Op-Eds

US Policy on Taiwan is a False and Dangerous Two-Step

1 Comment
Members of the Republic of China Army board a ship bound for Taiwan in 1949. Author unknown. Public Domain.
Members of the Republic of China Army board a ship bound for Taiwan in 1949. Author unknown. Public Domain.

On November 15, US president Joe Biden and Chinese president Xi Jinping held a “virtual summit” covering a number of subjects and resulting, for the most part, in banal public pledges of “cooperation” to “ease tensions.”

Biden, however, managed to score a double own goal on the subject of Taiwan by simultaneously justifying bad US foreign policy and endorsing Beijing’s false “One China” claim.

On one hand, the US has neither any obligation nor any good reason to continue guaranteeing Taiwan’s  de facto independence from the mainland regime.

Taiwan is not a US state. Taiwan is not a US territory.  There are no plausible circumstances under which a change of political authority in Taiwan would represent a threat to the defensibility or security of the United States. Therefore the only thing the Taipei regime should expect, or get, from the US regime is a Jeffersonian policy of  “peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations; entangling alliances with none.”

On the other hand, there’s also no obligation on the part of the US government to pretend that Taipei is part of the People’s Republic of China and subject to the Beijing regime’s authority. It is not, it never has been, and no amount of “One China” posturing on the part of other regimes will change that fact.

Some people paraphrase the question as an answer: “Taiwan has always been part of China.” That’s no more true than the claim that “Cuba has always been part of Spain” or “Ireland has always been part of the United Kingdom.” All three islands have histories preceding their invasion, occupation, and colonization, and all three islands have long since established independence (apart from Ireland’s Six Counties, anyway).

Taiwan has, over the last few hundred years, been “part of” the Netherlands, “part of” Qing Dynasty China, “part of” Japan, and finally independent under Chinese Nationalists who wanted no part of the mainland’s Communist revolution.

Whether Taiwan ever BECOMES “part of” the People’s Republic should, in an ideal world, be a decision for its own people to make through whatever institutions they set up to make such decisions.

In our non-ideal world, there’s a good chance that it will become “part of” the People’s Republic through invasion, occupation, and colonization. While would be a bad thing, it’s something the US government should neither commit American blood or treasure to prevent, nor encourage with its “One China” diplomatic balderdash.

Frankly, the latter course seems the likely goal of US strategy. Much as the Carter and Reagan administrations used Afghanistan as bait to give the Soviet Union “its own Vietnam,” the Biden administration may be using Taiwan as bait in hopes of giving Beijing “its own Afghanistan.” That would be a very bad outcome for all involved — especially the Taiwanese people.

Sooner or later, the US will return to the “hands off foreign disputes” approach that characterized its first century. Better that it do so sooner and voluntarily than later under the compulsion of military, economic, and political collapse.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION HISTORY

Op-Eds

Cryptocurrency: Dave Troy is Partly Right, But on the Wrong Side

1 Comment
Cryptocurrency logos. By voytek pavlik. Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication.
Cryptocurrency logos. By voytek pavlik. Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication.

In a series of tweets on November 9, “serial technology entrepreneur” Dave Troy outlines his view of cryptocurrency as  “an ideologically-driven attack on the legitimacy of fiat currency, the
@federalreserve, and the incumbent financial system,” and “the sequel to the January 6th” Capitol riot.

Let’s dispense with the latter charge first: There’s no merit to it whatsoever.

Cryptocurrency came into existence years before Trumpism was so much as a gleam in the Republican Party’s eye, and was conceived in large part as a method of separating money and state.

The Capitol riot, on the other hand, was no more than a tawdry tantrum of preference over which tyrant was entitled to crack the whip of government over the “incumbent financial system.”

In short, the Capitol rioters have far more in common with Dave Troy than with Satoshi Nakamoto, Bitcoin’s pseudonymous creator.

Troy is partly right, though, in claiming that cryptocurrency constitutes “an ideologically-driven attack on the legitimacy of fiat currency” in general and on the Federal Reserve itself.

That doesn’t mean that the many people involved in cryptocurrency, from miners to exchange operators to individual holders, are all wild-eyed anarchist revolutionaries like me. Far from it. For the most part, they’re no different than any other class of investor, entrepreneur, or consumer. They see something of value and they want to profit from it, or at least make good use of it. For most of them, it’s no more ideological than buying a share of Apple or a loaf of bread.

But for us ideologues, yes, the purpose of cryptocurrency is to seize control of money  from the political class and distribute that control widely among free markets and individual people. That would be a good thing, not a bad thing, and to understand why we need look no further than the current worries over inflation.

America’s central bankers claim that recent inflation — supposedly annualizing to more than 6% at the moment, but probably much higher — is “transitory,” while politicians either claim confusion as to its cause or attribute it to convenient distractions.

Inflation happens when the money supply increases faster than the production of goods and services for purchase with that money. Period. Rising prices aren’t inflation, they’re just a symptom of inflation.

The Fed has spent the last two years magically creating new dollars out of thin air far faster than the economy can absorb those dollars with production of goods and services to sell.

Why? So that Congress can borrow those magical dollars and spend them on whatever the political class happens to want … in the process, reducing the value of the dollars you earned with actual productive work.

While it’s a stretch to claim that cryptocurrency is immune to government manipulation, it’s at least immune to arbitrary creation by government. Cryptocurrency makes it harder for the politicians to steal from you. That’s why the political class hates and fears it.

Giving government control of money was one of our worst mistakes. Cryptocurrency is how we’re correcting that mistake.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION HISTORY

Op-Eds

“Executive Privilege” Should Be Ended, Not Extended

1 Comment
Tear gas outside the United States Capitol on 6 January 2021. Photo by Tyler Merbler. Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.
Tear gas outside the United States Capitol on 6 January 2021. Photo by Tyler Merbler. Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

On November 9, DC District Court judge Tanya Chutkan refused former US president Donald Trump’s request, based on “executive privilege,” for a preliminary injunction forbidding the National Archives and Records Administration to release documents to the US House committee grandstanding on … er, “investigating” … the January 6 Capitol riot.

If  Trump’s name goes down in history for anything of substance rather than mere flash, it  should probably be for his bizarre claim that  people who aren’t executives anymore retain  “executive privilege” over information pertaining to their time in office.

The concept of “executive privilege” appears nowhere in the US Constitution, but instead developed over history in court decisions, culminating in 1974’s US v. Nixon.

Nixon lost that case and had to turn over audiotapes of Oval Office conversations as part of the Watergate scandal that led to his resignation, but the Supreme Court did assert a “valid need for protection of communications between high Government officials and those who advise and assist them,” so as to encourage “candor” rather than “a concern for appearances and for their own interests.” Appeals to “national security,” justified or not,  also remain a perennial “executive privilege” favorite.

What we haven’t faced before is a legal test of the notion that “executive privilege” inheres in the person rather than the office, remaining a former president’s prerogative after he’s lost his bid for re-election and returned to private life. It’s a silly notion without basis in law, jurisprudence, tradition, or common sense.

The US government’s executive branch records logically fall under the stewardship of that branch and of its current chief executive, not of every Bill, George, Barack, and Donald who may have held the post in the past.  And the purpose of that stewardship supposedly answers to claims of “the common good” rather than the comfort of former executives. The current chief executive, President Joe Biden, has directed the National Archives to release the documents requested by Congress, leading to Trump’s challenge.

The bigger question is whether “executive privilege” has any defensible place at all in a government that claims to be a democratic republic made legitimate the consent of the governed. The answer is no.

The purpose of the executive branch is to execute the will of Congress and, by supposed extension, the people. The president isn’t a king and the US government isn’t a company he owns. He’s an employee, a functionary, a gofer.  He operates at the direction and behest of Congress. His actions should therefore be subject to its constant examination and evaluation.

Donald Trump isn’t even any of those things anymore. He’s just a disgruntled former employee who enjoys no plausible “privilege” whatsoever regarding the historical records of his administration and its actions.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION HISTORY