The Cato Institute’s Doug Bandow slams Barack Obama for “attacking people for exercising their legal rights.”

What Obama did was to criticize the hedge fund managers who forced Chrysler into bankruptcy for doing something that, though legal, Obama (correctly) viewed as immoral. Is that really such a crazy course of action? A woman who cheats on her husband or a father who never reads to his kids is exercising his or her legal rights, but I think many would say it’s still appropriate to criticize such conduct as wrong. And the President of the United States is within his legal rights to make poor policy decisions, but of course he should still be criticized.

There’s a sense out there, however, that businesspeople should be exempted from the normal rules of society in which some things that are legal can also be wrong. Business decisions made by executives at ExxonMobil are imperiling the well-being of the entire planet but, hey, it’s just business. I think this makes no sense. It would seriously imperil liberty if you tried to make it illegal for people to do everything that’s wrong. But that means you have to be able to criticize people for doing stuff that’s wrong.

According to an increasingly popular conceit in American national security thinking, the phenomenon of “weak” or “failed” states is everywhere a threat to the United States. For example, here’s John Nagl and Brian Burton in The Washington Quarterly:

Trends like the youth bulge and urbanization in underdeveloped states and the proliferation of weapons and advanced technologies point to a future dominated by chaotic local insecurity and ‘‘non-traditional conflict’’ waged by non-state actors rather than confrontations between the armies and navies of nation-states.

This likely future of persistent low-intensity conflict around the globe suggests that U.S. interests are at risk not just from rising peer competitors but also from what has been called a ‘‘global security capacity deficit.’’ Gates recently warned that ‘‘the most likely catastrophic threats to our homeland, for example, an American city poisoned or reduced to rubble by a terrorist attack are more likely to emanate from failing states than from aggressor states.’’ As a result, the U.S. military is more likely to be called upon to conduct counterinsurgencies, intervene in civil strife and humanitarian crises, and rebuild nations than to fight mirror-image conventional forces.

Michael Cohen responds:

Some weak states have incubated global threats – obviously Afghanistan and Pakistan comes to mind. Others are responsible for regional instability (Somalia, Congo, Lebanon and North Korea). But the majority of failed states represent very little threat to America and to address Gates’s argument more directly, they are highly unlikely to be the source of a terrorist attack (particularly one involving WMD) against the United States (for example, Haiti, Sudan, Zimbabwe, Chad, Cote d’Ivorie, Burma, Uganda, Guinea, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka etc).

I would make a couple of further points. First, one needs to watch the use of relative terminology. It’s true that we’re more likely to be threatened by a terrorist attack launched from a weak or failing state than we are to fight a large-scale war against a conventional peer competitor. But that has a lot to do with the fact that it’s extraordinarily unlikely that we’ll fight a large-scale war against a conventional peer competitor. What’s more, we have good policy levers that have nothing to do with the military at our disposal to try to ensure that our relationship with China doesn’t deteriorate to that point. None of this speaks to the actual likelihood of a threat emerging from a failed state.

Another thing is that one shouldn’t assume that intervention in a state-failure scenario makes things better. America’s effort to “solve” the problem in Somalia around Christmas/New Year’s of 2006 made things worse. In particular, botched intervention is a good way to transform a situation form the kind of failed state scenario that’s not a problem for us into the sort of situation where you suddenly have a faction that’s hostile to the United States.

Last, people shouldn’t assume that yoking humanitarian goals to a security agenda is always such a great idea. I think sometimes that people who mostly just think it’s sad that living conditions in Haiti are so bad jump on this kind of bandwagon because they think that’s a good way to get more funding for their agenda. Ultimately, I think that’s very short-sighted. People who think we should be spending less on the military and more on non-military priorities—including helping people out who find themselves in sad situations—ought to say so, and make sure their members of congress hear about it.

Bruce Bartlett has a column lamenting the poor outlook for the Republican Party that concludes with this:

Eventually, Republicans will tire of being out of power just as Democrats did, and they will do what it takes to win. But I fear that Republicans will have to at least lose in 2010 and again in 2012 before they start to come to their senses. Perhaps by 2014, some leader with maturity, resources, vision and discipline will find a way of leading the GOP out of the wilderness. But I see no one even in a position to start that process today.

I think that’s probably right. Then again, I’m not sure that outlook is so bleak. After kinda sorta losing in 2000, some thought the lesson was that Democrats were way too liberal. Folks like Will Marshall and Mark Penn warned that they had to turn much more conservative in order to win elections. Their warnings went only semi-heeded and, consequently, Democrats lost ground in 2002 and lost more ground in 2004. But guess what? By 2008 they had strong congressional majorities and a popular new president ready to support universal health care, tough action to limit greenhouse gas pollution, a public more supportive than ever of equal rights for gays and lesbians, etc., etc.

Looking at the Republican side, the electoral map is just very bad for them in the 2010 Senate race no matter what they do. And the odds are that we’ll be in an economic recovery by 2012 that the voters will credit Obama for and he’ll get re-elected. But by 2014, the Senate electoral map will be bad for Democrats. Who wins in 2016? It has more to do with what’s happening in 2016 than with what the candidate says.

The problem with the conservative positions pushed by Bush and DeLay and Lott & McConnell and now McConnell & Lott and Boehner and Cantor and Pence isn’t that they’re “unelectable” positions it’s that they don’t work as a governing agenda. That’s bad for the country and also means that if they do get back into office, they’ll run things back into the ditch and probably get voted out again.

Via Calculated Risk:

The Miami real estate situation got totally crazy for a while. But Miami’s not Detroit; no reason to expect the city to enter long-term economic decline. If price/rent ratios start dropping below their historical level, they’re good investments, especially in the supply-constrained “near the ocean” locations.

(By the same token, not time to buy houses in New York)

I continue to feel that the House GOP’s impressive level of partisan unity hasn’t been explored to the extent that it should. You often hear it explained with reference to the fact that most members have uncompetitive, very conservative districts. Which is true enough. But most is not all. Take Ken Calvert, Dan Lungren, and Brian Billbray in California, for example. These guys all represent districts that Barack Obama carried in 2008 and they themselves won 51 percent, 49 percent, and 51 percent of the vote respectively in fairly close 2008 House races.

These are not people who can count on the angry anti-Obama minority to win elections for them. And John Boehner has little in the way of favors to hand out, while Nancy Pelosi is in a position to give them something to take back to their district at home in exchange for acquiring a veneer of bipartisan cover. And yet not a one of them—nor even a single House Republicans nationwide—could be induced to vote for the Obama Recovery Act or the Obama budget plan. It’s impressive. My best guess is that the Club for Growth has really put the fear of God into everyone, but maybe there’s more to it.