

But this is not just a test for Congress. It is test for American citizens and voters. Will we support public officials who confront the real problems—or punish them for their courage?

—Michael J. Gerson is nationally syndicated columnist who appears twice weekly in The Washington Post and is the author of Heroic Conservatism (2007) and the co-author of City of Man: Religion and Politics in a New Era (2010).

To respond to the author of this Commentary: capcomm@cpjustice.org

Topic(s): entitlement reform

Capital Commentary is a weekly current-affairs publication of the Center for Public Justice. Published since 1996, it is written to encourage the pursuit of justice. Commentaries do not necessarily represent an official position of the Center for Public Justice but are intended to help advance discussion. To receive Capital Commentary each Friday by email, send a request to CapComm@cpjustice.org.

Reference: http://www.capitalcommentary.org/entitlement-reform/budget-realities-and-political-courage

Article 1 (U.S. Drug Control Policy: Moral & Economic Considerations)

Below are 4 articles that approach drug control policy from a different perspective. The first two articles advocate fundamental changes to current U.S. policy while the last two articles promote continued Prohibition. Morality and economics are at the center of this discussion, and they are never mutually exclusive. I would be interested to hear your opinions on U.S. drug control policy, how you have arrived at these opinions, and any responses to the cases made below.


reason "Just a Matter of When?" (February 2011)
By Brian Doherty

Legalizing marijuana has failed in California. But even in defeat, Proposition 19 might mark the beginning of the end for prohibition.

On Homecoming Day at the University of Southern California, Elizabeth Tauro strode purposefully through the dense, shifting mob of pre-game partiers, bearing huge rolls of “Yes on 19” stickers on each arm.

Saying yes to California’s Proposition 19 would have meant that adults could legally possess up to an ounce of marijuana. They also would have been allowed to grow marijuana on up to 25 square feet of their property. Local governments would have been free to raise (but not reduce) these limits on possession and cultivation. They would also have been authorized to license, regulate, and tax sales of the long-demonized weed.

Tauro, a senior majoring in public policy, was working the crowd on this Saturday before Election Day on behalf of Students for Sensible Drug Policy. At this point in the campaign, she said, she was mostly “just letting everyone know that Tuesday is Election Day” rather than arguing the benefits of pot legalization. “Our generation supports reforming marijuana laws,” she said. “It’s just a question of whether they vote.”

Not enough of them did. Proposition 19 lost by 54 percent to 46 percent just six weeks after most polls showed it winning. The drug war’s foes had been on the verge of achieving a staggering victory, one that would have forced a confrontation with the federal government. Instead they saw history slip through their fingers.

Yet reformers are still optimistic. Prop. 19 won a higher vote total (and higher vote percentage) than any previous attempt to legalize pot in the United States. It made legalization—not medical marijuana, not decriminalization, but full legalization—a legitimate political debate in the country’s biggest state. And it forged a coalition that stretched far beyond the usual axis of antiprohibition activists, notwithstanding some dissension within the ranks. The opposition, meanwhile, conceded some important arguments to the reformers, suggesting that public opinion has moved further along than ever before. The legalization of marijuana, activists argue, is a matter of when, not if.

Who Supported Prop. 19
Prop. 19 sprang from the brain and bank account of Richard Lee, a medical marijuana entrepreneur who operates a big dispensary and associated retail stores in Oakland as well as Oaksterdam University, a vocational school for the new industry that has had more than 12,000 students pass through since 2007.

Lee has played the local politics of medical marijuana as skillfully as anyone, winning city approval for industrial-sized indoor growing operations to feed the medical distribution system as well as a statement of intent to legalize the general sale of marijuana to adults as soon as the state permits it. Lee’s opponents paint him as the would-be kingpin of legal pot, using the political system to guarantee that his in-the-works industrial grows will corner a market he is fighting to create.

Even while thriving within the medical marijuana system, Lee has always pushed for full legalization, because he thinks “prohibition is hypocritical, unjust, and unfair.” In March 2009, a poll Lee commissioned showed, for the first time, a majority of California voters supporting legalization. At that point, he began drafting language for a ballot initiative. Two other legalization measures vied for the 2010 ballot, but only Lee, who spent nearly $1 million just on gathering signatures, had the money to succeed.

Traditional drug reform groups initially either snubbed Lee or advised him that a presidential election year would be better. “It was surprising to see how hostile they got,” he says. Lee joined the board of the Marijuana Policy Project, hoping he could steer it toward supporting his initiative, but the group lacked the money and the will, leading Lee to resign and go it largely alone. Representatives of the Drug Policy Alliance (DPA) did help him with drafting the language of the initiative, while remaining doubtful about the timing.

The major drug reform groups did eventually all get behind Prop. 19, and two of the biggest moneybags in reform circles, George Soros and Peter Lewis, chipped in during the last days of the campaign. (Soros’ $1 million donation was funneled not through Lee’s organization but through a separate pro-19 group managed by the DPA.) It “hurt us,” Lee says, that the big drug policy groups “didn’t get on board until late in the process.”

But long before Soros hopped on, the Yes on 19 coalition had expanded far beyond the drug policy world. Seasoned Democratic operatives joined the pro-19 campaign, even though incoming California Gov. Jerry Brown opposed it and Sen. Dianne Feinstein chaired the opposition. The progressive netroots blog Firedoglake launched a “Just Say Now” campaign that, together with Students for Sensible Drug Policy, placed 50,000 targeted get-out-the-vote calls. And perhaps most significantly, the proposition was endorsed by such drug policy newbies as the California chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the League of United Latin American Citizens of California.

“The groups most adversely affected by the drug war—minorities, Latinos, African Americans—were not [traditionally] in the fray,” says Neill Franklin, a former police officer who leads Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP). When the NAACP endorsed Prop. 19, he says, it was “a game changer. I called [Alice Huffman, head of the California NAACP,] up and told her I was law enforcement, and I was for Proposition 19. She said she practically fell out of her chair.” LEAP sent representatives to more than 250 events around the state, emphasizing that police and court resources should be used more productively than in the failed attempt to get people to stop selling and using a relatively benign drug. (A September 2010 study for the Cato Institute by Harvard economist Jeffrey Miron found that California spends $960 million a year on marijuana law enforcement.) LEAP recruited the National Black Police Association and the National Latino Officers Association for the cause.

Organized labor was another important source of new support. Dan Rush, special operations director for the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) Union Local #5, got excited about the jobs that could be created in a legal market for marijuana and hemp. He convinced his union, against initial doubts, that “this initiative would create an industry in retail, agriculture, and food processing, and UFCW is a retail, agriculture, and food processing union.” He became labor director for the Yes on 19 campaign.

Rush convinced the powerful Service Employees International Union and the Northern California Council of the Longshoremen to back Prop. 19, and he persuaded the California Labor Federation (CLF) to refrain from opposing it. When the next legalization campaign comes along, Rush swears he’ll be able to move the CLF from neutrality to support, which could be a key step toward changing minds in the Democratic Party.

Who Didn’t Support Prop. 19
Although Prop. 19 found new allies in the civil rights and labor movements, it did not have the unified support of the marijuana reform movement. The most successful and active medical marijuana group, Americans for Safe Access (ASA), was officially neutral. That in itself was not necessarily a problem. Given the group’s institutional mandate to deal exclusively with medical marijuana, Yes on 19 spokesperson Dale Sky Jones says, ASA’s neutrality was “the closest they could come to officially supporting us.”

Medical marijuana dispensaries were split on the issue. Although the initiative was ultimately crafted to change nothing at all about the laws in place protecting doctor-certified patients’ access to pot and their ability to grow, possess, and exchange it, rumors were rife that they would be hit with new limits on how much they could possess. (The current limit—set by court decisions, not statute—is whatever is deemed medically necessary for the patient.) Others noted that the proposition didn’t legalize smoking pot in public, and worried that this would be a loophole allowing authorities to harass medicinal smokers. Pro-19 canvassers say many dispensaries refused to allow campaign literature in their shops. Since the passage of California’s Compassionate Use Act in 1996, the medical folks had managed to create a market niche for sellers and a relatively safe haven for users, and many feared that opening up the market to more competition would be bad for their bottom line.

For the same reason, and with more anger, most of the growers from Northern California’s fertile Humboldt and Mendocino counties were against Prop. 19. The initiative lost in both. Allen St. Pierre, executive director of the National Organization for Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML) and one of the oldest warriors in the national drug policy fight, says the growers rebelled when they decided there was “no way post-prohibition for anyone to fetch $15 or $25 for a gram of dried vegetable matter.” People currently making $25 to $30 an hour trimming weed in Humboldt imagined their jobs reduced to minimum-wage work or eliminated entirely.
Prop. 19 supporters pushed back with the idea of a post-legalization market similar to the market for wine, with room for both cheap, mass-produced offerings like Two-Buck Chuck and expensive, artisanal products like Chateau Petrus for connoisseurs. But with the growing medical market already driving down prices, most Northern California growers didn’t want to hear it. They saw Lee as the wannabe Sam Walton of grass. “People will want something faceless and easy,” one grower told me. “They want their fucking Big Mac. In order to make something of quality, you have to deal with a lot more labor and a lot more time. Just use machines, turn out crap, sell it cheap.”

In the end, it might not matter whether the “marijuana community” per se supports legalization. The total number of voters in the major growing counties amounted to only 65,000 or so ballots in an election that was lost by half a million, and even adding all the people across the state involved in cutting or moving their product wouldn’t be enough to have ensured victory. Still, many Prop. 19 strategists say they want to bring in medical marijuana producers, sellers, and consumers as stakeholders from the beginning next time around. They hope to persuade all involved that full legalization would ensure less police harassment, and less danger from violent black market criminals, and they hope to persuade producers that, especially in the short term, there will still be room for small family growers.

Other activists are less forgiving. “If growers are against legalization,” West Coast Leaf Publisher Chris Conrad told The Huffington Post, “they can’t be part of the legalization process, and now it’s up to them to show good-faith support or be left out of the process.…Prop. 19 offered them a legal customer base, a statewide regulatory framework, and a local voice to protect their interests. The next campaign is more likely to pitch a more restrictive approach to bring [in] more conservative voters like Asians and housewives, who want heavy-handed controls, and will consider whether growers deserve any consideration at all. Those folks are unreliable at best, traitors to the cause at worst.”

What the Opposition Concedes
The narrow space around the sunken floor of Hollywood’s hip Café Was was crammed with a dozen reporters. Cameras jockeyed for an angle on the table where activist/actor Danny Glover, singer Melissa Etheridge, and likely 2012 Republican presidential candidate Gary Johnson talked about the importance of passing Proposition 19. Also on the bill: comic actor Hal Sparks, Sarah Lovering of the Marijuana Policy Project, and 20-year L.A. police veteran Stephen Downing of LEAP.

The activists pointed out the fiscal madness of spending billions over decades on a failed attempt to stop people from using a benign weed. They talked about the taxes not collected when a $14 billion industry is driven into the black market. They discussed the rape kits that went untested while police processed 861,000 misdemeanor pot arrests in California last year. They argued that it’s actually easier to keep kids from pot in a legal market, since legal merchants check ID and illegal drug dealers don’t. They noted that we don’t tend to see illegal vineyards in state and national parks in California, where violent drug dealers sometimes grow their wares.

Alone and earnest on the sidewalk outside the club, a blonde woman in a business suit was passing out pamphlets. It was Alexandra Datig, one of the primary public voices against Prop. 19. She comes from the “I stopped; you shouldn’t start” school. A former call girl in Heidi Fleiss’ famous escort business, Datig insists that her own life was derailed by drugs—pot and the harder stuff she insists pot led to—and that legalization will only create more stories like hers.
Datig’s pamphlet shed light on the shifting shape of the drug reform debate. It stressed, for example, that voting against Prop. 19 would “not interfere with a patients [sic] access to medical marijuana.” Those who remember the mid-1990s might be amazed that the anti-19 forces declined to attack, and in fact defended, medical marijuana, just 14 years after a remarkably contentious political fight over the Compassionate Use Act, a.k.a. Proposition 215, the first successful initiative to legalize marijuana for medical purposes in the United States. Medical pot is now as mainstream in California as surfing, and 14 other states and Washington, D.C., have embraced it as well.

Datig’s literature also implicitly accepted a central argument of the legalizers: that black markets create negative ancillary effects. “Legalization would not eliminate the black market or organized crime,” the pamphlet warned. “Black market sales to kids would expand.…Taxation would return buyers to the black market.” The No on 19 forces thus conceded that the black market created by prohibition is something to worry about.

That was the most striking thing about the Prop. 19 fight: The opposition was not defending the drug war status quo. They just picked at particular aspects of the initiative, hoping to move lukewarm legalizers into the no column. While that approach undoubtedly helped kill Prop. 19’s chances, it is great news for the larger debate over drug policy. Although 26 of the state’s biggest daily newspapers editorialized against the initiative, many used language like this from the San Francisco Chronicle: “We agree with the architects of Prop. 19 that the ‘war on drugs’—especially as it applies to marijuana—has been an abject failure.”

The opposition to 19 was also heavily outspent, by more than 10 to one. The last time a major drug law reform was on the ballot in California—Prop. 5 in 2008, which would have moved nonviolent drug offenders from jail to a largely treatment-oriented model—it was defeated with $1.8 million in California Correctional Peace Officers Association cash. CCPOA stayed out of the fray on 19, as did many of the formerly anti-reform and deep-pocketed Indian tribes. Some police chiefs and narcotics officers groups gave tens of thousands to fight 19, and the California Beer and Beverage Distributors gave $10 grand, but no one seemed willing to spend significant amounts fighting legalization.

Why Did Prop. 19 Lose?
Message discipline is tight in the Yes on 19 camp. No one sounds discouraged, even after their electoral defeat. All parties say they will remain unified, this time from the start, in a likely 2012 redo, when the youth vote they are sure can push them over the top is more likely to come out for the presidential race. Richard Lee cautions that he is not in a position to sink the same amount of money into this cause again. But NORML’s Allen St. Pierre says one of Prop. 19’s great long-term victories was that it uncovered “more young millionaires committed to marijuana law reform”—such as former Facebook president Sean Parker, who gave the campaign $100,000—“and we are interacting with them in their ascendancy, not in their doddering retirement years.”

But it’s hard to know how to do better if you aren’t sure why you failed. I found no consensus among pro-19 forces regarding what went wrong. Some are sure that more money early on, more TV ads, and/or more mailers would have made a decisive difference, but that the timing and the messaging were otherwise fine. Most 19ers saw their campaign as an attempt to get an already existing mass of pro-legalization citizens to vote, as opposed to changing anti-legalization voters’ minds. Steve Fox of the Marijuana Policy Project thinks that that attitude is dead wrong, and that more sales work on the essential harmlessness of pot needs to be done to ensure enough of a margin of victory. The UFCW’s Dan Rush says the next initiative should include a statewide tax and regulatory scheme. Firedoglake’s Michael Whitney thinks the campaign has to put more effort into “building the kind of grassroots infrastructure and volunteer network needed to sustain turnout.” (More than one 19er thought that such efforts in Los Angeles especially, where the initiative lost, could have won it for them statewide.) Ethan Nadelmann of the Drug Policy Alliance wants to lose the initiative’s language that would forbid employers from discriminating against or punishing an employee for using pot if it didn’t actually impair job performance, which the California Chamber of Commerce and several newspapers cited as a reason to oppose Prop. 19.

Almost everyone agrees that if a benefactor wants to drop $1 million on the campaign the next time round, he should do it before absentee ballots have been cast. (Instead, around a third of the campaign’s money came in only in the last two weeks.) And while debates at in-person events and in the papers are all well and good, legalizers need to reach the mass of people whose main exposure to political thought is on TV. That means more TV ads (like one the pro-19 camp launched at the last minute) with police officers explaining that legal pot will mean more, not less, law and order.

Public support for pot legalization continues to rise. According to Gallup, since 1995, before the dawn of the medical pot era, support for marijuana legalization has risen nationally from 25 percent to 46 percent. And as of Gallup’s October 2010 poll, in states west of Texas 58 percent of those polled support the change that Prop. 19 tried to make.
Still, the reform movement has not yet managed to sell legalization to otherwise libertarian-minded folk as a logical part of constitutionalist, limited government. A CNN Election Day exit poll in California found that 61 percent of those who think government is doing too much nonetheless opposed Prop. 19, as did 53 percent of those “angry” at the federal government and 63 percent of Tea Party supporters.

Even more surprising, a post-election Greenberg Research poll financed by Prop. 19 supporters found that 31 percent of California voters who believe pot should be legal nonetheless cast their ballots against the measure. That suggests many voters objected to this particular proposition, rather than legalization in general. The initiative, with its many provisions designed to pre-empt opposition, offered multiple targets for opponents to shoot at.

One point of contention, stressed heavily by the anti-19 campaign, was the local option, which gave local jurisdictions leeway to establish their own regulations and taxes for the cultivation and sale of marijuana. According to opponents, this system would have created “a jumbled legal nightmare,” as anti-19 spokesman Roger Salazar put it, even though California, like most of America, already deals with many controversial matters, from booze to gambling to gun possession, with a variety of local restrictions rather than one statewide rule.

One aspect of Prop. 19 that bothered both anti-pot activists and pro-legalization libertarians was the provision restricting pot-related job discrimination. Anti-pot propagandists envisioned a wave of stoned school bus drivers zipping off bridges and zonked nurses passing out over patient’s beds, while libertarians argued that it was an unnecessary intrusion into employment contracts.

It’s also possible that many voters felt the issue was less pressing after Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, a month before Election Day, signed S.B. 1449, a measure that reduced possession of less than an ounce of marijuana from a misdemeanor to an infraction, similar to a traffic violation. Schwarzenegger’s move killed a great selling point for 19 proponents: Why burden so many tens of thousands of people a year with a searchable criminal record and get them embedded in a criminal justice system that could eventually lead to prison, just for dope? While it was already true that almost no one went to jail or prison in California for mere use or small possession, 1449 lowered the legal difficulties facing pot users even further.

Still, 1449 does not solve the problems of crime and corruption associated with black market sales of pot. And, as co-chair of the Prop. 19 legal committee Hanna Dershowitz points out, by eliminating court costs for the system, under 1449 the incentive for cops to waste lots of time targeting young minorities might be even higher. Dope law enforcement is now a pure cash cow, so even under 1449 police attention will still be mistargeted to harassing pot smokers. (And with a targeted class that won’t always be able to pay fines on time, even the new system could lead to real criminal consequences.)

But in truth, as Ethan Nadelmann says, “we have no hard evidence whatsoever that any one of the provisions helped or hurt and no really good evidence about whether any particular message helped or hurt.” Several legalization advocates suspect the voting was swayed more by general uneasiness with sudden, far-reaching change, and that when they have a second chance to think about legalization, they’ll come around.

What They’re Fighting For
All this talk of messaging, coalition building, and conventional electioneering is itself a sign that the politics of repealing prohibition underwent a significant shift during the Prop. 19 campaign. Outright legalization is now on the table in several states, with measures likely to reach the 2012 ballot in at least California, Colorado, and Nevada. Activists hope as many as half a dozen states may end up in play. California Assemblyman Tom Ammiano (D-San Francisco) has a legislative take on legalization ready to roll out again in 2011 as well (last year an earlier version became the first such bill in American history to get out of committee in the Assembly), though politicians are clearly more scared of legalization than are voters.

Although he is still a dark-horse candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson, as the first major politician in America to make legalization a big part of his message, could turn up the volume on the national conversation if he gets anywhere in the primaries. So could Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) if he runs.

But even with all this hopeful talk, there is a darker side to the politics of pot, as I was reminded at an election night party where I ran into Stephanie Landa. Landa is a sweet, gentle woman who spent three years in federal prison for running a San Francisco marijuana growing operation that, with the full knowledge of local law enforcement officials, served the city’s medical market. When I first met her in November 2009, she was being forced to live in a grim halfway house with unpleasant, nutty neighbors. Her every move was monitored. She was legally prohibited from seeing the father of her child, since he was also arrested in the federal bust that sent her to prison.

Landa, a heroine and a martyr within the medical marijuana community, knows it well and understands its concerns. But for Landa, determining the right thing to do when it came to Prop. 19 did not require complicated guesses about how Attorney General Eric Holder might enforce federal law in California, or how counties would regulate and tax cannabis, or who might come out ahead in a legal marijuana market. As she put it, “I just don’t want anybody to go to prison anymore.”

Senior Editor Brian Doherty is author of This is Burning Man (BenBella), Radicals for Capitalism (PublicAffairs) and Gun Control on Trial (Cato Institute).
Resource: http://reason.com/archives/2011/01/18/just-a-matter-of-when





Cato Institute "U.S. in Slumber as Mexico Drug War Rages" (October 13, 2010)
By Ted Galen Carpenter

Ted Galen Carpenter, vice president for defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute, is the author of eight books on international affairs, including Bad Neighbor Policy: Washington's Futile War on Drugs in Latin America.

This article appeared in USA Today on October 13, 2010.

It takes a brave person to be a reporter in Mexico these days if the intent is to cover the drug cartels. More than 30 journalists have been killed since 2006, making Mexico perhaps the most dangerous place in the world for members of that profession. The country is at least on a par with such countries as Iraq, Sudan, and Afghanistan. It has become so bad that several Mexican journalists have sought asylum in the United States, and at least one has been granted that status.

It is the latest sign that the danger of Mexico becoming a "failed state" — once an absurd notion — is no longer so far-fetched.

Drug gangs make it a point to either control media coverage of their activities, or to intimidate independent-minded outlets into silence. They've been especially successful on the latter front. Numerous newspapers, radio stations, and television stations no longer cover stories related to the drug war, or they provide only very brief, bland accounts.
The ability of the drug traffickers to cow the Mexican press is yet another indication that the country is in deep trouble.

The intimidation reached new heights in mid-September when El Diario, the leading newspaper in Ciudad Juarez, El Paso's sister city and the most violent arena in Mexico's drug war, published a front-page editorial asking the cartels for a truce, following the killing of one of its photographers. One plaintive passage in the editorial underscored just how bad the work environment has become. "We want you to explain to us what you want from us," the editorial pleaded with the traffickers. "What are we supposed to publish or not publish? You are at this time the de facto authorities in this city, because the legal authorities have not been able to stop our colleagues from falling."

A news blackout
The intimidation problem is not confined to Juarez. Throughout northern Mexico, the news blackout reaches astonishing proportions. The border city of Reynosa and the surrounding area was a battlefield between two major drug gangs, the Zetas and the Gulf cartel, in early 2010. Gun fights and executions went on for days at time, producing hundreds of deaths. But Carlos Lauria, head of the Americas program for the Committee to Protect Journalists, points out that there was not a single report in newspapers or on radio and television about the bloodshed. In fact, the first media reports of the extent of the casualties appeared in a U.S. paper, the Dallas Morning News. A similar news void occurred in July following a terrifying gun and grenade battle in Nuevo Laredo.

Yet President Felipe Calderon rebuked El Diario for a willingness "to negotiate with criminals." The government offered a plan to provide greater security to journalists as they attempt to do their jobs. But most members of the news media seemed underwhelmed by that promise, and understandably so. After all, the Calderon government's other plans in the drug war haven't worked out, so why should anyone expect this latest measure to fare any better?

Ted Galen Carpenter, vice president for defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute, is the author of eight books on international affairs, including Bad Neighbor Policy: Washington's Futile War on Drugs in Latin America.

More by Ted Galen Carpenter
The ability of the drug traffickers to cow the Mexican press is yet another indication that the country is in deep trouble. There is a long litany of other depressing pieces of evidence. More than 28,000 people have perished in the fighting since Calderon launched his military-led offensive against the cartels in December 2006, and 2010 will set a new annual record. Once peaceful Monterrey, Mexico's economic heart, has become so dangerous that the U.S. State Department recently ordered diplomatic personnel at the consulate there to send their dependents home. American business executives, and even some Mexican ones, are sending their families to safe havens in the United States. Major shootouts and kidnappings have come to some of the most prominent resort areas, including Acapulco and Cancun.

What to do
Last month, President Obama rebuked Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for suggesting that the drug violence had become a full-blown insurgency. He needs to wake up to the increasingly dire developments. The president should convene an immediate, comprehensive discussion of the security situation in Mexico, utilizing both his national security team and outside experts.

And all options need to be on the table. That includes the suggestion by Mexico's former president, Vicente Fox, that we contemplate ending drug prohibition to drastically reduce the cartels' vast source of black-market revenue. The current approach clearly is not working, and we must consider alternatives before we end up with either a failed state or a narco-republic on our southern border.

Resource: http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=12473





U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) "Speaking Out Against Drug Legalization"

In many circles, U.S. drug policy is under attack. It is being criticized primarily by those who favor a legalization agenda. It is also being challenged by those who encourage certain trends in European drug policy, like decriminalization of drug use, “harm reduction” programs, and distinctions between hard and soft drugs.

Proponents of legalization are spending huge amounts of money to encourage a greater tolerance for drug use. A number of states have passed referendums to permit their residents to use drugs for a variety of reasons. The citizens who vote in these referendums too often have to rely on the information—or rather, misinformation—being presented by the sponsors of these expensive campaigns to legalize drugs.

This booklet, Speaking Out Against Drug Legalization, is designed to cut through the fog of misinformation with hard facts. The ten factual assertions, taken together, present an accurate picture of America’s experience with drug use, the current state of the drug problem, and what might happen if America chooses to adopt a more permissive policy on drug abuse.

Drug abuse, and this nation’s response to it, is one of the most important and potentially dangerous issues facing American citizens—and especially its youth—today. The unique freedoms of America have always depended on a well-informed citizenry. We hope you will use the facts you read in this booklet to help inform your friends and neighbors so that America can make a wise and well-considered decision on the future of its drug policy.
Summary of the Top Ten Facts on Legalization

Fact 1: We have made significant progress in fighting drug use and drug trafficking in America. Now is not the time to abandon our efforts.
The Legalization Lobby claims that the fight against drugs cannot be won. However, overall drug use is down by more than a third in the last twenty years, while cocaine use has dropped by an astounding 70 percent. Ninety-five percent of Americans do not use drugs. This is success by any standards.

Fact 2: A balanced approach of prevention, enforcement, and treatment is the key in the fight against drugs.

A successful drug policy must apply a balanced approach of prevention, enforcement and treatment. All three aspects are crucial. For those who end up hooked on drugs, there are innovative programs, like Drug Treatment Courts, that offer non-violent users the option of seeking treatment. Drug Treatment Courts provide court supervision, unlike voluntary treatment centers.

Fact 3: Illegal drugs are illegal because they are harmful.
There is a growing misconception that some illegal drugs can be taken safely. For example, savvy drug dealers have learned how to market drugs like Ecstasy to youth. Some in the Legalization Lobby even claim such drugs have medical value, despite the lack of conclusive scientific evidence.

Fact 4: Smoked marijuana is not scientifically approved medicine. Marinol, the legal version of medical marijuana, is approved by science.

According to the Institute of Medicine, there is no future in smoked marijuana as medicine. However, the prescription drug Marinol—a legal and safe version of medical marijuana which isolates the active ingredient of THC—has been studied and approved by the Food & Drug Administration as safe medicine. The difference is that you have to get a prescription for Marinol from a licensed physician. You can’t buy it on a street corner, and you don’t smoke it.

Fact 5: Drug control spending is a minor portion of the U.S. budget. Compared to the social costs of drug abuse and addiction, government spending on drug control is minimal.

The Legalization Lobby claims that the United States has wasted billions of dollars in its anti-drug efforts. But for those kids saved from drug addiction, this is hardly wasted dollars. Moreover, our fight against drug abuse and addiction is an ongoing struggle that should be treated like any other social problem. Would we give up on education or poverty simply because we haven’t eliminated all problems? Compared to the social costs of drug abuse and addiction—whether in taxpayer dollars or in pain and suffering—government spending on drug control is minimal.

Fact 6: Legalization of drugs will lead to increased use and increased levels of addiction. Legalization has been tried before, and failed miserably.

Legalization has been tried before—and failed miserably. Alaska’s experiment with Legalization in the 1970s led to the state’s teens using marijuana at more than twice the rate of other youths nationally. This led Alaska’s residents to vote to re-criminalize marijuana in 1990.

Fact 7: Crime, violence, and drug use go hand-in-hand.
Crime, violence and drug use go hand in hand. Six times as many homicides are committed by people under the influence of drugs, as by those who are looking for money to buy drugs. Most drug crimes aren’t committed by people trying to pay for drugs; they’re committed by people on drugs.

Fact 8: Alcohol has caused significant health, social, and crime problems in this country, and legalized drugs would only make the situation worse.

The Legalization Lobby claims drugs are no more dangerous than alcohol. But drunk driving is one of the primary killers of Americans. Do we want our bus drivers, nurses, and airline pilots to be able to take drugs one evening, and operate freely at work the next day? Do we want to add to the destruction by making drugged driving another primary killer?

Fact 9: Europe’s more liberal drug policies are not the right model for America.
The Legalization Lobby claims that the “European Model” of the drug problem is successful. However, since legalization of marijuana in Holland, heroin addiction levels have tripled. And Needle Park seems like a poor model for America.

Fact 10: Most non-violent drug users get treatment, not jail time.

The Legalization Lobby claims that America’s prisons are filling up with users. Truth is, only about 5 percent of inmates in federal prison are there because of simple possession. Most drug criminals are in jail—even on possession charges—because they have plea-bargained down from major trafficking offenses or more violent drug crimes.

Resource: http://www.justice.gov/dea/demand/speakout/index.html





Drug Free Australia "Arguments Against Drug Legalisation"

The Success of Prohibition

Prohibition has a successful track record suppressing illicit drug use since it was introduced 100 years ago22 in that licit drugs have current (last 12 months) user rates as high as 80-90% in populations over 14 years of age,23 and tobacco has historically had current use rates up to 60% of adult populations,24 the percentages currently using illicit drugs in OECD countries are generally below 1% of the population excepting cannabis where most are between 3% and 10%, with six countries between 11% and 17%.25

In the 50 year period following the first 1912 international convention restricting use of opium, heroin and cocaine, the United States’ use of illicit drugs other than cannabis was consistently below 0.5% of the population, and cannabis at 1-2% of the population between 1955 and 1965.26 With the advent of the counter-culture movement from the late 1950s, where illicit drug use was characterized as mind-expanding and relatively harmless,27 illicit drug use rose sharply. These new generations were quite obviously distanced from those generations which had first witnessed first-hand the harms of the illicits at the turn of the previous century and which had fought for their prohibition.

With illicit drug use peaking in the 1970’s in the United States, the ‘Just Say No’ campaign, initiated under the patronage of Nancy Reagan, coincided with recent (past month) illicit drug use dropping from 14.1% in 1979 to 5.8% in 1992, a drop of 60%.28 In 2009, despite increases in illicit drug use since the 1990s, levels are nevertheless 40% below 1979 levels. Rising levels of drug use across the Western world have coincided with the bankrolling of the drug legalization lobby particularly by billionaire financiers from the US and UK since 1991.29 George Soros, perhaps the most central billionaire financier for drug legalisation worldwide is clearly not opposed to illicit drug use, as per his autobiography where he asserts that ” I would establish a strictly controlled distribution network through which I would make most drugs, excluding the most dangerous ones like crack, legally available.”30 The drug legalization lobby’s vigorous promotion in media and schools of a ‘safe use of illegal drugs’ message31 indicates that drug prohibition has been in the midst of a pitched battle waged by those who are accepting not only of the drug user but who also promote an acceptance of drug use itself.

With extremely low expenditures spent on illicit drug control by countries worldwide until the mid ‘60s, it can be argued that the counter-culture message that illicit drugs can and should be used ‘safely’, backed by the multi-million dollar inputs by drug legalisation financiers, is to a great extent responsible for the heavy increases in drug control expenditures since that time.

Those seeking the legalization and consequent regulation of illicit drugs have proposed that prohibition does not work, despite its 100 years of successful suppression of illicit drug harms, and use a variety of erroneous arguments to support their view.

Their argument that “Prohibition promotes drug use” sharply conflicts with a 2001 Australian study of 18-29 year olds by the NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research which shows that Prohibition does indeed deter illicit drug use.32 29% of those who had never used cannabis cited the illegality of the substance as their reason for never using the drug, while 19% of those who had ceased use of cannabis cited its illegality as their reason. 91% of those currently using cannabis weekly said they would use more cannabis if it were made legal, while 14% of the total sample of 579 interviewees said they ‘definitely’ or ‘probably’ would use the substance more frequently. The Director of the Bureau, Don Weatherburn, said,

“Cannabis use may be widespread but the critical question for policy is whether its use would become even more widespread if the drug were legalised. The present findings suggest that it would.”

The criticism that the ‘war on drugs’ can never be won (and therefore is of no value) is no more true than the argument that police ‘blitzes’ on highway speeding should be curtailed because they fail to eradicate speeding. While blitzes on speeding very successfully reduce and contain the behaviour, policing of illicit drug use does exactly the same. Removing policing of speeding drivers will have precisely the same effect as removing policing of illicit drugs. No one would suggest legalizing stealing because it has never been eradicated.
It is contended that prohibition causes greater drug use by making drugs so expensive that users must become dealers and continually recruit new users to support their habit. This contention is deficient on two grounds a. higher prices levied by governments on alcohol and tobacco inevitably

reduce demand, and so it is with illicit drugs,33 and b. taking the 1,000,000 young people in the US per year who start smoking tobacco,34 prohibiting tobacco would not conceivably swell their numbers, only decrease them. Of course, legalizing drugs will make drugs cheaper and thus increase use as with the experience of cheaper crack cocaine in the US.35

The view that prohibition makes a prohibited item lucrative for criminals is indeed correct, after all this is an inherent dynamic that drives criminality. But capitulating to illicit drug use on these grounds makes no more sense than capitulating to those who continue to traffic in human lives, a more expensive business because of its illegality and therefore more lucrative for the criminal, but necessary for the rights of vulnerable citizens.

The idea that criminals will be put out of business by legalization fails to recognize that the most productive recruiting pool to illicit drug use has always been amongst secondary school-aged young people,36 an age group that would still be prohibited from buying drugs even in a regulated framework, as with alcohol or tobacco. Consequently, criminal effort will be more concentrated on this vulnerable age group even moreso than currently. Further, a large number of studies have shown that criminal careers are embarked on before the onset of drug use, while drug use intensifies this criminal behaviour.37

Criminal behaviour can importantly be the direct result of drug use which can cause emotional/brain damage, mental illness and anti-social behaviour.38 Psychoactive drugs can have a powerful impact on behavior which may influence some people to commit crimes that have nothing to do with supporting the cost of their drug use.39 The use of drugs changes behavior and causes criminal activity because people will do things they wouldn=t do if they were rational and free of the drug=s influence. Cocaine-related paranoia is an example. If drug use increases with legalization, so will such forms of related violent crime as assaults, drugged driving, child abuse, and domestic violence.
It is sometimes argued that the harms of prohibition outweigh the harms to users and their community. Given that prohibition has so demonstrably suppressed the harms from illicit drug use, as previously outlined, the harms to users and society, also previously outlined, under legalization/regulation would clearly far outweigh the current harms of prohibition.

The argument that drug addicts are forced into crime by prohibition should first and foremost highlight the fact that this argument presupposes and underlines the addictive nature of illicit drugs (which legalization proponents often downplay), addictive enough to create a viable criminal supply industry. Secondly, the harms of increased drug use, which as previously outlined would be a consequence of legalization and its cheaper prices, far outweigh the current crime harms of prohibition.

Drug legalization advocates spuriously claim that US prisons are overflowing with people convicted for only simple possession of marijuana. This claim is aggressively pushed by groups seeking to relax or abolish marijuana laws. A more accurate view40 is that the vast majority of inmates in prison for marijuana have been found guilty of more than simple possession. They were convicted for drug trafficking, or for marijuana possession along with other offences. Many of those in prison for marijuana entered a guilty plea to a marijuana charge to avoid a more serious charge. In the

US, just 1.6 percent of the state inmate population were held for offences involving only marijuana, and less than one percent of all state prisoners (0.7 percent) were incarcerated with marijuana possession as the only charge. An even smaller fraction of state prisoners were first time offenders (0.3 percent). The numbers on the US federal prisons are similar. In 2001, the overwhelming majority of offenders sentenced for marijuana crimes were convicted for trafficking and only 63 served time for simple possession.

The proposal that countries must capitulate to the ‘overwhelming flood of illicit drug use’ by deserting prevention and rehabilitation for a more enlightened policy of harm reduction is shown to be without support when the example of Sweden is considered.41 Sweden had the highest levels of illicit drug use in the 1970’s but has long had the lowest levels of drug use in the developed world due to a sustained emphasis on education and rehabilitation. When Sweden reduced spending on these elements its drug use rose as it did in the 1990s42, but restoring expenditure from 2002 again sharply decreased drug use as per student surveys.43 In 2001, a poll run by TEMO for the newspaper Dagens Nyheter, found that 96% of Swedes are strongly supportive of their restrictive drug policy.44

Under a purely harm reduction model it is inevitable that more people will try illicit drugs and become addicted. The Netherlands policy of taking a soft line on cannabis use to create a ‘separation of markets’ between cannabis dealers and hard drug dealers failed to stem the initiation to drugs such as heroin, cocaine and amphetamines. In the EMCDDA’s 2000 report Annex (shown below but no longer available from EMCDDA on the internet) in the year 1998 the Netherlands had the third highest cannabis and cocaine use in Europe. This level of cannabis use negates any argument that the Netherland’s soft approach on cannabis, which by 1998 had been in place for decades, creates lower drug use. Dutch tolerance has allowed the Netherlands to become a criminal epicentre for illicit synthetic drug manufacture, as well as a home for the production and export of strains of cannabis with THC 10 times higher than normal.45

However, where there were once thousands of cannabis cafes there are now only several hundred.46 Levels of cannabis use, in 2005 only marginally higher than in 1998, while other European countries have accelerated past them, are more likely the result of this evident growing intolerance of cannabis in the Netherlands rather than a growing tolerance. British reductions in cannabis use after softer legislation may be moreso the result of heavy UK media exposure of the stronger evidence of links between cannabis and psychosis.47 The UK has since toughened its laws on cannabis.

Resource: http://www.drugfree.org.au/fileadmin/Media/Global/Taskforce_Arguments_for_Prohibition.pdf (pages 3-7)

Articles 22 (Economics: Contrasting Liberal & Conservative Approaches)

The New York Times “The Two Cultures” November 15, 2010
By David Brooks

Many of the psychologists, artists and moral philosophers I know are liberal, so it seems strange that American liberalism should adopt an economic philosophy that excludes psychology, emotion and morality.

Yet that is what has happened. The economic approach embraced by the most prominent liberals over the past few years is mostly mechanical. The economy is treated like a big machine; the people in it like rational, utility maximizing cogs. The performance of the economic machine can be predicted with quantitative macroeconomic models.

These models can be used to make highly specific projections. If the government borrows $1 and then spends it, it will produce $1.50 worth of economic activity. If the government spends $800 billion on a stimulus package, that will produce 3.5 million in new jobs.

Everything is rigorous. Everything is science.

Conservatives, who are usually stereotyped as narrow-eyed business-school types, have gone all Oprah-esque in trying to argue against these liberals. If the government borrows trillions of dollars, this will increase public anxiety and uncertainty, the conservatives worry. The liberal technicians brush aside this soft-headed mush. These psychological concerns are mythological, they say. That’s gaseous blathering from those who lack quantitative rigor.
Other people get moralistic. This country is already too profligate, they cry. It already shops too much and borrows too much. How can we solve our problems by borrowing and spending more? The liberal technicians brush this away, too. Economics is a rational activity detached from morality. Hardheaded policy makers have to have the courage to flout conventional morality — to borrow even when the country is sick of borrowing.

The liberal technicians have an impressive certainty about them. They have amputated those things that can’t be contained in models, like emotional contagions, cultural particularities and webs of relationships. As a result, everything is explainable and predictable. They can stand on the platform of science and dismiss the poor souls down below.

Yet over the past 21 months, it has been harder to groove to their certainty. To start with, the economy has not responded as the modelers projected, either in the months after the stimulus was passed or this summer, when it was supposed to be producing hundreds of thousands of jobs. It has become harder to define how much good the stimulus package is doing. An $800 billion measure must leave a large footprint, but it is hard to find in a $70 trillion global economy.
Moreover, it has been harder to accept that psychological factors like uncertainty and anxiety really are a mirage. The first time a business leader tells you she is holding off on investing because she is scared about the future, you dismiss it as anecdote. But over the past few years, I’ve had hundreds of such conversations.

It’s been harder to dismiss morality as a phantom concern, too. Maybe in a nation of robots the government can run a policy that offends the morality of the citizenry, but not in a nation of human beings, as the recent elections showed.

Nor has the world come to look simpler and easier to manipulate since the stimulus passed. It now looks more complicated. It’s one thing to hatch an ideal policy in an academic lab, but in the real world, context is everything.

Ethan Ilzetzki of the London School of Economics and Enrique G. Mendoza and Carlos A. Vegh of the University of Maryland examined stimulus efforts in 44 countries. In a recent National Bureau of Economic Research paper, they argued that fiscal stimulus can be quite effective in low-debt countries with fixed exchange rates and closed economies.

Stimulus measures are generally not as effective, on the other hand, in countries like the U.S. with high debt and floating exchange rates. The authors of the paper pointed to a series of specific circumstances that complicate, to say the least, the effectiveness of increasing public spending: How much stimulus money ends up flowing abroad? What is the relationship between fiscal policy and monetary policy? How do investors respond to fear of future interest rate increases?

One could go on. It’s become harder to have confidence that legislators can successfully enact the brilliant policies that liberal technicians come up with. Far from entering the age of macroeconomic mastery and social science triumph, we seem to be entering an age in which statecraft is, once again, an art, not a science. When you look around the world at the countries that have come through the recession best, it’s not the countries with the brilliant and aggressive stimulus models. It’s the ones like Germany that had the best economic fundamentals beforehand.

It all makes one doubt the wizardry of the economic surgeons and appreciate the old wisdom of common sense: simple regulations, low debt, high savings, hard work, few distortions. You don’t have to be a genius to come up with an economic policy like that.

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/16/opinion/16brooks.html?ref=opinion


The New York Times “Mugged by the Moralizers” October 31, 2010
By Paul Krugman

“How many of you people want to pay for your neighbor’s mortgage that has an extra bathroom and can’t pay their bills?” That’s the question CNBC’s Rick Santelli famously asked in 2009, in a rant widely credited with giving birth to the Tea Party movement.

It’s a sentiment that resonates not just in America but in much of the world. The tone differs from place to place — listening to a German official denounce deficits, my wife whispered, “We’ll all be handed whips as we leave, so we can flagellate ourselves.” But the message is the same: debt is evil, debtors must pay for their sins, and from now on we all must live within our means.
And that kind of moralizing is the reason we’re mired in a seemingly endless slump.

The years leading up to the 2008 crisis were indeed marked by unsustainable borrowing, going far beyond the subprime loans many people still believe, wrongly, were at the heart of the problem. Real estate speculation ran wild in Florida and Nevada, but also in Spain, Ireland and Latvia. And all of it was paid for with borrowed money.

This borrowing made the world as a whole neither richer nor poorer: one person’s debt is another person’s asset. But it made the world vulnerable. When lenders suddenly decided that they had lent too much, that debt levels were excessive, debtors were forced to slash spending. This pushed the world into the deepest recession since the 1930s. And recovery, such as it is, has been weak and uncertain — which is exactly what we should have expected, given the overhang of debt.

The key thing to bear in mind is that for the world as a whole, spending equals income. If one group of people — those with excessive debts — is forced to cut spending to pay down its debts, one of two things must happen: either someone else must spend more, or world income will fall.

Yet those parts of the private sector not burdened by high levels of debt see little reason to increase spending. Corporations are flush with cash — but why expand when so much of the capacity they already have is sitting idle? Consumers who didn’t overborrow can get loans at low rates — but that incentive to spend is more than outweighed by worries about a weak job market. Nobody in the private sector is willing to fill the hole created by the debt overhang.

So what should we be doing? First, governments should be spending while the private sector won’t, so that debtors can pay down their debts without perpetuating a global slump. Second, governments should be promoting widespread debt relief: reducing obligations to levels the debtors can handle is the fastest way to eliminate that debt overhang.

But the moralizers will have none of it. They denounce deficit spending, declaring that you can’t solve debt problems with more debt. They denounce debt relief, calling it a reward for the undeserving.

And if you point out that their arguments don’t add up, they fly into a rage. Try to explain that when debtors spend less, the economy will be depressed unless somebody else spends more, and they call you a socialist. Try to explain why mortgage relief is better for America than foreclosing on homes that must be sold at a huge loss, and they start ranting like Mr. Santelli. No question about it: the moralizers are filled with a passionate intensity.

And those who should know better lack all conviction.

John Boehner, the House minority leader, was widely mocked last year when he declared that “It’s time for government to tighten their belts” — in the face of depressed private spending, the government should spend more, not less. But since then President Obama has repeatedly used the same metaphor, promising to match private belt-tightening with public belt-tightening. Does he lack the courage to challenge popular misconceptions, or is this just intellectual laziness?
Either way, if the president won’t defend the logic of his own policies, who will?

Meanwhile, the administration’s mortgage modification program — the program that inspired the Santelli rant — has, in the end, accomplished almost nothing. At least part of the reason is that officials were so worried that they might be accused of helping the undeserving that they ended up helping almost nobody.

So the moralizers are winning. More and more voters, both here and in Europe, are convinced that what we need is not more stimulus but more punishment. Governments must tighten their belts; debtors must pay what they owe.

The irony is that in their determination to punish the undeserving, voters are punishing themselves: by rejecting fiscal stimulus and debt relief, they’re perpetuating high unemployment. They are, in effect, cutting off their own jobs to spite their neighbors.
But they don’t know that. And because they don’t, the slump will go on.

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/01/opinion/01krugman.html?ref=paulkrugman


The New York Times “The Election That Wasn’t” October 23, 2010
By Thomas L. Friedman

In the past two weeks, I’ve taken the Amtrak Acela to the Philadelphia and New York stations. In both places there were signs on the train platforms boasting that new construction work there was being paid for by “the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009,” that is, the $787 billion stimulus. And what was that work? New “lighting” — so now you can see even better just how disgustingly decayed, undersized and outdated are the rail platforms and infrastructure in two of our biggest cities.

If we were a serious country, this is what the midterms would be about: How do we generate the jobs needed to sustain our middle class and pay for new infrastructure? It would require a different kind of politics — one that doesn’t conform to either party’s platform. We will have to raise some taxes to generate revenue, like on energy or maybe a value-added tax, and lower others, on payrolls to stimulate work, and on multinational corporations to get them to bring the trillion dollars they have offshore back to the U.S. for investment. We will have to adjust some services, like Social Security, while we invest in new infrastructure, like high-speed rail and Internet bandwidth; the U.S. ranks 22nd in the world in average connection speed. And, most of all, we will have to have an honest discussion about how we got in this rut.

How we got into this rut is no secret. We compensated for years of stagnating middle-class wages the easy way. Just as baseball players in the ’90s injected themselves with steroids to artificially build muscle to hit more home runs — instead of doing real bodybuilding — our two parties injected steroids, cheap credit, into Wall Street so it could go gambling and into Main Street so it could go home-buying. They both started hitting home runs, artificially — until the steroids ran dry. Now we have to rebuild America’s muscles the old-fashioned way.

How? In the short run, we’ll probably need more stimulus to get the economy moving again so people have the confidence to buy and invest. Ultimately, though, good jobs at scale come only when we create more products and services that make people’s lives more healthy, more productive, more secure, more comfortable or more entertained — and then sell them to more people around the world. And in a global economy, we have to create those products and services with a work force that is so well trained and productive that it can leverage modern technology so that one American can do the work of 20 Chinese and, therefore, get paid the same as 20 Chinese. There is no other way.

Sure, more countries can now compete with us. But that’s good. It means they’re also spawning new jobs, customers, ideas and industries where well-trained Americans can also compete. Fifteen years ago, there were no industries around Google “search” or “iPhone applications.” Today, both are a source of good jobs. More will be invented next year. There is no fixed number of jobs. We just have to make sure there is no fixed number of Americans to fill them — aided by good U.S. infrastructure and smart government incentives to attract these new industries to our shores.

But not everyone can write iPhone apps. What about your nurse, barber or waiter? Here I think Lawrence Katz, the Harvard University labor economist, has it right. Everyone today, he says, needs to think of himself as an “artisan” — the term used before mass manufacturing to apply to people who made things or provided services with a distinctive touch in which they took personal pride. Everyone today has to be an artisan and bring something extra to their jobs.
For instance, says Katz, the baby boomers are aging, which will spawn many health care jobs. Those jobs can be done in a low-skilled way by cheap foreign workers and less-educated Americans or they can be done by skilled labor that is trained to give the elderly a better physical and psychological quality of life. The first will earn McWages. The second will be in high demand. The same is true for the salesperson who combines passion with a deep knowledge of fashion trends, the photo-store clerk who can teach you new tricks with your digital camera while the machine prints your film, and the pharmacist who doesn’t just sell pills but learns to relate to customer health needs in more compassionate and informative ways. They will all do fine.

But just doing your job in an average way — in this integrated and automated global economy — will lead to below-average wages. Sadly, average is over. We’re in the age of “extra,” and everyone has to figure out what extra they can add to their work to justify being paid more than a computer, a Chinese worker or a day laborer. “People will always need haircuts and health care,” says Katz, “and you can do that with low-wage labor or with people who acquire a lot of skills and pride and bring their imagination to do creative and customized things.” Their work will be more meaningful and their customers more satisfied.

Government’s job is to help inspire, educate, enable and protect that work force. This election should have been about how.

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/24/opinion/24friedman.html?ref=thomaslfriedman