Searchlight Crusade

The genesis of all of this is Something’s Gotta Give, a report (.pdf format) from the Center For Housing Policy. Furthermore, there is an article in the Washington Times from UPI that connects the dots on the tactical level.

The Center for Housing Policy report details some of the costs to society. Not surprisingly, when people are forced to spend a large portion of their income on housing, they have less to spend on other things, and so they can’t spend as much on other things. Lest you think I’m talking about Lexuses, Lattes and Liposuction here, I am not. I’m talking about bare minimum things like food – as in people going hungry because they don’t have enough to eat. Far from talking about liposuction, I am talking about basic medical care and insurance. I am talking about clothing, which, rightly or wrongly, people use to judge the worth of other people, and people who cannot afford good clothing are not given the opportunity to advance because no one will hire them. I am talking about basic transportation needs, without which people’s job-hunting prospects are limited to the places they can walk. If you cannot get from work to home and back again in reasonable amounts of time, then you’re either not going to live here or not going to work there.

Nor am I talking about the needs of some nebulous underclass. As the NHC report makes clear, these are people earning up to 120 percent of national median income. Furthermore, they are among the fastest growing classes of worker.

Below the first level effects, there are others lurking, largely unmentioned in the report. But malnutrition, parental depression, and lack of good medical care are the causes of many other ills. Malnutrition allows health problems to become chronic and generates more health problems. These are people who have more difficulty getting and holding jobs. So long as we have societal programs of social insurance, these folks are going to cost us, as a society, tens to hundreds of billions of dollars annually. If they can’t hold a job, they’ve got to get money somewhere. No job means welfare or crime, and both are bad situations not only for that person, but for everyone else as well. Poor or no medical care makes any problems they have worse than they need to be, further increasing both explicit costs, what we actually spend on them, and implicit costs, money they don’t make, taxes they don’t pay, and other stuff that they suck out of society. Long commutes people suffer in order to buy housing they can afford means less parental supervision of children, leading to delinquency, increased crime, and other problems a few years out. Most critically, difficulty with money is the number one cause of divorce, and when families go through a divorce, the standard of living suffers even more and more long term societal troubles ensue.

Who is causing all this bad stuff? The short answer is that we all are. The cold hard fact of the matter is that they are not making any more land. Housing needs land. Land that is in use for other uses, whether it is industrial, commercial, open space, or other housing is not available for housing. Higher population means we (as a society) need more places to live. Anytime we add a person or a family, we add the need for that person to live somewhere. We can’t just push them under the workbench in the garage until the next time we need them. Well, actually, I suppose we could, but I am certainly not going to vote for policies like that, nor, I imagine, is a majority of the electorate. So that fry cook at Lenny’s, the cashier at the supermarket, and the nice lady who helps you carry your purchases out to the car at Home Despot, all need places to live.

Cold hard fact number two: In the high density places where jobs are to be found, land is expensive. In fact, it is far and away the most costly thing about a place to live. I can show you places where the lot goes for $350,000, while the finished home goes for $500,000. Considering the economic realities: Developer has to buy the land, then apply for permits that take years, then put the homes up for sale. Developer has to pay for the land, the cost of the money to own it for the years that are necessary, the property taxes, the cost of the permits, the cost of the people to get the permits, the labor and materials to build, and of course, they have to pay the people that sell the finished product. Except for the comparatively minuscule costs of labor and materials to build, these are all fixed costs! They are what they are. So if the developer pays another $5000 for labor and materials, and can sell the house for $200,000 more because it’s got two more bedrooms and Italian marble floors, that is obviously the way for them to make a better profit. So they build the higher end home, which cannot be afforded by the lower income buyer. If the government requires so many homes to be set aside for lower income people, that merely increases the money they have to charge for the rest. Plus the “low income” buyers are likely to sell as soon as their contract limitation on doing so runs out. Just because Mr. and Mrs. Lower Income Couple only make $40,000 per year doesn’t mean they don’t realize they can make enough money to pay their rent for the rest of their life by selling the home that the city forced the developer to sell them at a reduced price for a huge profit. It’s not like there’s any difference between their home and the house next door that the developer sold for full price. I assure you that they are keenly aware of this. This makes getting into low income housing akin to winning the lottery in expensive parts of the country, and that is not what it is intended for.

There are obvious solutions to this. More housing. High density housing. Shortening the approval process, and making it less expensive and less uncertain. But the observable trend is in the other way. Why?

This is where it comes down to you and me. We’re making it tougher for the developer to get those permits. When developers offer to buy property with the intent of building, neighbors come out in force to protest. Oh, we use all of the high-sounding names like “open space” and “habitat protection” and “quality of life” and even the mostly honest “No higher taxes to pay developers costs!” They come out and throw obstacles in the way of the project and sue in court and delay as best they can – which raises developer’s costs, forcing the rest of us to pay for them. Or at least the people who buy those properties.

But the real issue, the elephant in the room that everyone desperately wants to ignore, is scarcity. We all want housing to be scarce. Why? Because we’re already owners, that’s why. If there’s not enough of something, the price goes up and people wanting to buy have to pay the people who already have more money in order to buy. Whether people who obstruct developers will admit it to themselves or not, they are trying to vote themselves a profit at other’s expense. The cashiers who work at the stores in the strip mall where you buy groceries need to live somewhere, and the lower on the socioeconomic scale they are, the closer that they have to live. It has almost nothing to do with the “Eeevil!” developers or any other corporate alleged malefactor. If they have to charge two million dollars per house to make a profit, they will build two million dollar houses. Or three. It’s the buyers that pay for it, and these buyers are real people just like you are, who need a place to live just like you do, and if they can’t get one in a sustainable way, will do it in an unsustainable way, as too many people have.

If you really want to watch something both amusing and eye opening some time, go to a planning commission approval hearing where you have nothing at stake. Let’s say the proposal is thirty miles away on the other side of the city and you never go there. And watch them try to have a discussion about high density housing.

Oh!, the carrying on I’ve seen! The histrionics! The burying of the real issues! The hysteria! Ask for the mike and mention “property values” and the NIMBYs will go ballistic, guaranteed. “It’s not about that!” some will scream. Then why, once all of the other concerns have been dealt with, do they continue to oppose the project? Or do you think it’s really about a little bit more traffic on the roads, or open space that most of them can’t see and never go use? “Ruining the character” of a neighborhood where they might know two or three other families at most? Why then, won’t the people live near where they work? “Because it’s not a nice neighborhood!” “Explain,” you will say, and they will oblige with “Because it’s all condos and apartments and it’s a nasty neighborhood and and everything is expensive and property values don’t go up!” And there the real agenda slips out. Figuring it out, and getting them to admit it, is about as challenging as dynamiting fish in a barrel.

Recently, the City of San Diego made a rational attempt to plan for housing affordability, lessened commutes, etcetera. Called the “City of Villages” concept, it envisioned more decentralized and distributed services, employment, and shopping, and in particular, a lot more high density housing with neighborhood parks and social centers. It may still come about, but over the objections of suburbia which sees their future increase in property value drying up. Over the objections of members of my profession who have tried everything they can to obstruct it. Let’s face it, when everybody who has a job in a county of about three million people is trying to get to one of three places, and then out of those same three zones where everyone works, all at the same time, it’s a recipe for a traffic jam. Add in the fact that the median commute is something over twenty miles, and many people drive well into the next county over (80-120 miles) and it’s a recipe for an extended traffic jam. We have three full-blown interstates and at least a dozen spur and connecting freeways, and they’re all jammed solid at least ten miles and two hours one way every morning, and the other way at night.

People in my profession aren’t exactly blameless for the high cost of housing. Real Estate, as a profession, is responsible for a significant amount of price increases due to encouraging speculation and selling exclusive lifestyles. Actually let’s stop for one quick moment and consider the idea of “exclusive lifestyle.” Doesn’t it have to do with excluding the masses? Making yourself one of the well off? Raising ones’ self? It’s not like the money to buy you out is coming from nowhere, and the poor schmuck who buys the property is going to have to deal with every penny of it.

Every time I go into the MLS, a large percentage of the results have the statement “Quiet cul-de-sac,” and these are all homes built within about the last thirty years. Cul-de-sacs were comparatively rare before then. Even in San Diego, with all of our hills and slopes and irregular terrain, neighborhoods older than that are designed for open access. The streets are laid out on a grid. Major and secondary roads cut all the way across entire developments. You can get from point A to point B without going around the whole thing. Cul-de-sacs were rare, and mostly there because the developer could get a few more homes into irregular terrain that way.

This suddenly changed sometime right around 1970. Suddenly developers realized that the “exclusive” label added to the value they could receive. Now streets were designed not to encourage access, but to discourage it. They start and stop and start again for no reason other than to discourage access. The quickest way to get from one major road to another, on the other side of the development, is to go all the way around the development. The developers lost very few homes to the redesign, if any, but now they could sell the cachet of “exclusivity,” as in keeping the helots out. The start of accelerated growth in home prices traces to this period. It’s also worthwhile to note that when these “keep the peasants out” neighborhoods start downhill, they tend to go a long way down, very fast.

The motivations for driving the prices up on the behalf of my profession are certainly understandable human motivations. We make more money on bigger transactions from the same amount of work and expense. That doesn’t make them good for society, but more money for your clients and higher profit for performing your professional function is at least an honest motivation. Ditto for the City, County and State. You’re taking up X number of square feet of land, and they’re not getting any more land in their jurisdiction. If the price goes up, they can sock you and they can sock the merchants and they can sock everyone in the area for more money. More money means more money for salaries – their salary. Their cronies. More lucrative contracts, necessitating more campaign contributions.

Fact: Given the current economic situation, the only way to get developers to build more housing that low income people can afford is to make housing for low income people more profitable than other housing.

How do you accomplish that? Allow more high density housing, but force them to plan the impact correctly. Enough parking, water capacity, sewage. Give the developers the parameters up front, so they know whether or not they can meet it, and enact a “must issue if standards met” law. Let the community get involved in setting the standards, if they want, but make them universal throughout the jurisdiction. Same standards for hoity-toity-ville as for the wrong side of the tracks. And make the citizens themselves subject to the same requirements. Make waivers as tough to get for homeowners as for developers, and come down hard on non-permitted activity. I just pulled up a couple dozen properties on MLS, and the well over half of the listings had the notation somewhere that “X may not be permitted.” In my experience the owners know damned well that they didn’t have the proper permits, but that it’s very easy for the people who buy it from them to get a waiver as theoretically innocent, and they know that there’s very little enforcement even if the new owner doesn’t get it retroactively approved. So they put on an extra bedroom or bathroom without permits, knowing it made the property more valuable when they sell it, and because if they don’t get a building permit, their property won’t be reassessed until they sell. Incidentally, most of them don’t use licensed contractors, either, but rather what our wonderful government euphemistically calls “undocumented workers” because contractors have to report where they did the work and woe be unto the contractor that does something without the proper permits. This means that the people who go through the process that society has agreed is necessary to perform competent, safe work in accordance with code, pay their people in accordance with the law, report their income so that a fair share of taxes are paid – the people who are playing by the rules – get cut out. Either do away with those rules or come down on the people who violate them, please. But I suppose that since it’s “the little guy” who wants to make some money illegally, that makes it Okay? Even when in order to buy the property, this “little guy” has to have income in the top ten percent of the population? Didn’t think so.

I am not trying to get all holier than thou on anyone here. I am as much of a capitalist as anyone, and more so than most. Capitalism works, but it works better when everyone has to follow the same set of rules. I’m tired and disgusted of bending the rules on behalf of one class but not another, because of lying, self-serving propaganda. My younger brother works – when he can find work – as an on the books construction worker at about $13 an hour or so. This works out to $26,000 per year if he was working full time all the time. This is well below the federal poverty line for a family. So far below that were he married and his wife working a minimum wage job, they still wouldn’t beat the poverty line. Compare this to the “handymen” who work off the books, without any qualification beyond their word that they can do the job right, and who claim they make $80,000 per year when they’re asked how much they make in order to get a loan. The taxes they don’t pay means that you and I pay more. The property taxes their clients don’t pay mean that you and I pay more. The permits that their clients didn’t get means that there are more building code issues out there that someone else is going to have to deal with – after said client makes the inflated profit on the sale of the home, despite not having properly paid the increased property taxes they should have.

Contrast this with the hell a developer has to go through, often for years, in order to get a project greenlighted and never knowing for certain whether some stupid technicality will put the whole thing back to square one. For smaller developments, it’s hard to find a place where it they are economically feasible, even with higher sale prices.

Furthermore, no developer with a lick of sense is building condominiums here in California right now. For ten years, they have unlimited liability for anything that can be considered a “construction defect.” There are several highly profitable law offices that actually make a career out of going around nine to nine and a half years after the project is sold out, and telling homeowner’s boards they can get them money. Usually this is done without any prior complaints, and they don’t have any knowledge of actual conditions there – they just know they can get money. There was a period not too long ago where you just couldn’t find condos that weren’t going through a lawsuit, which is why it was eventually dropped from many underwriter’s standards. I’m certain that a certain percentage of them had legitimate complaints, but there were just too many lawsuits filed with exactly the same sort of timing for anything else to be the explanation. For the record, what the developers are doing is building them as apartments, and then they are being converted after the unlimited liability period has expired. This is a severely bad thing, societally, but a full explanation would digress too far.

If a developer wants to build high density housing, there should be a fixed set of steps – parking, utility upgrades, etcetera – they have to go through, and then approval is immediate and mandatory – provided they actually sell the units for the stated price. If they renege, they are prevented from selling at all until they’ve gone through the whole approval process from the start, with no mandatory approval.

Put this into law, and watch the prices of available housing drop. We could even structure it into tiers, Tier A where the approval process is basic and automatic, Tier B with somewhat higher prices but more hoops and less certainty, and so on. I would love to be able to find young families affordable three or four bedroom condos – but three bedroom condos are like hens’s teeth whether or not they are affordable, and four bedroom just doesn’t exist, period, affordable or not.

For the last decade or so, the various governmental entities even been requiring developers to set aside infrastructure projects which, under current rules, are more properly the realm of government. They have to build schools and deed them to the government. Funny, but I thought with the increased tax base they are getting, that was the government’s job. It doesn’t do anything beneficial for the price of the homes in the rest of the development. Ditto parks, which are an excellent and admirable idea, particularly near high density housing, but should not be part of a government shakedown to cut down on the profit margin of land the developer paid their own money for, and went through an extended approval process for. The population is already there, and whether the developer builds new housing for them or not, the government would be responsible for finding school and park space. At the very least, the government should reimburse the developer for the proportional cost of the land and utility capacity, and do the building themselves.

Many of you reading this are thinking about money – dollars and cents. And you know, that’s fine. I like it when clients make money on their property. It’s part of my job to help them make money on their property. But there’s a difference between a reasonable profit at 5% increase per year, and extortion because you happen to own a place to live and there isn’t enough housing to go around because you’re doing your best to get policies enacted to make certain that there isn’t enough housing to go around.

The gentrification has reached the point in many areas of the country where you need to be in the top ten percent of all income earners in order to afford to buy a place to live – any place to live. That’s great and wonderful if you’re seventy years old and you can sell your home for a three quarter of a million dollar profit to your retirement nest egg and go live somewhere cheap. It’s not so hot if you’re a young working class couple looking for a place to live that you can afford and here is where all the jobs are. The damage done to the latter far outweighs the benefits that accrue to society because of the former.

If this continues, what happens next? Instead of having to be in the top 10 percent, now you’ve got to be in the top five percent, or the top one percent. If mommy and daddy never owned a house, or were so unlucky as to sell for less than stellar profit, you won’t either. If there’s no place to live that you can afford, you have to stay with mom and dad – but what if they don’t want you, or they’re in no shape to host you, or they just don’t live in the only place you can get a living wage job? Suppose now you’re twenty-five or thirty, engaged or even married, and still cannot afford a place to live? This is a recipe for social disaster.

At one percent homeownership rates, we’re below what the homeownership rates were when we had tenements and slum lords, even if they are single family homes in older areas of town. And many people who have been engaged in “condo flipping” are themselves priced out of the market. There are damned few folks who cannot be priced out of the market if it gets bad enough, and if policies remain unchanged, who is to say that it will stop just before you become one of the victims, the permanent underclass? Even if you’re one of that fortunate class who isn’t priced out, when there are ninety-nine people who want housing for every one who can actually afford it, what do you think is going to happen at the ballot box, or in the streets if necessary? I’d rather start now, while we can plan it rationally, as opposed to later when any old low quality crackerbox will be thrown up in panic mode anywhere and anyway it can be just to keep people from rioting in the streets.

Other things that need to happen. Tax codes need to be rewritten. this article traces the most recent acceleration to 1998 – coincidentally about two years after the $250,000 profit exclusion on housing ($500,000 for married couples) was enacted. All you had to do was live in it for two years, and bang! you didn’t pay taxes on the gain. I believe that instead of keeping it in the current “cliff” form (after two years you qualify for the full exclusion), I think it needs to be phased in over a longer period of occupancy. Two years gets you maybe $50,000, then another $25,000 per year until ten years are done. It’s hard to argue that someone who makes more on flipping houses every two years than they do on their day job deserves to make that money tax free, when the poor shlub who can’t qualify to get into the first house pays taxes on every penny he earns.

I also suspect that we would benefit from more limits on Section 1031 exchanges (and reverse exchanges), which has to do with not taxing profits from real estate when it’s replaced within six months with other real estate. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a beneficial code section overall and I’ll keep helping clients with them, but I have to question whether someone who makes an exchange and then refinances to strip equity is really doing something to earn all that tax free money, or just engaging in paper transactions that make it look like they contributed something. I don’t blame the participants for taking advantage of what is in the code, but some of what I have seen, and much of what I have heard about, is of questionable economic benefit to the country.

Zoning also needs to be heavily looked at, and not just for high density housing. “Granny flats” are just too useful, but prohibited by blanket R1 zoning with no exceptions allowed in too many neighborhoods. Many folks don’t want and don’t have room for granny to live in the same dwelling, but if they could put up a small second dwelling, whether attached or not, granny could live there rather than off somewhere else where the choices are often “completely alone” or “in a nursing home,” by which I mean they are one of the best ways to keep granny out of a nursing home. Furthermore, granny flats are also good for young adults who may not be able to easily afford housing on their own. None of this was a problem before 1970, and it’s not a problem now – except in so called “modern” “exclusive” neighborhoods where we’ve made it a problem.

I hope this article will start a certain amount of discussion about what’s really going on, and whether it is of net benefit to the country, and the people in it.

(This was originally going to be part II of Is the United States Worth Defending? but that got too long to continue.)

What are my political priorities? Quite simply, I want to make the world as a whole and the United States in particular better places to live. I want people to live longer, richer, safer, happier lives. I want people both here and in the rest of the world to be able to do what they want as long as it doesn’t mess up anybody else, and by anybody else I mean people.

Part and parcel of making the world better is not allowing it to get any worse. We have scratched and clawed our way up from the primordial slime, and whether you’re talking 750 million years since life began on earth, or just the last hundred thousand or so when our species has identifiably existed, it was a long hard brutal slog up the slope, and the further down we fall, the harder it will be to start our way up again. Only in the last few hundred years have we come up with the idea that as we learn more about the world around us, maybe we know more than our ancestors. It’s only been a couple of centuries since we started to drive out the idea that the people with the important ancestors are the important people. They certainly can be as is witnessed by any number of families of brilliant people, but this fallacy is to blame for the slowness of progress throughout most of human history. If your daddy was a peasant, you were a peasant, and if you didn’t want to break your back to grow food for the rest of your life, you’d damned well better do it anyway until you prove that you can do something else – and because your daddy was a peasant, nobody believes you can be anything more, either. If your daddy was a king – even a king who accomplished nothing more than falling asleep and drooling on himself, the supposition that you deserved to be important also was overwhelming. History is largely the study of those people who made themselves important. It’s only by oblique examination of the attitudes of the time that you find out how truly amazing the exceptions were.

It’s only been a couple hundred years since the notion of democracy really took root, first in western culture, and recently spreading elsewhere. The idea that perhaps the sum of everybody’s wisdom was greater than any one person’s is a profound conceptual change. The idea of patent and copyright, that someone who invented something that potentially made everyone’s life easier was entitled to some of the good of their invention, as opposed to it being just taken over by whatever noble (i.e. those who already had the resources to take advantage of it) first saw the uses, was likely what really ignited the industrial revolution.

It’s been less than a century since people first really began to practice the idea that perhaps we ought to give everyone those same chances, not merely those who happened to be of the ruling sex, race, class, or ethnicity. It’s only been a few decades even here in the United States where it has really been practiced. It’s only been a few decades that sciences from medicine to physics to chemistry started advancing rapidly.

I could go on for hours, but the point I’m trying to make is that the ideals and elements of western civilization, and the United States in particular, however unpopular they may be with certain elements (who, I might add, would never give them up!) are worth defending. Hell, they are worth circling the wagons and retreating into the mountains and fighting guerilla style as our enemies have done and fighting to the last man, woman, and child, if we have to, rather than giving them up. If you don’t substantially agree with me on this point, you might as well stop reading right now. I am not giving up our Freedoms which permitted all of this to happen. Not a chance in anybody’s hell. And there are whole armies of people, good decent people who spend their lives as schoolteachers and police and firefighters and scoutmasters and military defenders of our country, and even bureaucrats, who will not allow it either. I am humbled by the knowledge that they would even permit me to stand with them if it came down to the necessity, and yet there is no doubt in that they would, and that they would be similarly humbled that I would permit them to stand with me.

The beauty of this society that we have built here in this country just beggars the imagination, and every time I think I understand it all, something comes along and knocks the feet out from under me and picks me up and slaps me around and shakes me and rubs my nose in the fact that we live in the most wonderful society anywhere throughout human history, and I am moved by the experience every time. Because of the great ideas of our civilization and our country, and the fact that they are so beautiful, so enabling of human dignity and human worth, they are so contagious that half the world wants to be an American, and most of the rest and a good deal of the first half wants to create an America wherever they happen to be. They may not speak English, they may never have so much as seen an American in the flesh, but they understand that they want to be American, and in that moment they have taken the first step in becoming Americans. Every year, millions of people want to be Americans so much that some of them will wait decades for the opportunity and come here to start all over again at an age when most people figure they have earned the right to take it easy for the rest of their lives. And millions more want to be Americans so much that they will break our laws, and risk, at least theoretically, a lifetime banishment in order to start becoming Americans right now. These people are more counterweight than the Chomsky brigades and other “America is Eeevil!” apologists can ever make up for even if they did put their lives where their mouths are and vote with their feet by actually going to live in one of those Fifth World hellhole “paradises” they keep telling us about, that would be wonderfully glad to have them and give them positions of privilege and importance, insulated from the everyday realities of life there, where they could rail to the world about how evil America is, and how wonderful their new homelands are, all the while living off the blood, the sweat, the tears of those who never were and never will be given any of the opportunities that these useful idiots take for granted. And yet these people haven’t left, and more new Americans cross our borders every day. That tells me something quite profound.

Unfortunately, the rest of the world is not America. In fact, the entire idea of America, and western civilization in general, is supremely dangerous to those who are powerful in many areas of the world. The idea of democracy, that says we will choose our leaders based upon the one who persuades us that we want to go the way they want to go, mocks and undercuts those who are leaders because their grandfather was a leader, and their grandfather’s grandfather before that, and instills no little amount of fear that perhaps they will not always be a leader. The idea of evolving wisdom based upon learning how the world works in ways that can be repeated, time and time again, and get the same answer no matter who conducts the tests, mocks and undercuts the idea of revealed wisdom, the idea that the Answer is always going to be the same because some priest hundreds of years ago said that was what God wanted, and instills no little amount of fear that perhaps the answer that priest put in God’s mouth may not be correct. The idea that anyone can become wealthy, important, one of our leaders if they only have good ideas, work hard, and stick to it, mocks and undercuts those who are wealthy and powerful because their family has owned the port concession for the past seven generations, and instills no little amount of fear that perhaps someday, someone else may be given another port concession and manage it enough better so as to put them out of business, or even that there may be no port concession and so whomever wants to run a port can try.

These people we threaten by spreading our ideas are not blind or stupid. If they were, they would have lost their positions of power and wealth and privilege in favor of a new leader who really is as inspired as grandpa was. They are typically competent enough, and it’s much easier to hang on to a position than to get it, and grandpa made certain daddy knew enough to hang on, and daddy made certain they did. But they feel threatened because however great a man grandpa, or grandpa’s grandpa was, they know deep down that they personally are nothing special. They know that any number of people could do just as well, given their positions starting from wealth and privilege and having connections that most people do not.

But however unintentional the threat may be, the threat that American values represent is nothing short of devastating to their way of life. The fact that this powerful man is the son of a line of chiefs going back to the days of the prophets means very little to people who have been infected by our ways of thought. It still means something, even here in America, else the Kennedy and DuPont and Ford families (among others) would not have the cachet they do. It’s a sign that it’s more likely that there may be something here worth watching. But not even being a member of those families will get you anything if you’re a loser (in fact, it will get you derision for being a waste of an opportunity), and it won’t get you any opportunities that someone from outside them cannot get, even if they have to work harder than you do.

But even this mode of thought is supremely threatening to the man who is what he is because he’s the son of the last king, or the son of a line of influential priests. Evolving wisdom, based upon experiments and observable, verifiable results, are a direct and immediate threat to the world of Revealed Wisdom and the Word of God (according to some priest or another, of course). Competition is anathema to those who have always been insulated from it, whose position depends upon being the only one with the legal ability to do some good or necessary thing, however artificial that ability may be.

So they want to stop these ideas, and the only way to stop them is at the source. So long as America and her allies stand strong and proud, America’s ideas are going to, as they see it, “infect” the rest of the world. But let America be humbled, let her confidence be broken, above all let her ideas be defeated, and these people can retain their positions of wealth and power and privilege, and maybe even expand them.

That the desire to strike at us is understandable in no way, shape or form means that I think it should succeed. It should not, in fact, if we want the world to continue to become a better place, it must not. It only means that these people are not, by their own lights, necessarily evil.

Just because they do not see themselves as evil does not mean that their prescription is the one the world should be following. Indeed, in the free competition marketplace of ideas, their method of striking back tells us that they know their ideas will lose. They cannot convince us by rational process, and they know they cannot really convince us by force, either. Their strength is a fraction of ours.

Where they do see a light of hope for their cause, however, is ironically in the very success of our ideas. Our ideas are so successful that not even our grandparents grandparents had any significant war or violence across an entire continent that their parents had conquered. It has been 140 years and counting since any large proportion of our population saw war “up close and personal” the way large proportions of most generations in the rest of the world have. There are still a large number of living Chinese who remember the events of the Communist Revolution. The violence of the Partition of India was contemporaneous with that. We sent something like ten million uniformed troops overseas in the second world war, but people from North Africa to the whole of Europe to the entire Western Pacific watched the war ravage their cropland, bomb their manufactories, and squash their homes. The generations since in Central and South America, all through Africa, and large swaths of Eurasia, have seen war just as closely. We have not. Many of us do not understand war. Many of us don’t understand the nature of war. Many of us don’t understand what it’s like, what it means, to have war come to you, and be fought over your land. Most of us especially don’t understand what it means to lose a war. It’s been too long since it really happened.

In this lack of understanding, our enemies see a window of opportunity. If they can just convince us that it’s not worth fighting, they can win. Indeed, if they convince us it’s not worth fighting, they will win. Once we concede that we’re not fighting any more, they automatically win. And because of the casualties and the allies we betray and the treasure we have wasted, if we later decide that we were wrong, it becomes much harder to change our minds. The South Vietnamese we encouraged to stand straight and tall and resist communism, and whom we then left to die because Democratic congress wanted to strike back at a Republican administration for domestic misdeeds were the genesis of the communist successes of the later seventies, when it seemed that the whole world was turning Communist. Angola, Mozambique, Nicaragua, the role call of countries that fell, or almost fell, goes on and on. Established, stable allies like Columbia and Venezuela fought off determined marxist insurgencies, both military and political, that sowed the seeds for modern troubles in those countries. The communists saw that they could bluff their way to victory, and those who would have opposed them saw that we left our allies to die when it became politically convenient to do so. So our enemies became emboldened, and our allies became fearful.

We rescued ourselves from that one, or actually Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher rescued us by restoring our confidence. A good thing, too, else we probably would have learned all too soon what it’s like to really lose a war, in a way that we escaped with Vietnam, because it was so unexpected and our enemy never thought that we were really that stupid until we proved that we were, and next time we won’t be likely to be nearly as lucky. Losing a war means real, long term consequences. Just ask Germany, or Japan, and reflect that we treated them far more kindly than any other defeated adversary had ever been treated, any other time in the history of the world. Ask the Nationalist Chinese, or any of the losers from dozens of revolutions around the world in the last two generations. Ask the Bosnians, the Croatians, the Rwandans, the Angolans, the Sudanese, the Cambodians, both the Pakistanis and the Bangladeshis, ask the Afghanis. Only where the victorious armies were themselves civilized, and subject to morality based claims of right and wrong, as with the United States, Britain, and the Israelis, have any of these hard facts been somewhat lessened.

I would rather not be in this war. War is a nasty, dehumanizing business that makes people die unpleasantly, wasting lives and resources and treasure that might have won real advances for us as a species. Like it or not, though, one determined enemy makes a war – it is peace that takes the cooperation of both sides. The other side has been at war with us, whether they realized it or not, since at least the 1970s and perhaps since the 1930s. That we as a group did not wake up to this until September 11, 2001 in no way alters these facts. Consider the way that any Americans captured by them have always been singled out for special attention. Not Swedes, not Danes, and not Greeks. Americans. The only nationality which draws anything like the same degree of attention is Israeli, and I think we all understand why that is. Israel represents the presence in their area of the world, but the United States stands behind that.

Unfortunately, there is no way that we can not threaten this group of opponents. Our very way of life provides the threat, and we cannot change this without changing our way of life, the thing that makes us American, and therefore worthwhile. The threat we represent has nothing to do with our military, which although it may be the most advanced and most capable in the world, it in no way, shape or form threatened them prior to September 11, 2001. Okay, we had bases in Saudi Arabia, and elsewhere in the region. Our actions said, as clearly as it can possibly be said, that we had no territorial ambitions in the area, and that so long as our mercantile interests were not threatened, we just weren’t going to do anything. Why else would we have let Saddam Hussein off the hook the first time? We even went a far distance out of our normal ways to respect their ways of life and customs. I knew military women who were stationed in the middle east in the early 80s, ten years before Desert Storm, who were ordered to wear extra clothing in the desert heat so as not to offend their mores. Christians were told to keep their religion as low key as they possibly could, and public activities such as worship discouraged. And unless you yourself were Islamic and therefore permitted, for crying out loud don’t go anywhere near the holy places! (By contrast, our great ideas have no problem with the idea of nonbelievers visiting Bethlehem, or Jerusalem, or Rome, and even the Mormons have no problems so long as you stay out of the “sealed” areas of their actual churches. Indeed, no small number of converts have been won by precisely this approach!)

We have tried being low key and inoffensive. It hasn’t worked. The people we are fighting are threatened not by our guns, but by something a thousand times more powerful: our ideas. Indeed, it has finally become apparent to both sides in this war exactly what it is we are fighting over. This great clash between civilizations is over nothing less than the future direction of the world. Forward looking, evolving wisdom based upon observable reality, or Revealed Wisdom of words put into the mouth of God by a priest over a thousand years ago. Finding leadership in whichever of our citizens can best provide it, or looking to the sons and grandsons of chiefs. Remember, our enemy is not evil by his own lights, I would even argue that the vast majority are not really evil at all, but instead merely threatened by ideas that they cannot counteract with ideas of his own. Indeed, the thought of allowing those ideas to do battle in the intellectual marketplace is itself alien and threatening to him. Nonetheless, our enemy must be defeated. However imperfectly we practice and however recently we have come to it, the idea of allowing any citizen to lead who can convince us that they are worth following trumps the idea of following the son of the last leader. The idea that we should all be free, within limits of not harming others, to do what we want trumps the idea that our actions are prescribed by the place in society where we were born. The idea that members of all groups should have at least the same opportunities as anyone else trumps the idea that that the tribe that has always ruled gets all the goodies. The idea that women can make their own roles trumps the idea that women are housewives and mothers whose role is to support their husbands and raise their sons to treat their wives in the same way (“Women should not be beaten with a stick thicker than your forefinger”), second class citizens in every way. The idea that everyone can, should, must be allowed input into the decision-making process and that the daughter of a bricklayer may be more correct than the son of our leaders for the last hundred years trumps that the idea that the nobles and educated elite should make all the decisions because their clans have always led us and always been educated. You see, the real reason why they are losing the war – why they’ve already lost it, unless we throw away the victory by refusing to fight, or refusing to follow up the victories that have already been won – is that they waste so damned much of the human capital they are given, and that alone is more than reason enough why they must be defeated, and gives us ten thousand times more justice and right than our real enemies will ever have on their side. Not to say that we don’t waste any, but they cannot hope to beat us except by becoming like us, and that in itself spells defeat for them, or by seducing us into a forfeit. The system we have beats anything that has come before it so hollow that there is no competition, which is why millions of ordinary people every year want to become Americans, and why we are a example held out as a symbol of hope by those fighting oppression elsewhere in the world. It is not to the Secretary General of the United Nations that they appeal, not to the head of the EU, nor even to the executive of NATO, but to the President of the United States. It is to his eternal credit, and ours, that he has shown he understands what really is at stake here and has shown himself willing, et enormous risk and cost to himself, to take the proper actions.