If All You've Got's A Hammer, Every Task Looks Like A Nail
I had a history teacher in high school who pointed out that we should
never trust a philosophy or moral view that could answer every question
with the same answer. His immediate example was ideological Marxism, which could
reduce everything to an aspect of the class struggle. Yesterday we were
treated to a view of ideological Marxism's equally simple-minded mirror image, as
the FutureMAP project flamed out in spectacular fashion.
When I heard the news, I was quite literally speechless. I couldn't
imagine that so many people could be so unbelievably stupid as to let
the project get as far as it did. The fact no one put the kibosh on the
idea long before now can only be explained by a fanatical religious faith
in market forces among the powered elite who people the Pentagon and
White House these days.
There were so many things wrong with this plan that I hardly know where
to begin. As many have pointed out, this market would provide a profit
motive to support terrorism. You would think that people who worship
the profit motive as the prime mover in human society would be able to
connect the dots here.
Remember that someone (and I think we all have a good idea who that
someone is) "shorted" the stock of some of the companies that were
headquartered in the World Trade Center in the days before 9-11 and made
a hefty profit. In a very real and horrible sense, this was the worst
of the insider trading scandals. Do we really want to provide a whole
market dedicated to this very business?
"Ah," the proponents of the market might say, "but that's exactly the
point. When we see a spike in speculation on a particular incident,
we'll know what to defend against." Don't you think that the terrorists would
learn not to tip their hands by trading on this market? They're brutal
and remorseless and they want to destroy us, but they're not stupid. If
we haven't at least learned that by now, then we've got some real
problems ahead of us. So in this scenario, the terrorists aren't using
this market to make money on the misery they cause, but the market
doesn't give us any information, either.
But before we even get to the point of whether it would work on a
practical level, we need to look at the underlying premise. The market
was proposed because it was presumed that the market is a good predictor
of the future. Have we so quickly forgotten the words "irrational
exuberance?" What about "dot com boom?" Frankly the market can, from
time to time, be a really lousy predictor of the future.
And what would an irrational bubble in the terrorism market do to our society as a
whole? Think for a minute about the potential damage to
our society. First think of the economics. No one would want to invest
in anything, and resources might be drained by panic against the
speculation. Then consider our collective soul. In a more literal
sense than we have ever seen before, profit would lie in the misery of
our fellow man, while peace and justice could mean financial ruin. (Joe Conason explores some of these issues in greater depth here.)
Every question cannot have the same answer. Life is simply more
complicated than that. The fact that so many people with influence in our government don't understand that is dangerous, indeed.
7:39:49 AM 
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