Death Is Bad

Based on various discussions in recent weeks, I am revising my stance on Transparency. Not the end result, which is still ideally a state of complete transparency, but in how to get there from here.

I’ve said that the records the NSA was collecting should be public information anyway. But obviously the government doesn’t feel the same way, because they were hiding the fact that they sought them. And they are now attempting to prosecute Snowden the same way they’ve reprehensively detained and prosecuted Bradley Manning. And yet they are doing NOTHING to investigate whether these secret programs actually needed to be secret. There are some things that will have to be held secret, even in a transparent society, for reasons of national security. After an interval of time they should all be revealed, and an independent panel would review past actions to determine if the secrecy was truly necessary for self-defense. Any abuse MUST be prosecuted fully, so that secrecy does not become the norm again, to keep the society as transparent as possible. In light of Snowden’s leaks, it seems that these programs should never have been secret, and the government officials/agencies that claimed protection from exposure in courts due to security concerns were lying. They are vile people who threaten the very concept of transparency. If the government cared anything for Transparency they would be prosecuting these obfuscationists for fraud and treason, rather than attacking the people who have brought this outrage to light.

Right now the window goes one-way only. The actions of those in power are being held in opacity while they can peer in on everyone else. Most people want the opacity to go both ways. I want the transparency to go both ways. But in either case the party that will be forced to change is the government. I was in the wrong to say the data that the government was gathering was no big deal. It is a big deal because they are trying to hide it, and until we can pry back their shells and expose them to the same light we live in, we should demand the same secrecy they get. The exchange of information must be mutual, or they will not have any incentive to change.

I was proclaiming “This is not a big deal” because I often live in the world I wish was already here, a world were Transparency works both ways, and where a return to secrecy and paranoia is a net loss for everyone, and thus must be defended. (“Be the change you want to see in the world” and all that). I forgot that this is not the world we’re in. We are a LONG way from there, and getting There from Here will require a lot of leverage and negotiation by those of us on the wrong side of the glass. We shouldn’t give away any tools in that fight for free, which is what I was doing. My bad.

We’re still a ways away from human labor being unnecessary, but out of compassion many countries have social welfare programs in place to help the very poor anyway. I don’t know how it works in other countries, but in the US there is a lot of resistance to giving people aid simply because they are poor. There must be an excuse to give the aid, to make sure the recipient is worthy or deserving. Alone has pointed out (in his unique way) that this has lead to the pathologizing of a whole class of people as “disabled” to the enrichment of a class of professionals. But while this program (SSI) paid out $45B in 2009, a much bigger program cost $680B that same year, and had arguably greater negative impact on the world.

It’s a bit of an open secret that the US Military is a combination social welfare program and employer of last resort in the US. If you can’t find any other work, you can always join the army. The pay is decent, the benefits are amazing (free health care for life! Most of your college tuition paid!), and there’s a rock-solid pension program. That’s one of the reasons that women, gays, and minorities all fought for the right to join the military. It certainly wasn’t for the privilege of being maimed and killed. The only catch is that you have to be willing to advance America’s global interests using violence, and risk your life/limbs/health.

My brother spent a year in Afghanistan. He didn’t need to join the army, but most of the other people he met were forced into it by life circumstances – ie: they needed the welfare benefits. He described the fear of walking through IED-laced areas. He saw a friend lose a leg to one. He was pretty upset that in the USA, we demand that the destitute young take these risks for us before we’re willing to help them pay for college and medical care. He has a point.

In addition, the military is not the most efficient welfare provider. Of that $680B annually, only $2.2B went to college expenses. Vast sums are spent on training tens of thousands of people to kill, and buying top-of-the-line war machines. If half this amount was instead used to train engineers and fund public works, we wouldn’t have nearly the infrastructure crisis we have now. We could provide all these people with wages, benefits, and education and actually have something to show for it as well.

There is a point where more military spending creates disutility, and like many liberals, I’m of the opinion that we’ve passed this point quite a while back. A large, expensive military is hard to justify if it stands unused. And when your best tool is a hammer, soon most problems start to look suspiciously nail-like. The mere existence of such a large standing army has probably caused wars simply by being available (*cough* Iraq *cough*), leading to trillions of dollars in waste and hundreds of thousands of lives lost or ruined.

Does our social welfare program really have to have such insanely negative externalities? People talk about the hazards of unconditional transfer payments – the disincentives to being productive – but are those consequences really worse than inflicting physical and mental trauma on our poor, and killing a percentage of them?

It seems that for now, we do require such blood prices. It’s not like I’m advocating a grand new idea, it’s been tried before. But the voting public looks to be unwilling to fund a massive social program right now unless violence is involved. It seems we’ve become so used to being politically motivated by fear that nothing else has any impact anymore. And in the meantime, the government will keep getting a bigger, stronger tool of destruction to tempt them.