Friedman does not tell us specifically to whom the pronoun "we" refers in his phrase "we designate." The issue of who is responsible and who is not and the process by which such a designation can be made surely deserves a treatise, but I will nonetheless take it up briefly here, with the hope that Professor Friedman will engage a conversation about his views.

Let me first say that I can agree with him on some of the concepts he sets forth. Responsibility and freedom do have a relationship. Further, babies are manifestly not free and cannot be held responsible for their actions. Human beings become free and responsible (or not) in the social process of growing up.

Some of his examples are also unexceptionable. Visiting violence upon one's neighbors is not responsible, for instance. Friedman notes that "[t]here is little difficulty in attaining near unanimity to the proposition that one man's freedom to murder his neighbor must be sacrificed to preserve the freedom of the other man to live."

But other examples may be more difficult for votaries of global capitalism. For instance, should the uncounted men from the West and Japan who travel far and wide to brutalize children sold into the international sex trade deserve be designated as "responsible" and allowed to cross international borders with little or no restriction on their mobility? Or should they be jailed for statutory rape or sexual assault instead, which was the opinion of a French judge in October 2000 regarding the activities of a French sex tourist in Thailand?

Friedman also takes up the problem of pollution, which creates adverse "neighborhood effects" as for instance when someone pollutes a stream and "in effect forc[es] others to exchange good water for bad." Indeed, taking inspiration from Einstein, one should extend this spatial idea of neighborhood effects to the time dimension, because visiting ill-effects upon future generations is also irresponsible. This also leads to some difficult questions. For instance, should those who are steering the Earth towards likely massive and irreversible climate change be designated as irresponsible? If so, who should make the designation? How should their freedom be curbed? Should limits be imposed on fossil fuel consumption, the main source of greenhouse gas buildup? How and by whom? And should the principal polluters play the paternal guardians of the planet?

Madness presents ticklish problems as well. It is generally recognized that there are instances of people who are violently delusional, who are dangerously insane, and whose freedom of action must be curbed by society to the extent that is necessary to protect its other members (and perhaps also themselves). But since not all insane people are prone to violence, it is not from madness as such, but from delusional violence that society needs protection (though not only from delusional violence).

There are further complications. If we are to make progress towards the realization of the Jeffersonian idea of a unitary morality for people, "whether acting singly or collectively," the notion of the connection between freedom and responsibility must be extended to collectives of human beings. Much of the violence that has resulted in the restriction of the freedom of people has emanated from political, economic, and military institutions. How are we to judge whether the violence of collectives of people (organized as the state, church, corporations, social clubs, and the like) is sane and responsible, or delusional, and therefore mad, deserving of restrictions on freedom of action? Under what circumstances does collective responsibility fade into irresponsibility, thereby requiring restraints on freedom?

Given the parlous, violent state of the world, and the rush of the United States to wear the imperial mantle, these are urgent questions. But they have deep historical roots. Imperialists have sought to justify genocide, murder, and conquest by portraying their victims as infantile, irresponsible, uncivilized, unfit, or even insane. Surviving Native peoples in the United States were put under the "paternal" authority of those who slaughtered their brothers and sisters, for instance.

Let us note that the state of society or civilization of the victims is not here in question. The issue here is whether a civilizational structure in which genocidal violence, treaty breaking, and slavery played such large roles can be regarded as responsible today. No reasonable or responsible process can visit the sins of the fathers upon the sons. But we can surely ask whether the hallmarks of the political-military-economic culture persist in the ruling system and to what degree they dominate it.

Specifically, is there a delusionally violent component to ideas such as "Manifest Destiny" that have been used to rationalize genocide in the past, which continue to hold sway today? And if there is, does it share similarities, with the delusional violence of, say, al Qaeda's suicide bombers? Or is it mainly non-delusional, in search of material gain at the expense of others? Is it a mixture of the two?

U.S. "exceptionalism" seems to represent just such a mixture. It has been clothed in various mixtures of God, country, Christianity, free markets, and civilization and has been present in various guises well past the period when Europeans overspread the continental United States, into the period of the Cold War, and now into the War on Terror.

Consider the 1973 military coup in Chile. Henry Kissinger, then President Nixon's National Security Advisor, thought the Chilean people irresponsible for leaning leftward. In a quote that was censored by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in a book about that agency, he reportedly said in 1970: "I don't see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist because of the irresponsibility of its own people."² So when they voted for Salvador Allende, they were condemned to a paternalistic coup, which took place on September 11, 1973. Like the supposed U.S. government paternalism towards Native Americans, the Chilean coup extinguished freedom for millions. It led to governmentally sponsored murder of thousands. It is natural therefore that while some think that Henry Kissinger is the essence of modern responsibility (for instance, in November 2002 President Bush appointed him to chair the commission of inquiry into the crimes of September 11, 2001),³ there are others who believe that there is sufficient evidence for him to be tried as a criminal for actions undertaken in his official capacities.⁴

A large part of Milton Friedman's edifice of associating capitalism with freedom is constructed on a liberal dose, so to speak, of capitalist mythology, not global economic, political, and military reality. In capitalist mythology, free individuals meet in a marketplace. Natural equality among these individuals is implicit. Capitalists generally own small, competing companies, though monopolies are sometimes possible. Milton Friedman's book, Capitalism and Freedom, contains no discussion of topics such as imperialism, nuclear weapons, genocide, or modern slavery.

In Friedman's mythological world of Capitalism and Freedom, armies are really only for defense. Multinational corporations with revenues larger than most countries' gross domestic products that can and do hire private armies (to say nothing of hiring governments) do not exist. Imperialist-created famines do not exist. Partitions of countries and regions resulting from divide-and-rule politics or other imperialist conveniences do not exist. Nuclear threats by capitalist states for the control of the resources of others do not exist. CIA coups or Schools of the Americas, where ruthless dictators and torturers are trained, do not exist.

A retired Marine general, Smedley Butler was not so reticent during the 1930s:

The pattern has persisted. For instance, nuclear weapons have been alerted on several occasions in the context of U.S. assertion of power and dominance in the Third World. In one case, U.S. nuclear bombers were sent to Nicaragua two months before the CIA-sponsored coup in Guatemala, with a corporation, United Fruit, being the intended beneficiary of this employment of nuclear and covert action muscle. The results of this use of power have been catastrophic for the people of Guatemala, especially its indigenous people -- more than 200,000 killed.

Consider just one massacre. The government's soldiers came in 1982 to the village of Sacuchum, on a mountaintop. They robbed the villagers, raped about twenty women, and took 44 men with them. They cut out their tongues, slit their throats, and killed them all. Later they killed eight more. They thereby made fifty-two widows and more than a hundred orphans. The newspapers announced they were guerrillas who had died in combat. There were, of course, no authorities to whom such a massacre could be reported, for the authorities had perpetrated it. The first time they were able to tell the story was to a U.S. author, who made their terror known to the world in 2002.⁵ How does U.S. government support for and complicity in large-scale murder in Guatemala, admitted by President Clinton in 1999,⁶ square with the idea of responsibility or with setting up shop as a judge of another, one-time ally, Saddam Hussein, who also practiced similar brutality and terror?

The U.S. war on Iraq and the accompanying declarations that have come fast and thick and in many forms that any who dare to challenge official U.S. risk similar devastation are the latest exhibitions of Manifest Destiny. It is perhaps the most fearsome one, for it comes at a time when the urge to dominate the world using threats of everything from subversion to nuclear annihilation has spread from the capitals of civilization to the caves of Afghanistan.

Governments, including that of the United States, have asserted that people may not judge their actions in war because those actions carry with them a "sovereign immunity" from judicial proceedings. But the bloody history of modern times that has brought and kept the world at the edge of the nuclear abyss does not justify a continuation of this immunity, if indeed it was ever justified. The Nuremberg trials after World War II suggest that it never was. The present reality is that the most powerful country in the world, the United States, the only country that has used nuclear weapons to incinerate cities, insists on the right to police the world, essentially without restriction, even as it relegates observance of its own treaty obligations to the status of political convenience.

If the possession of power is not a proof of virtue, then countries that refuse to subscribe to the International Criminal Court should be ruled out of leadership roles in the world. War must no longer be allowed to be a racket in which the only justice is meted out to the losers by the victors. It is time for people to deprive the machinery of the state of its freedom to murder as it pleases. It is time to declare that nuclear weapons are unsafe in any hands.

Governments must be subject to the same connections between freedom and responsibility that apply to individuals. That must be a principal part of the struggle for global democracy and the restructuring of the institutions that we need for responsible and accountable governance, security, and freedom. The Jeffersonian ideal of a single morality for people "whether acting individually or collectively" underlying global democracy has practical expressions today, of which the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Criminal Court are so far among the most important.

In the framework of global democracy, the International Criminal Court is a good candidate for investigating and making decisions about a lack of responsibility to a degree deserving of a deprivation of freedom when it comes to "the most serious crimes of concern to the international community as a whole." Some determined people in Britain have already started the long labor of making that a reality by beginning an investigation for referral to the prosecutor of the Court as to whether war crimes were committed by Prime Minister Tony Blair and his Defense and Foreign Ministers during the recent War on Iraq.⁷

⁷ The British group is Public Interest Lawyers. See http://www.publicinterestlawyers.co.uk/iraq_war_crimes.htm. The United States withdrew its signature from the ICC and is not a party to it. Nineteen Iraqi victims of the War on Iraq are trying to take their war crimes allegations against General Tommy Franks to a Belgian court. The U.S. government has stated that the investigation would be "abuse of the legal system for political ends." Constant Brand, "Iraq War Victims to File Case Vs. Franks," Seattle Post-Intelligencer, 29 April 2002, at http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/apmideast_story.asp?category=1107&slug=Iraq%20War%20Crimes.