A couple quick questions, Ed. 1
Posted on April 28, 2010 at 9.45 pm
Q. I’m struggling with the concept of the right to privacy. I understand how privacy is important as a hedge against government control and interference, but what exactly is the philosophical basis to the right to privacy? — Preston, from Bellevue, WA.
A. I’m answering three questions quickly, so I might not give you the deepest answer here. But then again, this is probably a book-length topic, in all honesty. Privacy is generally considered a natural right, and it’s a concept which flows from the individualism and property rights of John Locke, Adam Smith, Thomas Jefferson, and other classical liberals and humanists. The right is derived from the individual’s property in his person and belongings. After all, if I own my body, am I not entitled to say who can look at it or otherwise interact with it? The same goes for my physical property — the Fourth Amendment sums it up as “persons, houses, papers, and effects.” Of course, individual ownership and its attendant privacy also allow me to abandon that privacy and share information or access if I wish, though I cannot rightfully be forced to do so.
Q. What is the best way to promote peace to people with right-wing sensibilities? — Matt, from Omaha, NE.
A. The short answer, I’d say, is money. Even though they are rarely consistent about it in practice (at least not on the federal level — though I hear there are sometimes actual fiscal conservatives in state and local governments), people on the right do tend to be rhetorically firm about their love for controlled spending and taxation. Showing intellectually honest conservatives that aggressive war is quite frankly unaffordable ought to go far toward promoting their love of peace. That war is just another big, expensive government program is a strong argument, if altogether foreign to many on the right. Fortunately, history has amply demonstrated this point: “Vietnam should remind conservatives that whenever you put your faith in big government for any reason, sooner or later you wind up an apologist for mass murder.” Hopefully this introduction might lead to more complex and principled opposition to aggression.
Q. How many vocal pro-choice candidates have made it through to be the Republican presidential nominee? — Dustin, from New York, NY.
A. Goldwater was of course pro-choice, but before the Nixon presidency (1969-1974), abortion doesn’t really seem to have been a major issue. It was during that time that Roe v. Wade was decided, yet Nixon never spoke publicly on the subject. His wife was apparently was vocally pro-choice, but Nixon’s own views didn’t come out until years later. When the Watergate tapes were released, however, Nixon was shown to be ambivalent on the subject, saying abortion fostered “permissiveness” but finding it necessary in cases of rape and interracial children. His vice-president, Gerald Ford, was pro-choice as well — though he took a federalist perspective on the subject. Since then, every GOP nominee for the presidency (Reagan, Bush 1, Dole, Bush 2, McCain) has been pro-life.
Ms. Kristian,
I am as anti-war as the next libertarian, and I sympathize with the need of selling anti-war rhetoric to the right. However, I don’t think that highlighting the financial costs of war is the way to do it. Instead, we should make the case that war is a never a means of completing the objectives in the party’s foreign policy.
War is expensive holistically, but is inexpensive relative to other expenses. The calculator you link to suggests that to date the government has spent ~$720.4 billion on Iraq and ~$268.8 billion on Afghanistan. This is roughly $103 billion per year on Iraq and $30 billion on Afghanistan, or a total of ~$130 billion per year on both wars (these represent the direct cost of war, not the secondary expenses incurred, of course).
Total estimated receipts for FY2010 is $2.381 trillion. The direct cost of war represents 5.4% of the budget. Compare this to $695 billion being spent on social security, $453 billion on medicare and $290 on medicare. If the government did not have to allot money to expensive social insurance programs, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan would be affordable in terms of direct cost, and not including human costs.
What about indirect costs? These make the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq prohibitively expensive. These include the costs of care taking for the tens of thousands of wounded soldiers returning from deployment. Joseph Stiglitz suggested, in 2006, that the total cost of the war was somewhere around $3 trillion (he later suggested even more).
But, the only way of persuading war hawks against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is to prove how all this spending is for nothing. In other words, how by financing these wars the United States will not get what it wants. War will not stabilize either Afghanistan or Iraq, while war will not end the “terrorist threat” (terrorists who now reside in completely different countries). These are the points we have to sell Republicans on, because the money is inconsequential if you do not show why spending the money isn’t worth it.
By the way, I love the fact that readers can ask you questions! It seems like a very good method of directly responding to your readers’ intellectual demands.
Jonathan, thanks for the comment! You make a good point. The reason I went with costs for this (really) short answer is that the moral/philosophical case seems like a hard sell on the right and I’ve heard no end of “the surge worked” arguments from my conservative friends. Nonetheless, I definitely agree with your argument about ineffectiveness of war, and suspect that it’s probably too broad a subject to generalize about: Some conservatives will be persuaded by one argument, some by another.
Oh and thanks — I’m hoping the question thing will catch on XD