Image source: indiatogether.org

To be clear, the Lokpal Bill (Ombudsman Bill) proposed by the lawmakers in India as a mechanism to fight corruption is a sham and is designed to encourage, rather than discourage corruption. In the lawmaker’s version of the Lokpal bill, the office of the ombudsperson is appointed by the government (at its own pleasure) and the office will serve only in an advisory capacity with no powers to actually pursue corruption charges in court. Furthermore, the jurisdiction of the office will be limited to politicians and not the civil servant and other officers who are responsible for running the government machinery; of course, the office will not have the authority to investigate the Prime Minister. Also, while the office of the ombudsperson do not have the authority to actually press charges against the politicians they deem corrupt, they do have the authority to penalize the citizens who make the corruption accusation (in the event that the office finds their target of investigation innocent). [source: India Against Corruption]

It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that this bill is a toothless tiger which will only foster the moral bankruptcy and the rampant corruption that is the Indian government.

Now, we come to the Jan Lokpal bill that is being proposed by the India Against Corruption lobby. The Jan Lokpal bill proposes that the office of the ombudsperson be an independent institution much like the supreme court or the election commission. It is to be appointed by a selection committee consisting of judges, ‘meritorious’ citizens who have won awards like the Nobel prize, Magsasay award, the Election Commission, Auditor General, and others. The bill proposes that central vigilance commission (which investigates corruption by the civil servants and government offices and departments) and the division of the Central Bureau of Investigation be folded into the office of the ombudsperson, so that there is a single office that investigates the charges of corruption in all branches and levels of the government. The bill also proposes that the office be an investigatory body with authority for law enforcement which allows the office to pursue criminal charges against the individuals who the office finds guilty. The bill also sets a time limit of one year to complete the investigation and one year for filing charges against the accused if sufficient evidence is available. The bill also have provisions for whistle blower protection, and a provision to recover the money or value lost by the government from the individual who was found guilty of corruption (which resulted in the aforementioned loss). [source: India Against Corruption]

On the face of it, the Jan Lokpal bill looks like a great idea, but reflecting on it, I am disturbed by the assumptions made in the bill. My objections are a little different from the kind I have seen online. For example, here are objections by [Rohan], [Offstumped], and [Business Standard]. I have both practical and philosophical objections. I present one of each.

On a practical level, the bill says little to address the issue of “who watches the watchman”. How do you ensure that the integrity of the ombudsperson’s office is not compromised, and if it is compromised, then how do you recognize and then fix it? Given the level of corruption in India, this is a real concern. Until this issue is addressed sufficiently, I am not too comfortable throwing my support behind it.

On a philosophical level, I have deeper concerns. The office proposed by the Jan Lokpal bill is a meritocratic institution which monitors a the government, a democratic institution. To put it differently, the bill makes a democratic institution accountable not to the people who voted, but to a meritocratic institution which can potentially exert it’s influence on the outcomes of the governance. The risk here is that such a meritocratic institution could develop the attitude of “people don’t know what they want, but we know what’s good for the people”, and use it’s authority to enforce an agenda that might not be the will of the people.

While I grant you that the current “democracy” in the India is really plutocracy in disguise, simply making it answerable to a meritocracy cannot be a solution to the problem at hand.

IMHO, the solution to this problem of corruption can only come from democracy itself. Not because democracy is somehow sacred, but because the institution that is corrupt is supposed to be democratic in the first place. Initiatives like “I Paid A Bribe” is a great example of such efforts. Another example of involving the citizenry was proposed by India’s chief economic advisor Kaushik Babu in which he proposed decriminalizing bribe giving and keep bribe-taking a crime. This will provide an incentive for the bribe giver to not conceal the fact that the bribe was given and even co-operate to ensure that the bribe taker is caught.
I wish I had something more constructive to offer, but unfortunately I don’t.

UPDATE: Realitycheck provides credible objections to the Jan Lokpal bill..

Recently, Jon Stewart did his piece “I give up” on the fact that while the conservative political machine has been painting the public workers (like teachers and firemen) as the greedy ones who are bleeding the nation dry, in reality it is corporations like GE who are the problem because despite a $9B profit, GE paid $0 federal income tax and got a $3.2B tax benefit. Now, it is considered common or ‘folk’ knowledge that corporations exploit all kinds of tax loopholes and lobby heavily to ensure that tax laws leave open several such loopholes to be exploited by these corporations. So why are Stewart and other so-called pundits (including news organizations) ‘noticing’ this only now and then pretending to be salient critics of such incongruities while at the same time depending on, and profiting from, the very same incongruities.  This is a real conflict of interest! One that hasn’t been adequately explained. My discussion on Facebook yielded the following.

Acting as an apologist for Stewart and co, it may be argued that while they do not contribute anything for affecting a change or reform, at least they enlighten us on how we are being screwed over. Many times we already know of it, and at other times it is news. But through it all, at least we are laughing. Then again, isn’t it a little bit like Elle Driver reading to Budd “Sidewinder” about the effects of the venom of a Black Mamba, in Kill Bill Vol. 2, after the Black Mamba has bitten him?

Consider the following hypothesis: This country has been and continues to be run by corporations. The political parties and the politicians are simply the means by which the corporations accomplish this task. There is little by means of democracy or “the system” that can be done to change this fact. So the only way out is perhaps a revolution. And the existing power brokers want to ensure that it never happens. They do this by drugging the entire population, intellectually speaking, of course.

The population in question can be broadly classified as the “vulgar” (and by vulgar I mean “Of or associated with the great masses of people”) or the “intelligentsia“. The vulgar have the numbers and the ability to affect such a revolution, but they lack the knowledge and understanding to accomplish this; the intelligentsia, on the other hand, have the knowledge and the intellect to use the abilities of the vulgar to affect the revolution. So together, the population can make the change. But they will not, by design. And here’s why.

Glenn Beck, Bill O’Reilly, and others serve as the ”opiate of the vulgar” in ensuring that the masses focus their frustrations, anger, and action against all the wrong issues and attribute the problems to all the wrong reasons. Simultaneously, Stewart, Colbert, and others serve as the “opiate of the intelligentsia” by convincing their audience to simply resign to the status quo and not advocate for any change. Between the two, the existing power structures ensure perpetuation.

Take any religious moral codex and it will emphasize of forgiving, and more about about forgiving even though one should not forget. This mantra worked well for, well, hundreds or even thousands of years, but now it seems to be coming under increasing attack. That attacks comes from the most unlikely source — the Internet!

Over the millenia, we (and by we, I mean human kind) have been able to forgive and let people start over mostly because we can forget. That is, we could forgive misdeeds because even though we remembered them at that time, we knew that our memory was fallible and so we would eventually forget the misdeeds. What’s the point of being unforgiving about something you don’t even remember? There is a lot of value in such forgiving because it makes you life a lot easier. It helps you be happy rather than be depressed by everything that has gone wrong because of someone else. In the end, if you did not forgive, then you will ending up hating a lot of people and not really know why! A tragic way to lead a life indeed.

Surprisingly, the Internet has changed all that because the Internet never forgets. So the traditional incentive to forgive (namely, that you will eventually forget it, so what’s the point in holding on to a grudge) is no longer there. Facebook, Google, Blogs, Twitter, message boards, discussion forums, all of them chronicle your life in a non-volatile fashion to enable you to recall everything about your life if you choose put your life up online. As it turns out, a lot of people put their life up online. So there you have it, now if you want to forgive, it would have to be true forgiveness, despite the fact that you will probably never forget.

How many people have such moral fortitute to be able to forgive despite not being able to forget?  Not many, I hazard to guess. In many ways,  forgetting may be viewed as our biological adaptation for a happier life. We have successfully invalidated that adaptation with the Internet. Now what?

The irony in this deal is that social networking, a mechanism created by technology to keep us happy by keeping us from becoming isolated has precipitated a side-effect that is now actively undermining the very some thing it strived to foster to begin with!

And I am not making all this up. This is not some high flying philosophical/spiritual rant with no material underpinning. Just take look at the news over the past year. Look at how many people we fired because of an indisrection that was years and years old and was discovered only recently thanks to Facebook. Consider the well-trained teachers who can now no longer teach because at some low point in their lives, they were forced to become an exotic dancer to pay their tuition and fees (Why? Because someone took her photograph during a bachlor party and put it up online). I can go on and on with more realistic (and potentially true) illustrations; but you get the point.

So now the question is, what are you prepared to truly forgive despite never forgeting. And this is not for any altruistic motive, but for a very selfish one. You happiness. Do you value your happiness enough to let someone else off the hook? Are you willing to forgive and never forget?

P.S.: Inspired by a post from Patrix and an NY Times article.

Even though there is a lot of noise about privacy issues, there isn’t really anyone with a clear picture on where things are, where they will be heading, where they should be heading, and how do we as individuals adapt to these changes. I think the problem is that of methodology. People are trying to solve new-age problems with old-age tools; it’s not going to work. In this post, I attempt to explain my foregoing sentences.

Fatalists and conservatives. Let us take a look at the two major camps on the issue of privacy today. On one side you have the likes of Mark Zukerberg, David Thomson, and Samy Kamkar who believe that privacy is dead (the fatalists), and on the other side you have the likes of Future of Privacy Forum and Bruce Schneier who believe that maintaining our privacy is only a matter of setting up the right legal/economic framework of incentives and disincentives within the present (and future) context (the conservatives).

Both camps have valid points. Despite all the brouhaha about privacy issues with facebook, facebook continues to add more users, and current users continue to treat facebook as their repository of their social life and social interactions. So maybe privacy really is dead! But the very fact that there is such a backlash reveals the fissure in society where you have a significant faction that jealously guards many of its actions and its information, but finds that it is not able to maintain its privacy because ‘other entities’ (friends, banks, credit card companies, and such) are making them public. And there are still others who simply do not realize that what they think is private really is not. So the question is, what is the state of the art on this issue?

Privacy vs. Security. The first problem that you encounter when trying to answer that question is that there no common understanding of what privacy really is. Often people bleed their concerns of security into the issue of privacy. This is muddying the waters to the point where no coherent narrative emerges. While security is and should always be a grave concern, it an orthogonal issue to privacy. One possible consequence of loss of privacy is that the security of our property and resources is at jeopardy, but that is not a basis to conflate privacy with security. There should be separate discussions on each issue. They may complement each other but one should not supplement the other. Remember, a secure life does not guarantee a private life!

Privacy through public obscurity. Now that we know we talking exclusively about privacy and not security, we can move forward. In the past privacy has been protected largely due to the technological limitations that made several tasks intractable. Such intractability lead to privacy through public obscurity. For example, before the advent of telegraph and telephone, there was very little to worry about legitimate information about your activities (that you deem private) to your relatives in a different state. Why? Because of what I like to call Chinese-Whispers effect. But that changes with the ubiquity of telephones. Similarly, before the advent of the internet, at any point in your life, you were free to ‘reinvent’ yourself by simply moving to a new town, getting a new job and simply not citing individuals from your old life as references. There was very little anyone could reasonably do to dig up your past life (of course, you could always hire a private-eye, but that would constitute an unreasonable effort).

In fact, the privacy of your online communications with your bank are established by privacy through public obscurity. Worried? Don’t be, not for now at least. All `secure’ online communications use what is called public-key cryptography which involves dealing with numbers that have 100-200 digit prime numbers as their factors and encrypting messages with these numbers. In order to decrypt the message, one has to be able to factorize the large number into its constituent large prime numbers. The fastest-to-date mechanism to factorize a number is still by brute-force, and hence intractable. For even the fastest computers, this task could take years, by which time the contents of your private communication will be (hopefully) irrelevant. Thus, privacy through public obscurity.

I bring up the example of public-key encryption for a reason: the task of factorizing large numbers, although intractable right now, might not be so in the future (it wont be because the computer got faster, it will be because either quantum computers become a reality, or the answer to the famous P=NP problem in computer science is the affirmative). If that happens, then what do you think society’s response will be? Do you do expect two camps: one that says cryptography is dead, and another one that says all mechanisms to factorize numbers should be outlawed or disincentivised some how? Of course not. That’s an absurd proposition! The response will be to build a better cryptographic technique that works despite the state of the art.

We are facing a similar situation with privacy today, and the two camps that I referred to earlier are not helping. The fact remains that these days more often than not someone is hearing a tree fall in the forest, and so more trees are making a sound when they fall. So how do we deal with it?

First, learn to give up some of your privacy. Technology has made a lot of tasks tractable, and our physical and mental abilities and faculties are not evolving at a rate to match the pace of technology. Consequently, we are not able to make all our actions intractable to the new technology. So we have to give up some of our privacy. While this may be a ghastly notion for people in the western hemisphere, it is surprisingly common for societies in the eastern hemisphere to trade privacy for social support structure, security, and (more controversially) for happiness. Much like we have given up privacy for air flights but not for bus or train journeys, we may have to give up privacy in certain aspects of your life that we had otherwise considered to be private.

As for the natural follow-up question, what aspect of our privacy do we have to give up, I honestly don’t know. My speculations and proposals here are of methodological nature. I am not answering questions. I am just trying to figure out what the right questions to ask are! Isn’t that the first step in arriving at a resolution to our privacy issues?

Second, indulge in information overload. The less information you give out, the more useful every extra bit of information about you is. Inevitably, despite your best efforts, more information about you will leak out. So how do you counter that? With information overload. Take Hasan Elahi as a classic example. After he was erroneously put on the FBI terrorist watch list, and he had to endure a gruelling questioning by the FBI that took up hours of his time and ultimately to no one’s benefit, he decide to turn the tables on FBI. He put up a website called Tracking Transience where he has up up pictures, videos, and all sorts of evidence of where he has been and what he has been doing every hour of every day! Since there is already so much information about him available, any additional information about him is not so useful any more. Curiously, he doesn’t appear in any of this photographs. He is one behind the camera. So in a sense although he has given you so much information about him, he really hasn’t given you anything that is remarkably useful. Paradoxically, by revealing so much about himself online, he has secured his privacy. [For details, visit: http://memes.org/tracking-transience-hasan-elahi]

Ok, so Tracking Transience works for Hasan, what about the rest of us? Again, I am only showing you where to being asking the right questions; I do not have answers for you.

Are there any more tools of this or different kind that we can employ? Arguably, yes. One needs to look harder, and looks at different places. The new tools are different in kind, and presumably, in an ironic twist, an artefact the technology that has precipitated the issue of privacy in the first place.

In conclusion, my argument simply is that you cannot use old tools of fatalism, legal recourse, and economic regulation to frame the debate of privacy and expect a resolution. They are simply the wrong tools for the job! I will wrap this post up by continuing with the metaphor with which I started this article: if the tree falls in the forest and there are people to hear it, then let them hear it, but make sure that every minute sound made by the tree and the trees around it are perpetually amplified and broadcast to where the sound made by the falling tree become noise and simply irrelevant!

Here is the first video of the 12 [link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kBdfcR-8hEY]

www.youtube.com/watch?v=kBdfcR-8hEY

The resolution essentially says that the US Justice Systems are too irrepairably broken to admit a fair and just death penalty. In its own words:

.. more fundamentally Section 210.6 is simply inadequate to address the endemic flaws of the current system. Section 210.6, which in many respects provided the template for contemporary state capital schemes, represents a failed attempt to rationalize the administration of the death penalty and, for the reasons we discuss in greater detail below, its adoption rested on the false assumption that carefully-worded guidance to capital sentencers would meaningfully limit arbitrariness and discrimination in the administration of the American death penalty.

It lays out six important reasons for such disrepair [sourced from the actual text of the resolution (in PDF)]:

1. Section 210.6 advocates for an individualized determination of a crime (specifically murder, under certain circumstances) to be considered for death penalty as appropriate sentencing. However, several states have statutory identification of which murders should command the death penalty, and furthermore, such statuary discretion leaves the jury with a ‘formula’ to award the death sentence (rather than individualized determination).
2. Furthermore, the wide scope of murders/crimes that are currently eligible to extract the death sentence, under various state laws, is antithetical to the “spirit” and gravity of the punishment. The problem is that no state has successfully confined the death penalty to a narrow band of the most aggravated cases. Death eligibility in prevailing statutes remains breathtakingly broad, as aggravating
   factors or their functional equivalent often cover the spectrum of many if not most murders.
3. There is an almost unforgivable racial bias in the ratio of the number of minorities sentenced to death compared to the total number. Persistent efforts by various groups to address this issue has yielded little fruitful results in terms of a legal remedy to this issue.
4. The cost of administering the death-penalty is extremely high, and combined with the ineptitude of the defendants’ legal representation, the state incurs high costs in putting people to death who, arguably, do not deserve the punishment in the first place. The resolution noted: “Despite the fact that “effective assistance of counsel” is a recognized constitutional right, the scope of the right and the nature of the remedy have precluded the courts from being able to ensure the adequacy of representation in capital cases.”
5. In light of DNA evidence and upcoming forensic technologies, the acceptable risk of having some persons sentenced to death later, and perhaps too late, be shown to not have committed the crime for which they were sentenced. This issues is highlighted in House v. Bell, in which, the petitioner sought federal review with substantial new evidence challenging the accuracy of his murder conviction, including DNA evidence conclusively establishing that semen recovered from the victim’s body actually came from the victim’s husband, as well as evidence of a confession to the murder by the husbandthe Tennessee Supreme Court refused to consider whether new DNA evidence presented during death penalty appeals necessitates a new trial, and declined to answer other questions posed.
6. The politicization of judicial and gubernatorial elections has made death penalty a campaign issue, which leads to populist-style administration of the death penalty. Additionally, the politicization of the issue of capital punishment in the legislative sphere limits the capacity of legislatures to promote and maintain statutory reform. The kind of statutory reform that many regard as the most promising for ameliorating arbitrariness and discrimination in the application of the death penalty is strict narrowing of the category of those eligible for capital crimes.

In light of these observations, the resolution concludes: “these conditions strongly suggest that the Institute recognize that the preconditions for an adequately administered regime of capital punishment do not currently exist and cannot reasonably be expected to be achieved.”

The it-is-how-you-choose-to-interpret-the-term answer to the foregoing question is (1) a cop-out, (2) an unsatisfying response, and (3) exposes an inherent flaw in the nature of the institution. Yes, marriage, much like other institutions created by humans is flawed, and the way I see it, it is flawed in a very interesting way. This flaw was not problematic for a very long time in the human society, but I think the cracks are beginning to widen right about now in the human history. But what do I mean by that? I have given you two (potentially provocative) sentences with no information in them. Although I would like to expand on my conjecture, I cannot do it without proving you with a background on what I view Marriage to be. So this post will focus on my view of the institution of Marriage, and a future post will defend my position that marriage itself is flawed (but not in an irredeemable fashion).

The institution of marriage, in my opinion, has conflated three different, but related, institutions: (1) a personal institution, denoted pMarriage, (2) a social institution, denoted sMarriage, and (3) a legal institution, denoted lMarriage. A lot of the hoopla about the disintegration of Marriage in the society is, I think, because we have not been able to understand how these three institutions interact to maintain Marriage. Let me define these three institutions before proceeding further.

• pMarriage: A personal institution.
  • In general terms, a personal institution is one that exists solely within the confines of the participating individuals. It can be viewed as a personal contract between the two people. pMarriage is a specific form of personal institution that has romantic and/or sexual component in the personal contract to which the participating individuals have affirmed. Note that many marriages carry pMarriage within them; and Marriages in which pMarriage has ceased to exist are often termed ‘loveless’ marriages. These are marriages that are ‘surviving’ on sMarriage (the social institution) and/or lMarriage (the legal institution) alone. Such Marriages are common in societies where divorce carries a social stigma.
  • But can pMarriage exists in isolation? If so, then can it still be called a marriage? The answers are ‘yes’, and ‘no’, respectively. We have many terms to describe pMarriage (in isolation) depending on the specifics of the contract within each instance. Popular examples of pMarriage are couples who are ‘just dating’ (Note that this does not include couples who are in a ‘committed ‘ relationship, because that includes the social institution sMarriage) and ‘friends with benefits‘. The more unpopular examples of pMarriage are extramarital affairs and emotional affairs. Note that in none of the foregoing examples would you consider the individuals ‘married’.
• sMarriage: A social institution.
  • In general terms, a social institution is one that plays a role in maintaining the stability of the society. There is tendency of equate Marriage and sMarriage simply because Marriage is often seen as a social institution with legal support for its perpetuity. sMarriage can be seen as a contract in which the individuals within the marriage (specifically, sMarriage) present themselves, and are seen by other members of the society as, a unified entity. Clearly, many Marriages embed sMarriage within them. But this may not be the case in all Marriages. A classic example of a Marriage devoid of sMarriage is couples who are ‘separated’. Note that couples who are separated often do not have pMarriage between them either (their Marriage is often just the legal institution of lMarriage, and for social purposes they are seen as divorced, but for legal purposes, they are still viewed as being married).
  • Now, can sMarriage exist without pMarriage? It seems very unlikely that individuals in the social institution would not be in a personal institution as well. However, there are cases where this could be true. For example, you could have individuals of opposite sex who are both gay (and still in the closet about it) and marry each other because they are tried of everyone in the family setting them up with ‘potential’ spouses. This placates the families because the families see the sMarriage (in conjunction with the legal institution of lMarriage) as Marriage, and it allows the individuals to pursue their own personal institutions of pMarriage with different individuals. I could give you a more common example of an individual marrying someone due to family pressure while having an affair with someone else, but in this case the status of pMarriage between the married couple is unclear and I’d rather not muddy the waters here. I am trying to get a concept across here, not the nuances.
  • We saw how sMarriage could exist without pMarriage, but in the example I gave, sMarriage was ‘propped’ up by the legal institution of lMarriage. A natural question is: can sMarriage exist in isolation then? I think it could, but I cannot substantiate it with hard evidence. One such situation could be the following: In orthodox and conservative societies, it is plausible for two individuals who are married, to has irreconcilable differences, get a divorce, but for the sake of the children and the extended family (i.e. the social stigma), continue to live together and be a ‘family’. Here is an example (albeit fictitious, at least to my knowledge) where pMarriage and lMarriage (the legal contract of Marriage dissolves with a divorce) no longer exists, but sMarriage continues to thrive in isolation.
• lMarriage: A legal institution.
  • lMarriage, is perhaps, the easiest one to understand. lMarriage is the legal marriage contract signed between two individual that grants them certain rights and responsibilities (unless explicitly forbidden under a prenuptial agreement). Such rights and responsibilities include inheritance, visitation rights, tax exemptions, alimony, entitlement as ‘next of kin‘, and such.
  • lMarriage is often used to recognize Marriage in the contrapositive. That is, you might not be necessarily perceived as ‘married’ if you are in an lMarriage (e.g. you are separated from your spouse), but are defined perceived as ‘NOT married’ if you are NOT in an lMarriage. Needless to say, an individual could be in an lMarriage with some person regardless of whether or not the individual is in a pMarriage or an sMarriage with that same person. In other words, lMarriage could exist in isolation, or in combination with pMarriage and/or sMarriage.

While I admit that I may not be completely accurate in my characterization of Marriage, I think this is yet a useful tool to understanding the institution. However, this does raise many questions. For instance, when you say that you are ‘married’, which institution(s) are you referring to? All three? Only a subset? A more nuanced and difficult question to answer is: when would you consider a marriage to have failed? Often, the success or failure of a marriage is determined solely bases on the integrity of the lMarriage within the Marriage. In fact, this forms the basis for the argument that Indian marriages (often arranged) are more successful than marriages in the west. What about the role of Marriage towards fostering a healthier individual and a healthier society? How successful are today’s marriages in this regard?

On more question to end this post. Has our conflation of multiple institutions into a single institution of Marriage contributed to the continual failure of Marriage as perceived by many [here, here, and here], and if so, then does treating Marriage as a combination of multiple institutions enable it to be adapted and morphed according to changing needs of the society and thereby continue to be successful and relevant?

The answer is actually “No”! The US has a noteworthy history of socialistic policies:

1. Agricultural subsidy: Since 1933, the US government has been subsidizing its agriculture. Even though it marginalizes small farmers and mostly serves the agri-business gaints [source], has adverse impact on developing nations economy [source], and many economists see it as a waste of resources [source]. The subsidy still remains, and is still antithetical to free-market capitalism.
2. Social security: Social security was introduced in the US in the 1930s to help recover from the great depression (yet another spectacular collapse of free-market economy). On a side note, it is interesting to see how every time free-market economy falters, the government steps in with a socialist solution and yet feels insulted when called out on it. Its a program that is still in practice, and is arguably one of the largest socialist program in existence in the world. Despite several criticisms of the program, the White House is steadfast in its commitment to this socialistic program, and will not have anyone saying anything otherwise.
3. S&L Crisis: The Savings and Loans Crisis of the 80s and 90s demonstrated the socialist tendencies of the US yet again. The of the chief causes for this crisis, among others, was the rampant deregulation of the economy (allowing greater influence of free-market forces). When the fit hit the shan, guess what the US government did? Yup, it bailed the parties out, much like Freddie mac and Fanny May. In fact of the total loss of about $160 Billion, the US government, and hence the tax payers, paid for over $124 Billion! They just couldn’t let the market heal itself, a socialist relief simply had to be provided. On a side note, its ironic that the Financial Institutions Reform, Recovery, and Enforcement Act (FIRREA) of 1989 which was enacted in response to the S&L crisis put Freddie Mac and Fanny May in charge of supporting mortgages for low- and moderate-income families. Guess who needs saving in the new free-market precipitated crisis now? That’s right! Freddie Mac and Fanny May!
4. Public Education: Yet another (expensive) example of socialism in the US is that public education system. This includes federal (soft) loans, education grants, the public school system, etc. With the US spending over $11,000 per student per year, the public school system in the US is one of the most expensive in the world, and with a 100% of it being provided for free to the students out of the tax payers pocket, this is yet another example of America’s socialist policies.
5. Unemployment benefits: Uncle Sam pays any unemployed citizen a fixed amount as.. well… a hand out, a give-away. Its called unemployment benefit. There are similar welfare programs for other disadvantaged demographic in the society to equalize the opportunities available to them. Now if that isn’t socialist, I don’t know what is.
6. The Arts: The US government support for the arts through the National Endowment for Arts is yet another use of the tax payers money to fund a ‘greater social good’. And not everyone is happy about it. be anything other than a socialist program. Why? Because if free-market were to drive arts, then you’d have private buyers/parties funding the arts, and not the government, as simple as that.

There probably are many more such examples, but I cant think of any more off the top of my head. But I guess six are sufficient to make my point. Despite all the rhetoric of the glories of capitalism, free-market, and the spiteful opposition to socialism, there are many US policies that are strictly socialist, and yeah, Freddie Mac and Fanny may bailout is not in the least bit unprecedented (remember the S&L crisis bailouts), or a marked jump towards socialism. Its simply business as usual in the US of A. So the next time someone says US was always capitalistic and socialism is an evil that needs to be uprooted, you’ll know better than to waste your time arguing with them.

Image Source: http://www.clas.ufl.edu/users/wbeal/images/socialism.gif

No, I am not going to make the same pedestrian arguments against such a ban that you have read/heard all over the place; ranging from ‘if they want to keep people from smoking, then they should ban cigarettes’, to ‘my nicotine habit is my business’. In fact, I think those arguments do not hold water, and I will demonstrate why.

Ban cigarettes… uh, no.

Consider the ‘ban the cigarettes instead’ argument. There have been widespread calls for banning alcohol since it is a social evil, and a similar argument is made for cigarettes as well. Cigarette cause severe health problems. Unhealthy youth put a strain on the society’s (rickety) health care system, and their unproductivity make them a liability to the rest of the society. Hence they should be banned. Well, actually no. because banning them will only drive them underground, and the society (and the government) will lose all regulatory control over them. Consequence is that now there is no way to regulate the processing of tobacco (since they are going to be processing it in some dingy backyard, there is a good chance they may be contaminated with some lethal chemical, like illegal arrack sometimes is); there is no way to control the sale to tobacco (one the most addictive substances known to man) to minors; there is no way to control the supply of tobacco, and hence no way to control people’s addiction to it.

It’s a victimless crime… uh, no.

Another argument is ‘it’s my body, and I can do what I want with it’. Well, while that argument may apply to drug abuse, it does not apply to smoking. Why? Because there is such a thing called second-hand smoke. Even if you are a smoker in a den of smokers, you have no right to damage the health of another smoker through your second-hand smoke. Every smoker’s lung cancer is her/her own business, and no one else has the right to expedite that.

Smoking increases health care costs… uh, no.

Third argument is ‘smoking increases the health cost, and puts strain on the health care system’.  If you look at this study in the New England Journal of Medicine, it’s conclusion is:

Conclusions If people stopped smoking, there would be a savings in health care costs, but only in the short term. Eventually, smoking cessation would lead to increased health care costs.

So there you have it! The whole lower health care costs argument is dubious as well. Then what does this mean? It simply means that banning cigarettes is not the smartest idea.

Now coming to the actual smoking ban going into effect from October 2nd: it wont help either. Why? Because of many reasons:

1. Air Quality: If people are forced to smoke outside, it will affect the air quality around all work places. So not only are the smokers at risk, so are all employees, visitors, and bystanders.
2. Ascetics: Smoking outside means more cigarette butts outside, which affects the ascetics of the common places like roads (assuming they were clean to begin with) and sidewalks (assuming they exist). Now you have the increased costs to keeping them clean, and not to mention the stink of burnt cigarette butts.
3. Accountability and responsibility: Requiring the employers to provide facilities for smoking, and have mechanism to ensure that they do NOT affect the air quality (with special filters on ventilators to absorb cigarette smoke), will induce a sense of responsibility and accountability to the employers, thus incentivize them to encourage non-smoking. On the other hand, with the new smoking ban, employers no longer have to bear the burden of having smokers in their staff, all the burden now shifts to the state because all the employer has to do is say smoking is banned indoors, but you can go outside to smoke. If you want to keep people from smoking you need to include as many stakeholders as possible, and this ban just lost the employers as stakeholders!
4. Accessibility: One way to disincentivize smokers is make cigarettes less accessible (by controlling the price and distribution). With this ban, I can see more office buildings sporting cigarette hawkers outside offering cigarettes to smokers, who have little choice but to come out to smoke. Now this only serve to enable the smokers some more, rather than curb the practice.

Besides, if you want to control the amount of smoking people do, the only way you can do it is to control the supply and distribution of cigarettes and invest more on education, prevention, and rehabilitation program. Introducing a ban on indoor smoking simply wont do any of that, and fails to address the root cause of the issue to begin with.