You need to work on the bugs there, Henry.

Looking at it now? Hell, I and many others correctly identified it at the time; IMO, it took a seriously skewed perspective, or more likely in Rumsfeld’s case (IMO again) a willingness to indulge in wishful mendacity, to see it as anything else.

The legal monopoly is needed if uniform pricing is to be maintained. Otherwise entrants could offer competition for low-cost service, such as delivery between points in a given city, and leave USPS with the high-cost services. You may not like uniform pricing, but that’s a separate issue.

It’s had this, as authorized by Congress, since the 1860s, when a libertarian lawyer challenged the Postal Service, Lysander Spooner. To us, this is admission enought that the “Service is a failure.”

But I find Tabarok’s an analogy of postal deliver under peace-time conditions with war uncompelling. Business units are not the equal of the military or defense – especially since the latter function is often rarely used. Because of this, is it not comparable to any continuing business. Today in the world, defense is most often a function of nation-state nationalism. It is the latter that libertarians fail to find any good in. Classical liberal philosopher David Conway effectively answers this charge.

But two things happened in the 20’s—Tokyo Earthquake (good), refusal to exempt Japan from racist provisions of immigration laws (real bad). So I don’t think there was quite the steady trend you envisage. Hence the training of academics and others as Japan experts (I can think a few others nobody would have heard of), and the reliance on West Coast populations (including some under-the-covers Japanese Americans) for language and cultural expertise.

Re: the link you posted, if I forced you to pay for my services, would your use of them constitute an inconsistency?

Since the most important triumph of intelligence (and since Japan was in important respects thoroughly beaten by a very skilled American (and Allied) war effort in 1942-44 the atomic bomb, whatever one thinks of Truman’s decision, is irrelevant) was the planning for the battle of Midway in June 1942 the Navy had obviously been thinking about this for some time. There may have been some use made of suddenly acceptable Asian populations on the West Coast (Chinese and Filipino) who were bilingual, but I think it was basically recognized as a relevant skill and maintained through the 30’s.

Is the conduct of warfare analogous to the physical delivery of mailed items. Very doubtful.

Alex, what do we expect from a blog post? Well, not a perr-reviewed, footnoted paper, but not BS, as well. The specific corruption and incompetancy of this administration can not be kept out of any honest description of this war. Neither, to be fair, can the fact that the Bush era has demonstrated that ‘libertarianism’ is, in fact, highly correlated with the Republican Party. I would say ‘post-9/11 era’, but that correlation was apparent from the 1990’s; it just lost the last excuses during the Bush administration.

Alex makes an important point here. But again, this is not an inevitable structural problem in government as such. It is an argument for a powerful institional bias towards government operations in other countries listening and responding to the needs and opinions of other countries’ citizens and institutions. One reason why US efforts in both Afghanistan and Iraq have gone (relatively) better with Zalmay Khalilzad in charge is that he is someone with an instinctive understanding of consensus and of the region he’s dealing with.

I think Alex is pointing towards an important point: there is a bizarre incongruity in the fact that those on the conservative and libertarian end of the spectrum so often point to the inevitable perverse or unintended consequences of government in every field EXCEPT warfare (where in fact perverse and unintended consequences are most inevitable and most severe). However, this critique misses many of the factors that have made US government performance in Iraq much worse than government performance often is. Many of these factors – the subordination of intelligence, research, and analysis to political and public-relations goals; the intense politicization of what should be non-political organs of expertise – can be generalized throughout contemporary US government. And they’re part of the reason why the government is functioning so poorly at the moment.

To get back to the “incentives” point: one of the reasons why US government is so unresponsive to the interests of Iraqi citizens is that it’s SO responsive to the interests (= political sentiments) of US citizens. This is true of US foreign aid as well. When these organizations are very responsive to US voters in the short term, they become less responsive to the foreigners they’re supposed to help, in the long term.

No, but it does a general case against wars of choice make. If you know in advance that you’ll mess up any war you go, then best only go to war when you have to.