Posts in "Elliot Engstrom"

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By Elliot Engstrom at 12:19PM

Why do so many members of Congress support SOPA?

Remember social studies class in high school, when you learn about how there are three branches of government that balance against each other, and one of those is the legislative branch which is supposed to represent the will of the people (originally the will of the people and the states, but you know what I mean).  If anything should show us just how perverted this system has become, it should be the difference in the support in Congress for the Stop Online Piracy Act vs. the actual support among the various congressional constituencies.

Let's start with the rationale for supporting SOPA.  Why do it?  DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz, one of the most prominent supporters of the bill and its highest-ranking Democrat sponsor in the House, thinks that we need the bill in order to "protect Americans from companies that profit by stealing and repackaging other people's work."  Ahh yes.  We need to deprive Americans of an important freedom in order to protect them from a vaguely-stated threat.  Where have I heard that sort of talk before...?

Well, okay.  The congresswoman (and others like her) say that they support (or supported until they realized it was unpopular) this bill because it protects Americans.  Let's start with the (false) assumption that members of congress are generally good and honest people.  Certainly we shouldn't just automatically disbelieve anything they say, right?  Perhaps there is evidence that suggests another, more concrete reason that Wasserman and her compatriots support this bill.<--break->


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By Elliot Engstrom at 8:43AM

A legal argument for less regulation in the U.S.

I'm interning for a month in Aix-en-Provence, France with a French law firm.  As I have a few minutes of free time, I thought I'd throw out some of the perspective my time working at a French law firm has given me on the costs and benefits of the American and French legal systems.  A lot of what I write below might seem like obvious things to many readers, especially those who have studied history or law at all, but I just want to lay out all of the important facts so that even those readers with a very elementary knowledge of law can follow along.

Note: This is a long article, and I don't expect everyone to read it.  Therefore, these two paragraphs in italics sum up my point:

Common law countries traditionally have less regulation but more litigation, while civil law countries have the inverse setup.  With more litigation and less regulation, we only have the courts deciding disputes when actual wrongs have occurred, contrary to an over-regulated system where companies are punished by the government for things they have not even done yet.  

I think that the United States' traditional model of allowing a huge amount of litigation while having relatively small regulation has served us well, as it has allowed our economy to grow while punishing companies in court if and when they actually do something wrong.  However, now that we are maintaining our massive amount of litigation AND adding on a suffocating amount of regulation, we threaten to suffocate our economy and stifle any growth by businesses attempting to be honest who fear they will be punished at every term by both litigation and regulation.

Now, if you want to know the historical background and rationale for why I wrote the above paragraphs, keep on reading:


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By Elliot Engstrom at 12:43PM

Florida judge correctly orders use of Islamic sharia law

It's enough to haunt the nightmares of any neoconservative worth his salt -- a judge in America is applying Islamic law in the courtroom!!  However, this summary, which is all that most opposors of the judge's actions say on the subject, is crucially inaccurate.  The St. Petersburg Times reports:

...Hillsborough Circuit Judge Richard Nielsen is being attacked by conservative bloggers after he ruled in a lawsuit March 3 that, to resolve one crucial issue in the case, he will consult a different source.

"This case," the judge wrote, "will proceed under Ecclesiastical Islamic Law." Nielsen said he will decide in a lawsuit against a local mosque, the Islamic Education Center of Tampa, whether the parties in the litigation properly followed the teachings of the Koran in obtaining an arbitration decision from an Islamic scholar.

If you haven't yet heard people frantically yelling about how this is an example of Muslims taking over our culture, you soon will.  For example, two Republicans in Florida are already on the move.  So, for when you encounter such people, let me explain a few things.


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By Elliot Engstrom at 4:56PM

Drone attacks in Pakistan kill few high ranking militants

Newly published research indicates that US drone attacks are killing very few valuable targets in Pakistan.  Considering the amount of blowback against the United States caused by these very attacks, this data should seriously call into question whether these attacks should be continued.

The Washington Post reports:

CIA drone attacks in Pakistan killed at least 581 militants last year, according to independent estimates. The number of those militants noteworthy enough to appear on a U.S. list of most-wanted terrorists: two.

Despite a major escalation in the number of unmanned Predator strikes being carried out under the Obama administration, data from government and independent sources indicate that the number of high-ranking militants being killed as a result has either slipped or barely increased.

In the report, the argument is made that civilian casualties in such attacks are down to six percent.  However, based on my research, this claim by the CIA has absolutely no backing, and is based more on CIA guesswork than anything else.  We should remember the words of Baitullah Mehsud, founder of the Pakistani Taliban, who said, "I spent three months trying to recruit and only got 10-15 persons. One U.S. [drone] attack and I got 150 volunteers!" (cited article on p. 14)

Along with the cost in human lives of these drone attacks, we also must never forget their economic cost.  The amount of money it takes to build, fuel, and maintain an attack drone and its armaments certainly could be put to better use, ideally in the free market, but even in other areas of government as well.

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By Elliot Engstrom at 11:48AM

Are politicians really against violence?

Since the recent tragedy in Arizona, I have heard more politicians and other public figures than I can think of make statements about how they condemn the use of violence.  For example, Franklin Graham recently said of Sarah Palin, "Whether you agree with her politics or not, it is outrageous to suggest that her political opinions encourage violence toward anyone."  Likewise, Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi stated that we should not use violence to achieve our political ends.

But wait a minute -- isn't war violence?  I am not suggesting that we as a nation never have cause to go to war.  But, I do think that we go to war far, far too readily (despite the fact that Congress rarely actually declares it).

What do readers think?  Is there a large difference between the violence politicians condemn and the wars they support, or are our politicians simply condemning violence in spheres where they are pressured to by society, and supporting it when it helps to get the votes they need or further their ideology around the globe?

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By Elliot Engstrom at 12:02PM

What we can learn from the Wikileaks situation

“The people at Wikileaks could have blood on their hands,” Senator Lindsey Graham said Nov. 28 in response to the whistleblower organization’s most recent publications of previously classified State Department documents. “I don’t know what the cables may say, but we’re at war. The world is getting dangerous by the day. People who do this are low on the food chain as far as I’m concerned. If you can prosecute them, let’s try.”

I was amused, though not surprised, to see these words coming from a person who does have blood on his hands. However, Sen. Graham’s response to the most recent actions of Wikileaks sum up the United States government’s general demeanor towards whistle blowing in general – “How dare you reveal the things we have done.” Americans can learn a lot about our government simply from observing its response to an organization like Wikileaks. Let’s consider just three of the dozens of such lessons.

There is no anti-war political party in Washington

The entire point of Wikileaks’ revelations about American foreign policy has been to demonstrate that there is a massive divide between what the United States government claims to be doing around the world and what it actually does. And, despite the thousands upon thousands of documents that have revealed substantial war crimes, abuses of power, and despicable acts that establish a pattern going far beyond a few isolated incidents, not a single major politician in Washington has stated that the incidents being revealed need to be investigated. Instead, Wikileaks is attacked for daring to reveal what the United States government deemed that its people did not need to know.


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By Elliot Engstrom at 5:03PM

Unintended Consequences

As I tried to point out in a recent article at the Daily Caller, foreign policy is an extremely complicated thing.  This sounds self-evident, but it's amazing the extent to which certain officials think they can control events occurring around the world.  I like to characterize US foreign policy in the Middle East as throwing rocks at a hornet's nest, and then expecting to be able to control the hornets when they emerge.  The consequences of intervention are so many, so widespread, so complicated, and so unforeseen that no one can hope to be able to manage them, without inevitably intervening even more and thus fueling even more unintended consequences.  (You can see a strong parallel between the overconfidence of government officials in the area of foreign policy and their attitude in areas of attempted economic control.  But, that's a separate discussion.)

Thanks to the wonderful (in my opinion) people at WikiLeaks, we have been able to see a much more realistic picture of the war in Afghanistan than has so far been available.  CNN reports on one element of these reports that is none other than one of these most unintended of consequences -- some of the most advanced military technology in our country's arsenal falling into the hands of...well we're not really sure who.


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By Elliot Engstrom at 7:43PM

Realism, taken to its logical end, is non-interventionist.

I have a new piece up over at the Daily Caller about why I believe a realist foreign policy is in fact heavily non-interventionist, despite what many advocates of our current wars in the Middle East might say.

...when followed to its logical end, the realist school of internationalist relations which so many use to justify the American presence all over the world is in fact one of the greatest arguments against our current foreign policy.  I do not argue against America’s wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan because I think that we would all just get along if these wars ceased to happen.  I argue against these wars because I come from a perspective that sees the people we are fighting as human beings with the same base motivations as myself, and when these people see their livelihood threatened, they take the best course of action that they can find, which unfortunately often involves siding with whatever group holds the most regional power.


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By Elliot Engstrom at 8:06PM

New Article at the Daily Caller on Humanitarianism

I have a new article up at the DC about how freedom of communication is an essential force behind humanitarianism, and must be maintained in order for genuine aid to parts of the world that are in poverty to continue and increase.  I argue that the rise of easily accessible mass communication is pushing human society back to a dynamic that holds us accountable for our actions before others, a dynamic that existed for most of human history but was destroyed by the rise of modern society.  I write:

...Civilization took away the natural mechanism of keeping human beings in check; the ability to witness the actions of the other members of the group.    In the tribal community, if one robbed from another, it was rather hard to cover one’s tracks, and one almost definitely ended up paying the consequences.  In modern society, if one steals from another, cuts in front of another in traffic, or commits violence against another, the only way, until recently, that one could be found and punished for one’s actions was if the offender was someone both known and then found by the offended.

Mass media and mass communication are pushing modern society back towards the tribal dynamics of accountability.  Thus, it is not human nature that is changing to a more positive form, but rather society than is changing to better keep human nature in check...

Read the whole article here.

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By Elliot Engstrom at 7:11AM

An Interesting Perspective on Pakistani-American Relations

Nathan Fox-Helser, who is both a member of Wake Forest Young Americans for Liberty and a new author at the left-libertarian blog Rethinking the State, wrote a paper on American foreign policy in Pakistan for a political science class he took this semester.  I've been working on building the Wake Forest YAL Wiki recently as a tool to be used by future chapters, and I got Nathan to send me the paper, which I converted into a wiki article.  The paper contains an interesting analysis of the past and current situation in Pakistan, as well as several conclusions that are reached based on this analysis.  Nathan's thesis statement is as follows:

Understanding the causes of these discontinuities in interest and conflicts in views demonstrates that America needs to act skeptically, think innovatively, remember the costs of policies and deflate its policy, and, all the while, avoid international abandonment.


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