I thought the case against Amanda Knox was so circumstantial and sensationalized that a conviction would be a terrible injustice, and I think this is even more obvious today. As I wrote in 2009, the Statolatry, the demonization of any suspect that the State brands as guilty, and the blood-lust to convict and execute them led to the overblown media coverage, the caricaturing of Amanda Knox by nearly everyone, the calls for her head, and the eventual conviction.

What does she do about those four years of her life that she lost? What does anyone do about them? Who pays for those mistakes? Would a free market for courts and justice hold people more accountable for their mistakes or reduce the frequency of mistakes? Even the IRS gives you a refund if you overpay your income taxes. What accused murderer gets retribution after being acquitted? Why are judges, juries, lawyers, and the court systems so rarely held responsible for ruining people’s lives like this? I’ve heard of wrongful conviction lawsuits or settlements, but I doubt any is forthcoming here.

Many people scoff (or worse) at anarchists for proposing to dismantle an entire system because it has some flaws. The reason we want to abolish monopolistic criminal justice systems is because the monopoly is the root of all its injustices. No one has any say in the standards or structure of the laws and legal systems they are held to (if you counter that voting is their say, then you have obviously not been paying attention to the laughable level of justice and accountability that politicians and their cronies in financial firms and other huge corporations have been held to in the last decade). The State is so rarely held accountable for its mistakes, including ruining millions of people’s lives, like Amanda Knox, that it’s a wonder that more people don’t see that its lack of accountability to the people is by design, not by accident.

When Hurricane Katrina struck in 2005, one victim was political scientist Daniel Aldrich. He had just moved to New Orleans. Late one August night, there was a knock on the door.

“It was a neighbor who knew that we had no idea of the realities of the Gulf Coast life,” said Aldrich, who is now a political scientist at Purdue University in Indiana. He “knocked on our door very late at night, around midnight on Saturday night, and said, ‘Look, you’ve got small kids — you should really leave.’ “

The knock on the door was to prove prophetic. It changed the course of Aldrich’s research and, in turn, is changing the way many experts now think about disaster preparedness.

Officials in New Orleans that Saturday night had not yet ordered an evacuation, but Aldrich trusted the neighbor who knocked on his door. He bundled his family into a car and drove to Houston.

“Without that information we never would’ve left,” Aldrich said. I think we would’ve been trapped.”

In fact, by the time people were told to leave, it was too late and thousands of people got stuck.

Social Connections And Survival: Neighbors Matter

Because of his own experience in Katrina, Aldrich started thinking about how neighbors help one another during disasters. He decided to visit disaster sites around the world, looking for data.

Aldrich’s findings show that ambulances and firetrucks and government aid are not the principal ways most people survive during — and recover after — a disaster. His data suggest that while official help is useful — in clearing the water and getting the power back on in a place such as New Orleans after Katrina, for example — government interventions cannot bring neighborhoods back, and most emergency responders take far too long to get to the scene of a disaster to save many lives. Rather, it is the personal ties among members of a community that determine survival during a disaster, and recovery in its aftermath.

When Aldrich visited villages in India hit by the giant 2004 tsunami, he found that villagers who fared best after the disaster weren’t those with the most money, or the most power. They were people who knew lots of other people — the most socially connected individuals. In other words, if you want to predict who will do well after a disaster, you look for faces that keep showing up at all the weddings and funerals.

“Those individuals who had been more involved in local festivals, funerals and weddings, those were individuals who were tied into the community, they knew who to go to, they knew how to find someone who could help them get aid,” Aldrich says.

The Japan Example: ‘I Was Just Running Around And Talking To People’

In Japan, Aldrich found that firetrucks and ambulances didn’t save the most lives after earthquakes. Neighbors did.

“In Kobe in 1995, if you knew where your neighbors slept, because the earthquake was very early in the morning, you knew where to dig in the rubble to find them early enough in the process for them to survive,” he says.

Because of his research, when a powerful earthquake struck Japan this March, Aldrich was certain that good neighbors would play a decisive role.
[...]
[In Michinori Watanabe's effort to save his father's life,] why not just call the Japanese equivalent of 911?

“At that time all the electricity was down, and the telephone land lines were down and my mobile was not working, so there was no other way than I myself go out running around, asking people,” Watanabe said.

Local Knowledge Is Key

Not only did no professionals come to help Watanabe those first few minutes, there was no sign of them the first day.

Watanabe emptied his house of water and blankets and started helping neighbors who were homeless and shivering. They were still without help days later.
[...]
It’s this passion for a local community and granular knowledge about who needs what that makes large-scale government interventions ineffective by comparison. It’s even true when it comes to long-term recovery.

Beloit College economist Emily Chamlee-Wright has studied why some communities in New Orleans came back more quickly than others.

“One of the communities that in the post-Katrina context was the most successful was the Mary Queen of Vietnam community in New Orleans East,” said Chamlee-Wright. “It’s important to recognize that one of the reasons why they were so successful is that they ignored government warnings not to come back and start rebuilding too soon.”

‘The Second Tsunami’

Governments and big nongovernmental organizations — which are keenly aware of the big picture — are often blind to neighborhood dynamics.

In Southeast Asia, Aldrich found that well-intentioned NGOs actually hurt the fishing communities they were trying to help. They saw the damage caused by the tsunami in fishing villages and started giving new boats to all the fishermen.

“Fishing is a very social activity. It is organized, really, not in a hierarchy but in a network,” Aldrich said. “So you have someone who drives the boat, the person who steers, you have two people fishing in the water, some person who carries the net and some person who goes — takes the fish to market. Once every person is given their own boat, you’ve gone from five people working together to each individual working by themselves.”

Fishermen who used to work together now became competitors. Trust broke down. Fights broke out.

“Some of the local activists I talked to called this ‘the second tsunami,’ ” Aldrich said.

The problem isn’t that experts are dumb. It’s that communities are not the sum of their roads, schools and malls. They are the sum of their relationships.

The Japanese government seems to get this. The government there actually funds block parties to bring communities together. [Um, isn't that kind of missing the point? Anyway...]

That might never happen in America, but Aldrich thinks each of us can do something on our own: Instead of practicing earthquake drills and building bunkers, we could reach out and make more friends among our co-workers and neighbors.

“Get more involved in neighborhood events,” Aldrich said. “If there is a planning club, a homeowners association — if there are sports clubs nearby, PTAs — those groups have us in contact with people we wouldn’t normally meet and help us build up these stocks of trust and reciprocity.”

“Really, at the end of the day, the people who will save you, and the people who will help you,” he added, “they’re usually neighbors.”

One thing I will mention about the radio segment is the introduction that the All Things Considered host gives before Vedantam begins narrating his report: She says, “New research shows there’s something more important than rescue crews and government aid.” Umm, well, obviously Aldrich’s and Chamlee-Wright’s research is new and is interesting, but research on the cooperation and altruism that people exhibit after natural disasters, the feelings of purpose and liberation that people feel as their communities rise together after disasters, the intro-level economic fact that “price gouging” saves lives and expedites recovery, and the spontaneous order that always exists absent government interference, during good times and bad (especially bad), is far from new.

Hat tip: Peter Boettke

In the heady days of the 1990s, it was widely assumed that the global Internet was, by its nature, an anarchic zone of untrammeled speech inherently immune from the control of governments quite apart from any formal legal constraints on censorship. But as political scientist Henry Farrell, among other scholars, has observed:

[A] small group of privileged private actors can become “points of control”—states can use them to exert control over a much broader group of other private actors. This is because the former private actors control chokepoints in the information infrastructure or in other key networks of resources. They can block or control flows of data or of other valuable resources among a wide variety of other private actors.

The freedom of the global Internet comes with an increased dependence on globalized intermediaries, over whom political actors in large and valuable markets will typically exert enormous leverage. A dissident publication running its own press may have an incentive to resist that political pressure—but a multinational credit card company or hosting provider, for whom the publisher is a relatively insignificant source of revenue—will often find its bottom line better served by compliance. As Farrell notes, we’ve already seen a similar strategy pursued against offshore gambling sites, whose payment processors were threatened with litigation by ambitious prosecutors.

It’s a sobering validation of Friedrich Hayek’s famous dictum that to be controlled in our economic pursuits—perhaps now more than ever—means to be controlled in everything. Whatever you think of Wikileaks, the idea that a controversial speaker can be so effectively attacked quite outside the bounds of any direct legal process, thanks to the enormous leverage our government exerts on global telecommunications and finance firms, ought to provoke immense concern for the future of free expression online.

(Btw, the answer he gives to the question, about the vice presidents, was right.)

The Big Election! “Are you for the left or the right? Are you Democrat, Republican? Are you liberal, conservative?” One of the greatest divide-and-conquers in country history. …Let me tell you something about politics: it’s no different from professional wrestling. It’s one great show. At the end of the day, they all get together, and they have their steaks, and they laugh at jackasses like you and I that think we’re important and think we’re actually doing something to change our country. … I would not be shocked, at the end of the day, Mr. Oz pulls away his curtain and says, “I fooled all you retards. All of you.”
[...]
Where’s your favorite pizza place? You know what your favorite pizza place in the world is? Are you going to vote on it? …I live in a little town in Jersey. [Leading up to] the town election, you know when you see the dumb little lawn names? …Now, the guy in the corner of my block is a builder, he had “Bill” on his thing [lawn sign], and the whole town loved “Bill”, we knew “Bill” brings his kids to play softball, and blah blah blah. Two weeks later, a lot of names changed, especially guys that were builders. Now they were for “Fred”. And I really thought, like, “Wow, maybe they’re getting paid to put these things on the lawn. Maybe that’s the deal. Let me check, because…maybe my stock’s a little higher—’Hey, I was a goat on television, and TV guide…’—might get a little extra cash, a little per diem.” So I asked my neighbor, “Why did you have ‘Bill’ on your sign?” “Oh, my god, I love ‘Bill’. I think ‘Bill’ should be the mayor, hands down.” “Why do you have ‘Fred’ up?” “Because I need permits. And when I went to go get my permit, they told me, ‘Well, if you get rid of that sign, we can help you a lot quicker.’”

Now, as much as you think, “Oh, that’s small-town stuff,” don’t think for one second that doesn’t happen in the big picture. The genius part of it all is your mind is manipulated…. And what cracks me up is [people say], “We’re all about education! And I’d like to think that I have my own conscience!” That’s what you’d like to think.
[...]
The only way you can get a full grasp on it is, honestly: do not read one newspaper…and do not watch news for two weeks. …If you stop watching news, you start realizing how ridiculous it is and how much of a scam and a scandal and an agenda it all is, just to manipulate.
[...]
[T]his is what they do: “Here’s the subject: homosexuality. This side believes blah blah blah. This side—” Why is there “this side” or “that side”? Why isn’t it just a conversation? …”Are you with them, or are you with them?” It’s professional wrestling at its genius best.”

I don’t think it’s necessarily correct or all that productive to talk in conspiracy-theory tones like many libertarians do and like Jim Breuer does there, as though everything coming from TV, newspapers, and government employees is part of a consciously designed manipulative plan, but in the end it doesn’t particularly matter if the manipulation is consciously designed or not; if the results are the same whether people’s thoughts and feelings are shaped deliberately or just the natural result of a Statist societal structure, then the effect is equally distressing. People believe that politics and governmental coercion not only can solve problems but are in fact the best way to solve many problems; people believe that Democrats care more about the common man and restraining corporate power than Republicans and Republicans care more about individual rights and economic freedom than Democrats; people believe that voting is a duty that they owe to society and is a privilege that gives them the power to change society and the right to complain about the problems they caused; people believe they are lucky to be granted this power and this privilege by their relatively caring and enlightened government; people convince themselves that voting for the lesser of two evils is not the least bit evil!

Some of that propaganda probably comes from politicians, advisors, and bureaucrats who know that the two-party system is a sham and that voting won’t change anything fundamentally, so that is conscious manipulation. However, I doubt that is the major source of all of those misconceptions. I think it’s clear that the political problems we face are more the result of an all-pervading system than a relatively few evil geniuses, and this makes them less easily surmountable because, at least in theory, the evil geniuses could be replaced with good people, whereas the all-pervading system is much more difficult to even dent, much less take down and replace. We have the advantage that the State must inevitably destroy itself with its bloat and inefficiency, at which point the society that remains must be armed with the philosophical and moral principles to form the foundation of a truly free social order, in which coercion is never an acceptable means of change and no person or group is given power that others don’t have.

Egan’s point is that a large proportion of the Rebublican rank-and-file unquestioningly believe half-truths and blatant lies fed to them by right-wing media. For instance, that Obama is a Muslim, he was born in Kenya, he signed the TARP bailouts into law, and Michelle Obama and 40 friends recently vacationed in Spain on the public’s dime. He’s right, this is pretty alarming. Plenty of voters of all stripes believe things that are wrong, but I’m sure many of them are topics of debate or are not extremely easily disprovable. But to believe things that are objectively, undeniably, obviously wrong, immediately and easily disprovable, is indicative of willful ignorance that should alarm everyone.

But how about the things that liberal Democratic voters never bother to look into or question? For instance, how Obama voted on the aforementioned TARP legislation. (No, Egan didn’t bother mentioning that Obama voted Yea or that he has willfully continued and done nothing to reverse any effects of TARP.) How many Democratic voters know about Obama’s vote on a warrantless wiretapping program or how his regime feels about Bush’s warrantless wiretap policy? (Admittedly, these made bigger headlines than other crimes, failures, and broken promises of Obama’s.) How about the cost of Obama’s failed stimulus vs. the cost of almost 6 years of the Iraq War under President Bush? How about the number of Pakistani non-combatants killed by Predator drone attacks under President Obama in only a year and a half? How many Democratic voters would even be in the ballpark if asked to guess about those numbers? How many liberal blaggers care about the willful ignorance of Democratic voters on these issues? On the other hand, how many gladly avoid railing against Obama for things that, if (when) Republicans did them, they would rant about until they were as blue as Tobias Fünke?

Remember the CEO of Toyota standing in front of Congress and, in broken English, apologizing profusely and practically begging for America to give them another chance and believe in Toyota again? And how some congressmen, I don’t remember which, berated him and his company and basically tried to start a nationwide smear campaign against them? We won’t be hearing any apologies from them, nor can they undo the damage they helped cause to a perfectly responsible company that makes cars that are apparently about as safe any other company’s.

I think it’s safe to say that, in the minds of many senators, congressmen, and bureaucrats, the desire to bolster American car companies at the expense of the suddenly vulnerable Toyota played no small part in their attacks on Toyota before any solid evidence was available. Do you doubt that such favoritism will become commonplace and even more shameless as the Imperial Federal Government gains more influence, control, and eventually ownership of nominally private businesses? Of course government agents will make decisions based on politics and not necessarily economics, justice, good business sense, or even common sense. This kind of dishonesty, this disregard for the facts, the complete lack of importance placed on efficiency or fairness are characteristic of government-run economies when decision-making is political, so we can expect a lot more of this in the future, not less.