| Tuesday, October
22, 2002
I have put up a fairly
long letter and longer reply regarding the present danger over in mail.
I must not have been clear regarding responsibility for
securing one's computer from hackers: I never supposed that to be a legal
obligation.
Dear Jerry,
I've just read your column #267 and I cannot agree
on your pool example about user responsability on the fraudulent use of
their computer. Let me counter attack with an alternative example: Your
car. If your car is stolen and it is used for a crime you are not held
responsible even if you forgot to lock it. You can say owner was not
taking all the possible care when he forgot locking but the evil was on
the guys who stole it. You need an active role to stole a car (unless it
is same make and color as yours, it is parked on your parking slot and it
works with the same key and you happened not to double check the plate
number, and this has never happened to anybody I know of).
But of course this is just my opinion.
Take care,
Miguel Sanchez Valencia, Spain
If I leave my car unlocked in a place where it is likely
to be stolen, what is my moral situation? Certainly I am not as
culpable as those who stole it and used it in a hit and run; but I won't
feel good about the results, either. I will certainly wish I had locked
it, even if it is returned undamaged. That is really what I meant to say.
I wrote this earlier, but it still seems worth putting up:
The
DC Sniper
By all accounts, this lone gunman has nearly shut
down the east coast. There is an air of panic, and the military is being
asked to help find this man before he single-handedly causes a major
depression.
That’s
pure panic, of course. I’m working away from my desk so I have no way to
go on line and no library: I don’t have real data to hand. Still, we can
do some numeric analysis.
I assume
there are about 50 million people in the affected target area, and that 2%
or more are engaged in the kind of activities that put them at risk of
being shot by the sniper. That means that at any given time, 1 million
people will be shopping, out on parking lots, in school yards, at
convenience stores, filling their automobiles, driving busses: doing
things that expose them to the possibility that the sniper will get them.
So far he has got no more than one a day (fewer, actually) so your chances
of being shot when engaged in your normal activities are one in a million
on any given day, or roughly 300 in a million for a year. That’s 0.0003.
The US has about 50,000 traffic fatalities a year, in a population of
about 250 million at risk, for a probability of about 0.0002 that you’ll
be killed in a given year. In other words, if this guy is allowed to
continue his activities unmolested from now on, he’s about as likely to
get you if you live in his target area and take no precautions, as any
citizen including you is likely to die in traffic. We find one of those
risks acceptable, and not a threat to the economy. Why is the other?
Now I know,
that’s a callous way to look at it, and I certainly don’t mean that we
ought not be concerned, or doing all we can to catch this pathetic proper
Charlie; my real point is that it’s pretty goofy to shut down the
economy because of him.
And, in my
judgment, the best way to catch this guy is to call on the militia: get
lots of armed citizens out in shopping malls, at filling stations, on
busses, anywhere he is likely to strike, so that if you hear a shot you
can do more than look around for a pencil and paper to make notes on what
you saw. Make permits to carry weapons available to anyone you don’t
have reason to deny them to, which is to say established adult registered
voters of the area with no criminal records.
Do that and he won’t get his 300 for the year. And for that
matter, you may cut down on the base murder rate for DC, Maryland, and
Virginia, which I suspect is greater than 300 a year…
As to why
resident voters, it ought to be obvious: if we believe in a republic, we
believe in a republic, and if we trust people to vote we ought to trust
them with weapons; if we wouldn’t trust them with weapons, what are we
doing letting them vote?
Poll
Taxes, Property, and Literacy
The original
republic was not a democracy, even in theory: nearly every state had a
property qualification for voting. It wasn’t a heavy property
qualification: in one well known Virginia case it was satisfied by a
“house” four feet by three feet by three feet high which was carried
onto the lot by five men the night before the voter registered; but there
was a property qualification.
That
didn’t really vanish until the 1960’s. I recall when I registered to
vote in the State of Washington these many years ago, I was a resident of
the state because my parents were then residents of the Territory of
Alaska (a complex arrangement which needn’t be of concern here); but
although I could vote in all the political elections, not being a taxpayer
I could not vote in property tax elections. Only taxpayers could vote in
property tax elections. Taxation with representation indeed.
There also
used to be poll taxes, although not in Washington. They were fairly common
in the East and Old South: to register to vote you had to pay the modern
equivalent of about Twenty Dollars a year (some poll tax districts had as
high as the modern equivalent of about $100 a year, but those were rare).
They also had literacy requirements: you had to demonstrate either school
credentials or take a fairly simple literacy test. Now of course some
states used these reasonable requirements in an unreasonable manner,
enforcing them against blacks while seldom enforcing them against whites,
and in some cases using them to deny blacks any chance of voting (a
standard joke was that blacks got their writing test with wax paper and a
ball point pen). The remedy for that, it seems to me, was attention to
enforcement, not abolishing the requirements. Incidentally, many western
states deliberately did not have literacy requirements, although a few of
those did have poll taxes: you didn’t have to be able to read, but you
did have to care enough to pay a couple of bucks.
We used to
have restrictions on voting by felons, and by paupers: if you were a
criminal, or were on the government dole and paid no taxes, you didn’t
vote. That’s pretty well gone too. Yet one wonders if all this
egalitarianism in voting is a good thing: if a person on the dole ought to
be allowed to increase the dole; and if a person who doesn’t care enough
about the vote to pay the cost of a package of cigarettes or a bottle of
wine for the privilege really values it enough to be entrusted with it.
It’s all
moot now, of course. We have no restrictions on voting: not residency, not
paying taxes, not even proper identification seems to be required now. If
voting is to be done, then everyone ought to take part in it. And the
election arguments make less sense every year, so that they are now almost
exclusively sound bites devoid of meaning. This is called democracy in
action.
The result,
of course, is that elections are decided by fund raising: the one who can
afford the most repetitions of a meaningless slogan is likely the one who
will win, and incumbents have enormous advantages over challengers.
Incumbent safe seat politicians who can raise a lot of money establish
fiefdoms and have other politicians as clients: you vote my way and I’ll
see that money flows to your campaign war chest. Cross me and I’ll
finance your opponent. This greatly increases their ability to raise
campaign funds. That always did happen, but it’s a lot more prevalent now
that rational debate is such a small factor in deciding elections.
If you
establish a democracy, you will in due season reap the harvests of a
democracy, said Disraeli. Some of those harvests are bitter indeed. And
there never was a democracy that didn’t commit suicide, said the
Framers. There are some now which have not perished; but they’re not
very old. Even Switzerland had a civil war in 1875 or so.
There are
several forms of democratic suicide. The worst end with a tyrant. The
lucky ones end with a decent emperor. Of course that’s not assurance
either: Aurelius was followed by his no good son, who was followed by a
martinet killed by the Praetorians, who was followed by a man who bought
the empire at auction from the Praetorians, who was followed by Septimius
Severus. Severus, dying, told his sons “Stay together, pay the soldiers,
and take no heed for the people.” They fought with each other and
didn’t pay the soldiers…
But all that
was generations from Caesar Augustus. Empires can be magnificent, and
imperial citizens can be happy and proud. Herman Kahn thought Empire the
natural state of mankind. He may have been right.
I do point
out that a real republic would have no problem in dealing with the DC
sniper. But that would require trusting the citizens to keep and bear
arms, and that we dare not do. We would rather trust the expertise of the
BATF and the FBI, whose competence no one can question. Relying on
experts, rather than self-governing citizens, is a mark of empire. We have
seen much of it in the past decades, so much so that a generation has
grown up never knowing what self government is like. We shall see that
trend continue.
====
Note: I now
understand that the sniper has told police that he will target children.
While this make things more horrible, the odds aren't much changed: a
youngster in the target area is in about as much danger from traffic and
other such menaces as from the sniper. On the other hand, parents are
going to worry about their children: it's one thing to say "I am not
going to let this guy change my life," and another to put your
children to even a small increased risk for the sake of a principle.
Statistically,
it's safe enough. But that's small comfort to those who live in that area.
Coming up:
Is Iraq the right war for an empire?
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