Once you realize that political rulers are subject to the same, mainly self-interested, incentives as ordinary individuals, hidden features of the world become visible. Consider the question of who is responsible for the blast at the Al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza.
Until economists started developing public choice theory in the mid-20th century, and despite some exceptions (Machiavelli comes to mind), it was common for political analysts and economists to neglect the self-interested incentives of political rulers, including in democracies. Thanks to this analytical tradition, we can better understand many political phenomena, including atrocities in the current Middle East war.
Self-interest explains much of the incentives of any little barbarian warlord (in this case, self-interest may include, but not only, 72 virgins in heaven). Self-interest similarly explains the behavior of Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and American president Joe Biden. The incipit of Anthony de Jasay’s The State gives a methodological heuristic to grasp this: ”What would you do if you were the state?” (Giving up beds of roses grown with your own money in return for nothing?)
Now, to our question, who would have the strongest incentives to take the risk to bomb, intentionally or not, a hospital in Gaza, even if it killed tens or hundreds of civilians?
From a public-choice and rational-choice perspective, we know two related things. First, it is in the interest of the actors of whatever side is guilty to lie: if Hamas (the Palestinian quasi-state terrorist group), in order to erase its own moral turpitude and gain some apparent moral high ground; if the Israeli state, to shift the blame to Hamas or their fellow Palestinian terrorists. Second, constraints and limits (one’s “feasible set” or feasible options) change incentives. The incentive to lie is stronger if the lie has fewer chances of being exposed because, for example, there is no free press or independent organization to investigate on-site; and if the expected penalty for the outed liar is low. This is why autocratic states or barbarians lie more glaringly.
If this is true, the liars on the hospital blast are more likely to be Hamas or the Palestinian Islamic Jihad. This hypothesis was buttressed by US intelligence, the Israeli military, private analysts, and open-source imagery. The cause would be an “errant” or “misfired” missile, perhaps after an attempted launch from a nearby cemetery. The pictures taken at the scene also appear to be consistent with a rolling fireball from the missile’s fuel, but not with an aerial attack. (See “U.S., Experts Say Evidence Suggests Palestinian Rocket Hit Gaza Hospital,” Wall Street Journal, October 18, 2023.) This hypothesis of a nearby launch would also be consistent with the terrorists’ practice of operating behind human shields.
On the other hand, it would not be the first time that the US government (and, I suppose, the Israeli government) has lied to its citizens or to the world, but the fact that such lies are regularly found and disclosed attenuates this possibility. Of course, we need to be open to any new evidence that may come up.
At the very beginning of the war, some analysts underlined the risk of an Israeli defense strategy that would not recognize and proclaim the moral necessity of not behaving like the barbarians who had started the war. It was difficult to find such proclamations; we mainly heard talks of vengeance. And when Netanyahu said something to that effect during Biden’s visit, it was accompanied by an ambiguous qualification if the Wall Street Journal‘s report is correct (“Biden Backs Israel Over Gaza Hospital Blast,” Wall Street Journal, October 18, 2023):
Netanyahu said Israel is doing everything it can to keep civilians out of harm’s way, while also saying that “this will be a different kind of war, because Hamas is a different kind of enemy.”
Of course, we know that: barbarians are a different enemy than non-barbarians. A few days after Hamas’s aggression, Financial Times columnist Edward Luce voiced a prescient warning (“Biden, Netanyahu and America’s choice,” Financial Times, October 11, 2023):
Last weekend’s massacres were designed to provoke retaliatory Israeli atrocities in the Gaza Strip. … The rational position is to reject the playbook that Hamas wants.
It seems that affirming the moral-individualist position is also (or would have been) the best strategic decision from an Israeli viewpoint. Occupying the high moral ground is often a good strategy.
READER COMMENTS
MarkW
Oct 19 2023 at 12:38pm
Last weekend’s massacres were designed to provoke retaliatory Israeli atrocities in the Gaza Strip. … The rational position is to reject the playbook that Hamas wants.
Of course Hamas will do this — they will invent atrocities if none are forthcoming (as it now appears that not only was the explosion at near the hospital a result of an errant rocket but also that the rocket didn’t actually hit the hospital and nowhere close to 500 people died). But the other page in the playbook is deter Israeli attacks on Gaza via the mere threat of creating atrocities (via the use of human shields) and publicizing them or — alternately — inventing atrocities when real ones don’t happen. It’s not clear that it would be smart strategic decision to ‘take the high ground’ by not retaliating against Hamas and, effectively, allowing them to get away with the bloody massacre. If that were the strategy, what incentive would Hamas have to avoid a repeat performance?
Pierre Lemieux
Oct 19 2023 at 2:54pm
Mark W: Good questions. On your last sentence, the future incentives of barbarians to think twice is to know that they won’t have a sympathetic ear anywhere (or nearly anywhere) in the civilized world. And note that I am defending an individualist civilized ethic not only as a good war strategy but for a larger set of reasons, including that there is no way to maintain or develop a free society here without a consistent ethics of reciprocity. Our own rulers and soldiers are likely to be much more dangerous at home if they have taken the habit of being barbarians in foreign lands,
Craig
Oct 19 2023 at 7:25pm
Also let us not disincentivize the enemy to surrender.
Mactoul
Oct 20 2023 at 1:00am
Free society is a luxury when you are fighting for survival. This naivety directly comes from deeply ingrained libertarian habit of suspecting one’s own rulers. This isn’t how people who believe in our own state think.
I would also like to mention the Machiavellian tradition represented by Mosca, Sorel and Pareto. Burnham called them defenders of freedom and they had further advantage of not being burdened by the dogma of economics.
Jon Murphy
Oct 20 2023 at 9:19am
I disagree. The record of history seems much murkier than that. There have been many free societies, even those on the brink of destruction, who have resisted and survived (see, eg, Jews, the French Resistance, the Polish Resistence, just to name a few in recent memory). Likewise, there have been unfree societies that have been destroyed, in many cases precisely because they were unfree: the USSR, to give an example from recent memory. The fact that liberalism has survived various crises over the past 300 years or so while various totalitarian and unfree ideologies have risen and fallen says something to me about survivability. Finally, the fact that many totalitarian ideologies use precisely the argument you give as a means to destroy, not protect, freedom says something to me about the sincerity of that claim.
On a broader, more philosophical note, it seems to me that freedom is something worth dying over. When we look at the major sacrifices many people make to obtain freedom, often with a low expectation of survival, I think it shows that the relevant tradeoff isn;t between freedom and survival. Freedom and survival, it seems, are compliments. If one cannot have one of these, then there is less of a desire for the other.
One final note. You write: “This naivety [of suspecting one’s rulers] directly comes from deeply ingrained libertarian habit of suspecting one’s own rulers. This isn’t how people who believe in our own state think.” I’m not sure what that last sentence means, but it seems to me that the long history of people rebelling against various rulers suggests that people long have suspicions about their rulers.
Jon Murphy
Oct 20 2023 at 11:52am
I’m sorry, the part of your quote where I add in square brackets is incorrect. The naivety you’re referring to is that freedom is not a luxury but rather a necessity. That should be what is in the square brackets. Sorry for my mistake
Mactoul
Oct 20 2023 at 9:34pm
Free societies turn pretty collective in times of war.
It is said that Germany during WW 2 was significantly not running a war economy and had not mobilized the private sector the way Britain and US had done.
Jon Murphy
Oct 20 2023 at 9:56pm
Said by who?
Craig
Oct 20 2023 at 11:28pm
I enjoy history generally but one of my favorite subjects to read about is WW2. Hitler was aware of the privations caused by German involvement in WW1 and in the early part of the war he was trying to maintain domestic morale by not running the German economy on what most would call a war footing. Indeed many in Germany felt they lost WW1 at home actually. So there was a real reluctance to go to what would be called ‘total war’
In the early part of the war up through about December 1941 when the Red Army stopped the Germans in front of Moscow, things had been going well for the Germans and there was little need to do anything. Feb 1942, Hitler appoints Speer as the Armaments Minister, that’s the first ‘total war’ inflection point. The second would be Stalingrad. After Paulus surrendered the 6th Army, a major turning point in the conflict of course, Goebbels gives the rather infamous Sportpalast speech, infamous because in a slip of the tongue he actually alludes to the Holocaust, but he also does call for total war ‘Total war is the demand of the hour.”
“Deutschland jedenfalls hat nicht die Absicht, sich dieser jüdischen Bedrohung zu beugen, sondern vielmehr die, ihr rechtzeitig, wenn nötig unter vollkommen und radikalster Ausr… -schaltung [Ausrottung / Ausschaltung] des Judentums entgegenzutreten.”
He caught himself about to say “Ausrottung” meaning ‘extermination’ and changed to Ausschaltung ‘elimination’ which is obviously not a nice word either, but I’m sure you get the point.
Jon Murphy
Oct 21 2023 at 10:34am
Their governments do, absolutely. War is, after all, the health of the state (although not its people). But it doesn’t logically follow that freedom is a luxury.
MarkW
Oct 20 2023 at 8:21am
Of course. But it seems extremely unlikely that Israel would adopt Hamas’s ‘modern bronze age slaughter of the innocents’ style of ‘warfare’ — not just to try to maintain the good opinion of the world (difficult in any case given prevailing biases), but out of their own self-respect. As a strategy, I don’t believe they would do it even if they were certain they could get away with it.
steve
Oct 20 2023 at 12:25pm
Totally agree on Israel not willing to do that. There are certainly elements in the country that would but they are a small minority. Jon’s examples are good but there are also lots of examples where the good guys lost. It’s probably good to refer to John Boyd, the creator of the OODA loop. He wrote extensively on war theory. Part of that was that there was a hierarchy of importance in winning wars. Tactics, logistics, state capacity are important but he thought that the moral/morale factor was most important. It doesn’t guarantee victory but it explains a lot of ones that didnt look likely.
Israel should do want we did with ISIS. We went house to house, found ISIS and killed them. It takes time, you will lose some soldiers and you will accidentally kill some civilians but it is a way to kill Hamas.
Steve
Monte
Oct 19 2023 at 12:43pm
Taqiyyah, which means concealing the truth, is an Islamic tenet used by terrorist groups like Hamas and Hezbollah as an acceptable means to an end. They’re masters at the art of deception. They’ll use dead civilians and a sympathetic and gullible media as a powerful weapon to create revulsion against any counter-offensive by their enemies.
Which rulers are more likely to lie?
David Seltzer
Oct 19 2023 at 1:13pm
Monte: “Which rulers are more likely to lie?” Fair question as the first casualty of war is truth.
Monte
Oct 19 2023 at 8:22pm
Lies will have their dance, but truth wins in the end.
Craig
Oct 19 2023 at 2:07pm
We’ll never know definitively one way or the other.
MarkW
Oct 19 2023 at 2:48pm
In this particular case, I think we already do — Israel has offered video, audio and satellite evidence. US and European intelligence agencies reportedly accept Israel’s account. Hamas has offered no evidence to back its claims and likely will not do so. But they got all mileage (and headlines) out of the initial lie that they might have hoped for — now I expect they’ll just move on to the next thing.
Richard W Fulmer
Oct 19 2023 at 3:01pm
Presumably, “affirming the moral-individualist position” would be to identify the people responsible for the October 7 attack and punish them and only them, thus deterring future attacks without creating new victims and new causes for revenge. This ideal is made all but impossible by Hamas’ practice of using Palestinians as human shields. It places hostages in its military installations and locates those installations near schools, mosques, and hospitals. For example, Hamas’ main command bunker is located below the Al-Shifa hospital, Gaza’s largest medical center.
Israel attempted to separate Hamas personnel and innocent Palestinians by dropping leaflets in northern Gaza warning residents to move south before the IDF begins its operations to locate and destroy Hamas’ tunnel system. For this it has been condemned.
What should Israel do? Abandon any attempt to end Hamas’ rocket attacks (which continue as I write this) and to deter Hamas from future attacks? Or should Israel continue its attempts to eliminate Hamas as a threat while striving to limit killing and injuring innocent Palestinians as best it can? If the latter, do you have any practical suggestions for how it could better protect innocent life?
Mactoul
Oct 20 2023 at 6:19am
Men are either ruler-type or ruled-type. The ruler-type man is characterized by ambition, his will to power and fraud. A man hardly gets to be prominent in politics without being an adept in fraud, deceit, lies, stratagems etc.
Plus lying in service of the nation is not generally regarded as wrong especially in war time. Thus,
Perhaps, but not by much, if recent history of US is any guide.
Thomas L Hutcheson
Oct 20 2023 at 11:29am
“Once you realize that political rulers are subject to the same, mainly self-interested, incentives as ordinary individuals,”
Surly this discovery must have been made at least by the Neolithic. 🙂
Jon Murphy
Oct 20 2023 at 4:41pm
One would think, but you still have people wondering what the purpose of Public Choice analysis is
Jim Glass
Oct 24 2023 at 12:43am
Indeed. Of course.
Yes, but a great many people think all kinds of things. Remember, “people are ignorant” is a tenet of public choice…
Why would the average college graduate even have heard about public choice, much less want to understand it?
OTOH, ask the average person if he’s ever heard the words “lying politician”.
Jon Murphy
Oct 24 2023 at 9:12am
No, it’s not. People are self-interested, not ignorant. Some may be ignorant. But ignorance is not a tenet of public choice analysis.
Walt
Oct 20 2023 at 9:58pm
Aside from the documentary proof that Israel didn’t do it , the premise that it did fails on tne grounds of logic, i.e. if Israel were going to bomb a hospital, she sure as hell wouldn’t have done it on tne eve of Biden’s (odd) visit and his slated meetings with the rest of the middle east leaders. If anyone would have had a logical motive to purposely hit a hospital, and di it that night, it would have been Hamas, because look what it accomplished for them (with the aid of the press)—the cancelled meetings, and the anti-Israel and anti-American riots all around the world. That’s not to say it was a purposeful hit, but just that either way it worked to their advantage. And certainly against Israel’s and ours.
But yes, the American government has lied and is quite capable of it.
Jim Glass
Oct 24 2023 at 1:00am
Two perspectives that you absolutely don’t need to figure this out, and might do best without, if you want to do it like the pros do. Here’s a former US military intelligence analyst (in Iraq, etc,) now in the private sector, explaining the analytical steps in addressing this very question, using the steps and probability tables in ICD 203, which professional intelligence analysts use — 95+% of whom, I guarantee you, have never heard of “public-choice and rational-choice perspectives”. Though as to “self interest”, they all know PLENTY. (He doesn’t give his answer, he lets you score the steps and reach your own conclusion.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l29IRT16zq0
I’m kind of stunned. ‘Until economists developed public choice theory in the mid-20th century’, people didn’t realize that politicians lie? And analyze the self-interest in their lying behavior?’ Are you kidding?? If you are saying that it took economists that long to realize it, well, shame on them!! As to the rest of the world, real people (who never heard of public choice), for starters listen at the link above…
“The people know they live in such a corrupt world they joke about it, because what else are they going to do? The government lies to them, the government knows it is lying, they know it is lying,..”
Look, I dunno, anywhere in history. The ancient Greeks whose professional educators were so good at teaching how to gain political power though lies, manipulation and deceit that their schools of “sophistry” and “rhetoric” gave those words a bad connotation to this day. Look at any history of diplomacy, pre-WWII, Talleyrand, Metternich, back to Thucydides. Analysis of political deceit fueled by self interest, pre-Buchanan, is everywhere. Yes, he added insights. That doesn’t mean there weren’t plenty of insights before him.
People at all points of the political compass have their differing quirks. Libertarians more than any have “if it’s a good idea it was invented here” syndrome. If you want to say, “to figure out who most likely blew up the hospital, consider the players’ self interest, as public choice does”, that’s fine. If you are saying “before economists invented public choice there was no systemic analysis of how lyin’ corrupt politicians’ are driven by self-interest, such as to address questions like this”, all you are saying is that economists were really, really, really late to the party, and owe everyone else apologies.
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