German Joys

Heidelberg Debate on 'Morality and Criminal Justice'

Here, as promised are the videos of the talk I gave with Robert Blecker in Heidelberg on 4 May 2012. The introduction is by Franz-Julius Morche, one of the organizers of the conference, and the moderation is by Dr. Markus Englerth. Many thanks to both of them, to Robert Blecker, and to the audience, who asked some good questions.

Why is Germany Giving Away Billions of Euros to a Rich Country?

Günter Grass' op-ed 'poem' was lame on many levels, but in Salon, a couple of investigative journalists praise Grass for focusing attention on a pretty stunning fact:

Germany had already given Israel two Dolphin-class submarines, and subsidized one-third of the $540 million cost of another. The Germans are planning to similarly subsidize the sale of the latest submarine.

Before the Grass poem, I'd be willing to bet that very few ordinary Germans were aware that their government was simply giving away billions of dollars in military technology to Israel. Take it away, Wikipedia:

Israel has one of the highest life expectancies in the world. It is a developed country, an OECD member, and its economy, based on the nominal gross domestic product, was the 41st-largest in the world in 2010. Israel has the highest standard of living in the Middle East.

Its GDP per capita is around 26th in the entire world, and it already receives $3 billion in yearly aid from the U.S (pdf). So why can't it simply pay for the military hardware it wants to buy? All Eastern European countries are much poorer than Israel, yet when they want German military hardware, they have to pay for it.

Historical issues aside, surely Germany has better uses for €1.5 billion in taxpayer money than giving away free military presents to a country that can easily pay for them itself. How many schools could that money  have built in Botswana?

Why the American Voting System Sucks

The inimitable CGP Grey explains why mixed-member proportional voting (MMP) is more fair and rational than American first-past-the-post elections:

Now, a bleg for my German readers: As far as I can tell, the MMP system described here is what Germany uses. That's my gut feeling, but since I can't vote in Germany, I may be unaware of some minor differences. Please feel free to enlighten me in comments, as you so often do.

The Conservative Plagiarism Pandemic

I note with grim satisfaction that yet another conservative politician is facing allegations of having plagiarized in his doctoral disseration. This time it's Bernd Althusmann (g), member of the Christian Democratic Union center-right party. Ironically, he is also current chairman of the conference of education ministers, an influential working group of state education ministers that is responsible for maintaining standards of quality in the educational system.

I use the word satisfaction advisedly -- not because I feel Schadenfreude about this particular guy coming into the crosshairs, but because it's a good thing for Germany to be having this dissertation crisis. There are four kinds of university systems in the world, according to my experience:

First, those which aren't well-organized enough to confer doctoral titles.

Second, those who do confer doctoral titles, but in which much of the work is derivative, the process is often rigged or plagued with cheating, and nobody cares.

Third those who do confer doctoral titles, but in which much of the work is derivative, the process is often rigged or plagued with cheating, people do care and there are consequences.

Fourth and finally, those systems in which cheating or favoritism is rare, and thus virtually all doctoral titles really mean something.

For quite a while, Germany's system was, sad to say, in the second group of countries. Mechanisms for genuine accountability were pretty much nonexistent, and it was well-known that certain professors and universities would grant doctoral titles without too much fuss and bother about standards. Given Germany's obsession with titles, it was inevitable that hundreds of people would slap together piss-poor dissertations just to get the precious two letters, which are considered so important in Germany that they officially become part of your legal name (g).

Of course, the widespread toleration of third-rate career-enhancement dissertations debased the currency of the German doctoral title, punishing the majority of scholars who followed the rules and produced interesting -- or at least their own -- work. Yet the problem, as it is so often in Germany, was accountability. In order to clean out the Augean stables of crap dissertations, you might actually have to enforce rules and punish wrongdoers, which is hard to do in a culture, like Germany's, that enforces rigid insider/outsider distinctions and lets insiders get away with an awful lot of laziness and underhanded dealing.

This latest crop of revelations seems to be changing that. Universities are finally, belatedly beginning to put in force checks and sanctions for doctoral plagiarism, although it remains to be seen exactly how stringently they'll be enforced. Germany is slowly moving into the third category, and when that happens, it may be only a matter of time before it reaches stage four. The boil must be lanced! Reaching stage four also involves, not incidentally, reducing the number of dissertations handed out by weeding out the pure careerists. I see this as a very good thing.

I have one other comment. So far, all the doctor-cheaters have been members of center-right parties. Is this just a coincidence, or does it have something to do with the mindset of the kind of people who would join these parties? Could it be that German conservative politicians are unusually subject to a combination of yearning for social distinction commingled with a superficial careerist mentality?

Embarrassing the State

Sophie Meunier on the reaction in France to the DSK scandal:

With a few days hindsight, however, what is most surprising about the fallout of the DSK scandal in France is not how much, but rather how little displays of anti-Americanism it has provoked. To the contrary, the scandal is now turning into a teachable moment and a frank analysis of the comparative merits of French and American society. Perhaps this is the bargaining stage: if we understand the American system, perhaps we can expect it to treat one of our own fairly?

The flamboyant declarations by Bernard-Henri Lévy who was trying to help his friend by complaining that the American judge had treated DSK "like any other" subject of justice backfired. The next news cycle in France was about introspection. What if the American justice system actually had some features that could be replicated, such as the equality of treatment? A flurry of accusatory articles popped up in the French press denouncing how a defendant of DSK's stature would never have gone through the same legal troubles in France -unlike a random "Benoit" or "Karim." As socialist and DSK friend Manuel Valls publicly confessed, criticizing the American justice system also puts the spotlight on the weaknesses of French justice. This realization that perhaps the Americans might have components in their justice system that should be replicated in France might have left many with the depressing thought - "maybe we are not as wonderful and superior as we thought: so what is now our place in the world?"

...

[T]he French media ... quickly went into soul-searching mode. By refusing to report beyond the "bedroom door", had they been complicit? Why doesn't France have a tradition of investigative journalism? Should French reporters be importing best practices from their American counterparts?

European journalists tend to do a lot more commenting on what everyone else already knows than they do unearthing controversial new facts themselves. It's much easier to write yet another 1000 words assessing the implications of the Green Party regional conference in northern Thuringia than to trace illegal campaign contributions, assess racial discrimination in German justice, or uncover scandals within the German intelligence services.

Part of the problem is, of course, simple laziness. However, my examples aren't picked at random: they all involve writing stories that would embarrass the state. Investigative journalism in Germany is usually aimed mostly at the private sector; reports go undercover as low-wage workers, or publish exposes of lobbying scandals (for example) with some frequency. What they do less often is to publish stories that cast doubt on government officials' competence or honesty, or expose serious problems with government institutions. I think there are a few reasons for this: class solidarity between reporters and government officials, an undeveloped culture of leaking and whistleblowing, no freedom of information laws, and a general sense of loyalty to the state.

An example: a commenter to a previous post suggested that racial discrimination in German criminal justice is indeed discussed frequently in Germany, and linked to a German-language Wikipedia entry on the subject of crime by foreigners in Germany (g). However, the Wikipedia entry contains not a single reference to the possibility that some of the over-representation of foreigners in German prisons could be due to racial discrimination in the justice system. It doesn't even occur to German journalists or researchers to even ask the question whether the justice system might treat minorities unfairly.

I don't mean to single out Germany for this problem: France suffers from it as well: "For decades, French residents of immigrant origin—both the recently arrived and those whose families have been living in France for multiple generations—have complained that police target them for unfair, discriminatory, and unnecessary identity checks." The issue is now before the French Constitutional Council. But it was neither the French government nor the French press that challenged ethnic profiling: it was the Open Society Institute, an NGO founded by Hungarian-American billionaire George Soros. As a press release (pdf) notes, "In 2009 the Open Society Justice Initiative published Profiling Minorities: A Study of Stop-and-Search Practices in Paris, the first rigorous study to produce quantitative evidence necessary to identify and detect patterns of ethnic profiling in France."

The pattern is typical of much European journalism: After the 2005 riots in France's poor suburbs, the chattering classes produced long thumb-suckers about What it All Means, with all sorts of high-toned discussions of integration and marginalization and the Republican tradition and whatnot. But apparently nobody thought to actually study whether the protesters' complaint that they faced constant discrimination was actually well-grounded. The most obvious question went unasked and unanswered -- until the Open Society Institute came along...

Extremes Converge

Guess which European politician said this:

[S]he has come out with a detailed critique of capitalism and a position promoting the state as the protector of ordinary people. “For a long time, [my party] upheld the idea that the state always does things more expensively and less well than the private sector,” she told me. “But I’m convinced that’s not true. The reason is the inevitable quest for profitability, which is inherent in the private sector. There are certain domains which are so vital to the well-being of citizens that they must at all costs be kept out of the private sector and the law of supply and demand.” The government, therefore, should be entrusted with health care, education, transportation, banking and energy.

Stupid, American Style

The price of gasoline is pretty high in the United States right now. Not in international comparison, where it's still ludicrously cheap, but in comparison to what Americans -- who've let a completely car-dependent culture arise around them despite repeated oil shocks -- think they should be paying.

This fact, unfortunately, could have world-historical importance. American voters, ignorant and fickle creatures that they are, might well vote for any Republican to punish Obama for 'not doing enough' about U.S. gasoline prices, which of course are largely beyond his control. As Dave Weigel puts it:

Speaker of the House John Boehner made a prediction Monday about Barack Obama's re-election bid. "If gas prices are $5 or $6, he certainly isn't going to win." It might be the least disputable thing a politician has ever said. Well, yes: If people have to keep paying more and more to fill their cars up, the president could lose re-election—even to one of the current batch of Republicans. There's evidence, circumstantial but graphically compelling, that the president's current poll numbers are a function of the price of gas.

Now, most mainstream American journalists, like most Americans, have grown up in a political culture where the smarts of the 'common man' are universally assumed. The 22nd-tiredest political cliche in the United States is 'my opponent is underestimating the intelligence of the American people, who will see right through his craven pandering/blatant scare-mongering...' So Weigel calmly assesses the chance that gasoline prices alone will drive the next American election without ever once stopping to say to himself, or his readers: "Many of my countrymen are such fools that they will change control of the White House to a party with a different foreign policy and different spending priorities and different social values based solely on the price of one consumer good whose price the President cannot even control. God, how depressing. I should drop whatever I'm doing right now and dedicate my life to trying to improve the political judgment of my fellow Americans."

But that's clearly not the mission the American press corps has given itself. Here's a remarkable press statement from Obama yesterday (h/t Ed Philp) , in which he expains his decision to release his own birth certificate to defuse the moronic, years-long non-controversy over whether he was born in the United States:

Even Obama, who never flies off the handle, can't resist several digs at the press corps for giving 'birthers', as the morons are known, two long, pointless, wasted years of attention.

The truth is that the American journalistic lanscape -- especially when it comes to TV, the only source of news for most Americans -- is dominated by carnival barkers. Most of the news providers are for-profit companies, competing against one another for ratings. They will broadcast whatever attracts eyeballs, not whatever edifies -- yes, edifies* -- viewers. And that means stories that feature exciting controversies about emotionally-laden themes. As a result, the political judgment of those lost souls who get their news from TV becomes ever more adolescent. They're trained to focus on meaningless personality traits, ginned-up pseudo-conflicts, or vacuous horse-race bullshitting about who's got the better 'ground game'. Whatever ability they may have had to carefully balance competing policy priorities shrivels up and blows away.

And so, for the past few years, there have been thousands of U.S. television hours spent on the question of whether Obama was born in the U.S., usually in the form of idiots pontificating about the issue in ignorance, or 'debates' in which people yell at each other. These hours could have been devoted to America's two, ongoing, pointless, expensive wars, or strategies for containing health care costs, or analyses of the Arab uprisings, or even a good old-fashioned doughty, earnest documentary about water rights. But all those things would have cost a lot more money than inviting a couple of blowhards into the television studio and/or would have required finding people who actually knew what they were talking about. So they weren't done. Instead, the completely irrelevant non-controversy of Obama's 'real' place of birth was kept alive.

Since the press wouldn't police itself, Obama finally had to take action, and his frustration is visible. But even if this pointless distractions is largely put to rest, another one will surely follow, and the press corps will surely give it attention as long as it boosts ratings. As James Fallows said, "This is not a great day for the press."

* Sure, edify has all sorts of tea-cozy, church-basement-lecture overtones of stuffy didactic earnestness, but we elitists need to proudly reclaim it. I'm so old that I remember when there were some American intellectuals and officials who, quaintly enough, actually thought television might actually one day help improve people's judgment, and were disgusted at what it was doing instead:

But when television is bad, nothing is worse. I invite each of you to sit down in front of your own television set when your station goes on the air and stay there, for a day, without a book, without a magazine, without a newspaper, without a profit and loss sheet or a rating book to distract you. Keep your eyes glued to that set until the station signs off. I can assure you that what you will observe is a vast wasteland.

You will see a procession of game shows, formula comedies about totally unbelievable families, blood and thunder, mayhem, violence, sadism, murder, western bad men, western good men, private eyes, gangsters, more violence, and cartoons. And endlessly commercials — many screaming, cajoling, and offending. And most of all, boredom. True, you'll see a few things you will enjoy. But they will be very, very few. And if you think I exaggerate, I only ask you to try it.

That was back in 1961.

The Crumbling Plutocracy

Whenever people ask me why I've chosen to live in Europe, I say that America's just become too damn depressing. What I'm talking about are things like this New York Times article, which helpfully informs us that the American higher-education system, which charges tuition fees that put students in a kind of debt bondage -- is demanding ever more tribute from its victims students:

Two-thirds of bachelor’s degree recipients graduated with debt in 2008, compared with less than half in 1993. Last year, graduates who took out loans left college with an average of $24,000 in debt. Default rates are rising, especially among those who attended for-profit colleges.

The mountain of debt is likely to grow more quickly with the coming round of budget-slashing. Pell grants for low-income students are expected to be cut and tuition at public universities will probably increase as states with pinched budgets cut back on the money they give to colleges.

Some education policy experts say the mounting debt has broad implications for the current generation of students.

“If you have a lot of people finishing or leaving school with a lot of debt, their choices may be very different than the generation before them,” said Lauren Asher, president of the Institute for Student Access and Success. “Things like buying a home, starting a family, starting a business, saving for their own kids’ education may not be options for people who are paying off a lot of student debt.”

It's just another data point in the gradual destruction of the American middle class. You could also add the homeless shelter, already full, sending homeless families into the woods to live in tents , or the bankruptcy of one of America's greatest orchestras, or the political resentment caused by rising gas prices in an overwhelmingly car-dependent culture.

All these signs show America abandoning a principle that it used to share with Western Europe: In a decent society, someone of average talents with an average job should be able to afford the basic incidents of civilized life, such as a reasonably comfortable retirement, job security, regular vacations, childcare, entertainment, healthcare, and the ability to finance as much education as they or their children qualify for. This is the essence of social democracy -- it's not, as some people think, a giant charity for the poor, but a giant redistribution system for the middle class. In these societies, making a middle-class lifestyle affordable is partly done by naked redistribution, but is also accomplished indirectly by creating complex public-private hybrids like a heavily-regulated insurance industry and various tax subsidies. At least in Northern Europe, it still works reasonably well. That is, in Europe, much government activity is aimed at ensuring that ordinary people -- not the gifted, the beautiful, or the driven -- can go to a nice park on Sunday, take several vacations a year, get basic medical care, send their children to college, afford a newspaper subscription and opera tickets and the occasional nice restaurant meal, etc.

In the U.S., by contrast, the amount you need to earn to secure the ordinary incidents of middle-class life continues to rise, and far outstrips what most (formerly) middle-class people earn, as this report (pdf) documents. The middle class is like the proverbial frog in boiling water, passively observing as more and things their parents took for granted gradually slip out of reach. In short, the people who live where most Americans live -- not on the coasts, but in states like Texas or Arizona or Florida -- and the politicians who lead them -- have given up on the idea of trying to improve the way their communities work as societies. Of course, there are always exceptions. There are Arizonans and Texans who are doing old-fashioned social work (among them the Catholic Church, one reason the church has a reputation as -- mirabile dictu -- left wing in many parts of the USA). But changing a culture is a question of critical mass. There will never be a uniform belief that the welfare of all is the concern of all, but there has to be at least a broad consensus.

In places like Arizona, that's not even remotely the case. If you're an relatively privileged Arizonan, you don't try to solve social problems, or expect any government to do so. Suburban McMansions and massive vehicles waste incredible amounts of energy, yet merely suggesting that it might be wise to seek alternatives to a single person driving a three-ton automobile 500 yards to buy a gallon of milk will earn you a tirade about an American's God-given right to spend their hard-earned money however the hell they damn well please. Like this one.

The huge cars are all part of the contemporary American dream, which involves insulating yourself from social problems, rather than solving them. You live in the suburbs, possibly in a gated community, you buy a security system for your home (and maybe a gun), you send your kids to private school, you buy that tank-like car, you start saving for your children's college the moment they're born, you do whatever you can to keep your health insurance, you save for your own retirement, etc. If your children have problems, the last thing you will do is turn to the state. Its social services -- like its mass transit and its public-defender offices and its charity hospitals -- are under-funded and populated exclusively by people who can't afford anything better. You'll need to resolve family emergencies privately, and that means money for lawyers, tutors, shrinks, and private clinics, to make sure your childrens' futures aren't ruined by a criminal record.

All this private-market insulation against social problems and loss of status costs money, more every year. But if you're one of the few who can afford it, you can live a life in which everything works well for you: you live in a nice house in a safe neighborhood, you can pay all your bills, you'll get good medical care if you're sick, and your children will attend good schools and go to college. You'll soon forget about the people who don't have it as well as you do. Which, after all, is the point of insulation.

But you'll still be in the minority. As the Washington Post recently reported:

More than a year into the recovery, the economy is starting to show signs of improvement. The stock market has rebounded. Corporate profits are soaring. And yet, for millions of Americans, the lingering legacy of the Great Recession is a Great Slide, as job losses, declining home values and decimated retirement savings have knocked them down the socioeconomic ladder. For the formerly middle class, this slide plays out in big and small ways, from a loss of identity to the day-to-day inconveniences of life with less.

Unemployment is still over 8%, and income inequality has been increasing steadily. The latest crisis has just thrown into relief the background process in which working and middle classes have been falling behind for decades. It's brutally exposing just how much little insulation against misfortune remains for anyone below the upper-middle class.

Of course, the fact that the government doesn't meet the needs of ordinary people doesn't mean nobody does. Ever entrepreneurial, many firms make a living by exploiting others' economic hardship. The number one profiteers are, of course, large companies: unemployment increases the reserve army of labor, decreasing pressure on wages and reducing pressure to improve working conditions. Amazing as it sounds, there are still Americans naive enough to show unfeigned surprise that corporate profits are rising in times of high unemployment. But companies are just the beginning. The poorer areas of town are filled with payday loan shops, pawn shops, and other businesses whose business model is based on the old maxim: "It's expensive to be poor." Millions of people also get suckered in by private, for-profit "universities" located in gleaming office buildings by the side of the highway. There, they borrow tens of thousands of dollars a year to get degrees that often turn out to be useless -- or, at least, which don't furnish them with anything like the earning power they'll need to pay off their five-figure students loans. There's money to be made in convincing working-class people to spend beyond their means: the housing boom was caused in no small part by mortgage brokers who conned people of limited means into buying houses they couldn't afford, simply to pocket the fees.

When the other shoe drops -- when the house gets foreclosed on, or the sleep-deprived trucker working overtime jackknifes on the freeway, or the minimally-qualified nurse's assistant gives the wrong medication -- there are others waiting to profit. David J. Stern, a Florida lawyer who "made millions" processing evictions, "enjoyed a lifestyle that featured grand mansions, flashy sports cars and a yacht called Misunderstood. But the days of easy money are over for Mr. Stern, his law firm and ... investors."

Advertisements for plaintiffs' lawyers, in which they promise help to victims of truck or refinery accidents, plaster the freeways. Their websites proclaim them to be the tribunes of the little man -- the official motto of one plaintiff's firm is "Protecting What's Right®." But don't get the idea these protectors of the right are missionaries: they'll take 1/3 of whatever they win for the 'little guy". In return for this, of course, they'll always provide excellent and honest legal representation to their working-class (in American legal parlance, "unsophisticated") clients. Or maybe not -- as evidenced by the burgeoning sub-industry of lawyers who sue other lawyers for malpractice. Note, however, that the lawyer-malpractice lawyer won't take cases unless they involve at least $100,000 in damages.

And God forbid you should get in trouble with the law. America has a two-tier justice system: if you can't afford a private lawyer, you'll be dumped onto public defenders or "contract" attorneys. There, it's a pure lottery: the local public defender or private lawyer may care about their job -- or they may just be interested in processing as many cases as possible to enhance profit margins. Inmates in jails and prisons are fleeced right and left. One common scam, noted by a friend of mine who represents prisoners, is special meals for jail and prison inmates. The prison will outsources food preparation to a private firm. Part of the contract allows the firm to offer special higher-quality meals, which prisoners' relatives -- working-class or poor people -- can order online or by telephone. Of course, the same company providing the expensive-yet-delicious meals at a fat profit is also responsible for the "normal" meals. Which, predictably, are flavorless. Prisons also farm out telephone services to private companies, who charge astronomical fees to their captive customers.

The bottom line: if you're a working-class American, your social landscape is teeming not with efficient, low-cost social services, but with people and businesses picking over your ever-dwindling earnings like vultures huddled around a rotting corpse.

The most depressing part of all of this, perhaps, is that there's no end in sight. Americans have always been more individualistic than most other peoples, but this individualism used to be counterbalanced by an appreciation of solidarity, the role of unions, some sort of sense of collective responsibility for the most vulnerable. But that's all been gradually dismantled. Mainstream American discourse no longer understands the vocabulary it would need to even properly understand these problems. Firebrand, progressive Democratic politicians who actually took the 'little man's' side are long gone, as are the sort of Tory-conservative Rockefeller Republicans who acknowledged the need for strong social institutions -- if need be, the government -- to guarantee a decent standard of living to all. That sort of language doesn't even exist anymore in mainstream American political discourse. Kevin Drum recently summed it up well:

Income inequality has grown dramatically since the mid-'70s—far more in the US than in most advanced countries—and the gap is only partly related to college grads outperforming high-school grads. Rather, the bulk of our growing inequality has been a product of skyrocketing incomes among the richest 1 percent and—even more dramatically—among the top 0.1 percent. It has, in other words, been CEOs and Wall Street traders at the very tippy-top who are hoovering up vast sums of money from everyone, even those who by ordinary standards are pretty well off.

Second, American politicians don't care much about voters with moderate incomes. Princeton political scientist Larry Bartels studied the voting behavior of US senators in the early '90s and discovered that they respond far more to the desires of high-income groups than to anyone else. By itself, that's not a surprise. He also found that Republicans don't respond at all to the desires of voters with modest incomes. Maybe that's not a surprise, either. But this should be: Bartels found that Democratic senators don't respond to the desires of these voters, either. At all.

So it's hardly a surprise that Obama recently announced his ideal campaign contribution for the upcoming 2012 election: $350,000. I'll vote for him anyway, I suppose, if I bother to vote at all. But until something dramatic changes -- and in America, it always can -- I can't get all that excited about who will eventually run the crumbling plutocracy...

Guttenberg Finally Stops the Drama

As I predicted a couple weeks ago with the help of an old American political saw, Karl-Theodor's days were numbered.

I never understood his attempt to cling to his job. To quote Sibylle Bedford, this sort of problem would previously have meant one of two things for a nobleman: a bullet, or the colonies. If Guttenberg's personality had as much nobility as his name, he would have fallen on his sword weeks ago, sparing his political party, his university, and his colleagues weeks of exposure and humiliation. Then he returns to local politics, builds back his reputation, and returns a few years later to the national stage, humbled and even more appealing (at least to the many Germans who seem to like him). Bonus points for a long stay in a monastery! Instead, he furnished us with weeks of exquisite political theater.

A few quick thoughts on the scandal:

1. Germany's old-fogey network comes off rather badly. Guttenberg's doctoral supervisor, Peter Häberle, originally labeled the accusations against Guttenberg "absurd" (g), even though the website dedicated to the disseratation (g) had already documented dozens of instances of plagiarism. But who can possibly take a website seriously?! I mean, da kann jeder kommen (anyone can have access to it), which automatically means that serious people need not bother with it. After all, how many of the anonymous posters to the Wiki (whatever that suspiciously American-sounding word might mean) come from one of Germany's proudest noble families? Unfortunately for Häberle, the man with the prefix before his last name turned out to be the dishonest one, and the anonymous mass of scholars who compiled all of Guttenberg's plagiarisms turned out to be the ones upholding old-fashioned values. Häberle's initial reaction (which, to his credit, he later modified (g)) embodies two of the most mockable aspects of conservative German society: (1) the instinctive distrust of technology and innovation; and (2) the shameless cliquishness that treats every insider as automatically above suspicion, and every outsider as something you scraped off your shoe.
2. Guttenberg's resignation does at least prove that academic standards still mean something in Germany. But did you happen to notice how Guttenberg's popularity actually seemed to increase when the cheating was revealed? I saw dozens of man-in-the-street interviews in which Germans gleefully admitted to having cheated their way through school, and if everybody's doing it, how can anyone judge Guttenberg? You don't have to be a prig to find this disturbing. Cheating and absenteeism are rampant in German universities. Whenever I've caught students cheating and punished them, they react with astonishment and anger, as if I'm denying them a time-honored privilege. This is one of the reasons German universities are so depressingly mediocre (g).
3. Germany over-produces doctoral titles. There's no reason German universities should be wasting resources helping good students produce 350 pages of mediocre recapitulation just so they can gain a career advantage. Doctoral titles should be reserved for people who present a research and publication plan that really brings something new to the field, and there should be a team of at least 2 supervisors, preferably three, to heighten the chances of fraud-detection and ease the burden of supervision.
4. I have no doubt that there are dozens of other politicians and professors who are quaking in their boots right now, hoping their own dissertations don't get "Guttenscrutinized". May the Web have mercy on their souls.
5. I doubt many German universities are going to want to go through this in the future. If you haven't invested in plagiarism-detection-software companies, now might be the time to do so. 

State Pension Schemes are "Morally Irredeemable"

I often have a hard time explaining to Europeans that many mainstream American conservatives really, truly believe that government social welfare programs are harmful and should be either radically curtailed or completely dismantled. Europeans who haven't been to the U.S. simply refuse to believe that any sane person could seriously advocate this. Many continue to disbelieve this even after visiting the U.S. and meeting people who claim to favor completely abolishing welfare or Social Security (the U.S. state-administered government retirement scheme). 'Surely, they can't be serious', the Europeans mutter.

This holds even for Europeans who consider themselves conservatives. Mainstream European conservatism is driven by Tory, noblesse-oblige thinking that envisions a leading role for the state. Sure, conservative politicians may occasionally favor tinkering around the edges of social programs to adjust incentives, but none of them ever questions the assumption that the state has a primary role in providing for the economically vulnerable. Even the small-l liberal parties -- the closest thing to American conservatism on the European political landscape -- don't favor anything more than tinkering with existing arrangements.

The next time a European asks me for an example of an American anti-welfare thinking, I can now point them to a recent argument by libertarian Nick Gillespie, which sums up the thinking nicely:

How much, when, and in what form one should provide for retirement is highly individual--and is properly left to the individual's free judgment and action. Social Security deprives the young of this freedom, and thus makes them less able to plan for the future, less able to provide for their retirements, less able to buy homes, less able to enjoy their most vital years, less able to invest in themselves. And yet Social Security's advocates continue to push it as moral. Why?

The answer lies in the program's ideal of "universal coverage"--the idea that, as a recent New York Times editorial preached, "all old people must have the dignity of financial security"--regardless of how irresponsibly they have acted. On this premise, since some would not save adequately on their own, everyone must be forced into some sort of "guaranteed" collective plan--no matter how irrational. Observe that Social Security's wholesale harm to those who would use their income responsibly is justified in the name of those who would not. The rational and responsible are shackled and throttled for the sake of the irrational and irresponsible.

Those who wish to devote their wealth to saving the irresponsible from the consequences of their own actions should be free to do so through private charity, but to loot the savings of untold millions of innocent, responsible, hard-working young people in the name of such a goal is a monstrous injustice.

Social Security in any form is morally irredeemable. We should be debating, not how to save Social Security, but how to end it--how to phase it out so as to best protect both the rights of those who have paid into it, and those who are forced to pay for it today. This will be a painful task. But it will make possible a world in which Americans enjoy far greater freedom to secure their own futures.

Now, if you click through you'll see that Gillespie's views are being criticized and mocked in the blog post that reprints this argument. Dismantling Social Security is still an unpopular position in the U.S., and will never come to pass. Yet it's still part of the mainstream conservative discourse in the U.S., as is the notion that a proper conservative should believe in "starving the beast" of government to the point where it's possible to "drown it in the bathtub."