During the State of the Union address, you may have noticed a guy who was recently released from prison in Cuba. His name was Alan Gross, and President Obama told us, “[A]fter years in prison, we’re overjoyed that Alan Gross is back where he belongs.” Gross has been portrayed as a naive do-gooder, who the evil Cuban government treated like a spy. But the truth is at least a whole lot more complicated than that. And I would argue that the Cuban government treated Gross like a spy because Gross acted like a spy. He may not be a spy in the sense that he doesn’t work as an agent of the CIA. But he was working as a contractor for the US government doing espionage in Cuba.

What Gross was supposedly doing was setting up internet access for the Cuban Jewish community. That’s true in a sense. But as John Stoehr noted, “In 2009, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) paid Alan Gross, through a third party, almost $600,000 to go to the island nation to install military-grade internet equipment in Jewish synagogues that could not be detected by the government in Havana.” This is the kind of equipment that only the military and intelligence agency can get their hands on. Gross very clearly and knowingly broke Cuban law and was sentenced to 15 years for “criminal acts against the independence of the Cuban nation.” That it was — just as surely as the Bay of Pigs was.

The obvious retort to this is if Jewish synagogues want to have this kind of equipment they ought to be allowed. I totally agree! But you know who doesn’t agree? The United States government. If the Cuban government sent agents into the United States to install high tech gizmos for the purpose of evading surveillance, our government would arrest those agents and throw them in prison — very likely for a lot longer than 15 years. So it is just outrageous for the United States to claim that Cuba is in the wrong here when its government acted the same way that ours would.

Let’s remember: Edward Snowden is living in Russia right now. He not only can’t come back to the United States, he can’t even leave Russia. After Evo Morales said that he would consider giving Snowden asylum in Boliva, the US government got his plane forced down in Austria where it was searched in total disregard for diplomatic protocol. Similarly, Julian Assange is effectively under house arrest at the Ecuadoran embassy in London because the US wants to put him in prison for the rest of his life.

I’m for freedom of speech and the right to privacy — in the extreme. But until my own country shares my commitment, I’m not going to complain about other countries that are similarly small minded. (And Cuba has a much more valid reason for worrying than we do.) But this is always the way in the United States — not just with the government but also with our media. If a country is an enemy, whatever it does is bad and whatever we do to it is good. I discussed this a couple of days ago regarding the different treatment we give to Venezuela and the far, far worse Saudi Arabia, American Double Standard Regarding Democracy. So Obama and the rest can claim that Cuba was wrong to imprison Alan Gross. But they would have been all for it if the parties had been reversed.

Sunday night, I wrote about the pathetic 60 Minutes segment that allowed John Boehner and Mitch McConnell to come on and pitch their talking points unmolested, Shameless Republican Ad on 60 Minutes. I wanted to add one more thing to that. In the discussion of the minimum wage, Boehner began to wax poetic about his days of working his way through college. This appears to be the case. Unlike most politicians, Boehner really is from relatively modest circumstances. But that doesn’t make his argument any stronger.

He gave the same old apologia for allowing the poor to work for next to nothing:

There are many things wrong with this. The biggest theoretical problem is that it depends upon a widely held myth about the way that business works. According to this theory, businesses hire people out of some sense of beneficence. That’s just not true. Businesses hire because they have to. They have work that needs to get done. So the idea that companies are going to cut workers because the minimum wage goes up is just madness. What will happen in a very small number of cases is that really badly run, inefficient companies, which are only profitable because they pay their works starvation wages, will go out of business. But these are just companies that are currently gaming the system and they deserve to go out of business.

But more important is the practical matter of just what the minimum wage was when little Johnny Boehner was working himself through college. He was born in 1949. So what was the minimum wage worth in the late 1960s? According to work by Dean Baker and Will Kimball, if the minimum wage had just kept pace with inflation, it would be $9.66 today (that’s with my adjustment from 2012 up to 2015). In addition, if it rose with productivity (which it always did until that time), it would now be almost $17.50. And if we look at just non-farm productivity growth, it would now be worth more than $23 per hour.

What Boehner did in the 60 Minutes interview is common among people his age. They look back on their own youths — when pretty much only youths had those kinds of jobs — and claim that they were just fine. Well that may be. But those jobs paid a lot more back then. If we use the non-farm productivity figure, John Boehner was earning three times what a minimum wage worker is earning today. And as I noted: these jobs are not for kids working their way through college; they are for adults with kids just trying to get through the month.

If Republicans and other conservatives want to stop the minimum wage from increasing, that’s fine. But don’t pretend that the minimum wage of today is the same as it always was. It isn’t. And until 1970, it always went up with the rate of productivity growth. It is no coincidence that when the minimum wage stopped growing, so did the wages for the rest of American workers. The current minimum wage simply adjusted for inflation is 67% of what it was in 1968, when John Boehner was doing “every kinda rotten job you can imagine.” The imagination problem is not with us; it is with him and all his conservative allies who can’t see that things have changed a lot since they were at the bottom rungs of the economic ladder.

Zack Beauchamp over at Vox wrote, It’s Over. It is more helpfully subtitled, “Why the Palestinians are finally giving up on Obama and the US peace process.” It’s a very interesting article. Basically, it is about how even Mahmoud Abbas has given up hope that a settlement can be reached in the traditional way everyone has previously thought with Israel on one side, Palestine on the other, and the United States in the middle. And it would seem that the proximate cause for this is John Kerry, who seems to have been every bit as clueless in dealing with the Palestinians as Condoleezza Rice had been — quite a feat!

But I wonder why anyone thought that the United States could be a neutral arbiter in the conflict between Israel and Palestine. I understand that the key to the conflict is where you are going to start it. That’s always the way it is with conflicts. If you tell me when it started, I will tell you what side you are one. When the Soviet Union was a going concern, they traced the Cold War back to World War I, whereas the US traced it back only to the period after World War II. But regardless of which side you come down on in the Middle East conflict, who thinks that America is a disinterested figure?

Things were probably different back in the 1970s. But today, the United States is pro-Israel in a way that defies all logic. Especially among conservatives, there seems to be more commitment to Israel than there is to the United States.[1] I think that is mostly due to the fact that Israel seems like a “kicking ass and taking names” kind of a country whereas the US is committed to diplomacy and all that sissy stuff. (Not that we are, but we give lip services to it.)

But more than this, there is just straight up racism going on. Israel looks more or less like the United States and Palestine looks like those people — you know, the ones who attacked us on 9/11. Out of Palestine we see desperate and mostly impotent attacks on anyone they can. We call this terrorism. Out of Israel, we see properly uniformed and armed forces that are devastatingly effective. We call this “Israel defending its right to exist.” In fact, these seem to get me into more arguments than I like. I have no problem with people siding with Israel, but it is a fantasy to claim that Israel’s tactics make it noble; both it’s tactics and those of the Palestinians are dictated by their power differential.

Given that there is pretty much nothing that Israel could do at this point that would alienate the American public — at least the way it is covered in the mainstream press — it is no surprise that our government has no interest in being an honest broker in the conflict. And I think it’s very simple: it is to Israel’s advantage to do nothing — at least in the short term. And if Israel were serious about a deal, it would stop the illegal settlements. But I think it is intent on allowing the situation to continue until a unified Palestine is impossible — figuring that it will just be able to finesse the situation at that time.

So I’m not surprised that Palestine is turning to the rest of the world, where they are much more likely to find people who understand that both sides have their problems. There isn’t much of an audience for that in the United States. So it isn’t surprising that our government hasn’t managed to get anything accomplished in a long time.

[1] It’s been a couple of days since I wrote this and it just occurred to me that people may think I’m referring to American Jews. That is not the case. In fact, it didn’t even occur to me. I am, of course, referring to Republicans — most of whom are evangelical Christians. Their support has little to do with the need for a safe place for a historically oppressed people. Rather, it is simply Islamophobia and the belief in the book of Revelation.

In the most recent issue of Washington Monthly, Michael O’Donnell wrote, SCOTUS Heads Toward the Cliff. It is ostensibly a review of two books about the Supreme Court — mostly, Damon Root’s Overruled: The Long War for Control of the US Supreme Court. I’ll present a quote from the article tomorrow. Right now, I just want to comment on one thing mentioned in the review as a side note. O’Donnell mentioned Richard Epstein, the “dean of judicial libertarians” — who Root apparently talks about with much admiration. But Epstein has a curious take on the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution. According to him, the government doesn’t just have to pay for land they take away from a citizen, “It also owes a business money if its regulations have the effect of ‘taking’ the business’ profits.”

By this theory, if the government enacted a law that banned the use of lead in gasoline, the oil companies would have to be paid not only for the cost of doing so but for any related loss in sales because, for example, people used less gasoline because their cars didn’t run as well with unleaded gas. This would effectively tie the hands of the government. As a practical matter, the government would never be able to regulate anything at all. And that, of course, is the point. That’s the point of “judicial libertarianism”: to tie the hands of democracy so that the public sector has no power to do anything.

This is a ridiculous theory. Consider a similar situation in which property rights are set like a fly in amber: the invention of flying. In the distant past, it was generally accepted that the space above your property was your own. The government had no right to tell you that you couldn’t shoot birds that flew over your property. But then planes came in. People were flying over private property. Sound silly? Maybe so, but there was a court case where a farmer sued to stop planes from flying in his air space. Because the aircraft industry had a lot more political power than the farmer, the courts found the way they almost always do: for the powerful. And as a result, air traffic is a common thing.

But not according to Epstein. Or rather, it wouldn’t have been according to Epstein a century ago. Now, I’m fairly sure, he would make some argument about how property rights have a limit in their vertical extent. But there is nothing obvious about that. I doubt very seriously that 19th century farmers would have liked the idea that they only owned a finite box of air. And like all libertarian thought, this idea starts to rattle apart with the slightest of pressure from practical implementations.

Think about what would have happened if the courts had claimed that airplanes couldn’t fly over private property without permission. The airplanes would have ignored the laws. The private property owners would have then had to sue the owners. But how would they have known what airplane violated their property rights? And even if they did, they would have to hunt down the owners and then start legal procedures. That would be pretty hard if the plane belonged to a foreign corporation. And what if a hundred planes flew over? A hundred lawsuits? In the end, the property owner would just give up in frustration. So much for your property rights!

But let’s go back to the leaded gas example. It is more complicated than I just said. Leaded gas is highly toxic; it makes people stupid. Every seller of gas should be culpable for the damage done by the lead that is poisoning society. But in Epstein’s world, the government couldn’t stop them. So every person who was harmed would have to sue every oil company. And that would be hard because it is pretty much impossible to show individual damages, even when it is trivial to show collective damages. And what about the secondary effect of lead: a more violent society. Should people knifed in the park be able to sue?

The situation clearly gets out of hand quickly. And this is why we do allow the government to regulate. Libertarianism may have an impressive simplicity in theory, but it always becomes ridiculously complex in practice. Consider just what a mess it would be if all the roads were owned by various people and we all had to pay tolls on them all. Now compare that to the very simple alternative of public roads funded by gas taxes. Gas use is correlated with road use. It’s a wonderful, simple solution. But it is unacceptable to libertarians because it doesn’t fit into their theory.

Libertarians live in a fantasy land in most of their thinking, but they are most delusional when it comes to the judicial system. They claim that the government can’t do anything right, yet it is going to have a perfect judicial system. Or maybe it is going to be a private system that somehow won’t be corrupted by money. It’s just madness. O’Donnell started a sentence with, “Libertarianism, so principled, so carefully thought out, does not appear to have grappled with…” But you could put anything that is concrete at the end of that. It hasn’t grappled with the real world consequences of anything. Why people take it seriously is beyond me.