Latest Article Roundup From Ajax The Great (Pete Jackson)

By Ajax the Great (Pete Jackson)

(Originally posted on the True Spirit of America Party blog)

A JOB GUARANTEE, WITHOUT THE GUARANTEE?

The TSAP has once endorsed the MMT idea of a Job Guarantee (JG), which is exactly what it sounds like.  Of course, we also supported Universal Basic Income (UBI) with NO strings attached as well for years now, but still maintained that a JG would be good in addition to that.  However, we no longer support that idea anymore.  JG, in all of its flavors, has far too many conceptual, logistical, and ontological problems to be workable at scale, as Rodger Malcolm Mitchell notes in his article, and several others.

So what do we at the TSAP support instead of JG?  Well, we clearly support UBI, hands down.  But beyond that, we support a scaled-up version of something like Job Corps, and which is basically a Job Guarantee but without the "guarantee" part.  That is, simply a jobs program, both for finding and creating jobs as needed, and one that provides only useful work rather than the Sisyphean make-work boondoggles that would inevitably occur in a true JG program.  Otherwise, it is guaranteed to fail.

POLITICS IN ONE LESSON 

There is, in fact, an eternal law of nature that at once explains just about everything, and even makes politics possible to finally understand. It is called The Law of Eristic Escalation:

Imposition of Order = Escalation of Chaos

By that, it pertains to any arbitrary or coercive imposition of order, which at least in the long run, actually causes disorder (chaos) to escalate.  Fenderson's Amendment further adds that "the tighter the order in question is maintained, the longer the consequent chaos takes to escalate, BUT the more it does when it does."  Finally, the Thudthwacker Addendum still further adds that this relationship is nonlinear, thus rendering the resulting escalation of chaos completely unpredictable in terms of the original imposition of order.

We see the real world consequences of this in everything from Prohibition to the War on (people who use a few particular) Drugs to zero tolerance policies to Covid lockdowns to sexual repression and so much more.  And especially in the ageist abomination that is the 21 drinking age in the USA.  Any short-term benefits that these arbitrary and coercive impositions of order may provide is entirely outweighed when they inevitably backfire in the long run.  For example, Miron and Tetelbaum (2009), Asch and Levy (1987 and 1990), and Males (1986) illustrate this very nicely in the case of the 21 drinking age.

(This same logic applies to practically every "victimless crime" law, and pretty much every other form of government overreach, as well as various excessive socio-cultural repressions of all kinds.)

Perhaps that is why most bans on various things have historically had a track record that is quite lackluster at best.  Ironically, bans tend to give more power to the very things that they seek to ban.

And now, ladies and gentlemen, you finally understand politics.

P.S.  The Dutch seem to understand this better.  They even have a proverb:  "when you permit, you control", which is the antithesis of the American proverb, "when you permit, you promote".  Carl Jung would also likely have a field day with that as well.

That said though......

"CATCH AND RELEASE" IS A TRULY DUMB POLICY THAT MAKES ZERO SENSE 

"Catch and release" of criminals is literally one of the very dumbest policies in all of recorded history, right up there with "defund the police" and similar half-baked ideas.  And the results of such no-accountability de facto tacit decriminalization of crimes big and small have sadly been predictable.

Only the most dyed-in-the-wool, super left-brained (and hare-brained), out-of-touch, ivory-tower academics and their acolytes could possibly think that such a real-life, literal "get out of jail free card" is somehow a good idea on balance.  People can argue "root cause theory" till they are blue in the face, but that does NOT somehow negate the non-root causes that clearly need to be tackled as well.  It's NOT an either/or situation, and clearly most of the root causes of crime are much harder and slower to solve.  Forest, meet trees.  And map, meet territory. 

Also, as much as we loathe victimless crime laws, per the late, great Peter McWilliams, author of Ain't Nobody's Business If You Do:  The Absurdity of Consensual Crimes in Our Free Society, that does NOT somehow imply a lax attitude towards real crimes (whether big or small, violent or not) that objectively harm (or unduly endanger) the person or property of nonconsenting others, or that otherwise violate the civil or human rights of others.  In other words, "Get tough on REAL crime" should really be the appropriate slogan here, something even the Libertarian Party has long agreed with.

(That is precisely where we at the TSAP decidedly part ways with the late criminologist James Q. Wilson, the main proponent of the "broken windows" theory, who we otherwise at least partially agree with.  In any case, the "broken windows" theory was ultimately inspired by the late sociologist Jane Jacobs.)

The TSAP has long compiled a list of promising ideas called "Smart On Crime", that should be food for thought indeed.  And guess what it does NOT include?  Catch and release, defund the police, or anything of the sort.  Focused deterrence actually does work, and these latest silly "new" (old) fads only monkeywrench and vitiate such a proven crime-fighting strategy. 

The one major city that bucked the disastrous trend recently was Dallas, Texas.  And not only did they NOT defund the police, they actually increased the use of smart policing tactics to target violent and serious crime.  And whaddya know, it worked.  So let's not throw out the baby with the bathwater now!

There is a strong inverse correlation between police numbers and crime.  Gee, who woulda thunk it?  In other news, water is wet, and the sun rises in the east.

And while the "deterrence" effect (whether general or specific) of incarceration is fairly weak, the "incapacitation" effect on crime is still fairly strong nonetheless, as Wilson famously noted long ago.  Meanwhile, it has long been known that the swiftness and certainty of punishment is far more important than severity is for effective deterrence.

And yes, the age-old correlation between poverty and crime, and also inequality and crime, is just as strong today as it has ever been.  Marcus Aurelius was right about that, both back then and now: "poverty is the mother of crime," and inequality is not far behind.  In the long run, any solutions that don't address poverty and inequality are simply not real solutions.  We certainly need a much better social welfare state, UBI, etc. among other things, to tackle that.  And of course, we must continue getting the lead out as well to further take a bite out of crime.

For example, street gangs (yes, even in today's flavor of Gangland Chicago) can be at least temporarily extirpated from an area by going RICO on them, that is, applying that law to them and vigorously enforcing it.  Many states, including Illinois, have their very own RICO laws as well, so they can do so even without any federal help.  However, such gangs will ultimately return and rise again if we don't also stamp out the conditions that cause such gangs in the first place.

That said, once again, it is not only root (or distal) causes that we should tackle, but also branch (or proximal) causes as well, as in practice the latter causes often get in the way of actually solving the former.  It's not either-or, and we can walk and chew gum at the same time.  Upstream AND downstream are the both important.  So what are we waiting for?

UPDATE:  The term "anarcho-tyranny" comes to mind.  While that term was (unfortunately) apparently coined, or at least popularized, by an infamous white supremacist guy back in the 1990s, and while I really don't like to willingly use the lingo of bigots of any kind, there is nonetheless no more suitable term than that for the current sorry state of affairs.  So, let's reclaim it for ourselves so the racists don't have exclusive use of such a useful term.  In Orwell's dystopian novel 1984, keep in mind that there was a "vast amount of criminality" that was openly tolerated by the dictatorship, ironically enough, so anarchy and tyranny are NOT mutually exclusive like many may think.  Dictatorships, tyrannies, and oligarchies can and do indeed exist without the rule of law.  It is a mutually-reinforcing textbook example of "Problem, Reaction, Solution".  And clearly, tyranny is always whimsical in practice.