America and Germany are allies and therefor, America should have no need to spy and snoop into their business. If I had an Allie, I would expect trust, care, concern, and honesty to be present. It is not right to tap into ones communications, and I believe Angela Merkel handled and expressed herself in a very good way. She did not express anger but rather stated the necessities that must be present between allies. Angela Merkel seemed to remind America that trust must be present between them two and that they both need to focus on rebuilding it.
Getting caught is an issue alone but then getting caught lying is a whole other issue at hand. America stated that they had not monitored and will not monitor Germany's communications in the future. This statement digs a hole for America because America has admitted to monitoring in the past. It is a very risky barrier to cross when weighing out the consequences of spying on Germany. The risk of finding something for intelligence benefits does not out weigh the diplomatic damage that will rise.
Matthew Yglesias' five year plan seems promising but only in some parts. In his step one, of solving short term unemployment, I believe that suspending the printing of the federal reserve until nominal income catches up is a great idea and has a lot pushing for it to succeed. I do believe that his second step is interesting, but I do not know if it will be successful. It seems alittle radical to start taxing land value, because of all the aspects that land value includes. His step three, on raising all the different real wages seems to be promising also. I do not agree with his fourth step on how we could raise population threw immigration. I believe that he really jumped and aggressively pushed for ways in which we can allow immigrants into the United States, and I'm not too big of a fan. I believe Mathew yglesias' fifth step is trying to change something that does not need to be changed. I believe copyright terms are fine at the level at which they are at, and do not need to be scaled back.
I looked at this situation in a very similar way. Allies are similar to a relationship we would have with our friends. In my friends I look for honesty and trustable characteristics. America should not have spied on somebody who they simply should trust.
ReplyDeleteI also agree with you on step 4 of immigrants. We have seen enough controversy already and allowing more will only escalate this controversy
I think you are right in that trust is needed to have good relationships with allies. We must be able to have faith in our allies and what we did was really damaging. In instances such as this we must come clean and admit we are in the wrong instead of trying to cover them up
ReplyDeleteI wonder exactly what the calculus of risk/reward here is. It may simply be that Germany is not close enough to have a non-spying treaty, and thus, even though we don't think we can get anything out of it, we might as well listen in. It will be interesting to see how things evolve now that we cannot count on not getting caught.
ReplyDeleteOn Yglesias: actually, we do already tax both land and structures. So just taxing land value would mean removing something from taxation. Immigration is indeed a controversial topic, but he is for it because it is one of the cornerstones of free markets. Remember Adam Smith vigorously criticizes restricting movements of people. Finally, many people think that copyrights and patents are actually causing more problems than they are solving as they protect little but open up the possibility of lawsuits (as in Dean Baker's work).
It seems that our modern American government is very comfortable with lying to not only its people, but also the governments of other countries. It will be very interesting in the future to see whether other countries and ourselves will continue to let this problem occur. I do agree that allies should have very good trust in one another, which would mean no spying.
ReplyDelete