I’ve now worked through the backlog of AFR opinion pieces. The most recent one to be posted is A deal not in our interest from 30 January 2003, dealing with the proposed Free Trade Agreement between Australia and the US. The main point is

On the Australian side, there are hardly any traditional barriers left to remove. We still have tariffs on textiles, clothing, footwear and motor vehicles, but these industries are just as beleaguered in the US as they are here, and any impact on trade will be small.

What, then, does the US want from us? One issue stressed by Trade Representative Robert Zoellick is ‘intellectual property’. To see what this might mean in practice, we need to look at the case of Eldred vs Ashcroft, decided recently by the US Supreme Court.

This case was a constitutional challenge to a recent Act of Congress which extended the term of copyright protection from fifty years after the death of the author to seventy years (ninety-five for corporations). The ‘Copyright Term Extension Act’ is often referred to as the ‘Mickey Mouse Act’ because of the observation that the term of copyright is extended whenever the Disney copyright on Mickey is about to lapse.

The constitutional challenge failed, but the case did elicit an unusual degree of interest from American economists , seventeen of whom submitted a brief to the Supreme Court opposing the Act. The list is striking not only because of the eminence of the signatories (five Nobel Prizes and more to come) but because it represents all shades of economic opinion from free-market luminaries like Buchanan, Coase and Friedman to interventionists like Akerlof and Arrow.

Australia still has the term of copyright fixed at fifty years after the author’s death and publishers interested in making public-domain works accessible to the general public are increasingly taking advantage of this. There can be little doubt that the negotiating demands of the US in any agreement will include an extension of our copyright terms.

Jason Soon commented on this piece when it came out, referring to me and Kim Weatherall (who shares these concerns)as ‘Cassandras of academe’. As I’m sure Jason is aware, Cassandra was subject to the curse that her prophecies would be always right and always ignored.

Update Scott Wickstein responds, arguing that bad copyright laws would be a small price to pay for “20 years worth easy access to US markets for our farmers? ” On the implausible assumption that the US will in fact offer this, he may be right. But Scott’s argument reinforces my main point, which is in the opening para of the article

Advocates of agreements for freer trade have had an easy run in Australia in recent decades. In much of the world, such agreements are seen as a form of barter – we give up our trade barriers in return for you giving up yours. By contrast, standard trade theory tells us that, as a general rule, we benefit from reducing our trade barriers regardless of what other countries do.

In this case, as Scott concedes, we are essentially engaged in barter. Fine if we get a good deal, but on past experience of US-Australia agreements, I doubt it. Ken Parish who’s moved yet again (making the shift to MT that I only talk about), has more useful discussion on this.

From the AFR on 16 January 2003, a piece called Our worst policy failure. Concluding para is:

At no time since the election of the current government has unemployment been an issue of real concern. Second-order trivia like the GST and waterfront reform have had far more attention. And, sadly, the Australian public has become inured to chronic mass unemployment. In the absence of a severe economic downturn, the government will pay no real political price for its worst policy failure.

In my last post, commenting on Tony Blair’s moral case for war against Saddam, I accepted Blair’s claim that Saddam’s war of aggression against Iran, involving the extensive use of poison gas and the loss of hundreds of thousand of lives was an indefensible crime against humanity. But it can be defended, as witness this counterargument:

Opposition to communism and the rampant Islamic fundamentalism of the Ayatollah Khomeini might actually have required an expedient war. The real world must never intrude into Quigginland. All must be black and white, no room for shades of grey or difficult moral choices where evil will be done either way – we simply avert our eyes and ignore the evil flowing from the choice that our ideological prejudice dictates should have been taken.

OK, I cheated a bit. In the original, this was a defence of the US alliance with Saddam in the war against Iran, and had the phrase expedient alliance in place of expedient war. Still the defence works just as well for Saddam as for Reagan and Bush Sr, and the basic point is pretty clear. If you want to justify a war against Iraq don’t do as Blair did and invoke considerations of morality. Above all, don’t do as Quiggin did and try to assess what a moral case for war would really involve.

PS: In the continued absence of Haloscan, Ken and I have ratcheted up the thermostat, to make up for the absence of the redhot barbs that normally fill our comments threads. Civilised discussion will resume shortly.

Like millions of others, I went to a peace rally yesterday. There were about 50 000 people in Brisbane*. I think it’s clear that the case for an immediate war aimed at getting rid of Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction has not convinced the majority of Australians. That could change, given new evidence, but it’s clearly going to take a lot more than we have seen so far.

[* Crowd estimates are always tricky. The march took about an hour to pass any given point. Assuming 15 people per second passed each point (the marchers were about 15 abreast) that would make 3600*15= 54 000.]

Faced with similar protests in Britain, Blair switched to the moral case that has been his primary motivation all along – that Saddam is an evil dictator who has caused immense suffering in a sequence of wars and that his overthrow would be a blessing. This is a strong case, but it implies a totally different approach than that adopted over the last year.

A starting point would be an admission by the US government that it actively assisted or passively encouraged Saddam in the commission of his worst single crime – the war of aggression he launched against Iran, in which he made extensive use of chemical weapons. When Blair correctly says that Saddam’s wars have killed more people than were marching in London, he should be remined of this. I don’t say that the past crimes of the US government mean that it should not do anything about Saddam now, but an open declaration of the US role and an apology for US complicity are necessary if the moral case against Saddam is to have any standing.

The second requirement is for some sort of just basis for asserting that a particular leader is a criminal who deserves to be overthrown. We have such a basis in the International Criminal Court, in which Britain is a participant. Blair should demand that Saddam be tried before this court. Of course, a precondition is that the US should drop its own objections.

Third, there is the problem of equal justice.The moral case against Saddam is compromised by US complicity in the occupation of Palestine. If Bush were to demand acceptance by both sides in this dispute of a peace plan similar to that put up by Clinton and back his demand by a threat of sanctions and a willingness to enforce an agreed peace, the moral case against Saddam would be lot stronger.

Finally, there is the problem of multiple agendas. A moral case for war can be made only by forgoing all attempts at seeking strategic or economic side-benefits. Yet many (most) of the US commentators supporting war are pointing to such benefits as a primary or secondary motivation. A moral case would require a clear commitment not to use Iraqi oil to the benefit of the US, not to use Iraqi territory as a base for further military action, not to make side deals with countries like Turkey etc. So far none of this has been forthcoming.

To summarise, a moral case for war requires clean hands. Arguably Blair has clean hands on this issue. Bush certainly does not.

Update Ken Parish responds, missing the point pretty thoroughly in my view. I’m not claiming that the moral case for war is the only possible one. War can be justified as a defensive response to aggression. In fact, the interpetation of international law prevailing until very recently suggested that this is the only justifiable ground for war. In this case, the considerations I’ve set out above are largely irrelevant.

A second possible case for war has arisen recently, namely that clear and direct defiance of the UN could justify military actions to enforce its resolutions. Since this case lowers the bar for war substantially, it requires convincing evidence. At the moment, the evidence hasn’t been enough to convince anyone who wasn’t already committed to war. In particular, only a handful of members of the UNSC accept it. This could change, for example, if Saddam refuses to destroy missiles, but the need for a clear case can’t be brushed aside on the basis that the US wants to fight before the weather gets too hot.

The claim that there is a moral case for war is quite different to either of the two considered previously. This claim is that war can be justified simply on the basis that the government to be overthrown is a bad one. I’m sympathetic to this claim in principle, but it’s obviously an idea that needs to be handled with extreme care. It must require more than a decision by one government that some other government ought to be overthrown. That’s why I suggested a range of considerations that would apply in this case, broadly summed up as the need for ‘clean hands’.

Ken argues that all of these conditions are totally unrealistic. I’d argue on the contrary that few of them would be particularly problematic for Blair. He’s joined the ICC, supports pressure on Israel for a peace with the Palestinians, does not appear to be seeking strategic or commercial advantage and so on.

Ken argues for a consequentialist justification of war, namely that it is justified whenever the anticipated benefits outweigh the costs. Although he covers himself with the caveat ‘That sort of exercise is not without its own difficulties when many of the consequences can’t easily be measured with precision in advance’ he doesn’t ask who is to make the judgement. The implicit answer is that the government that decides to go to war should make it. I’d suggest that, given this answer, every war in history would pass Ken’s test.

Haloscan, my commenting facility, is still out of action. The site says they ran into problems while trying to fix the server. I have a bad feeling about this, and I wish there was an easy way to save and archive my comments. However, there is some progress – comments are now readable although posting is still disabled.

For the moment, Monday Message Board is moving to manual backup. Email me your thoughts on any topic, and I’ll post them in batches as I get time.

QED by Richard Feynmann explains the basic principles behind quantum electrodynamics without any of the nasty integrals required to actually work anything out. Quantum theory has been the subject of a lot of confusion and outright mysticism starting with Heisenberg, but for anyone comfortable with probability theory there’s nothing fundamentally counterintuitive about it.

Subatomic phenomena are better described in terms of probability distributions than as miniature versions of macroscopic phenomena like waves and particles. Taking a ‘particle-like’ observation amounts to collapsing a distribution to a point mass in one dimension, leaving an uncertain distribution in another dimension. So far so good. It would be nice to actually be able to work this kind of thing out, and if I ever have a few years to spare, I’ll learn this.

I’m also converting my CD collection to MP3 files for my iPod. I want to move on the more challenging problem of my old LPs next. My turntable just died, but I was pleasantly surprised to discover that Tandy’s still stocks them at very reasonable prices. Anyway, if anyone has experience of converting LPs to MP3s, particularly using a Mac, they’re welcome to email me.

The comments thread has been particularly lively and informative over the past few days. So of course, Haloscan is having one of its now-routine episodes of comment-chewing. On past experience, the comments will reappear later, but comments posted in the interim (that is, now) will be lost forever.

I’ve been putting off moving to MT, despite some valuable advice and offers of help, but I won’t be able to do so much longer. Once I’ve got the main website transition completed and the backlog of files down to a manageable level, I plan to make the shift.

One thing that interests me in discussions of the UNSC is that France, China and Russia are always mentioned as having veto power. But no-one ever mentions the possibility that the US may end up vetoing a UN resolution, say, one calling for another four weeks of inspections.

In a series of recent posts, Ken Parish has attacked critics of George Bush and his Administration as “anti-American”. The targets have included the Labor Opposition, columnists like Ken Davidson, and even Americans like Maureen Dowd.

A major problem with this claim is that most though not all, critics of the Bush Administration were, and are, favorably inclined to its predecessor, at least as far as foreign policy is concerned. Conversely, attacks on Bush pale into insignificance by comparison with the vitriol poured on Clinton by his domestic and foreign opponents. As an example, Ken cites a Bunyip post, which attacks Clinton, as the source for his claim that Davidson’s piece, which praises Clinton and relies primarily on American sources, is “anti-American”.

It seems as if Ken’s steadily hardening pro-war position has clouded his judgement on this one. Only a couple of months ago, Ken himself was writing

I’m not usually impressed by Maureen Dowd’s journalism. However, her New York Times piece on President Bush’s appointment of Henry Kissinger to”investigate” America’s preparedness and actions leading up to September 11 is an exception. It’s succinct, well written and compelling.  I must admit I had harboured mixed feelings about the Bush administration until now (despite Paul Krugman’s convincing demolition of the Bush tax cuts), but in my book a government that associates itself with this cynical, thoroughly evil old man has definitively characterised its own values and aspirations.

The fact is that, for many opponents of war with Iraq, including me, distrust of the current Administration is one of the main issues. I simply don’t believe that the stated motives for the war are the real ones, and therefore that the promised outcomes will actually be delivered. By stigmatising all criticism of Bush as “anti-American”, Ken is stacking the deck in favour of war.

A separate claim is that, even if criticism of the current US Administration is legitimate in general, it’s not legitimate for an Australian government or alternative government. The difficulty here is that it’s generally accepted that Howard is going to do whatever the US Administration tells him to in relation to Iraq, and that any Australian government would probably be in the same position. In these circumstances, to say that criticism of the Administration is off-limits for Australians is to accept the role of a client state. Maybe that’s realistic, but it’s also humiliating.

Ina recent post on economists opposing Bush’s tax cuts, I predicted that few free-market economists would line up to support Bush’s budget. As “Anonymous Coward”* points out, I was way off the mark. The US Treasury has just released a statement by 250 supporters, including big names like Feldstein, Boskin, Mankiw and Meltzer. Since Feldstein has in the past been a big supporter of the ‘crowding out’ hypothesis, I’ll be interested to see if he puts forward a supporting analysis.

* This is the default identity from Slashdot and elsewhere, which has been popping up a bit in my comments thread. I’m going to treat AC as one person for the moment, but who knows. It could be yet another manifestation of the many-avatared Imre-Gudgeon-Bunyip-Parish complex, in which some commentators have sought to implicate me as well.

Update I wasn’t 100 per cent wrong. As the NYT points out, there are currently 5 Nobel winners at Chicago, none of whom signed either ad.