Is Senator Schumer With Us Or Against Us - Road to the Middle Class

SO, THE DUBAI port deal is off. The firestorm is over. What began, according to Newsday, at “the moment Chuck Schumer fielded a call from an Associated Press reporter asking New York’s senior senator to comment on an obscure plan to rejigger operations at six U.S. ports” has ended with the global best practice port operation company deciding not to invest in operating America’s ports.

That could end up being a real lose-lose proposition for the United States.

But it makes complete sense that a Democrat like Schumer should have led the opposition to the port deal. As a graduate of New York City’s Democratic school of politics he seems only to understand its savage culture of ambush accusations, political shakedowns, and unashamed support for rent-seeking special interests.

For the rest of us the question is the security of our ports. Can we trust a state-owned Arab company like Dubai Ports World (DP World) to operate our port terminals? It is a question that goes directly to President Bush’s challenge immediately after 9/11. “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.”

That is what The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States had to decide: whether DP World should operate the six port terminals previously owned by foreign interest P&O Ports, based in the home of the British terrorists of 7/7.

That is what neoconservative godfather Norman Podhoretz was writing about in February 2002 Commentary when he called the war on terror: World War IV. Since at least 1848 the world has been split in two, between the camp that believes in a global commonwealth of contract and trust and the axis of evil that has revolted again and again against it. First it was Marx and Engels who led the revolt. Then it was the Fabians and the Progressives with their rational, factual socialism of compulsory schools and beneficial government programs. Then it was Adolf Hitler urging a return to blood and lebesraum. Then it was Stalin and Mao and their noble experiment in egalitarian nation-building. Now the spirited rich kids of Islam are leading the rebellion of World War IV.

So we ask the question: Is a firm like DP World with us or against us? Mr. President, Is It Safe?

Curiously, our American academicians have solved this problem. They have found why the global movement of contract and trust has won out again and again against the eternal gang of ruthless men. They have found this out by researching the Prisoner’s Dilemma. You know the setup. Two prisoners are confined in separate prison cells for questioning. The dilemma for each of them is: should he rat on the other prisoner or not? Should he cooperate with the other prisoner or defect and hope for a lenient sentence?

Back in 1984 Robert Axelrod from the University of Michigan announced a competition to devise an iterative strategy for winning the Prisoner’s Dilemma. Against all expectations the winner was a strategy called TIT FOR TAT. This strategy operated according to a simple rule. It started out by cooperating with the other prisoner, but thereafter always copied the other’s move. If he cooperated, TIT FOR TAT cooperated back. If the other prisoner defected, then TIT FOR TAT would defect right back. If you conduct this iterated strategy on the world, you will find that it creates islands of trust and cooperation that slowly grow and eventually take over the world.

You can beat TIT FOR TAT. In 2004 a team of students at Southampton University did it using a strategy of collusion between the prisoners, illuminating why we have laws against price fixing and insider trading.

TIT FOR TAT teaches that you should trust people who have demonstrated their trustworthiness.

Not surprisingly the huge international effort to improve the security of the cargo transportation system is working on the trust issue. It involves everyone from port operators to the U.S. government and the U.S. military-industrial complex. The core of the effort is to extend the borders of trust, to project its frontier way beyond the ports of the United States to the factories in China and East Asia where the goods for the world are produced and loaded into ocean containers. In this cooperative effort DP World, as a global best practice company in port security operations, is a trusted team member. For instance, according to Robert M. Green:

At the recently opened Pusan Newport in South Korea, DP World and tech partner Samsung of Japan worked with the Korean port authority to build a state-of-the-art security port.

Don’t expect a veteran New York City pol like Chuck Schumer to care about that. Opportunistic ambush, betrayal, and fleecing of honest businessmen—that’s what New York politics is all about, and always has been.

Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

print view

To comment on this article at American Thinker click here.

To email the author, click here.

TAGS

Faith & Purpose

“When we began first to preach these things, the people appeared as awakened from the sleep of ages—they seemed to see for the first time that they were responsible beings...”
Finke, Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990

Mutual Aid

In 1911... at least nine million of the 12 million covered by national insurance were already members of voluntary sick pay schemes. A similar proportion were also eligible for medical care.
Green, Reinventing Civil Society

Education

“We have met with families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.”
E. G. West, Education and the State

Living Under Law

Law being too tenuous to rely upon in [Ulster and the Scottish borderlands], people developed patterns of settling differences by personal fighting and family feuds.
Thomas Sowell, Conquests and Cultures

German Philosophy

The primary thing to keep in mind about German and Russian thought since 1800 is that it takes for granted that the Cartesian, Lockean or Humean scientific and philosophical conception of man and nature... has been shown by indisputable evidence to be inadequate.
F.S.C. Northrop, The Meeting of East and West

Knowledge

Inquiry does not start unless there is a problem... It is the problem and its characteristics revealed by analysis which guides one first to the relevant facts and then, once the relevant facts are known, to the relevant hypotheses.
F.S.C. Northrop, The Logic of the Sciences and the Humanities

Chappies

“But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.” —Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison

Democratic Capitalism

I mean three systems in one: a predominantly market economy; a polity respectful of the rights of the individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and a system of cultural institutions moved by ideals of liberty and justice for all. In short, three dynamic and converging systems functioning as one: a democratic polity, an economy based on markets and incentives, and a moral-cultural system which is plural and, in the largest sense, liberal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Action

The incentive that impels a man to act is always some uneasiness... But to make a man act [he must have] the expectation that purposeful behavior has the power to remove or at least to alleviate the felt uneasiness.
Ludwig von Mises, Human Action

Churches

[In the] higher Christian churches… they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a string of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger. If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it every minute.
Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm

Conversion

“When we received Christ,” Phil added, “all of a sudden we now had a rule book to go by, and when we had problems the preacher was right there to give us the answers.”
James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh

Living Law

The recognition and integration of extralegal property rights [in the Homestead Act] was a key element in the United States becoming the most important market economy and producer of capital in the world.
Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital

mysql close